Quotes of the Day:
"The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding."
- Plato, The Republic
"The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression."
- Thomas Paine
"Resistance to oppression is second nature."
- Seneca the Younger
1. U.S. Pacific intel chief: Coming Chinese attack on Taiwan could target other nations
2. Opinion | U.S. foreign policy needs to get over its fear of instability
3. China's Nationalistic ‘Wolf Warriors’ Blast Foes on Twitter
4. Attempted Hack of R.N.C. and Russian Ransomware Attack Test Biden
5. China Fires Back at Biden with Conspiracy Theories About Maryland Lab
6. Cyber disinformation: How dangerous are the Middle East's "electronic armies"?
7. How Vietnam's 'influencer' army wages information warfare on Facebook
8. Russia Targets Fox News Fans in Bid to Become the World’s Anti-Woke Capital
9. Measuring the Effects of Influence Operations: Key Findings and Gaps From Empirical Research
10. 'We need help': Haiti's interim leader requests US troops
11. Special Report: Afghan pilots assassinated by Taliban as U.S. withdraws
12. A shabby ending: The US flight from Afghanistan was a mistake
13. America’s war in Afghanistan is ending in crushing defeat
14. Deleted Taiwan Tweet Is a Diplomatic Disappointment and a Concession to China
15. How to Beat China in the South China Sea? Ask a Fighter Pilot.
16. Military commanders aren’t getting necessary legal training, government review finds
17. The U.S. Grand Strategy of Liberal Internationalism Is Dead
18. The Time to Build America’s 'Smart' Military is Now
19. Myanmar rebels suspend pair over massacre claim
20. Myanmar: Free Burma Rangers cross rivers, walk up mountains and take shelter in bunkers to deliver aid
21. Revised UN Counterterrorism Strategy Has Stronger Rights Focus
22. Plagues, liberal society and the future after Covid
23. Black Sea drills showcase strong NATO-Ukraine defense ties
24. ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off
1. U.S. Pacific intel chief: Coming Chinese attack on Taiwan could target other nations
I do not recall any other combatant command J2's being this outspoken.
U.S. Pacific intel chief: Coming Chinese attack on Taiwan could target other nations
China’s growing military power in Asia has increased the danger Beijing will launch a war against a neighboring state, with Taiwan just one of several likely future targets, the admiral in charge of intelligence for the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command warned this week.
Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, the top intelligence officer, or J-2, for the East Asian command, said in a conference Wednesday that U.S. military forces are bolstering arms and equipment for when conflict could break out in the region over Taiwan or another American ally or partner.
“What are we warning about: It’s danger on all fronts,” Adm. Studeman told an online conference via telephone from the command’s headquarters in Hawaii. “This idea that it’s only a Taiwan scenario vs. many other areas where the Chinese are being highly assertive, coercive, is a failure in understanding complexity, because it’s not that simple.”
Adm. Studeman said it would be a mistake to wait to act until intelligence agencies receive a warning that China is preparing to launch an amphibious assault against Taiwan, the island nation China‘s Communist leaders have vowed to reunite with the mainland.
“That is one scenario and, frankly, it may not be the most likely,” he said. China’s Communist regime is placing pressure on “lots of its neighbors.”
China in recent months has engaged in disputes with India, Australia, Japan, Taiwan and countries around the South China Sea in what analysts say is an increase in bullying by Beijing. In the past, the leaders of the ruling Chinese Communist Party sought to avoid multiple entanglements with neighbors and the new assertiveness is seen as a sign of China’s growing power and military confidence.
Regarding Taiwan, China has engaged in low-intensity conflict against the island that has increased the dangers across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. The campaign has involved information operations and economic pressure, Adm. Studeman said.
“It’s already a struggle underway,” he said. “Whether or not the Chinese resort to a military option is in question. To us, it’s only a matter of time, not a matter of ‘if,’ because if you understand the problem set, you understand that Taiwan will unlikely fold based on economic, and informational and diplomatic influence alone.”
The admiral was reflecting earlier comments by the former and current chiefs of the Indo-Pacific Command, who said in testimony to Congress earlier this year that China appears to be preparing for a move against Taiwan by 2030 or before. Adm. Studeman said the United States needs to approach countering China with the same type of effort used against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“And we’re not there yet as a nation in understanding how to in fact employ our energy, our treasure to be able to grapple with” the danger, he said.
“Much of what we do,” he added, “is internal to us — ensuring that people are ready for a very bad day” if war breaks out.
‘Too late’
Adm. Studeman said naval intelligence officials sum up the current situation with China in two words used by Gen. Douglas McArthur in discussing the failure to head off World War II.
“’Too late,’” Adm. Studeman said. “Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy. Too late in realizing the mortal danger. Too late in preparedness. Too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance.”
The command’s intelligence unit has provided Washington policymakers with strategic warning of the dangers and intentions of China in the region. The admiral’s blunt warnings about China contrast with a more measured assessment of the risk of a conflict with China from Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“I think China has a ways to go to develop the actual, no-kidding capability to conduct military operations to seize through military means the entire island of Taiwan if they wanted to do that,” Gen. Milley told a congressional hearing last month.
Several days later Gen. Milley voiced concerns about the capabilities of the U.S. military in waging an extended conflict with China. A war with China “would be an enormous expensive undertaking in terms of all measures and I would be concerned about the ability to sustain a long-term conflict,” he said.
Adm. Studeman said he feels confident U.S. forces would have adequate warning of a Chinese military attack on Taiwan.
“The issue is even if you had, let’s say 90 days of strategic warning for Taiwan, whether or not we have … have built up the capacities and the capabilities that we need to be able to handle the type of scenario which may be unfolding,” he said.
Adversaries like China have a different concept of war than the United States. For them, “every day is a day of war in terms of the continuous struggle for advantage and disadvantage for influence,” he said.
Despite reluctance to compare the threat from China to the Cold War with Moscow, Adm. Studeman said the scale and breadth of the danger is “absolutely awesome and it has every dimension we saw in the 20th century.” China, he argued, is not simply seeking to become a leading world power but plans to surpass the United States and become the world’s most powerful state.
“That’s what Xi Jinping’s course looks like,” he said, referring to the Chinese president. “And he’s been very aggressive across the way. He’s very Machiavellian. It’s not unfair to say that the Chinese rise has come through lying, cheating and stealing.”
China is expected to employ cyber warfare and anti-satellite attacks in any future conflict. Beijing is also investing heavily in space in anti-satellite weapons, including electronic jammers, and missiles capable of blasting orbiting satellites and conducting attacks with other satellites.
“They are on the march,” Adm. Studeman said. “It’s clear as day what they’re putting into the investments.”
U.S. forces also are investing heavily in space defenses “and it will be a game of measures, and countermeasures, and counter-countermeasures” in a future space conflict.
China’s government has used its technological capabilities around the world to gather masses of data that can be used for what the admiral called “effective control” over populations, such as in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
“This is a foreshadowing of what Chinese effective control will look like in other places,” he said.
China is seeking to simultaneously gain control over contested areas such as the border with India, areas around Bhutan in South Asia, the Mekong region of Vietnam, the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, he said. Internally, the ruling Chinese Communist Party, has strong institutions of power and the regime does not appear to be threatened by dissension that could produce serious opposition, the admiral added.
2. Opinion | U.S. foreign policy needs to get over its fear of instability
Kennan, Kissinger, and US interests.
A key point from the Kissinger excerpt: We must always ask what is the central logic for any intervention. For example, we are now supposedly being asked to send troops to Haiti. What is the central logic for such an intervention and can we effectively explain that logic to the American people and the international community?
Excerpts:
Kennan urged a steely-eyed focus on these centers of power. “We must decide which areas are key areas, and which ones are not, which ones we must hold with all our strength and which we may yield tactically,” he said. Instead, Washington came to intervene in far-flung places all over the world to prevent communists from gaining power anywhere. This was a fool’s errand, and it produced only self-inflicted wounds. Strategy must be based on interests, not a reflexive response to any and all threats.
...
Henry Kissinger, a realist like Kennan, had been a skeptic of the Vietnam War as an academic. As a member of the Nixon administration, he supported vigorously prosecuting the war while negotiating the withdrawal of American troops. But in his private conversations with Richard Nixon, he revealed that he did not believe in the central logic that had guided American intervention.
...
A key reason for the collapse of Moscow’s empire, of course, was its intervention in Afghanistan, which bled the Soviet Union and sapped its will. Moscow got involved for familiar reasons: an insurgency, internal divisions, a fear of instability. Moscow should have paid attention to George Kennan’s sage advice then, as we should now.
Opinion | U.S. foreign policy needs to get over its fear of instability
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Fareed ZakariaColumnist July 8, 2021|Updated today at 7:04 p.m. EDT · July 8, 2021
Quiz question: When and why did Britain annex Sudan? The answer is in 1899, after a decade and a half of fighting. British forces were up against Sudanese militias that had rallied under the banner of a charismatic Islamic leader who styled himself as the Mahdi, and whom the British viewed as a fanatical terrorist.
There is a history lesson worth learning here about imperial overreach, as the United States leaves Afghanistan. Many voices warn that what follows will be instability and eventually a Taliban takeover. The country will once again become a base for terrorism, they argue, and so we must stay to keep it stable and in friendly hands.
The truth is, since 9/11, Washington and most advanced governments have developed a powerful capacity to intercept terrorists, track them down and prevent them from launching large-scale attacks. Groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are in tatters, hunted everywhere and fragmented into local forces. They operate in various unstable countries, such as Afghanistan, Mali and Yemen. This is an argument for global counterterrorism efforts, not the sustained occupation of any one particular place.
But the mentality that drove the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq was an imperial aversion to any instability. During the late 19th century, Britain worried that instability in Sudan — especially from Islamist terrorists — would spill over and threaten British access to the Suez Canal in Egypt. That canal provided the lifeline to the sea lanes to India, which was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. As the globe’s superpower, Britain had similar fears in many parts of the world. So London sent tens of thousands of troops to fight wars in Sudan and elsewhere, annexing remote provinces in Africa and Asia (including Afghanistan!) — all of which turned into massive burdens for Britain. The British allowed the tail to wag the dog.
The parallel is not exact, of course, but the United States is the world’s sole superpower, for now. It would be unfortunate if the Taliban retook Afghanistan, and Washington should support the Kabul government and work with other countries in the region — China, India, and above all, Pakistan — to find a sustainable power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan. But Washington must also keep in mind, as the Biden administration appears to be doing, that U.S. forces have spent two decades in Afghanistan. They have done what could be done, successfully degrading al-Qaeda and killing Osama bin Laden. Ultimately, Afghanistan is not central to the United States’ position as a global power.
Britain’s greatest mistake during its imperial expeditions at the turn of the 20th century was its failure to distinguish between its vital interests and those that were peripheral. By contrast, the most brilliant American strategist of the Cold War, George F. Kennan, always said the Cold War depended on a small number of power centers. He argued in the late 1940s that there were just five — the United States, Britain, the West German region, Japan and the Soviet Union. As long as Washington could maintain the 4-to-1 ratio against Moscow, it would win the Cold War.
Kennan urged a steely-eyed focus on these centers of power. “We must decide which areas are key areas, and which ones are not, which ones we must hold with all our strength and which we may yield tactically,” he said. Instead, Washington came to intervene in far-flung places all over the world to prevent communists from gaining power anywhere. This was a fool’s errand, and it produced only self-inflicted wounds. Strategy must be based on interests, not a reflexive response to any and all threats.
Henry Kissinger, a realist like Kennan, had been a skeptic of the Vietnam War as an academic. As a member of the Nixon administration, he supported vigorously prosecuting the war while negotiating the withdrawal of American troops. But in his private conversations with Richard Nixon, he revealed that he did not believe in the central logic that had guided American intervention. It didn’t really matter if South Vietnam fell, he told Nixon, and as long as it happened “a year or two” after U.S. troops were gone, the American public wouldn’t “give a damn.” South Vietnam did fall, and it caused a humanitarian tragedy, but in the long run it did not cripple the United States. Only a few minor dominoes fell to communism in Asia, and 10 years after the fall of Saigon, the Reagan administration was negotiating from a position of strength with the Soviet Union. By 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
A key reason for the collapse of Moscow’s empire, of course, was its intervention in Afghanistan, which bled the Soviet Union and sapped its will. Moscow got involved for familiar reasons: an insurgency, internal divisions, a fear of instability. Moscow should have paid attention to George Kennan’s sage advice then, as we should now.
Read more:
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Fareed ZakariaColumnist July 8, 2021|Updated today at 7:04 p.m. EDT · July 8, 2021
3. China's Nationalistic ‘Wolf Warriors’ Blast Foes on Twitter
I hope we have a big screen in the Global Engagement Center's operations center dedicated to tracking China's wolf diplomats' commentary on twitter. And then I hope we have some twentysomethings using non-government twitter accounts to exploit the Chinese twits, er.... I mean tweets. I would think these wolf diplomats could be easily baited by our social media savvy young people in the GEC and in the military PSYOP community. Remember the modern MEME is the traditional PSYOP leaflet.
We should have a line of effort in our global information and influence activities strategy dedicated to amplifying Chinese government and party missteps and bullying online to expose the true nature of the regime and its strategy.
And we need more articles like the one below from multiple sources (especially foreign ones) that expose Cinese strategies and activities. And of course target audiences for such messages are in the countries that are part of the One Belt One Road initiative.
China's Nationalistic ‘Wolf Warriors’ Blast Foes on Twitter
Diplomats hurl insults and mock enemies in screeds that often appear aimed at a domestic audience, even though the social media service is blocked in China.
07.10.2021 07:00 AM
Diplomats hurl insults and mock enemies in screeds that often appear aimed at a domestic audience, even though the social media service is blocked in China.
On Monday, Li Yang, China’s consul general in Rio de Janeiro, took to Twitter to mock the rescue efforts following the Surfside, Florida, building collapse. “American-style rescue: very layman in saving people, but too expert in blasting!!!” Li wrote, including side-by-side pictures of the partially collapsed condominium and its demolition with explosives.
In other recent tweets, Li called Adrian Zenz, a researcher who has written extensively about internment camps in Xinjiang, a liar. Li also referred to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau as “boy” and branded him “a running dog of the U.S.” Such outbursts have helped Li rack up nearly 27,000 followers on Twitter—even though the platform is blocked in China.
Li is one of dozens of Chinese diplomats who have found a home on Twitter in recent years, taking to the site with Trumpian bravado to raise their profiles at home and abroad. Spurred on by Chinese president Xi Jinping, who took power in 2013, this vocal cohort—nicknamed “wolf warriors” after the nationalistic movie franchise of the same name—fanned out across the globe, bashing enemies and bristling at even the mildest criticism.
Xi has brought China a renewed focus on ideology, as well as the return of Mao-era tools that include reeducation camps and collective study sessions. When Chinese diplomats see such domestic moves, “they are very good at calibrating their response to that in a way that safeguards their own individual interests,” says Peter Martin, whose new book, China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, traces the history of China’s diplomatic corps.
For today’s diplomats, safeguarding their interests often requires stridently defending China’s interests and image—both online and off. Last year, Chinese officials sparked a fistfight at a diplomatic event in Fiji, when they showed up uninvited to a celebration for Taiwan’s national day.
As a diplomat posted to Pakistan in 2015, Zhao Lijian filled his feed both with tweetstorms attacking the US and posts extolling China-Pakistan economic collaboration. By 2019, soon after sparking a Twitter spat with former US national security adviser Susan Rice, Zhao returned to Beijing and was promoted to be a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry. From that perch, he tweeted on March 12, 2020, that the US Army might have brought Covid-19 to China.
In 2016, when a Canadian reporter asked China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, about a Canadian citizen accused of spying and detained in China, Wang responded, “Your question is full of arrogance and prejudice against China … This is totally unacceptable.” His remarks went viral, and an online fan club for Wang—who’d already been named a “silver fox” by the Chinese press—racked up more than 130,000 members. It’s a stark contrast to the mid-2000s, when nationalistic citizens mailed calcium pills to the Foreign Ministry to suggest that officials needed to grow backbones in the face of international criticism of China’s human rights record.
“There’s been this very combative and even aggressive side to Chinese diplomacy.”
Peter Martin, author, China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy
While the medium is new, the approach is not—although the volume can be turned up or down depending on the needs of the day. As Martin writes, in November 1950, general-turned-diplomat Wu Xiuquan gave a fiery 105-minute speech at the United Nations in which he labeled the US, then facing off against China in the Korean War, "the cunning aggressor in their relations with China" and called for sanctions against the US.
“At times, Chinese diplomats are very charming, impressive, and they use the discipline that has been cultivated in the Foreign Ministry to win over international opinion and win friends for China,” says Martin. At other times, though, such as during the Cultural Revolution and again more recently, “there’s been this very combative and even aggressive side to Chinese diplomacy.”
That contrast was on display in Anchorage, Alaska, in March, during the first US-China summit under the Biden administration. After critical remarks from US secretary of state Antony Blinken about China’s mistreatment of the largely Muslim Uyghur population, economic coercion, and breaches of international norms, Chinese vice minister of foreign affairs Yang Jiechi launched into an angry speech for the assembled cameras, referencing, among other things, Black Lives Matter protests in the US. Once the cameras were gone, the talks were said to be cordial and productive.
To write China’s Civilian Army, Martin, a reporter for Bloomberg, spent four years poring over about 100 memoirs of former diplomats and interviewing Chinese and international officials to unpack the historical roots of wolf warrior behavior.
The book’s title comes from remarks that Zhou Enlai, China’s first premier and foreign minister, made to the new members of his diplomatic corps in November 1949. “Armed struggle and diplomatic struggle are similar,” he said. “Diplomatic personnel are the People’s Liberation Army in civilian clothing.”
The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was meant to reassert China’s position in the world and mark its recovery from the “century of humiliation”—a cascade of offenses cited by nationalists to this day. At the time, the country was diplomatically isolated and subject to the whims of Mao’s personality and policy making.
Zhou’s early attempts to shape interactions with the outside world set a mold that continues. Diplomats generally work in pairs, keeping tabs on one another. According to non-Chinese diplomats Martin spoke to, their Chinese counterparts stick faithfully to talking points and never betray internal struggles. The strict discipline allows no room for negotiation, but there’s also no confusion about where China stands. (Another recent book, Josh Rogin’s hawkish Chaos Under Heaven, reveals the infighting and mixed messages that characterized the Trump administration’s response to China.)
Today some diplomats and other observers in China are questioning whether wolf warrior tactics have gone too far. In early June, Xi himself told senior officials China should communicate in a tone that is more “modest and humble” and project a “credible, lovable, and respectable image” abroad. Repnikova thinks Xi’s remarks might signal that, despite its economic prowess and attempts to win friends with masks and medical supplies during the pandemic, China hasn’t been effective at projecting soft power or earning the respect it craves on the global stage.
But Xi’s actions since then call into question his commitment to toning down the rhetoric. On July 1, he commemorated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party with a speech in which, according to the official translation, he said, “we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us.” Chinese netizens, many of whom posted on social media to mark the party’s anniversary, approved.
Xi is also expected to name Qin Gang as the new ambassador to Washington. Qin was known to lash out in defense of China during his time as chief of protocol and when working on European affairs in Beijing. Qin’s predecessor, outgoing Ambassador Cui Tiankai, was a more traditional diplomat and often quelled fires in Washington, such as reaching out to Rice after Zhao’s outburst.
Even if Xi succeeds in making official Twitter feeds more “modest and humble,” it will do little to assuage Western concerns about China’s transparency over the origins of Covid-19, industrial policy, and attacks on Hong Kong’s democracy.
“I don’t see any way that you can repackage China’s policy on reeducation camps in a way that could possibly be persuasive to Western political elites,” says Martin. “Without some shift in policies, I don’t really see how a tweaking of wolf warrior tactics is going to help to improve China’s image very much. And I don’t really think that that shift in policy is in the cards.”
More Great WIRED Stories
4. Attempted Hack of R.N.C. and Russian Ransomware Attack Test Biden
Excerpts:
The attack, which began with a breach of Kaseya, a software maker in Florida, exhibited an unusual level of sophistication for ransomware groups, security experts said. REvil appeared to breach Kaseya through a “zero day”— an unknown flaw in the technology — according to the researchers, then used the company’s access to its customers computer systems to conduct ransomware attacks on its clients.
Researchers in the Netherlands had tipped Kaseya off to the flaw in its technology, and the company was working on a fix when REvil beat them to it, researchers said. It is unclear whether the timing was a coincidence or whether cybercriminals were tipped off to the flaw and worked quickly to exploit it.
In the past, REvil relied on more basic hacking methods — such as phishing emails and unpatched systems — to break in, researchers said. The group has demanded $70 million in Bitcoin to release a tool that would allow all infected companies to recover, a sum that it had lowered to $50 million by Tuesday.
In her remarks on Tuesday, Ms. Psaki, the White House spokeswoman, warned companies against paying because it would give the criminals an incentive to keep going. “The F.B.I. has basically told companies not to pay ransom,” she said.
Attempted Hack of R.N.C. and Russian Ransomware Attack Test Biden
By Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger
The breach of a Republican National Committee contractor, also linked to Russia, and the global ransomware attack occurred weeks after a U.S.-Russian summit.
At their summit in Geneva last month, President Biden said he had warned his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, of red lines in the cyber arena.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Published July 6, 2021Updated July 8, 2021
Russian hackers are accused of breaching a contractor for the Republican National Committee last week, around the same time that Russian cybercriminals launched the single largest global ransomware attack on record, incidents that are testing the red lines set by President Biden during his high-stakes summit with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month.
The R.N.C. said in a statement on Tuesday that one of its technology providers, Synnex, had been hacked. While the extent of the attempted breach remained unclear, the committee said none of its data had been accessed.
Early indications were that the culprit was Russia’s S.V.R. intelligence agency, according to investigators in the case. The S.V.R. is the group that initially hacked the Democratic National Committee six years ago and more recently conducted the SolarWinds attack that penetrated more than a half-dozen government agencies and many of the largest U.S. corporations.
The R.N.C. attack was the second of apparent Russian origin to become public in the last few days, and it was unclear late Tuesday whether the two were related. On Sunday, a Russian-based cybercriminal organization known as REvil claimed responsibility for a cyberattack over the long holiday weekend that has spread to 800 to 1,500 businesses around the world. It was one of the largest attacks in history in which hackers shut down systems until a ransom is paid, security researchers said.
The twin attacks are a test for Mr. Biden just three weeks after he, in his first meeting as president with Mr. Putin, demanded that the Russian leader rein in ransomware activities against the United States. At the meeting, Mr. Biden said later, he presented Mr. Putin with a list of 16 critical sectors of the American economy that, if attacked, would provoke a response — though he was cagey about what that response would be.
“If, in fact, they violate these basic norms, we will respond with cyber,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference immediately after the meeting. “He knows.” But he quickly added of Mr. Putin that “I think that the last thing he wants now is a Cold War.”
White House officials were preparing to meet on Wednesday to discuss the latest ransomware attack, which used the innovative technique of getting into the supply chain of software used by governments, federal agencies and other organizations — a tactic that the S.V.R. deployed in SolarWinds last year.
The White House did not directly address the breach of Synnex, the R.N.C. contractor, which was reported earlier by Bloomberg News. But Mr. Biden plans to gather officials from several agencies in the Situation Room on Wednesday morning “to discuss the Biden-Harris administration’s overall strategic efforts to counter ransomware,” the White House said on Tuesday evening.
The newest attacks appeared to cross many lines that Mr. Biden has said he would no longer tolerate. On the campaign trail last year, he put Russia “on notice” that, as president, he would respond aggressively to counter any interference in American elections. Then in April, he called Mr. Putin to warn him about impending economic sanctions in response to the SolarWinds breach.
Last month, Mr. Biden used the summit with Mr. Putin to make the case that ransomware was emerging as an even larger threat, causing the kind of economic disruption that no state could tolerate. Mr. Biden specifically cited the halting of the flow of gasoline on the East Coast after an attack on Colonial Pipeline in June, as well as the shutdown of major meat-processing plants and earlier ransomware attacks that paralyzed hospitals.
The issue has become so urgent that it has begun shifting the negotiations between Washington and Moscow, raising the control of digital weapons to a level of urgency previously seen largely in nuclear arms control negotiations. On Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said American officials will meet with Russian officials next week to discuss ransomware attacks — a dialogue the two leaders had agreed upon at their summit in Geneva.
On Saturday, as the attacks were underway, Mr. Putin gave a speech timed to the rollout of Russia’s latest national security strategy that outlines measures to respond to foreign influence. The document claimed that Russian “traditional spiritual-moral and cultural-historical values are under active attack from the U.S. and its allies.”
While the strategy reaffirmed Moscow’s commitment to using diplomacy to resolve conflicts, it stressed that Russia “considers it legitimate to take symmetrical and asymmetric measures” to prevent “unfriendly actions” by foreign states.
The remarks, cybersecurity experts said, were Mr. Putin’s response to the summit with Mr. Biden.
“Biden did a good job laying down a marker, but when you’re a thug, the first thing you do is test that red line,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “And that’s what we’re seeing here.”
Mr. Lewis added that “low-end penalties” like sanctions had been exhausted. “The White House will have to use more aggressive measures, whether that is something in cyberspace, or a more painful legal or financial maneuver,” he said.
Stronger measures have long been debated, and occasionally used. When Russian intelligence agencies put malicious code into the American power grid in recent years — where it is believed to reside to this day — the United States in turn put code into the Russian grid, and made sure it was seen, as a deterrent. Before the 2020 election, United States Cyber Command took down the servers of a major Russian cybercriminal operation to prevent it from locking up voting infrastructure.
But harsher measures have usually led to debates about whether the United States was risking escalation. Participants in those discussions have said they usually result in decisions to err on the side of caution, because so much of American infrastructure is poorly defended and vulnerable to counterstrikes.
Without question, the tempo of the daily, short-of-war cyberconflict with Russia is accelerating. That has led the Biden administration to look for new diplomatic options. The State Department is in discussions with representatives from roughly 20 foreign governments to develop a menu of consequences to foreign cyberattacks that would include sanctions, diplomatic expulsions and more aggressive counterstrikes, including in the cyber arena.
The likely S.V.R. breach of Synnex left unclear whether the R.N.C. was the target or whether it was unintended collateral damage in a broader hack that may not have been directed at the Republicans.
In a statement, Synnex said the attempted breach of its systems “could potentially be in connection with the recent cybersecurity attacks.”
“Was this an unaimed shotgun blast, or was it a careful, targeted rifle shot at a foreign intelligence target?” said Bobby Chesney, the director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas in Austin.
If it was the former, he said, it may cross the line the White House set when it punished Russia for its breach of SolarWinds and its customers. If it was the latter, it may be considered the kind of intelligence gathering that all major states engage in — and thus not something the United States was likely to seek to punish.
When the Democratic National Committee was hit, first by the S.V.R. in 2015 and then by Russia’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., in 2016, evidence revealed by the F.B.I. showed that servers used by the R.N.C. — also held by contractors — were also targeted. (There was no evidence that the servers held sensitive data, or that the data was stolen.)
The White House may face a more complex problem determining how to deal with the ransomware assaults that played out over the July Fourth weekend.
The attack, which began with a breach of Kaseya, a software maker in Florida, exhibited an unusual level of sophistication for ransomware groups, security experts said. REvil appeared to breach Kaseya through a “zero day”— an unknown flaw in the technology — according to the researchers, then used the company’s access to its customers computer systems to conduct ransomware attacks on its clients.
Researchers in the Netherlands had tipped Kaseya off to the flaw in its technology, and the company was working on a fix when REvil beat them to it, researchers said. It is unclear whether the timing was a coincidence or whether cybercriminals were tipped off to the flaw and worked quickly to exploit it.
In the past, REvil relied on more basic hacking methods — such as phishing emails and unpatched systems — to break in, researchers said. The group has demanded $70 million in Bitcoin to release a tool that would allow all infected companies to recover, a sum that it had lowered to $50 million by Tuesday.
In her remarks on Tuesday, Ms. Psaki, the White House spokeswoman, warned companies against paying because it would give the criminals an incentive to keep going. “The F.B.I. has basically told companies not to pay ransom,” she said.
Annie Karni contributed reporting.
5. China Fires Back at Biden with Conspiracy Theories About Maryland Lab
How is State's GEC exploiting this? We should be able to develop some useful themes and messages from this Chinese propaganda. Note the danger expressed in this article. This is information warfare in the human domain.
Excerpts:
Efforts to manipulate information about the virus’s origins can cause real harm—including within China and, most acutely, Russia, where vaccine skepticism has contributed to a deadly new wave of cases.
The Kremlin’s AIDS disinformation campaign, for example, helped create widespread denialism among at-risk populations around the world, including within the United States. In Africa, where Radio Moscow once claimed the United States was using vaccination programs to spread HIV as a test for biological warfare, Soviet disinformation almost certainly contributed to tens of thousands of preventable deaths year after year.
The same risks certainly apply today. As the world continues to grapple with vaccine skepticism and reluctance toward other public health measures aimed at curbing COVID-19’s spread, efforts to manipulate information about the virus’s origins can cause real harm—including within China and, most acutely, Russia, where vaccine skepticism has contributed to a deadly new wave of cases. And therein lies the problem with information operations, particularly in the digital age: Like a virus, information cannot be controlled once it reaches the general population, and as it spreads, it can mutate in never intended ways.
Beijing should heed these risks—if not for the sake of the world’s pandemic recovery, then for the sake of its own citizens.
China Fires Back at Biden with Conspiracy Theories About Maryland Lab
Since Washington launched the Wuhan lab leak investigation, Beijing has been pushing bizarre narratives.
When the Biden administration announced it would reexamine the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab, Beijing’s response was deny and deflect. Asked at a May 27 press conference about the U.S. investigation into a possible virus leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian quickly changed the subject. “What secrets are hidden in the suspicion-shrouded Fort Detrick and the over 200 U.S. biolabs all over the world?” he asked in response.
Since then, Chinese diplomats and government officials, in concert with China’s vast propaganda apparatus and covert networks of online agitators and influencers, have worked diligently to focus suspicion on Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army biological research facility in Frederick, Maryland, about 50 miles from Washington. According to data collected by the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard, at least 35 key Chinese officials and state media outlets have mentioned Fort Detrick in more than 115 tweets in nine languages since Zhao’s press conference. Many of those tweets have attempted to smear the lab’s reputation, for example by alleging the U.S. lab is “inextricably linked” with Japan’s notorious Unit 731, a germ warfare unit that targeted China during World War II.
When the Biden administration announced it would reexamine the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab, Beijing’s response was deny and deflect. Asked at a May 27 press conference about the U.S. investigation into a possible virus leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian quickly changed the subject. “What secrets are hidden in the suspicion-shrouded Fort Detrick and the over 200 U.S. biolabs all over the world?” he asked in response.
Since then, Chinese diplomats and government officials, in concert with China’s vast propaganda apparatus and covert networks of online agitators and influencers, have worked diligently to focus suspicion on Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army biological research facility in Frederick, Maryland, about 50 miles from Washington. According to data collected by the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard, at least 35 key Chinese officials and state media outlets have mentioned Fort Detrick in more than 115 tweets in nine languages since Zhao’s press conference. Many of those tweets have attempted to smear the lab’s reputation, for example by alleging the U.S. lab is “inextricably linked” with Japan’s notorious Unit 731, a germ warfare unit that targeted China during World War II.
But Beijing’s recent information blitz against Fort Detrick is just the latest in a yearlong campaign to cast aspersions on the lab. Since March 2020, Chinese government officials and state-affiliated media have mentioned Fort Detrick in more than 400 articles, videos, tweets, and press conferences. Many of those messages have focused on reciprocal transparency and access to U.S. research labs by Chinese investigators—the diplomatic equivalent of “you show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” But those more measured appeals have been joined by the promotion of elaborate conspiracy narratives, beginning with the claim that the virus was brought from the Fort Detrick area to Wuhan by U.S. Army reservist Maatje Benassi, who competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 2019. To bolster the claim, the state-run tabloid the Global Times cited writings by George Webb, an American conspiracy theorist best known for temporarily shutting down the Port of Charleston, South Carolina, by planting an online rumor that a “dirty bomb” was arriving via a cargo ship. Webb also suggested an Italian disc jockey, Benny Benassi (no relation to Maatje Benassi), was involved in the U.S. plot to bring the virus to Wuhan.
When the theory that Maatje Benassi was patient zero failed to gain traction, Beijing trial-ballooned a host of alternative conspiracy theories. One suggests a temporary shutdown of Fort Detrick in July 2019 over security protocol breaches was a precursor for the wider outbreak. Chinese state media hinted at a cover-up by citing coverage of the closure from numerous major U.S. outlets, including the New York Times, while simultaneously suggesting news about the closure was being “deleted” from the internet—something more possible in China than the United States.
As outlandish as some of the Fort Detrick claims by official Chinese sources have been, they represent the sanitized tip of a much larger conspiracy-theory iceberg.
From there, however, Beijing’s claims have gotten more convoluted, including suggestions of a link between the coronavirus and a 2019 outbreak of EVALI (the lung disease associated with vaping) in Wisconsin, with diplomats intentionally or mistakenly claiming the outbreak occurred “only near Fort Detrick”—never mind that Wisconsin is some 800 miles from the lab. Another oddball theory attempts to draw a link between COVID-19 and an unrelated outbreak of a respiratory virus in a northern Virginia senior care facility. In a video posted to Chinese state media outlet CGTN’s YouTube channel titled “Residents around U.S. Fort Detrick biolab keep silence about suspected COVID-19 outbreak,” a reporter tries but fails to gain access to the facility. He is identified only as a “U.S. stringer,” but open-source research suggests he is a camera operator working for Russia’s Channel One, one of the country’s major domestic propaganda outlets that also peddles in conspiracy theories.
As outlandish as some of the Fort Detrick claims by official Chinese sources have been, they represent the saner, sanitized tip of a much larger conspiracy-theory iceberg. Across Chinese social media sites, self-anointed online sleuths, crackpots, and anonymous trolls have spammed comment sections and posted content peddling a panoply of Fort Detrick conspiracy narratives without fact checks, labels, or other forms of content moderation. Whether or not these efforts are coordinated at the state level is unclear. However, numerous studies, including one I co-wrote, have highlighted Beijing’s willingness to manufacture consensus through the use of coordinated inauthentic behavior. In the case of Fort Detrick narratives, there are several examples of Chinese officials retweeting suspicious accounts. The cultural counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Pakistan, for example, retweeted a newly created, anonymous account whose second-ever tweet happened to mirror Beijing’s talking points about the alleged connection between Fort Detrick and Unit 731.
It’s easy to poke holes in Beijing’s Fort Detrick narratives, starting with the fact that the two labs studying coronaviruses in the United States are in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina—not Frederick, Maryland. But with influence operations, soundness of logic is less important than repetition. Beijing’s efforts to carpet bomb information platforms with theories—however implausible—about Fort Detrick’s role in the global pandemic have borne some fruit. In January, after Hua Chunying, another spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, repeated false claims about Fort Detrick, the lab topped the trending topic chart on Weibo, a major Chinese social media platform. And the effect is not limited to China. According to Google Trends, the topic and query terms most associated with Google searches for “Fort Detrick” over the past two years were “Wuhan” and “coronavirus,” respectively.
Beijing’s campaign to direct global suspicion toward Fort Detrick began with a single tweet. In March 2020, Zhao—whose Twitter exploits have earned him nearly 1 million followers—created a firestorm when he linked to a since-deleted article published by Global Research, a conspiratorial site the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center named one of the six pillars of Russian disinformation. The article suggested the virus could have originated at Fort Detrick. Although more than two dozen official Chinese diplomatic accounts retweeted Zhao’s tweet, the Fort Detrick lab leak theory initially failed to gain significant traction. Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the United States, told Axios at the time it was “crazy” to suggest the virus originated from a military lab in the United States. But as the Trump administration ratcheted up its anti-Chinese rhetoric over the spring and summer, Beijing’s initial reluctance to fully embrace the Fort Detrick narrative morphed into a persistent and consistent influence campaign. Chinese diplomats from Cape Town, South Africa, to Karachi, Pakistan, began parroting Zhao’s claims while state media fanned the flames with sensationalist headlines, such as “The Fort Detrick horror: a closer look at the US’ largest biochemical weapons research center.”
Interestingly, suspicion of the lab did not originate in China—nor in relation to the coronavirus. Nearly four decades ago, the lab played a starring role in one of the most infamous Soviet “active measures” of the Cold War. In 1983, KGB agents planted a purported letter to the editor in a friendly Indian newspaper alleging the AIDS virus had been “manufactured” at Fort Detrick. The claim was repeated across the developing world, aided and abetted by Soviet cutout newspapers, the analog equivalent of troll farms and bot networks. Known as “Operation InfeKtion” or “Operation Denver,” the campaign established Fort Detrick as the archetype of a shadowy, secretive government lab.
Since then, Fort Detrick has become a trope—a recurring antagonist dusted off every few years to play the villain in the latest virus-related disinformation drama. And like other successful formulas, the Fort Detrick franchise has spawned multiple spinoffs, with U.S.-funded research labs around the world serving as the setting for all manners of sinister activities. In the country of Georgia, for example, the U.S.-funded Lugar Center for Public Health Research has frequently found itself in the crosshairs of Kremlin disinformation since the lab was established in 2011. From claims the lab was used to release toxic mosquitos on targeted populations to allegations it was involved in the 2018 poisoning of Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom, the Lugar lab has been featured in more than a dozen different disinformation campaigns. Unsurprisingly, it has also been the target of coronavirus disinformation narratives.
Beijing has also stoked fears of U.S.-funded biolabs outside the United States. Since February 2020, Chinese officials and state media have posted more than 185 tweets referring to an alleged 200 biological labs operated by the United States around the world. Beijing’s favored narratives have varied from those spreading general suspicion of U.S. intentions to more explicit claims that the location of U.S. labs “closely resembles the spread of some diseases and viruses in recent years.” None of these claims have been backed with hard evidence. But, like with the Fort Detrick narrative, that’s not the point. The persistent and consistent nature of Beijing’s accusations have undoubtedly spun up suspicion of the lab—particularly in those parts of the world where mistrust of U.S. foreign policy is already high.
For Beijing and Moscow, disinformation campaigns targeting Fort Detrick and other U.S. labs have clear, short-term strategic benefits. For Russia, the primary goal, as during Soviet times, is to damage the United States’ international reputation, especially in regions where U.S. influence is perceived to be a threat to Moscow. For China, the objective is either retribution or, if there is any truth to the Wuhan lab leak theory, the creation of a diversion to distract from and dilute the truth. In both cases, however, the intent to damage the United States with virus-related conspiracy theories has come with significant consequences to global public health.
Efforts to manipulate information about the virus’s origins can cause real harm—including within China and, most acutely, Russia, where vaccine skepticism has contributed to a deadly new wave of cases.
The Kremlin’s AIDS disinformation campaign, for example, helped create widespread denialism among at-risk populations around the world, including within the United States. In Africa, where Radio Moscow once claimed the United States was using vaccination programs to spread HIV as a test for biological warfare, Soviet disinformation almost certainly contributed to tens of thousands of preventable deaths year after year.
The same risks certainly apply today. As the world continues to grapple with vaccine skepticism and reluctance toward other public health measures aimed at curbing COVID-19’s spread, efforts to manipulate information about the virus’s origins can cause real harm—including within China and, most acutely, Russia, where vaccine skepticism has contributed to a deadly new wave of cases. And therein lies the problem with information operations, particularly in the digital age: Like a virus, information cannot be controlled once it reaches the general population, and as it spreads, it can mutate in never intended ways.
Beijing should heed these risks—if not for the sake of the world’s pandemic recovery, then for the sake of its own citizens.
6. Cyber disinformation: How dangerous are the Middle East's "electronic armies"?
More players conducting information warfare in the human domain. Even though communication is via electronic means in cyberspace it is all about influencing behavior in the human domain. This is probably a blind spot for most of us 9and the US government) because few of us speak Arabic (or speak Arabic at a sufficient level to understand what is taking place).
Excerpts:
The Middle East's problem with electronic armies may also have to do with language, Owen Jones reasoned. "In Arabic, disinformation seems to thrive," he said during the TED talk. "And I think part of the reason for this is a regulatory blind spot when it comes to the social media companies, who are less inclined to take action against accounts who aren't speaking English, or that aren't impacting directly on U.S. interests."
Ghazayel believes it also has to do with the precarious political climate in some Middle Eastern countries, where there is conflict, economic pressure, or an authoritarian government.
"When they are being encouraged by politicians or governments, and then also find that social media platforms are letting them loose without any genuine or swift action to rein them in, electronic armies thrive in the absence of the rule of law."
Cyber disinformation: How dangerous are the Middle East's "electronic armies"? - Qantara.de
There are armies in the Middle East that do not have guns and whose "soldiers" work online only – but that doesn't mean they're not dangerous. The term "electronic armies" is commonly used in the Middle East for such forces.
The concept is simple, as the Internet freedom advocates from Access Now explain. "A group of people assume false identities in order to participate in Internet forums and social media to send – or suppress – a specific message."
Mahmoud Ghazayel, an expert in online disinformation in Lebanon, says that even in Western countries, for example, political influence is exerted via social media. Online campaigns and hate propaganda exist worldwide. But the degree and type of disinformation varies, says Ghazayel. "In the Middle East, such campaigns can easily get someone killed. Unfortunately, we already have a lot of examples of this," he said.
Conspiracy theory culminated in murder
Last August, for example, the young Iraqi activist Riham Yaqoob, born in 1991, was murdered. Yaqoob was supposedly killed because of her participation in local anti-government protests. But Ben Robin-D'Cruz, a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, has looked more closely into the details of Yaqoob 's death. He says that by the time she met her death, the 30 year-old fitness specialist had long since withdrawn from protests.
Videos circulating on social media that purported to show her leading protests were actually not of her, nor were they filmed in Basra as alleged, Robin-D'Cruz noted.
Instead, Yaqoob was the victim of a widely shared conspiracy theory that accused a group of young locals "of being agents in a U.S. plot to orchestrate violent protests in Basra," Robin-D'Cruz wrote for the London School of Economics' Middle East Center. In fact, the group had only participated in a U.S.-funded youth leadership programme.
A #woman activist and #medic , Dr Riham Yaqoob, was shot dead today in #Basra in south #Iraq , where #Iran-backed militias have been targeting protesters and critics. Iraqi activists are living in fear as assassinations are becoming increasingly frequent pic.twitter.com/RUDcX22bFn
Targeted disinformation
But a story on Iran's state news agency, Mehr, published on 10 September 2018, suggested otherwise.
The Iranian news agency article identified the young activists clearly and their pictures, including one of Yaqoob that showed her with the former U.S. consul general in Basra, Timmy Davis, were shared on social media. The image was enough to portray her to the public as a U.S.-backed conspirator. In Iraq, which was reeling from numerous protests, this was a serious accusation.
After that, pressure mounted on the activists from pro-Iranian militias in Iraq. Other members of the group fled the city or the country. But Yaqoob didn't, and on 19 August 2020, she was shot in her car by a gunman from the back of a motorcycle.
The Jamal Kashoggi case
A 2020 analysis of threats made against him on Arabic-language social media indicated a pattern of co-ordinated intimidation and abuse, much of which could be traced back to Saudi Arabia, investigators from the Soufan Group, a U.S.-based security consultancy, have argued.
State actors outsourcing their campaigns
Additionally, third parties may be involved. "We are increasingly seeing state actors outsourcing their disinformation operations," researchers from the Stanford Internet Observatory wrote in a report published last December. This gives governments a level of plausible deniability, they said. And if one firm gets banned, those who are paying simply use another.
Of course, other countries also have "electronic armies". Elsewhere they have been described as troll farms, cyber armies, keyboard armies or web brigades. In its 2020 report, Freedom House revealed that in 39 out of 65 countries surveyed, individuals were employed by political leaders to "manipulate online discussions".
Protest in Baghdad against Iran's influence following the murder of activist Hisham al Hashemi. The regime in Tehran is targeting democracy activists and opponents of Iranian influence in Iraq with targeted online defamation campaigns. In September 2018, Iran's Mehr News Agency published a photo of activist Riham Yaqoob with the then-U.S. consul general in Basra to portray her as a U.S.-backed conspirator. On August 19, 2020, Yaqoob was shot dead in her car by an unknown armed motorcyclist
Approach to digital media problematic
Experts agree that as a region, it is quite possible that the Middle East has some of the worst problems with electronic armies in the world. This may be because of how people in the region use social media, Ghazayel suggested. Although most Middle East countries offer a wide variety of traditional news outlets, locals tend to be wary of them, as many are funded, founded, or directed by the country's government or social or religious interest groups. So instead, they turn to social media for news and information, the credibility of which is often questionable.
This is a growing trend. A 2020 study of attitudes of Arab youths aged between 18 and 24 found that 79% were getting their news from social media. Around two-thirds of respondents told researchers they trusted social media "to do the right thing". In comparison, a 2020 study by the Reuters Institute showed that only 56% of young Germans and 51% of Americans of the same age got their news from either Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok.
Precarious political culture
The Middle East's problem with electronic armies may also have to do with language, Owen Jones reasoned. "In Arabic, disinformation seems to thrive," he said during the TED talk. "And I think part of the reason for this is a regulatory blind spot when it comes to the social media companies, who are less inclined to take action against accounts who aren't speaking English, or that aren't impacting directly on U.S. interests."
Ghazayel believes it also has to do with the precarious political climate in some Middle Eastern countries, where there is conflict, economic pressure, or an authoritarian government.
"When they are being encouraged by politicians or governments, and then also find that social media platforms are letting them loose without any genuine or swift action to rein them in, electronic armies thrive in the absence of the rule of law."
Cathrin Schaer
© Deutsche Welle 2021
7. How Vietnam's 'influencer' army wages information warfare on Facebook
An interesting article. Another information army. Cool name: Force 47. Like "Force 10 from Navarone." The Force (1st Special Service Force from WWII). May the force be with you.
I wonder if the GEC is mapping the efforts of all these countries around the world - it needs a nation-state tracker and other than government organizations to understand their intent, mission, strategy, and methods of operations.
Excerpts:
In addition to Facebook, Force 47 creates anonymous Gmail and Yahoo email addresses, and accounts on Google's YouTube and Twitter, according to the reports.
YouTube said it had terminated nine channels on Friday for violating its policies on spam, including a channel identified by Reuters as a suspected Force 47 operation.
Twitter said it had not seen any activity by Force 47.
Many of the Facebook groups reviewed by Reuters played on patriotic sentiments with names such as "I love the Socialist Republic of Vietnam", "Vietnam in my Heart", "Voice of the Fatherland" and "Believe in the Party".
Some groups, such as "Keeping company with Force 47" and "Roses of Force 47" were obvious in their affiliation, while others - such as "Pink Lotus" and a few groups that used the names of local towns in their titles - were more subtle.
How Vietnam's 'influencer' army wages information warfare on Facebook
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A Facebook page of a group called 'Pink Lotus', which was identified by Vietnamese state media as being controlled by 'Force 47' cyber troops, is displayed on screen in this photo taken July 6, 2021 by REUTERS
- Summary
- Thousands-strong 'Force 47' army unit fights 'wrong views'
- State media reveals network of Force 47 Facebook groups
- Vietnam threatens to block Facebook over censorship requests
- Facebook culls 'Force 47' group following Reuters investigation
- YouTube says removes nine channels over spam policy
HANOI, July 9 (Reuters) - In Vietnam, where the state is fighting a fierce online battle against political dissent, social media "influencers" are more likely to be soldiers than celebrities.
Force 47, as the Vietnamese army's online information warfare unit is known, consists of thousands of soldiers who, in addition to their normal duties, are tasked with setting up, moderating and posting on pro-state Facebook groups, to correct "wrong views" online.
According to a Reuters review of provincial-level state media reports and broadcasts by the army's official television station, Force 47 has since its inception in 2016 set up hundreds of Facebook groups and pages, and published thousands of pro-government articles and posts.
Social media researchers say the group may be the largest and most sophisticated influence network in Southeast Asia. And it is now playing a prominent role in the country's intensifying conflict with Facebook (FB.O).
After being approached by Reuters this week, a Facebook source said the company had removed a group called "E47", which had mobilised both military and non-military members to report posts they did not like to Facebook in an effort to have them taken down. The source said the group was connected to a list of Force 47 groups identified by Reuters.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that some groups and accounts were taken down on Thursday for "coordinating attempts to mass report content." A company source said the action was one of Facebook's largest takedowns initiated under its mass reporting policy.
But many of the Force 47 accounts and groups identified by Reuters remain active. Since they are operated by users under their real names, they do not violate Facebook policies, the company source said.
Vietnam's foreign ministry, which handles enquiries to the government from foreign media, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the takedown.
Unlike in neighbouring China, Facebook is not blocked in Vietnam, where it has 60 million to 70 million users. It is Vietnam's main platform for e-commerce and generates around $1 billion in annual revenue for the company.
It has also become the main platform for political dissent, launching Facebook and the government into a constant tussle over the removal of content deemed to be "anti-state".
Vietnam has undergone sweeping economic reforms and social change in recent decades, but the ruling Communist Party retains a tight grip over media and tolerates little dissent.
Last year, Vietnam slowed traffic on Facebook's local servers to a crawl until it agreed to significantly increase the censorship of political content in Vietnam. Months later, authorities threatened to shut down Facebook in Vietnam entirely if it did not locally restrict access to more content.
In a statement to Reuters, a Facebook spokesperson said the company's goal was to keep its services in Vietnam online "for as many people as possible to express themselves, connect with friends and run their business".
"We've been open and transparent about our decisions in response to the rapid rise in attempts to block our services in Vietnam," the spokesperson said.
Vietnam does not have the wherewithal to sustain a Chinese-style "Great Firewall" and develop local social media alternatives, said Dien Luong, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
"This has paved the way for Facebook to become the platform of choice for Force 47 to safeguard the party line, shape public opinion and spread state propaganda."
'SKILLED AND MALICIOUS'
There is no official definition of what constitutes a "wrong view" in Vietnam. But activists, journalists, bloggers and - increasingly - Facebook users, have all received hefty jail terms in recent years for spreading "anti-state propaganda", or opinions which counter those promoted by the Party.
Last week, Le Van Dung, a prominent activist who regularly broadcasts live to thousands of followers on Facebook, was arrested after more than a month on the run, according to a police statement.
Dung, who goes by "Le Dung Vova" was detained on charges of "making, storing, spreading information, materials and items for the purpose of opposing the state", under Article 117 of Vietnam's Penal Code.
He faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
Force 47 takes its name from Directive 47, a policy document issued by the army's General Political Department on Jan. 8, 2016. Analysts say it was created as an alternative to hiring civilian "opinion shapers" - or "du luan vien" - that had operated on a smaller, less successful scale.
"Since the 'du luan vien' were not as well trained in Party ideology or as conservative as military officials, their performance was not as good as expected," said Nguyen The Phuong, a researcher at the Saigon Center for International Studies. "Force 47 is also less costly. Military officials consider it part of their job and don't ask for an allowance."
The size of Force 47 is not clear, but in 2017, the general in charge of the unit at the time, Nguyen Trong Nghia, said it had 10,000 "red and competent" members. The true number could be much higher: the Reuters review of known Force 47 Facebook groups showed tens of thousands of users.
The Facebook source said the E47 group it had taken action against was made up of an active membership of military and non-military members.
Nghia now heads the main propaganda arm of the Party. Vietnam's information ministry recently promulgated a social media code of conduct that closely resembles Force 47 directives, urging people to post about "good deeds" and banning anything that affects "the interests of the state." read more
'STRUGGLE ON THE INTERNET'
In March, conferences were held at military bases across Vietnam to mark five years since the creation of Force 47.
State media reports about the meetings named at least 15 Facebook pages and groups it said were controlled by Force 47 which collectively had over 300,000 followers, according to a Reuters analysis of those groups.
Rather than being a single army unit, Force 47 soldiers appear to carry out their activities alongside their usual duties and create locally targeted content, the reports revealed.
In addition to Facebook, Force 47 creates anonymous Gmail and Yahoo email addresses, and accounts on Google's YouTube and Twitter, according to the reports.
YouTube said it had terminated nine channels on Friday for violating its policies on spam, including a channel identified by Reuters as a suspected Force 47 operation.
Twitter said it had not seen any activity by Force 47.
Many of the Facebook groups reviewed by Reuters played on patriotic sentiments with names such as "I love the Socialist Republic of Vietnam", "Vietnam in my Heart", "Voice of the Fatherland" and "Believe in the Party".
Some groups, such as "Keeping company with Force 47" and "Roses of Force 47" were obvious in their affiliation, while others - such as "Pink Lotus" and a few groups that used the names of local towns in their titles - were more subtle.
The posts varied in content, with many extolling Vietnam's army, founding leader Ho Chi Minh, or Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong. Others showed screenshots of "wrong information" posted by other Facebook users, marked with a large red "X".
"These developments unfolding in Vietnam are scary and have expanded with impunity," said Dhevy Sivaprakasam, Asia-Pacific policy counsel at internet rights group Access Now.
"We are witnessing the creation of a reality where people are not safe to speak freely online, and where there's no concept of individual privacy."
Reporting by James Pearson; Additional reporting by Elizabeth Culliford in New York and Fanny Potkin in Singapore; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Lisa Shumaker and William Mallard
8. Russia Targets Fox News Fans in Bid to Become the World’s Anti-Woke Capital
:-) A main target audience for the Rusians is the Fox News audience? Hmmm....
Russia Targets Fox News Fans in Bid to Become the World’s Anti-Woke Capital
Galvanized by the results of recent American polls and the popularity of Russian President Vladimir Putin with Fox News and its audiences, the Kremlin is proceeding with a new charm offensive targeting Western conservatives. Russia cannot offer much in terms of gun rights, freedom of speech, or standard of living—at least not for those excluded from Putin’s mob-like circle of trust. Rather, the Kremlin intends to attract Western converts with another type of currency—bigotry—turning Russia into the land of ultimate political incorrectness, the world’s anti-woke capital.
On Monday, Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov published an op-ed that left many readers scratching their heads. “In a number of Western countries, students learn at school that Jesus Christ was bisexual,” Lavrov claimed. Aside from a single viral post on TikTok featuring the ramblings of a child, there doesn’t seem to be any suggestion—much less any evidence—of such a curriculum actually being taught.
Far from simple non sequitur, Lavrov’s musings seem to be part of a larger agenda. In fact, they appear to fit squarely within the strategy pursued by the Kremlin’s elaborate propaganda ecosystem.
The topic of inappropriate lessons being taught in Western schools surfaced last week on the state TV show The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state media outlet RT, claimed to be personally helping multiple foreign families hoping to relocate to Russia. The reason for their desired move, Simonyan claimed, is what the children are being taught in school. Reminding the audience of Simonyan’s status as a prominent Kremlin insider with direct access to the Russian president, host Vladimir Soloviev immediately hinted that Simonyan ought to speak directly to Putin to expedite the process.
Back in January, the spokeswoman for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, told Soloviev that she has received a flood of inquiries from American Trump supporters imploring her to provide information about obtaining Russian citizenship. She seemed particularly impressed with communications from a certain blogger, who immigrated to the United States from the USSR and was now interested in going back to Russia, allegedly fearing “repressions.” Zakharova didn’t specify whether she was talking about the Russian YouTuber who posted videos at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and subsequently went on Russian state TV to blame “antifa” for the violence.
The Kremlin has long been toying with the idea of attracting Western supporters—and even potential émigrés—to side with Russia, and even move there. A stream of Steven Seagals would fuel Putin’s claim that Western democracies have lost their credibility and appeal. In 2018, a photograph of Trump supporters donning T-shirts that read, “I’d Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat” was proudly showcased in Russian state media as evidence of the Kremlin’s growing popularity with American Republicans. A recent opinion poll confirmed that Putin is more popular than President Biden among Republican voters.
“It’s time to move on to more active measures.”
— Vitaly Tretyakov, Dean of the Moscow State University's School of Television.
Simonyan excitedly claimed: “More and more people see our country—and Putin as its leader—as the embodiment of the place they can run to, like the West used to be for former Soviets.” She boasted that her media outlet receives plenty of support from English-speaking audiences, claiming that it proves the massive disenchantment of average Western denizens with their governments and popular ideologies.
Russia’s approach to courting Trump supporters has proven to be quite simple: to appeal to their belief that so-called “political correctness” threatens their livelihoods and even their future. In coming up with their tactics, pro-Kremlin propagandists rely quite heavily on the material pumped out by Fox News, with clips featuring Tucker Carlson regularly appearing on Russia’s most popular state TV programs.
Without even trying to conceal her glee about divisions in Western countries, Simonyan said: “What’s happening there honestly brings me joy. For the first time in Russia’s history—at least in the last 200 years—it has a unique opportunity to become a patron of its own homegrown ideology, which we couldn’t accomplish with communism.”
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The head of RT explained the ongoing goal of state propaganda in detail: “Russia is becoming the last refuge of a normal person.” She specified that a normal, “healthy” individual is someone who does not agree with liberal goals and ideas of Western countries, which she described as “totalitarian liberal fascism.” “It’s all such nonsense,” she moaned, referring to American public discourse on cultural appropriation, systemic racism, and LGBTQ rights. The host mockingly proposed the idea of a “heterosexual pride” event, and Simonyan enthusiastically played along. Disregarding damning statistics and contradicting RT’s own reporting, Simonyan boldly claimed that absolutely no discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation exists in Russia. “We’re different. I hope we will continue to be different,” she proclaimed.
Other top propagandists like Dmitry Kiselyov have been drawing absurd parallels between the prosecutions of the Capitol rioters and the suicide of John McAfee, claiming that McAfee killed himself because he was so afraid of the corrupt U.S. justice system. “America forever lost its moral leadership in the world,” he argued on his Sunday program Vesti Nedeli on channel Rossiya-1.
The program alleged that white people in America are being “shamed” and subjected to “mass humiliation.” Vesti Nedeli showcased clips from Fox News featuring Tucker Carlson, who claimed that the critical race theory amounts to racism against white people. Earlier in June, popular tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda opined that President Joe Biden “declared white Americans to be the main enemies of the United States” and vowed that Russia would not help the U.S. in its fight against the proponents of white supremacy.
Shortly after the Capitol riot, the host of the state TV program 60 Minutes, Olga Skabeeva, described the death of Ashli Babbitt as an example of “the negroes lynching the whites.” In the weeks following the attempted Capitol insurrection, Soloviev complained that unlike George Floyd, Babbitt wasn’t buried in a golden coffin and pondered out loud why there was no movement entitled “White Lives Matter.”
With Russia positioning itself as the anti-woke empire, it is ready to reel in more Western supporters by any means necessary. During Soloviev’s show last Friday, Vitaly Tretyakov, dean of the Moscow State University's School of Television, suggested: “It’s time to move on to more active measures—and I don’t mean sending ships into their territorial waters. I mean sending political vessels. Do you want me to spell it out?”
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Simonyan quickly interjected, keeping her fellow propagandist from divulging too much. “No need,” she said.
9. Measuring the Effects of Influence Operations: Key Findings and Gaps From Empirical Research
This is the most difficult aspect of psychological warfare and operations, information and influence operations, and Public Diplomacy.
Please go to the link to view the graphics and the pages of references and read this in the original format.
These references will be useful for the GEC, our PSYOP experts, and our Public Diplomacy specialists.
Measuring the Effects of Influence Operations: Key Findings and Gaps From Empirical Research
Influence operations can have measurable effects on people’s beliefs and behavior, but empirical research does not yet adequately answer the most pressing questions facing policymakers.
Combating influence operations is a major priority of governments, tech platforms, and civil society organizations around the world.1 Yet policymakers lack good information about the nature of the problem they seek to solve. Empirical research on how influence operations can affect people and societies—for example, by altering beliefs, changing voting behavior, or inspiring political violence—is limited and scattered. This makes it difficult for policymakers to prioritize influence threats, judge whether the problem is getting better or worse, and develop evidence-based solutions.
To assess what is known about the effects of influence operations and identify remaining research gaps, the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations sponsored a systematic literature review by Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. Laura Courchesne, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Isra M. Thange examined eighty-two studies published between 1995 and 2020.2 The review included only those studies that (1) examined a specific population targeted by an influence operation, (2) compared measurable outcomes (behaviors or beliefs) of people exposed versus those who were not, and (3) met minimum standards of statistical credibility. The selected studies covered multiple forms of influence operations—mainly political disinformation, state propaganda, and health misinformation.
The literature demonstrates that certain kinds of influence operations can have measurable effects on people’s beliefs and behavior. But we still lack answers to fundamental questions, like whether and how social media–based operations differ from traditional forms of influence.
KEY INSIGHTS
The strongest findings cluster in two areas: long-term exposure (lasting between four and thirty years) via traditional mass media, and short-term exposure (lasting days) via social media. Both types of exposure can measurably affect the beliefs or behavior of targeted populations.
LONG-TERM MASS MEDIA OPERATIONS
Multiple studies showed that long-term influence operations using pre-internet media such as newspapers, radio, and television can be successful at causing voters to support a particular political party.3 For example, populations in Ukraine and Taiwan appeared more likely to vote for pro-Russian or China-endorsed candidates, respectively, after repeated exposure to foreign-supported television channels.4 A separate study of Americans exposed to negative images of Ukraine by Russian media found this exposure decreased approval and perceptions of Ukraine by 10 percent.5
Long-term mass media campaigns have also affected the behavior of those people exposed to them. In particular, several studies have shown that targeted information operations can lead to increased political violence in settings of conflict or civil unrest.6 For example, mass media exposure to strong Nazi propaganda over many years was found to increase German soldiers’ risk-taking during World War II combat.7
SHORT-TERM SOCIAL MEDIA OPERATIONS
Another set of studies examined the short-term effects of social media–based influence operations. Some of the studied operations caused shifts in political beliefs and behavior, increased xenophobic or discriminatory sentiments, and increased skepticism and uncertainty around vaccines and medical information.8 Such findings are consistent with an earlier body of research on political advertising, which generally has “persuasive but short-lived influence on citizens.”9
Social media operations can affect more than just beliefs. Short-term shifts in social media activity by extremely prominent actors—Germany’s far-right AfD party, for example—can also have modest, statistically detectable impacts on racially motivated violence in a given area.10
KEY GAPS
While the existing literature provides important insights, it also has significant gaps. On the whole, empirical research does not yet adequately answer many of the most pressing questions facing policymakers.
MEDIUM OF INFLUENCE
A vast majority of these studies (74 percent) examined the effects of influence operations carried out through traditional mass media. While traditional mass media remain important channels for influence operations, such studies do not directly address the role of the internet and social media, the primary focuses of many policymakers. More research is needed to learn whether online influence operations have different effects than their off-line counterparts—for example, due to the increased role of social networks and algorithms.
Only twenty-one of the eighty-two studies examined influence operations on social media. Of these, fourteen focused solely on Facebook or Twitter. The two platforms have outsized importance in the Western world and a documented history of influence operations. But the same is true of YouTube and Instagram, which have received far less attention from researchers.
The predominant focus on two major Western platforms means there has been little study of platforms popular in other parts of the world. It also means that we cannot compare how the effects of influence operations may vary based on a platform’s size, function, architecture, or algorithms. Further, none of the studies included in the review examined cross-platform or multi-platform influence operations. Yet experts see all of these aspects as important focus areas for policymakers.11
Only one study in this review examined what has arguably been the greatest focus of policymakers since 2016: the threat of foreign governments using social media to sway voters in democratic elections. The study, examining efforts by Russia’s Internet Research Agency during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, found no effect on the beliefs of American Twitter users.12 The dearth of studies in this area, and their limited findings so far, suggest major disconnects between how policymakers and the research community perceive this threat.
TIME HORIZON
Most studies in this review examined long-term exposure (years) or short-term exposure (days) to influence operations, but no study evaluated impacts over months or weeks. In particular, short-term studies often lacked follow-up observations necessary to gauge the continued duration of an influence operation’s initial effect.
This research gap is significant because many policy interventions have focused on the weeks and months immediately surrounding a sensitive event. For example, U.S. Cyber Command reportedly disrupted Russia’s Internet Research Agency around the time of the 2018 midterm elections, and major social media platforms instituted many new policies and product design tweaks in the months before and after the 2020 U.S. election.13 We do not currently know whether influence operations are effective on the same time scale that these policies operate.
INFLUENCE TACTICS
No study in this review directly tested for potential variations in effectiveness between different influence operations tactics. For example, there has been substantial work on how automated social media “bots” can impact those people exposed to them, but it is unclear how so-called bot tactics compare to other tactics that might also be available to influence operators. Such research could reveal the relative cost-effectiveness of influence operations tactics and thus help shape efforts to deter or disrupt bad actors.
TARGETED COUNTRY
The eighty-two studies covered a wide range of countries, including Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Chile, China, Croatia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mali, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, Russia, Rwanda, Spain, Taiwan, Uganda, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
That said, studies involving U.S.-based populations constituted 27 percent of the total. Moreover, studies of foreign government–sponsored political influence operations have focused almost entirely on Russian campaigns, despite that more than twenty other countries have a proven capacity to conduct such operations.14 To help inform policy on an international and global scale, research should examine a broader range of victim and perpetrator countries.15
LOOKING AHEAD
The good news is that the research community is moving swiftly to address many of these gaps. As figure 1 demonstrates, there has been a dramatic increase since 2016 in the number of studies meeting our selection criteria—about 60 percent were published in the last two years alone. The COVID-19 “infodemic” has further catalyzed research; roughly one-fifth of the 2020 studies dealt with pandemic misinformation.
Still, the research gaps are serious and long-standing. There are inherent difficulties in establishing causality and in accounting for complex factors like cultural and political context when measuring influence operations effects. Filling key gaps will likely take many years and substantial investments by a range of institutions to empower researchers. Today, researchers often struggle to access important data held by third parties, such as platforms and governments. They also face inadequate funding, misaligned professional incentives, disciplinary silos, and nonstandard terms and methodologies.16
In the long run, new models of research collaboration will be needed to address these barriers and enable better measurement of influence operations effects.17 Multi-stakeholder collaboration would leverage the unique strengths of industry, academia, and government. Such collaborations can generate the evidence needed to support society’s response to challenges in the information environment.
Effects of Influence Operations
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A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilizationRobert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler2012Variation in exposure to a message on Facebook: either encouragement to vote with some profile pictures of friends who had voted, encouragement to vote without the profile pictures of friends who had voted, or no message(1) "Self-reported voting," measured through "clicking the I Voted button," (2) "desire to seek information about the election," measured through "clicking the polling-place link," and (3) "voting in the election"Researcher manipulated "randomized controlled trial" where "users were randomly assigned to a ‘social message’ group, an ‘informational message’ group or a control group"A spatial analysis of the impact of West German television on protest mobilization during the East German revolutionCharles Crabtree, David Darmofal, Holger L Kern2015Exposure to West German television"The probability of protest events occurring," with data gathered through a "micro-level dataset of more than 2,700 protest events that took place between September 1989 and March 1990"Variation arising from the fact that "West German television broadcasts could be received in most but not all parts of East Germany"A Tear in the Iron Curtain: The Impact of Western Television on Consumption BehaviorLeonardo Bursztyn and Davide Cantoni2014"Differential access to West German television broadcasting in East Germany... during the communist era," calculated based on a "signal propagation model""Differences in private consumption" in "the period immediately following the German reunification of 1990," based on data from "the first two waves of the German income and expenditure survey (EVS) collected after 1990"Variation in access to West German television in some East German regions that "were either too distant from the Western border or West Berlin, or located in valleys behind mountains that would block TV broadcasting signals"Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017Christopher A. Bail, Brian Guay, Emily Maloney, Aidan Combs, D. Sunshine Hillygus, Friedolin Merhout, Deen Freelon, and Alexander Volfovsky2019"Interaction with [Russian Internet Research Agency] accounts," measured through "a binary indicator of whether respondents interacted with IRA accounts between the 1st and 2nd survey""Individual-level changes in political attitudes and behaviors over time," measured using survey records of "political attitudes measured preinteraction and postinteraction""Whether or not the respondent interacted with an IRA account prior to the 1st survey conducted by Bail et al. in October 2017 by mentioning, retweeting, liking, or following an IRA account or liking a tweet that mentions an IRA account"Asymmetrical perceptions of partisan political botsHarry Yaojun Yan, Kai-Cheng Yang, Filippo Menczer, and James Shanahan2020(1) "Time of deliberation," (2) "Perceived uncertainty," (3) "Twitter activity and behaviors," (4) "Existing knowledge," (5) "Previous encounters of bots," (6) "Self-efficacy in recognizing bots," and (7) "Demographics" or partisanshipAbility of the subject to accurately identify whether the account they just interacted with was a bot, measured through four answers to a question that asked that, ranging from “definitely a bot,” “likely a bot,” “likely a human,” and “definitely a human.” Accuracy is measured as "a percentage of correct answers and an odds ratio"Naturally occurring variations in the study's subjectsBias in Cable News: Persuasion and PolarizationGregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu2017Variation in exposure to "slanted news"Voting decisions, based on "precinct-level voting data from the 2008 Presidential election" and NAES "data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 election cycles""Cable channel positions" are used "as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership" because they "do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and voting, nor with local satellite viewership"Brief Exposure to Misinformation Can Lead to Long-Term False MemoriesBi Zhu, Chuansheng Chen, Elizabeth F. Loftus, Qinghua He, Chunhui Chen, Xuemei Lei, Chongde Lin, and Qi Dong2013Visual exposure to two different 50-slide "stories" with two versions of 12 "critical information" or misinformation slides, and exposure to narrations of those stories, including 38 true statements and 12 statements containing misinformationAmount of false memories arising from misinformation exposure that persisted, measured through "endorsement rates" 1.5 years after the initial studyTwo different versions of each of the 12 "critical event" slides were created by the researchersCan Television Bring Down a Dictator? Evidence from Chile’s “No” CampaignFelipe Gonzalez and Mounu Prem2017"Television exposure, "measured through "the percentage of households with television"(1) Stock prices, and (2) "Voting behavior," measured through "the opposition’s vote share in [a] county""Differential television exposure of counties while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in political preferences – derived from voting behavior in the 1970 presidential election – and other predetermined characteristics"Can Television Reduce Xeno- phobia? The Case of East GermanyLars Hornuf, Marc Oliver Rieger, Sven Hartmann2020Exposure to West German television, based on "the fact that West German channels exposed their audience more frequently to foreigners and foreign countries than East German channels""Xenophobia and election outcomes of nationalist parties in East Germany""The exogenous variation in the geographic features of East Germany, that provided differential access to West German television"Capturing the Airwaves, Capturing the Nation? A Field Experiment on State-Run Media Effects in the Wake of a CoupJaimie Bleck and Kristin Michelitch2017Variation in "exposure to national public radio (ORTM)"(1) "National identity and attitudinal consistency with the junta’s broadcasting," (2) "acceptance of the ethnic group championed by the secessionists," measured through "whether the respondent would allow his or her child to marry a Tuareg," (3) "junta influence on political opinions," through questions on when they would like to hold elections and their satisfaction"Randomly selected women and nonelite men were invited to become “custodians” of a solar, crank radio" in 5 villages with only ORTM access, while 5 otherwise-similar villages were not given a radioCognitive and affective responses to political disinformation in FacebookArash Barfar2019Exposure to political misinformation versus true news via Facebook posts from popular pages"Cognitive and affective responses that political disinformation prompted in Facebook," measured through the anger, anxiety, incivility, and analytical content of comments on "2,100 political posts from popular sources in Facebook"Differences in exposure to political misinformation versus true news via Facebook posts from popular pagesCross-Border Media and Nationalism: Evidence from Serbian Radio in CroatiaStefano DellaVigna, Ruben Enikolopov, Vera Mironova, Maria Petrova, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya2014Exposure to Serbian radio while living in the border region of CroatiaVote shares for the extreme nationalist parties (HSP, HP-HPP, and HCSP), for the moderate nationalist parties (HDZ), and for the main party without nationalistic ideology (SDP), in CroatiaVariation in the availability of Serbian radio among different villages in the border region of CroatiaDemonizing the enemy: the influence of Russian state-sponsored media on American audiencesAleksandr Fisher2020Exposure "to an article from Russia Today (RT)... criticizing the Ukrainian government," and assignment to one of four experimental conditions(1) "How exposure to negative information – with and without the message source – influences favorability toward Ukraine, Ukraine’s foreign policy, and its president," (2) "whether citizens draw pro-Russian policy conclusions following exposure to Russian propaganda, assessing their attitudes toward expanding sanctions on Russia and arming the Ukrainian government" on a five point scaleResearcher induced variation in "whether audiences are aware of the message source, and/ or the intentions, of the Russian-funded network"Digital propaganda, political bots and polarized politics in IndiaTaberez Ahmed Neyazi2019Exposure to political bots on Twitter "in the wake of the Uri Attack" in Kashmir in 2016 and "the subsequent Surgical Strike""Twitter public opinion" on "two international conflicts between India and Pakistan," measured through Twitter dataBot activity promoting various hashtags and messages on TwitterDo Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital? Evidence from Indonesian VillagesBenjamin Olken2009Exposure to television and radio in Indonesia"Impacts on social capital," as measured through (1) "participation in social groups," (2) "trust""Use[s] two sources of variation in signal reception—one based on Indonesia’s mountainous terrain, and a second based on the differential introduction of private television throughout Indonesia"Does emotional or repeated misinformation increase memory distortion for a trauma analogue event?Sasha Nahleen, Deryn Strange, and Melanie K. T. Takarangi2020Exposure to a traumatic film with removed scenes, followed by exposure to differing numbers (zero, one, or three) of reports describing the removed scenes"Memory distortion," measured through participants' memories of the removed scenesExperimentally manipulated by the researcher, to expose participants to zero, one, or three reports with misinformation that described scenes that did not take place in the original film shown to participantsDrifting Further Apart? How Exposure to Media Portrayals of Muslims Affects Attitude PolarizationDesirée Schmuck, Raffael Heiss, and Jörg Matthes2020Variation in exposure to positive versus negative information about Muslims, as well as in congruent versus incongruent negative information about Muslims"Attitudes toward Muslim immigration," measured on a 7-point Likert scaleVariation in "positive and negative portrayals of Muslims in traditional media outlets and on social networking sites"Electoral Effects of Biased Media: Russian Television in UkraineLeonid Peisakhin and Arturas Rozenas2018Differential "availability of Russian television" in different areas of the Ukrainian provinces studied, based on signal strength and reception data revealing "the probability that a precinct receives Russian analog television""Electoral behavior in Ukraine" in the 2014 national elections, based on "precinct-level data... from the Central Election Commission of Ukraine"Large amounts of variation in "signal quality" between the areas studiedErasing Ethnicity? Propaganda, Nation Building, and Identity in RwandaArthur Blouin and Sharun W. Mukand2019"Variation in exposure to the government's radio propaganda," measured through "village-level variation in reception of the government-owned/operated Radio Rwanda"(1) The "measure of ethnic salience" through the Salience of Identity Test (SIT), (2) the ethnicity chosen to partner with in a "cooperative face-to-face interaction," (3) "interethnic trust" measured through a survey, and (4) "behavior in a trust game""The mountainous topography of Rwanda" creates a naturally occurring "variation in exposure to the government's radio propaganda"Evaluating the Impact of a National AIDS Prevention Radio Campaign in St. Vincent and the GrenadinesSusan E. Middlestadt, Martin Fishbein, Dolores Albarracin, Claudette Francis, M. Ann Eustace, Michael Helquist, and Anton Schneider1995Exposure to a "three-nation, mass media, condom use campaign," based on the self-reported exposure of respondentsA myriad of belief-related and behavioral outcomes measured through survey responses, such as (1) "Awareness of the AIDS Hotline," "Impact on Perceived Control" or protection from AIDS, (3) "Impact on Communication and Communication Belief," (4) "Impact on Perceived Norms," (5) "Impact on Beliefs About and Attitudes Toward Condom Use," and (6) "Intentions to Use Condoms"Respondents were either exposed or not exposed to the radio campaignExposure to hate speech increases prejudice through desensitizationWiktor Soral, Michał Bilewicz, and Mikołaj Winiewski2017Exposure to "a list of pre‐selected examples of hate speech directed against refugees and Muslims"(1) Sensitivity to hate speech, measured based on subjects' ratings of whether they found the hate speech offensive or not, (2) sensitivity to social norms, measured on a 7-point scale ranking responses of "social acceptability" in response to a short scenario, (3) outgroup prejudice, measured through the Social Distance Scale, (4) anti‐immigrant attitudes, measured through a 7-point scale asking about support for refugee policies relating to violence and isolationResearcher manipulatedExposure to Health (Mis)Information: Lagged Effects on Young Adults' Health Behaviors and Potential PathwaysAndy S. L. Tan, Chul-joo Lee, and Jiyoung Chae2017"Exposure to health misinformation about 4 cancer-related risk factors (indoor tanning, e-cigarette use, reusing plastic bottles, and artificial sweeteners)"(1) "Beliefs," measured through a 4-point scale agreeing or disagreeing with a health point, (2) "Intentions," measured through a 5-point scale asking about one health topic, and (3) "Behaviors"Researchers manipulated exposure to misinformationExposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarizationChristopher A. Bail, Lisa P. Argyle, Taylor W. Brown, John P. Bumpus, Haohan Chen, M. B. Fallin Hunzaker, Jaemin Lee, Marcus Mann, Friedolin Merhout, and Alexander Volfovsky2018Exposure to a Twitter bot with "opposing political ideologies," achieved through randomly offering participants "$11 to follow a Twitter bot" that "retweeted messages randomly sampled from a list of 4,176 political Twitter accounts""Change in political ideology during the study period measured via a 10-item survey instrument that asked respondents to agree or disagree with a range of statements about policy issues on a seven-point scale"Random assignment to a treatment condition in which respondents "were offered financial incentives to follow a Twitter bot for 1 month that exposed them to messages from those with opposing political ideologies"Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate CrimeKarsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz2018Exposure to "right-wing anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook," collected using Facebook Graph API and the AfD Facebook page"Violent crimes against refugees," measured through "the number of incidents targeting refugees"Matching similar municipalities with differing levels of social media usage, exploiting "weekly variation in posts about refugees," and "exploit[ing] exogenous variation in major internet and Facebook outages"Foreign Media and Protest Diffusion in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of the 1989 East German RevolutionHolger Lutz Kern2010Variation in exposure to West German television, measured through matching "East German counties that differ, to the greatest extent possible, in their level of access to WGTV while being as similar as possible in terms of their background characteristics"The "Rate of Diffusion" and "Depth of Diffusion" of protests in a given countyNaturally occuring variation resulting from "the fact that West German television broadcasts could be received in most but not all parts of East Germany," and matching otherwise similar counties into pairs with one having access to West German television and the other not having access
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jon Bateman is a fellow in the Cyber Policy Initiative of the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Elonnai Hickok is a nonresident scholar and an independent expert examining how technology and policy can impact and benefit society.
Laura Courchesne is a PhD candidate in international relations at the University of Oxford and a research fellow at the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University.
Isra Thange is a rising senior pursuing a degree in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a research assistant at the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project.
Jacob N. Shapiro is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. His research covers conflict, economic development, and security policy.
NOTES
2 While the reviewed studies were all published between 1995 and 2020, some examined influence operations that took place much earlier.
3 Leonid Peisakhin and Arturas Rozenas, “Electoral Effects of Biased Media: Russian Television in Ukraine,” American Journal of Political Science 62, no. 3 (2018): 535–550; and Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan, “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 3 (2007): 1187–1234.
4 Peisakhin and Rozenas, “Electoral Effects of Biased Media”; and Jay C. Kao, “How the Pro-Beijing Media Influences Voters: Evidence From a Field Experiment,” University of Texas at Austin, December 2020, https://www.jaykao.com/uploads/8/0/4/1/80414216/pro-beijing_media_experiment_kao.pdf. In the case of Taiwan, however, a backfire effect was reported if the targeted audience had a preexisting negative view of China or perceived the outlet as associated with the Chinese government.
5 Aleksandr Fisher, “Demonizing the Enemy: The Influence of Russian State-Sponsored Media on American Audiences,” Post-Soviet Affairs 36, no. 4 (2020): 281–296.
6 David Yanagizawa-Drott, “Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence From the Rwandan Genocide,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 (2014): 1947–1994; and Maja Adena, Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, Veronica Santarosa, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, “Radio and the Rise of the Nazis in Prewar Germany,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 130, no. 4 (2015): 1885–1939.
7 Benjamin Barber IV and Charles Miller, “Propaganda and Combat Motivation: Radio Broadcasts and German Soldiers’ Performance in World War II,” World Politics 71, no. 3 (2019): 457–502.
8 Christopher A. Bail, Lisa P. Argyle, Taylor W. Brown, John P. Bumpus, Haohan Chen, M. B. Fallin Hunzaker, Jaemin Lee, Marcus Mann, Friedolin Merhout, and Alexander Volfovsky, “Exposure to Opposing Views on Social Media Can Increase Political Polarization,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 37 (2018): 9216–9221; Ruben Enikolopov, Alexey Makarin, and Maria Petrova, “Social Media and Protest Participation: Evidence From Russia,” Econometrica 88, no. 4 (2020): 1479–1514; Holger Lutz Kern, “Foreign Media and Protest Diffusion in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of the 1989 East German Revolution,” Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment 44, no. 9 (2011): 265–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/0734282913508620; Matthew L. Williams, Pete Burnap, Amir Javed, Han Liu, and Sefa Ozalp, “Hate in the Machine: Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Social Media Posts as Predictors of Offline Racially and Religiously Aggravated Crime,” British Journal of Criminology 60, no. 1 (2020): 93–117; Leonardo Bursztyn, Georgy Egorov, Ruben Enikolopov, and Maria Petrova, “Social Media and Xenophobia: Evidence From Russia,” no. w26567, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2019, https://www.nber.org/papers/w26567; and Man-pui Sally Chan, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Dolores Albarracin, “Prospective Associations of Regional Social Media Messages With Attitudes and Actual Vaccination: A Big Data and Survey Study of the Influenza Vaccine in the United States,” Vaccine 38, no. 40 (2020): 6236–6247.
11 Victoria Smith and Natalie Thompson, “Survey on Countering Influence Operations Highlights Steep Challenges, Great Opportunities,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 7, 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/12/07/survey-on-countering-influence-operations-highlights-steep-challenges-great-opportunities-pub-83370; and Ben Nimmo, “The Breakout Scale: Measuring the Impact of Influence Operations,” Brookings Institution, September 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-breakout-scale-measuring-the-impact-of-influence-operations/.
12 Christopher A. Bail, Brian Guay, Emily Maloney, Aidan Combs, D. Sunshine Hillygus, et al., “Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s Impact on the Political Attitudes and Behaviors of American Twitter Users in Late 2017,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 1 (2020): 243–250.
13 Ellen Nakashima, “U.S. Cyber Command Operation Disrupted Internet Access of Russian Troll Factory on Day of 2018 Midterms,” Washington Post, February 27, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-cyber-command-operation-disrupted-internet-access-of-russian-troll-factory-on-day-of-2018-midterms/2019/02/26/1827fc9e-36d6-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html; and Kamya Yadav, “Platform Interventions: How Social Media Counters Influence Operations,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 25, 2021, https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/01/25/platform-interventions-how-social-media-counters-influence-operations-pub-83698.
End of document
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
10. 'We need help': Haiti's interim leader requests US troops
So as Kissinger would have us ask: What is the central logic for any US intervention in Haiti? Will anyone be able to effectively explain that to the American people as well as the Haitian people if we make the decision to send troops and intervene? Is the 1st Special Forces Command's Information Warfare Center and its PSYOP professionals working on those themes and messages to transmit to the Haitian people in preparation for a possible deployment? Have they received any strategic guidance to help them prepare?
'We need help': Haiti's interim leader requests US troops
AP · by DANICA COTO and JOSHUA GOODMAN · July 10, 2021
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haiti’s interim government said it asked the U.S. to deploy troops to protect key infrastructure as it tries to stabilize the country and prepare the way for elections in the aftermath of President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination.
“We definitely need assistance and we’ve asked our international partners for help,” Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph told The Associated Press in a phone interview late Friday. “We believe our partners can assist the national police in resolving the situation.”
The stunning request for U.S. military support recalled the tumult following Haiti’s last presidential assassination, in 1915, when an angry mob dragged President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam out of the French Embassy and beat him to death. In response, President Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines into Haiti, justifying the American military occupation — which lasted nearly two decades — as a way to avert anarchy.
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But the Biden administration has so far given no indication it will provide military assistance. For now, it only plans to send FBI officials to assist with the ongoing investigation into a crime that has plunged Haiti, a country already wracked by gaping poverty and gang violence, into a destabilizing battle for power and constitutional standoff.
On Friday, a group of lawmakers declared loyalty and recognized Joseph Lambert, the head of Haiti’s dismantled senate, as provisional president in a direct challenge to the interim government’s authority. They also recognized as prime minister Ariel Henry, whom Moïse had selected to replace Joseph a day before he was killed but who had not yet taken office or formed a government.
Joseph expressed dismay that others would try to take advantage of Moïse’s murder for political gain.
“I’m not interested in a power struggle,” said Joseph, who assumed leadership with the backing of police and the military. “There’s only one way people can become president in Haiti. And that’s through elections.”
Joseph spoke as more details emerged of a killing that increasingly has taken the air of murky, international conspiracy involving a Hollywood actor, a shootout with gunmen holed up in a foreign embassy and a private security firm operating out of a cavernous warehouse in Miami.
Among those arrested are two Haitian Americans, including one who worked alongside Sean Penn following the nation’s devastating 2010 earthquake. Police have also detained or killed what they described as more than a dozen “mercenaries” who were former members of Colombia’s military.
Some of the suspects were seized in a raid on Taiwan’s Embassy where they are believed to have sought refuge. National Police Chief Léon Charles said another eight suspects were still at large and being sought.
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The attack, which took place at Moïse’s home before dawn Wednesday, also seriously wounded his wife, who was flown to Miami for surgery. Joseph said he has spoken to the first lady but out of respect for her mourning has not inquired about the attack.
Colombian officials said the men were recruited by four companies and traveled to the Caribbean nation in two groups via the Dominican Republic. U.S.-trained Colombian soldiers are heavily sought after by private security firms and mercenary armies in global conflict zones because of their experience in a decades-long war against leftist rebels and powerful drug cartels.
In an unexplainable twist would’ve surely outed any highly sensitive mission, some of the men posted on Facebook photos of themselves visiting the presidential palace and other tourist spots in the Dominican Republic, which shares Hispaniola Island with Haiti.
The sister of one of the dead suspects, Duberney Capador, told the AP that she last spoke to her brother late Wednesday — hours after Moïse’s murder — when the men, holed up in a home and surrounded, were desperately trying to negotiate their way out of a shootout.
“He told me not to tell our mother, so she wouldn’t worry,” said Yenny Capador, fighting back tears.
It’s not known who masterminded the attack. And numerous questions remain about how the perpetrators were able to penetrate the president’s residence posing as U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, meeting little resistance from those charged with protecting the president.
Capador said her brother, who retired from the Colombian army in 2019 with the rank of sergeant, was hired by a private security firm with the understanding he would be providing protection for powerful individuals in Haiti.
Capador said she knew almost nothing about the employer but shared a picture of her brother in a uniform emblazoned with the logo of CTU Security — a previously unknown company based in Doral, a Miami suburb popular with Colombian migrants.
The wife of Francisco Uribe, who was among those arrested, told Colombia’s W Radio that CTU offered to pay the men about $2,700 a month — a paltry sum for a dangerous international mission but far more than what most of the men, non-commissioned officers and professional soldiers, earned from their retirement pensions.
Uribe is under investigation for his alleged role in the murder of an unarmed civilian in 2008 that he tried to present as someone killed in combat, part of a spate of thousands of extrajudicial killings that rocked Colombia’s U.S.-trained army more than a decade ago.
CTU Security was registered in 2008 and lists as its president Antonio Intriago, who is also affiliated with several other Florida-registered entities, some of them since dissolved, including the Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy, the Venezuelan American National Council and Doral Food Corp.
CTU’s website lists two addresses, one of which was a gray-colored warehouse that was shuttered Friday with no sign indicating who it belonged to. The other was a small suite under a different company’s name in a modern office building a few blocks away. A receptionist at the office said Intriago stops by every few days to collect mail and hold meetings. Intriago, who is Venezuelan, did not return phone calls and an email seeking comment.
“We are the ones who are most interested in clarifying what happened, so that my brother’s reputation does not remain like it is,” said Capador. “He was a humble, hard-working man. He had honors and decorations.”
Besides the Colombians, among those detained by police were two Haitian Americans.
Investigative Judge Clément Noël told Le Nouvelliste that the arrested Americans, James Solages and Joseph Vincent, said the attackers originally planned only to arrest Moïse, not kill him. Noël said Solages and Vincent were acting as translators for the attackers, the newspaper reported Friday.
Solages, 35, described himself as a “certified diplomatic agent,” an advocate for children and budding politician on a now-removed website for a charity he started in 2019 in south Florida to assist resident of his home town of Jacmel, on Haiti’s southern coast.
He worked briefly as a driver and bodyguard for a relief organization set up by Penn following a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed 300,000 Haitians and left tens of thousands homeless. He also lists as past employers the Canadian Embassy in Haiti. His Facebook page, which was also taken down following news of his arrest, features photos of armored military vehicles and a shot of himself standing in front of an American flag.
Calls to the charity and Solages’ associates went unanswered. However, a relative in south Florida said Solages doesn’t have any military training and doesn’t believe he was involved in the killing.
“I feel like my son killed my brother because I love my president and I love James Solages,” Schubert Dorisme, whose wife is Solages’ aunt, told WPLG in Miami.
Joseph refused to finger any attackers but said that Moïse had earned numerous enemies while attacking powerful oligarchs who for years profited from overly generous state contracts.
Some of those elite insiders are now the focus of investigators, with authorities asking that presidential candidate and well-known businessman Reginald Boulos and former Senate president Youri Latortue meet with prosecutors early next week for questioning. No further details were provided and none of the men have been charged.
Analysts say whoever plotted the brazen attack likely had ties to a criminal underworld that has flourished in recent years as corruption and drug trafficking have become entrenched. Even before Moïse’s murder, Port-au-Prince already had been on edge due to the growing power of gangs that displaced more than 14,700 people last month alone as they torched and ransacked homes in a fight over territory.
Prosecutors also want to interrogate members of Moïse’s security detail, including the president’s security coordinator, Jean Laguel Civil, and Dimitri Hérard, the head of the General Security Unit of the National Palace.
“If you are responsible for the president’s security, where have you been?,” Port-au-Prince prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude was quoted as telling French-language newspaper Le Nouvelliste. “What did you do to avoid this fate for the president?”
___
Goodman reported from Miami. AP Writers Evens Sanon and videographer Pierre-Richard Luxama in Port-au-Prince, Astrid Suarez in Bogota, Colombia and Trenton Daniel in New York contributed.
AP · by DANICA COTO and JOSHUA GOODMAN · July 10, 2021
11. Special Report: Afghan pilots assassinated by Taliban as U.S. withdraws
An unasked question is how can the Taliban be so effective without any air power?
It is smart (on the Taliban's part) to target the pilots because it takes a long time to train pilots and gain the requisite flying experience to provide effective close air support to conduct operations in support of ground troops.
I also wonder who is training Afghan pilots? Where are they trained? Will training of pilots in the US continue after we complete our withdrawal? And will we continue to fund their flight training?
Also, will contractors providing maintenance support be targeted? I also wonder if we could see operations conducted "out of theater" in "over the horizon" bases that will be used to support Afghan security operations (either maintenance or actual air power employment). Will Al Qeada start targeting these bases and support personnel?
Special Report: Afghan pilots assassinated by Taliban as U.S. withdraws
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A member of the Afghan air force marshals in an A-29 Super Tucano at Hamid Karzai International Airport near Kabul, Afghanistan, January 15, 2016. Picture taken January 15, 2016. To match Special Report USA-AFGHANISTAN/PILOTS U.S. Air Force/Tech. Sgt. Nathan Lipscomb/Handout via REUTERS
KABUL, July 9, (Reuters) - Afghan Air Force Major Dastagir Zamaray had grown so fearful of Taliban assassinations of off-duty forces in Kabul that he decided to sell his home to move to a safer pocket of Afghanistan's sprawling capital.
Instead of being greeted by a prospective buyer at his realtor's office earlier this year, the 41-year-old pilot was confronted by a gunman who walked inside and, without a word, fatally shot the real estate agent in the mouth.
Zamaray reached for his sidearm but the gunman shot him in the head. The father of seven collapsed dead on his 14-year-old son, who had tagged along. The boy was spared, but barely speaks anymore, his family says.
Zamaray “only went there because he personally knew the realtor and thought it was safe," Samiullah Darman, his brother-in-law, told Reuters. "We didn’t know that he would never come back."
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At least seven Afghan pilots, including Zamaray, have been assassinated off base in recent months, according to two senior Afghan government officials. This series of targeted killings, which haven't been previously reported, illustrate what U.S. and Afghan officials believe is a deliberate Taliban effort to destroy one of Afghanistan's most valuable military assets: its corps of U.S.- and NATO-trained military pilots.
In so doing, the Taliban -- who have no air force -- are looking to level the playing field as they press major ground offensives. The militants are quickly seizing territory once controlled by the U.S.-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani, raising fears they could eventually try to topple Kabul.
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Reuters confirmed the identities of two of the slain pilots through family members. It could not independently verify the names of the other five who were allegedly targeted.
In response to questions from Reuters, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed the group had killed Zamaray, and that it had started a program that will see Afghan Air Force pilots “targeted and eliminated because all of them do bombardment against their people."
A U.N. report documented 229 civilian deaths caused by the Taliban in Afghanistan in the first three months of 2021, and 41 civilian deaths caused by the Afghan Air Force over the same period.
Afghanistan's government has not publicly disclosed the number of pilots assassinated in targeted killings. The nation's Defense Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The Pentagon said it was aware of the deaths of several Afghan pilots in killings claimed by the Taliban, but declined comment on U.S. intelligence and investigations.
Afghan military pilots are particularly attractive assassination targets, current and former U.S. and Afghan officials say. They can strike Taliban forces massing for major attacks, shuttle commandos to missions and provide life-saving air cover for Afghan ground troops. Pilots take years to train and are hard to replace, representing an outsized blow to the country's defenses with every loss.
Shoot-downs and accidents are ever-present risks. Yet these pilots often are most vulnerable in the streets of their own neighborhoods, where attackers can come from anywhere, said retired U.S. Brigadier General David Hicks, who commanded the training effort for the Afghan Air Force from 2016 to 2017.
"Their lives were at much greater risk during that time (off base) than they were while they were flying combat missions," Hicks said.
Although Taliban assassinations of pilots have happened in years past, the recent killings take on greater significance as the Afghan Air Force is tested like never before.
Just last week, U.S. forces left America’s main military bastion in Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, as they complete their withdrawal from the country 20 years after ousting the Taliban following the Al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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"Pilots are on top of the Taliban's hit list," the senior Afghan government official said.
That Afghan official and two others, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they're working to protect pilots and their families, moving some to on-base housing and relocating others to safer civilian neighborhoods.
A White House National Security Council spokesperson strongly condemned “all targeted assassinations in Afghanistan” and stressed U.S. commitments to continue providing security assistance to the Afghan military.
The Afghan Air Force is heavily dependent on U.S. training, equipment and maintenance as well as logistics to ensure a reliable pipeline of munitions and spare parts. The Pentagon has yet to fully detail how it will keep Afghan aviators flying after the U.S.-led mission formally ends in coming weeks, as ordered by President Joe Biden.
The Pentagon told Reuters it would seek to provide Afghanistan with extra aircraft to ease the strain of combat losses and maintenance downtime.
David Petraeus, a former CIA director and former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, warned that failure of the United States to provide enough support for the Afghan military could be disastrous.
"We are potentially consigning Afghanistan and the Afghan people to a civil war," Petraeus said in an interview.
Washington is moving to evacuate interpreters who worked for the U.S. military, but it’s unclear if the Biden administration would risk doing the same for Afghan forces, like pilots. Some officials believe offering an exit strategy for elite Afghan troops could accelerate a feared collapse following the U.S. withdrawal.
U.S. intelligence assessments have warned that the Afghan government could fall in as little as six months, two U.S. officials told Reuters.
"No one wants to have the (Afghan forces) preemptively throw in the towel," another U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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PRECIOUS, OVER-STRETCHED
Two Afghan Air Force pilots were killed on June 7 while trying to evacuate troops wounded during a surge of fighting against the Taliban insurgency.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for shooting down their Russian-made, U.S.-financed Mi-17 helicopter. Local media identified the deceased pilots as Milad Massoud and Abdul Alim Shahrayari. The Afghan Defense Ministry said in a statement that the aircraft crashed, but it did not say why, nor would it identify the pilots. An Afghan official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the chopper was shot down.
Both the crew and the aircraft were precious.
The Afghan fleet contained just 13 Mi-17 helicopters and 65 qualified aircrews of pilots and co-pilots to fly them, according to U.S. military data from April 2021 and November 2020, respectively.
Those data show the entire Afghan Air Force comprises 339 qualified aircrews and 160 aircraft -- less than a quarter of the fleet size of U.S. commercial carrier Southwest Airlines. The "usable" fleet is even smaller - around 140 aircraft - after accounting for aircraft undergoing maintenance, according to the same April data.
Built in America's image, the Afghan Air Force is equipped with UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and lumbering C-130H transport aircraft, neither of which Afghans know how to maintain, according to a Pentagon report released in April. Those aircraft are serviced by U.S.-funded contractors, which also handle most maintenance for the rest of the fleet, including A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft, AC-208 Eliminator planes and MD-530 helicopters, according to that report.
A separate 2020 report by the Pentagon's Lead Inspector General warned that Afghanistan's fleet would stop being "combat effective" within a few months if the Afghan Air Force were to lose contractor support. The Pentagon has not said how many contractors will remain in Afghanistan.
Reuters contacted two large U.S. defense contractors that support the Afghan Air Force: Leidos Holdings Inc and DynCorp International, now part of Amentum Services Inc. Spokespeople for those companies declined to say how many contractors, if any, were still in Afghanistan.
In comments to Reuters, the Pentagon acknowledged the withdrawal of contractors could impact routine maintenance, something it was working to address. Spokesman Major Rob Lodewick said it had already become common practice to send aircraft abroad for heavy maintenance.
Petraeus said that’s not only costly, but it’s "impractical" in a wartime setting to fly aircraft out of Afghanistan for repairs. Remote instruction and meetings via video-conference also have natural limitations.
Along with Afghanistan's Special Forces, the Afghan Air Force is a pillar of the nation's strategy for preventing a Taliban takeover of cities. In addition to providing air cover and performing bombing raids, pilots conduct medical evacuations, ferry supplies and transport troops for the country's over-stretched army.
Since Biden’s April withdrawal announcement, Taliban militants have more than doubled the number of districts under their control in Afghanistan to 203, which is nearly half the country’s 407 districts, according to the Long War Journal, an online publication associated with the conservative think-tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. Reuters could not independently verify the data.
Western security officials said insurgent forces have captured more than 100 districts, but the Taliban say they have control of more than 200 districts in 34 provinces comprising over half the Central Asian country.
The U.S. military has stopped releasing its tally of Taliban-controlled districts and says that information is now classified. But on Thursday, a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged the Taliban had taken "dozens" of district centers.
Swift gains by the Taliban are putting more strain on Afghan Air Force crews and aircraft to repel the advances, four U.S. officials said.
Even before the latest wave of Taliban offensives, the Afghan Air Force was flying missions at a faster pace than anticipated, piling up maintenance checks that took more planes out of circulation, according to a May report by the Pentagon's Inspector General.
General Austin Miller, the commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, warned on June 29 that he was concerned about "overuse" of the Afghan Air Force.
"If you overuse the organizations, it's difficult for them to ... reconstitute," Miller told reporters.
In remarks from the White House on Thursday, Biden said aid to Afghanistan’s military would continue after the U.S. military mission ends on Aug 31. But Biden was hardly optimistic about Afghanistan’s future, casting doubt on the two-decade-old project to preserve a unified, centralized state. Still, he said a Taliban victory was not inevitable.
"I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, which is better trained, better equipped and more competent” than the Taliban, he told reporters.
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STAY AND FIGHT?
It wasn't just Taliban death threats against him and his family that drove decorated Afghan helicopter pilot Major Naiem Asadi out of Afghanistan. Asadi said the Afghan Air Force had failed to do enough to protect pilots vulnerable to off-base assassinations.
"They spend a lot of money on (the training) of these pilots, but they can't spend any money on the pilots for their security," Asadi told Reuters in an interview, after arriving in New Jersey in June to start his bid for asylum.
Asadi complained that not all Afghan pilots got paid the same or even regularly. As a member of the ethnic Hazara minority, Asadi believed he was also passed up for promotion.
"They are not taking care of every pilot equally," he said.
The Afghan military did not respond to requests for comment on Asadi’s case. Asadi did not show Reuters documentation to support his discrimination claims.
Experts say the morale of Afghan forces could prove critical in preventing collapse, given the momentum of the Taliban and the perceived weakness of the Afghan central government in key parts of the country.
On Sunday, more than 1,000 Afghan security personnel fled across the border into Tajikistan following Taliban advances in northern Afghanistan. Almost 300 flew back to Afghanistan on Wednesday, and officials in Kabul continue to express confidence in the Afghan security forces.
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A review by a U.S. government watchdog found nearly half of all foreign military trainees who went Absent Without Leave (AWOL) while training in the United States since 2005 were from Afghanistan. The Pentagon eventually halted training of Afghan pilots inside the United States.
Niloofar Rahmani, the first female fixed-wing pilot in the Afghan Air Force, won asylum in the United States in 2018 after receiving death threats from the Taliban and others in Afghan society who condemned her for working alongside the U.S. military.
Rahmani, who is now training in Florida to become a flight instructor, said the Afghan government didn't take those threats seriously enough and that even some of her fellow pilots didn't think women should fly. She said she wasn't paid for a year.
Still, the decision to leave Afghanistan wasn’t an easy one.
"It honestly broke my heart, I was depressed for two years just thinking about it," Rahmani said, explaining she felt like she had abandoned her family and what once seemed like a promising military career. She said she feared many pilots would drop out of the force "because of lack of support, because of the threat."
The Afghan military did not respond to a request for comment on Rahmani’s case.
An active-duty Afghan pilot, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity from Afghanistan, said he, too, was trying to figure out a way to flee the country in the face of deteriorating security.
Some are finding the U.S. door shut. Mohd Hamayoun Zarin, a former A-29 pilot, expressed shock that the U.S. Embassy in Kabul rejected his visa request in March.
As an Afghan Air Force veteran who spent years training in America, Zarin is convinced the Taliban will make good on their many threats to kill him and his family now that U.S. troops are leaving.
It would be payback, he says.
"I wasn't dropping flowers on them. These were bombs," Zarin said in an interview, detailing his case publicly for the first time in the hopes that the United States might reconsider.
In its letter to Zarin, viewed by Reuters, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said he was ineligible for the same visas set aside for interpreters because he did not work directly for the United States, but rather for the Afghan government.
Zarin said that distinction makes little difference on the ground in Afghanistan, where he was known as an English-speaking pilot who spent years training in the United States.
The State Department declined comment on Zarin’s case, saying visa applications are confidential.
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TRAINED KILLERS
Masood Atal, a Black Hawk helicopter pilot, was driving on his day off on Dec. 30 to buy fruit for his mother when two motorcycles flanked his gray Toyota Corolla on a Kandahar city highway, one on each side of the car.
Gunmen on the back of both bikes opened fire on Atal, shooting him 11 times, once in the face, six times in his right arm and hand, the rest in his chest, his family said.
Atal had confided to his family that he had received Taliban death threats, the latest in an expletive-laced phone call just two days before he was killed.
"We're killing you," they told him, recounted Bashir Ahmad, one of Atal's brothers.
Atal had asked for bodyguards and a bullet-proof car but the Afghan military turned him down, Ahmad said, accusing it of being "very weak on these things."
An Afghan military spokesman, Sadeq Esa, confirmed Atal had been killed by the Taliban but did not provide further comment about his case.
The Taliban confirmed it killed Atal and said it would do the same to other pilots.
“Targeting those who bombard civilians, who drop blind bombs on civilian houses, is an obligation for us and we will do this,” Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, told Reuters.
For Atal's parents, it was their fifth child killed in the many decades of fighting in Afghanistan. In 1984, during the Soviet occupation, a rocket fired by an anti-Soviet mujahideen landed in front of their children's school in Kandahar, killing another son and three daughters, the family said.
Such crossfire has killed untold numbers of Afghan civilians. But there was nothing indiscriminate about Atal's killing, his family said. The Taliban "are absolutely focusing on the pilots first ... to make the Afghan government vulnerable enough so they can be beaten," said another brother, Waheed.
Catching the killers of Afghan pilots has proven difficult.
A few weeks after the January shooting of Zamaray, the airman shot dead in his realtor's office, Kabul police told the family they had made an arrest. They asked Zamaray's 14-year-old son to identify the suspect.
Glimpsing the detainee at the police station, the teen informed police they had the wrong man. Police tried to convince the boy that the suspect might now look different because he had a broken nose, the family said.
"The police were pushing (Zamaray's) son to identify and implicate the wrong person just to hide their weakness and show an achievement," Darman, Zamaray's brother-in-law, said.
Afghan authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the allegations.
Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali in Washington, and Hamid Shalizi in Kabul; Editing by Mary Milliken and Marla Dickerson
12. A shabby ending: The US flight from Afghanistan was a mistake
Excerpts:
What will be the consequences of the hasty US departure? It’s too early to say, but the signs are not good. Violence in Afghanistan had escalated dramatically even before the US withdrawal. Taliban attacks on Afghan forces and civilians have intensified and the group has taken control of more than 100 district centers. The government still controls most cities, but several, including Kabul, are under siege and racked by suicide-bombings.
In a typically bureaucratic statement that conjures visions of power point slides with color -coded matrices, Pentagon leaders have said there is “medium” risk that the Afghan government and its security forces collapse within the next two years, if not sooner. They offer no solution.
“Civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized if it continues on the trajectory it’s on,” Miller told the New York Times during a recent news conference. “That should be a concern for the world.” The world maybe – but apparently not the US Government.
“Hope” military planners are fond of telling one another, “Is not a course of action.” After this week’s events, it appears to be the only one we have left.
A shabby ending: The US flight from Afghanistan was a mistake
Basil Liddle-Hart famously wrote “The object of war is a better state of peace.” With this pithy admonition in mind, it’s difficult to see the precipitous US withdrawal from Bagram this week as anything but an admission of abject failure – made all the more damnable by the absence of any admission at all.
While Americans celebrated their Independence Day, the last US troops slipped out of Bagram Air Base, literally overnight leaving behind the detritus of 20 years: vehicles, supplies, weapons and ammunition – and a pervasive sense of betrayal among Afghan partners and NATO allies alike, given little warning of US plans for imminent departure.
And just like that America’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan came to an end. Everyone knew of course that we were going to leave — but surely not without any coherent plan to shape what comes next. No ceasefire, no political agreements or military support arrangements to mitigate the likely onset of mayhem and civil war. Instead, a stealthy departure under the cover of darkness. A turning point without destination. A shabby, furtive end to America’s longest war.
Afghanistan was a costly war in every respect — dragging on interminably, while achieving few meaningful objectives. But the decision to withdraw so precipitously was a mistake. That statement remains true, whether you are a hardline proponent of real politick or someone who still believes that our nation represents certain values and should engage with allies and partners in a spirit of enlightened self-interest. Even if none of the dire prognostications about civil war and Taliban resurgence come to fruition, there can be no doubt that our swift exit has sent a message to the world about US reliability as a partner with consequent loss of influence — the coin of the realm in this era of so-called great power competition.
Most Americans agree with the decision to withdraw US troops. What many do not realize is that full-scale US combat involvement in Afghanistan ended seven years ago. And that the last decade has seen a vast reduction in U.S. military presence: from a high of near 100,000 in 2010-2011, to some 12,000 a year ago, to just 2,500 at the beginning of this year. And with a concomitant reduction in risk to force: it has now been 17 months since the last US soldier was killed in Afghanistan. The residual force, small though it appeared to be, was nevertheless important.
“This [reduced] force has the appropriate lethality and the U.S. government retains its counterterrorism capacity in Afghanistan,” Gen. Scott Miller, commented to the Stars and Stripes in January.
This is no exaggeration. Those familiar with troop level calculus in support of partner nation operations , know that much can be achieved by employing a relatively small number of personnel with the right qualifications, such as special operators, combat air controllers, signals intelligence collectors, drone operators, logistics personnel and information and electronic warfare specialists. And, an element to provide force protection -- maybe a company or two of infantry.
Furthermore, by leaving this force in place, the US guaranteed the security of some 10,000 NATO troops involved in training the Afghan Army. Bereft of this assurance, NATO has also now departed. Simply put, a small US force could have remained in country to provide support for the Afghan military, while retaining leverage for US foreign policy in the region, at little cost in terms of risk or financial expenditure. Withdrawing them made no sense to except as a piece of political theater for a misinformed domestic audience.
“Afghans are going to have to decide their future, what they want,” the president announced center-stage in late June during a meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, adding with unintended irony the non-sensical non-sequitur: “The senseless violence has to stop.” As though prompted by the simple act of US departure the Taliban could be relied upon to come to their senses, lay down their arms, and acknowledge the 2004 Afghan Constitution that embodies principles so alien to their pious, pre-modern ethos as universal education and rule of law.
U.S. leaders have long insisted the only path to peace in Afghanistan is through a negotiated settlement, but now appear to have abandoned this principle. US plans for withdrawal continued apace even as US officials complained that the Taliban were not adhering to their part of the deal agreed to in February of last year.
That Presidents Biden and Trump made the decision to withdraw against the recommendations of their military commanders should not by itself incur criticism. The right to go against such recommendations is a hallmark of the principle of civilian control, a cornerstone of our democratic values. But to do so, without demanding a plan to mitigate the risks that their Generals warned them against, suggests hubris and a reckless disregard for consequences.
Biden’s withdrawal strategy is based on one of two assumptions. Either terrorists will not be able to operate from Afghanistan, or they can be contained there by counterterrorism efforts. However, no planning has taken place to validate these assumptions, which have been widely challenged by experts.
Nick Reynolds, an analyst at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute wrote this week: “If the Taliban take over, al-Qa’ida and other organizations will regain a significant base of operations”.
This claim is borne out by recent US Government intelligence reports which indicate that ties between the Taliban and Al Qaeda have grown stronger over the last decade “making it difficult for an organizational split to occur.”
The U.S. has pulled all its fighter and surveillance aircraft out of the country, and has yet to make any basing or access agreements with countries bordering Afghanistan such as Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. Until it does – and there are no indications that such agreements are even part of the plan - it must rely on manned and unmanned flights from ships at sea and air bases in the Gulf region, such as Al-Udeid in Qatar and al-Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates. This will increase response times and drastically reduce time on station.
In any case, one lesson that US Special Operations Forces have learned repeatedly over the last decade in places like Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Niger is that there is simply no comparison in efficacy between conducting remote strikes and accompanying partner nation forces on the ground. And without US contractor support to help sustain maintenance on Afghan aircraft, unilateral operations cannot continue indefinitely.
What will be the consequences of the hasty US departure? It’s too early to say, but the signs are not good. Violence in Afghanistan had escalated dramatically even before the US withdrawal. Taliban attacks on Afghan forces and civilians have intensified and the group has taken control of more than 100 district centers. The government still controls most cities, but several, including Kabul, are under siege and racked by suicide-bombings.
In a typically bureaucratic statement that conjures visions of power point slides with color -coded matrices, Pentagon leaders have said there is “medium” risk that the Afghan government and its security forces collapse within the next two years, if not sooner. They offer no solution.
“Civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized if it continues on the trajectory it’s on,” Miller told the New York Times during a recent news conference. “That should be a concern for the world.” The world maybe – but apparently not the US Government.
“Hope” military planners are fond of telling one another, “Is not a course of action.” After this week’s events, it appears to be the only one we have left.
Andy Milburn is the former commanding officer of the Marine Raider Regiment and CJSOTF-Iraq in the counter-ISIS campaign. He retired in 2019 as the Chief of Staff of Special Operations Command, Central (SOCCENT). Since retiring, he has written a critically acclaimed memoir “When the Tempest Gathers”, and a number of articles for national publications. He is on the Adjunct Faculty of the Joint Special Operations University and teaches classes on leadership, planning, ethics, command and control, mission command, risk, special operations and irregular warfare at US military schools. He tweets at @andymilburn8
13. America’s war in Afghanistan is ending in crushing defeat
Another scasthing critique.
America’s war in Afghanistan is ending in crushing defeat
The consequences of the conflict for Afghans, already catastrophic, are likely to get worse
Jul 10th 2021
“I WANT TO talk about happy things, man!” protested President Joe Biden in early July, when reporters asked him about the imminent withdrawal of the last American forces from Afghanistan, expected some time in the next few weeks. No wonder he wants to change the subject: America has been fighting in Afghanistan for 20 years. It has spent more than $2trn on the war. It has lost thousands of its own troops and seen the death of tens of thousands of Afghans—soldiers and civilians alike. Now America is calling an end to the whole sorry adventure, with almost nothing to show for it.
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True, al-Qaeda, which sparked the war by planning the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan, is no longer much of a force in the country, although it has not been eliminated entirely. But that is about as far as it goes. Other anti-American terror groups, including a branch of Islamic State, continue to operate in Afghanistan. The zealots of the Taliban, who harboured Osama bin Laden and were overthrown by American-backed forces after 9/11, have made a horrifying comeback. They are in complete control of about half the country and threaten to conquer the rest. The democratic, pro-Western government fostered by so much American blood and money is corrupt, widely reviled and in steady retreat.
In theory, the Taliban and the American-backed government are negotiating a peace accord, whereby the insurgents lay down their arms and participate instead in a redesigned political system. In the best-case scenario, strong American support for the government, both financial and military (in the form of continuing air strikes on the Taliban), coupled with immense pressure on the insurgents’ friends, such as Pakistan, might succeed in producing some form of power-sharing agreement. But even if that were to happen—and the chances are low—it would be a depressing spectacle. The Taliban would insist on moving backwards in the direction of the brutal theocracy they imposed during their previous stint in power, when they confined women to their homes, stopped girls from going to school and meted out harsh punishments for sins such as wearing the wrong clothes or listening to the wrong music.
More likely than any deal, however, is that the Taliban try to use their victories on the battlefield to topple the government by force. They have already overrun much of the countryside, with government units mostly restricted to cities and towns. Demoralised government troops are abandoning their posts. This week over 1,000 of them fled from the north-eastern province of Badakhshan to neighbouring Tajikistan. The Taliban have not yet managed to capture and hold any cities, and may lack the manpower to do so in lots of places at once. They may prefer to throttle the government slowly rather than attack it head on. But the momentum is clearly on their side.
*This film was first published in July 2020*
At the very least, the civil war is likely to intensify, as the Taliban press their advantage and the government fights for its life. Other countries—China, India, Iran, Russia and Pakistan—will seek to fill the vacuum left by America. Some will funnel money and weapons to friendly warlords. The result will be yet more bloodshed and destruction, in a country that has suffered constant warfare for more than 40 years. Those who worry about possible reprisals against the locals who worked as translators for the Americans are missing the big picture: America is abandoning an entire country of almost 40m people to a grisly fate.
It did not have to be this way. For the past six years fewer than 10,000 American troops, plus a similar number from other NATO countries, have propped up the Afghan army enough to maintain the status quo. American casualties had dropped to almost nothing. The war, which used to rile voters, had become a political irrelevance in America. Since becoming president, Mr Biden has focused, rightly, on the threats posed by China and Russia. But the American deployment in Afghanistan had grown so small that it did not really interfere with that. The new American administration views the long stalemate as proof that there is no point remaining in Afghanistan. But for the Afghans whom it protected from the Taliban, the stalemate was precious.
There will be a long debate about how much the withdrawal saps America’s credibility and prestige. For all its wealth and military might, America failed not only to create a strong, self-sufficient Afghan state, but also to defeat a determined insurgency. What is more, America is no longer prepared to put its weight behind its supposed ally, the Afghan government, to the surprise and dismay of many Afghan officials. Hostile regimes in places like China and Russia will have taken note—as will America’s friends.
That does not make Afghanistan a second Vietnam. For one thing, the Afghan war was never really the Pentagon’s or the nation’s focus. American troops were on the ground far longer in Afghanistan than they were in Vietnam, but far fewer of them died. Other events, from the war in Iraq to the global financial crisis, always seemed more important than what was happening in Kandahar. And American politicians and pundits have agonised over whether to stay or go for so long that, now the withdrawal has finally arrived, it has lost its power to shock. To the extent that outsiders see it as a sign of American weakness, that weakness has been evident for a long time.
Unhappy things
Shocking or not, though, the withdrawal is nonetheless a calamity for the people of Afghanistan. In 2001 many hoped that America might end their 20-year-old civil war and free them from a stifling, doctrinaire theocracy. For a time, it looked as though that might happen. But today the lives of ordinary Afghans are more insecure than ever: civilian casualties were almost 30% higher last year than in 2001, when the American deployment began, according to estimates from the UN and academics. The economy is no bigger than it was a decade ago. And the mullahs are not only at the gates of Kabul; their assassins are inside, targeting Shias, secularists, women with important jobs—anyone who offends their blinkered worldview. America was never going to solve all Afghanistan’s problems, but to leave the country back at square one is a sobering failure. ■
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This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Abandoning Afghanistan"
14. Deleted Taiwan Tweet Is a Diplomatic Disappointment and a Concession to China
Was this a mistake in information warfare? Was the tweet a mistake or was deleting it a mistake? We have to get better at information operations. Did the GEC have a role in making the tweet or advising whether or not to delete it? Were the experts at the GEC even consulted?
Excerpts:
President Biden has earned well-deserved praise for his strong support of Taiwan since taking office, even surprising China hawks who had lower expectations for the president’s handling of this issue. In addition to the donation of 2.5 million vaccine doses, his team invited Taipei’s representative in Washington to the inauguration, approved an arms-sale package to Taiwan, and issued critical statements about Beijing’s continued military intimidation of the country. Much of this has been seen as a continuation of the previous administration’s work to bolster Taiwan’s military capabilities in the face of an eventual Chinese attack.
But deleting the tweet, then publicly signaling it was a “mistake,” is itself a blunder. White House press secretary Jen Psaki also called it an “honest mistake” yesterday, adding “we remain committed to the One China policy.” The tweet, however, was not a reversal of the One China policy, under which the U.S. maintains unofficial ties with Taiwan. Only the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to use the post as a political cudgel, would have strained to describe it as such. So why did the White House need to be so vocal about its walk-back of the tweet, if not to assuage fears about angering China? Why did it need to delete the tweet at all?
We’ve moved past the days when provoking the party’s ire was considered a reasonable rationale for anything. In the early days of this administration, officials showed commendably few qualms about jettisoning that flawed logic — which makes this episode all the more disappointing.
Deleted Taiwan Tweet Is a Diplomatic Disappointment and a Concession to China
(Oleksii Liskonih/Getty Images)
After tweeting a message about America’s COVID vaccine donations to the world that included an image of the Taiwanese flag, the Biden administration has deleted the post and apologized for its “honest mistake.” Per Reuters:
Taiwan has asked its office in Washington to remind the United States not to cause “unnecessary speculation or misunderstanding” after the White House deleted a social media post on COVID-19 vaccine donations that included Taiwan’s flag.
A spokesman for the White House National Security Council called the use of the flag “an honest mistake” by the team handling graphics and social media that should not be viewed as a shift in U.S. policy towards Taipei, under which Washington does not formally recognise Taiwan’s government.
The White House COVID-19 Response Team this week posted on Twitter an image giving details of U.S. vaccine donations globally, including last month’s Moderna shots sent to Taiwan. It showed the island’s flag along with those of others getting vaccines.
President Biden has earned well-deserved praise for his strong support of Taiwan since taking office, even surprising China hawks who had lower expectations for the president’s handling of this issue. In addition to the donation of 2.5 million vaccine doses, his team invited Taipei’s representative in Washington to the inauguration, approved an arms-sale package to Taiwan, and issued critical statements about Beijing’s continued military intimidation of the country. Much of this has been seen as a continuation of the previous administration’s work to bolster Taiwan’s military capabilities in the face of an eventual Chinese attack.
But deleting the tweet, then publicly signaling it was a “mistake,” is itself a blunder. White House press secretary Jen Psaki also called it an “honest mistake” yesterday, adding “we remain committed to the One China policy.” The tweet, however, was not a reversal of the One China policy, under which the U.S. maintains unofficial ties with Taiwan. Only the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to use the post as a political cudgel, would have strained to describe it as such. So why did the White House need to be so vocal about its walk-back of the tweet, if not to assuage fears about angering China? Why did it need to delete the tweet at all?
We’ve moved past the days when provoking the party’s ire was considered a reasonable rationale for anything. In the early days of this administration, officials showed commendably few qualms about jettisoning that flawed logic — which makes this episode all the more disappointing.
15. How to Beat China in the South China Sea? Ask a Fighter Pilot.
Professor Holmes recently wrote an essay asking who are the air power theorists.
How to Beat China in the South China Sea? Ask a Fighter Pilot.
One in particular: the late U.S. Air Force colonel John Boyd. Colonel Boyd would exhort U.S. officialdom to grasp the strategy China is pursuing in Southeast Asia, and to acknowledge—indeed, grok—that Beijing wants to transform the regional maritime order in ways inimical to America, its allies, and all seafaring nations. That’s a challenge worth taking seriously.
The precepts underlying the liberal order—in particular, that no coastal state makes the rules governing use of the global commons—should be nonnegotiable for the United States. Accordingly, Washington must summon up resolve, resources, and allies to defend the commons rather than talk itself into believing Beijing will compromise away things it deems of crucial importance—things such as sovereignty over regional waters, skies, and land features. If U.S. leaders gird themselves to do the former, they might stand some chance of achieving the latter.
In short, Obama administration chieftains must orient themselves to Beijing’s strategy while clarifying their own purposes and deciding how much they treasure those purposes. Only after completing the intellectual work and a gut-check can the administration design a strategy that deploys power to fulfill its goals. Executing the strategy will prove simple by contrast with devising it—although as military philosophers warn, accomplishing the simplest thing is difficult amid the hurly-burly of strategic competition and conflict.
Acting as custodian of nautical freedom in Southeast Asia is an open-ended mission. It will prove neither quick, nor cheap, nor risk-free. “Genghis John”—such was his ornery repute—would grin knowingly at the administration’s plight. A self-made military strategist of Cold War vintage, Boyd devised his “OODA” decision cycle—observe, orient, decide, act; lather, rinse, repeat—to explain how combatants adapt to ever-changing surroundings. (Or not, in the case of the losers in strategic competition.)
Savvy competitors, that is, afford their surroundings close scrutiny; filter the information they gather through historical, cultural, and organizational lenses; decide how to manage those surroundings; and act. If sufficiently alert, resolute, and nimble, they keep up with change—and philosophers teach that keeping apace of change represents one of the foremost tasks of statecraft.
The OODA construct applies to conflict situations ranging from duels between lone swordsmen to power politics between nations. Contends Boyd, the likely victor in wartime or peacetime strategic competition is the contestant who best stays in tune with far-from-static surroundings. Or, better yet, the victor takes charge of his surroundings, modifying them to his advantage—and thus keeping his opponent perpetually disoriented and vulnerable.
In other words, the savvy antagonist disorients rivals by throwing “fast transients” at them. If you’re a flyboy like Boyd, prosecuting a dogfight against an enemy warbird, you can suddenly climb or dive, add or shed speed, or juke at odd angles. A fighter ace constantly changes the combat environment around his opponent until he loses touch with reality. The other aviator can’t observe, orient, decide, and act accurately or speedily enough to keep pace with changes his antagonist imposes. In short, a well-executed series of radical maneuvers leaves a less agile foe in the ace’s crosshairs.
You’ve got the foeman once you outwit and outmaneuver him. An uptempo, more economical, more clearsighted OODA cycle confers dominance over competitive endeavors.
And again, keeping an opponent perpetually off-balance is about more than fancy tactics in close combat. Strategic maneuver or diplomatic stratagems can accomplish much the same thing. China, Boyd might say, knows what it wants; wants it badly; and is acting on that desire. It has a sense of purpose and the steadfastness to pursue its goals relentlessly. Having observed and oriented to conditions in Southeast Asia, it has decided on a strategy and acted. Meanwhile, America is floundering back in the observation and orientation phases. Advantage: China.
To be sure, the U.S. leadership knows what it wants, namely to preserve a status quo that has served the region well for seventy years. Yet conserving a status quo betokens a static, reactive strategic vision. Washington is stuck trying to adapt to a strategic setting China has repeatedly altered through bewildering actions.
If you’re China and covet the South China Sea, fast transients include proclaiming, loudly and often, that sea and sky belong do you—never mind solemn covenants and longstanding custom that say otherwise. It includes deploying your coast guard and fishing fleet as policy implements of choice—baffling rivals like America that are accustomed to confronting navies rather than white hulls or seagoing militiamen. And it includes dredging island air and naval stations out of the seafloor while insisting it’s no big deal.
In short, Chinese officialdom has taken offbeat measures to consolidate its hold on the South China Sea while branding its actions as harmless. In so doing it plays on Washington’s well-known aversion to confronting Beijing. In Boyd’s OODA parlance, that aversion constitutes a self-imposed impediment to observing events accurately and orienting strategy to manage them. Strategic drift delays American countermeasures that might confound Beijing’s slow-motion effort to abolish the regional order.
The more U.S. policymakers console themselves that the current slate of half-measures is “complicating Chinese calculations,” and the more they heed scholars who espouse a “long pause” before confronting China, the happier Beijing is. Time is China’s friend.
Now let’s conscript a Prussian soldier—and one of Boyd’s intellectual north stars—to help the U.S. leadership orient itself to the new normal China is busily constructing. Carl von Clausewitz declares that “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.”
Indeed, refusing to accept that Beijing considers the strategic competition in Southeast Asia a form of bloodless combat verges on trying to transform the competition into something alien to its nature. Clausewitz and Boyd have tart words for competitors who delude themselves—and justly so.
Clausewitz goes on to sketch a “discovery” process whereby combatants understand what they’re getting into. Call it observe and orient, Prussian style. To “discover” how many resources to muster to compete successfully, he writes, “we must first examine our own political aim and that of the enemy.” What each contender wants and how badly he wants it determines how many lives, how many military implements, and how much national treasure he’s prepared to expend on behalf of his goals—and for long.
The contender who’s all-in has an edge over a tepid foe—even if the foe is stronger by material measures. China is fervently committed to its goals in the South China Sea. Is America? It should be. It’s trying to uphold principles that undergird the international system over which it presides. That no state may unilaterally abrogate parts of international law is one. That the seas are a common, open to the free use of all seafaring peoples, is another. That the South China Sea is a crucial theater, home to U.S. allies and friends who may need defending, is still another. These are stakes of a high order.
Next, Clausewitz instructs would-be competitors to “gauge the strength and situation of the opposing state.” Geography makes an immense difference in the strength each competitor can bring to bear where it counts. China holds the homefield advantage in a contest against America, a visiting team operating far, far from home. Competing close to home bestows a host of advantages, whatever the estimates of the military balance may imply. It’s important to be “very strong” in general, vouchsafes Clausewitz, but especially at the decisive place and time. It’s about concentrating forces at the right place on the map at the right time to make the difference.
The weak, then, can be stronger where and when it matters. China’s People’s Liberation Army, Coast Guard, and other implements of marine might operate close to their bases, whereas U.S. Navy forces are far from theirs and dispersed across the globe. Who’s better able to concentrate superior forces at the decisive place and time—especially when it can back up seagoing forces with shore-based fire support? And who’s more willing to hazard valuable warships and airframes—the contender who’s passionately committed to an enterprise, or a halfhearted opponent? Both material and psychological factors work in China’s favor.
The next step in the Clausewitzian algorithm: “We must gauge the character and abilities of its government and people and do the same in regard to our own.” In effect, Clausewitz prescribes a venture in comparative politics, cultures, and societies. A society typically cares more about what transpires in its environs than any outsider does—especially when, as Chinese officialdom never seems to tire of doing, the leadership can shroud its political aims in history, sovereignty, and other emotionally laden concepts that concentrate the popular mind.
Think about the competing narratives. Beijing claims that the South China Sea has belonged to China for centuries and was stripped from the nation by seaborne conquerors. Powerful stuff. By contrast, Washington’s rallying cry in Southeast Asia is “status quo!” Try leading soldiers over the top with that. Ergo, it’s at least conceivable that China holds an edge in uniting government, people, and military for long-term strategic competition against America and its Asian allies.
And lastly, says Clausewitz, “we must evaluate the political sympathies of other states and the effect the war may have on them.” To borrow from General Patton, people love a winner while shying away from likely losers. U.S. leaders must calculate strategy and diplomacy with regional audiences in mind, including friends and allies, bystanders, and third parties able to influence the competition’s outcome. If the United States appears unable or unwilling to compete over the long term, China’s neighbors may well start accommodating themselves to Beijing’s wishes in Southeast Asia. They may have no other recourse with no strong external patron to back them.
Am I counseling despair? Hardly; more like a sense of urgency. As Boyd and Clausewitz teach, fathoming the nature of a struggle constitutes the beginning of strategic wisdom. For the United States, this is a campaign far from home, for seemingly abstract goals, against a rival that prizes its purposes and thus—by Clausewitzian logic—has undertaken an open-ended effort involving a heavy expenditure of resources to achieve those purposes.
The time for acting is long overdue. Let’s get serious about observing, orienting, and deciding so we can act.
16. Military commanders aren’t getting necessary legal training, government review finds
I received my legal experience as a baptism of fire in 1983-84. I had a very odd company commander in Germany who used to offer article 15s to soldiers. His process was to edminster Article 15s on Fridays. Then he would take leave and as the Company XO (1st LT) I would have to administer Article 15s. He would tell me that was part of my professional development. I cannot recall him ever completing the administration of an Article 15 himself at least while I was his XO. As a real company commander a couple of years later in Koreain 1986-88, I administered far fewer Article 15s than I did as an acting company commander and I never transferred authority to anyone else to administer them).
Military commanders aren’t getting necessary legal training, government review finds
Military commanders may not be getting the legal training they need, said a Government Accountability Office study released July 8, 2021. (Samuel Morse/ U.S. Air Force)
Legal training provided to commanders may be inadequate, a government watchdog agency found in a report released as Congress determines whether to remove commanders from prosecutorial decision-making in cases involving suspected sexual assault.
The Government Accountability Office, after analyzing legal training and holding discussions with commanders and legal support staff, found that “perspectives varied on the general preparedness of commanders to address legal issues.
“In addition, GAO found that the timing, amount, and mix of legal training provided to commanders may not be meeting their needs,” said the report released Thursday.
Commanders may be responsible for many legal duties, including making criminal justice decisions, conforming with international law and complying with the rules of engagement in combat.
Legal training is generally reserved for mid-level commanders, but “commanders from all four services indicated that they would have benefited from dedicated legal training earlier in their careers,” the report said.
However, commanders of similar grades and responsibilities may not receive similar levels of legal training.
For example, the 101st Airborne Division’s company commander course spent 90 minutes on legal issues and U.S. Army Europe spent 2.5 hours, the GAO found. But at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., nine hours were devoted to legal issues.
“Some commanders and legal support staff expressed the view that commanders would benefit from additional legal training,” the report said.
Other commanders said they thought more training would be detrimental because it might lead commanders into thinking they were experts, and not to rely on staff judge advocates for advice.
The GAO also found that problems with recordkeeping made it difficult to know whether commanders completed their required training. The training’s usefulness was also unclear because the services primarily relied on voluntary surveys to gauge effectiveness.
The report comes as the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, which would shift the decision to prosecute rape, sexual assault and other felonies from the chain of command to military prosecutors, has garnered support from 66 Senate co-sponsors, as well as President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III.
The bill is being held up in the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose chairman, Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and ranking Republican, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, oppose it.
Nancy Montgomery
17. The U.S. Grand Strategy of Liberal Internationalism Is Dead
Two interesting perspectives/arguments here in these excerpts. I think it is in our interest to ensure the viability of the international nation state system built on the premise of sovereignty.
Excerpts:
My argument is that the only viable strategic path forward is a specific form of the traditional realist one of balancing – one that Rush Doshi in his recent book The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order has labelled “blunting.” According to Doshi, a blunting strategy would involve denying China hegemony in its home region, undermining Chinese efforts to assert its leadership regionally and globally, and preventing China from dominating the global commons, including not only the high seas, but space and cyber as well. As Doshi argues, such a strategy would have military, political and economic dimensions, for it is in precisely these domains that China is seeking to build its own forms of control. The goal of such a strategy would be essentially defensive – to prevent the emergence of China as either a regional or global hegemon.
But where Doshi sees blunting as tied to a broader strategic project of order (re)building, I do not. Rather, I see it as a stand-alone strategy, one anchored in both balance-of-power realism and the realities of the new era of great power competition. The goal of such a stand-alone blunting strategy would be nothing more than preventing the crystallization of an unfavorable balance of power in any of the world’s key regions – minimally, the traditionally defined geographic regions of Europe, the Middle East and the Western Pacific, but also the less traditional “regions” of space, the high seas, cyber, and the world’s more consequential multilateral institutions. It would not be an element of a broader strategy of reviving some half-imagined liberal or rules-based international order in the face of threats posed by the gathering forces of illiberalism and autocracy in general or China in particular. Rather, it would be a strategy for maintaining a stable balance of power – one that would be conducive both to American national security and the United States’ global economic interests.
My graphic depiction.
The U.S. Grand Strategy of Liberal Internationalism Is Dead
That great power competition has returned is no longer in doubt. Just as the era of Cold War bipolarity gave way to the post-Cold War era of unipolarity, that era in turn has now given way to one of multipolarity. And with the advent of a more multipolar order, the factory settings of the modern international system have kicked in once again.
Whereas the period from 1990 to about 2010 was characterized by the historically anomalous circumstances of unipolarity and the dominance of a single set of (liberal) norms, rules and institutions, the period since then has been defined by the return of multipolarity; the emergence of a serious challenge to the liberal or rules-based order; and the continuing erosion of American military primacy. In short, over the past decade or so we have witnessed the resurfacing of what might be called the “deep structure” of international relations: a condition in which states, operating under conditions of anarchy, compete for power – and perhaps even dominance – in the diplomatic, military and economic domains.
Although it has yet to sink in, this new geopolitical reality has rendered the US grand strategy of liberal internationalism – first conceived in the 1940s, but only fully practicable since the end of the Cold War – effectively obsolete. That grand strategy, of course, had two main elements: upholding and defending the liberal international order (ends) and maintaining American primacy (means). The former entailed creating a dense network of US-led liberal institutions, advancing liberal-democratic norms, promoting liberal economic systems, and universalizing liberal conceptions of human rights. The latter involved maintaining a margin of hard- and soft-power superiority necessary to police and defend that liberal international order against all comers.
But the liberal international order, if not quite dead, is certainly on its deathbed, and American primacy is fast slipping away in the face of China’s multifaceted military buildup. As a result, the grand strategy of liberal internationalism is no longer viable. As the conditions of possibility that made the strategy conceivable in 1945 and practicable in 1991 have evanesced, it has simply been rendered impossible – even if some of its most ardent advocates refuse to admit it.
But while the return of great power competition has effectively ended the checkered career of liberal internationalism, it is also calling into question one of its main competitors, the grand strategy of restraint. In connection with grand strategy, of course, the term restraint can be used in at least two registers. First, it is sometimes used as a hypernym covering a family of approaches to foreign policy that are less enthusiastic about maintaining global primacy or policing the liberal international order. That is not the way I am using it here. Rather, I am using the term solely to refer to restraint proper – that is, to a grand strategy that assumes that the US inhabits an extremely favorable security environment in the post-Cold War world, that this environment is the product of forces other than American primacy, and that the United States, therefore, does not require the world-spanning system of military alliances, bases, and deployments to maintain a liberal international order that either doesn’t exist or is self-sustaining.
And just how has the return of great power competition rendered restraint just as passé as liberal internationalism? Simply put, like liberal internationalism, restraint was an artifact of the post-Cold War unipolar moment. In that moment, the United States as the sole superpower faced no peer competitor. In fact, when added to the blessings of its geography, its overwhelming defensive capabilities seemed to leave the US facing no real military threats at all. Such dangers as did exist – “rogue states” like Iran and Iraq; terrorist groups like al-Qaeda; humanitarian emergencies like that in Rwanda; or state failure as in the case of Somalia – either did not pose a direct threat to US security or could be addressed using limited military means. In such a world, advocates of restraint argued, the US could liquidate the legacy alliance systems leftover from the Cold War, downsize its armed forces, end the pointless policing actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and otherwise assume a much more modest security posture. Even offshore balancing was deemed excessive. In the post-Cold War unipolar world, an ability to maintain adequate forces “offshore” to intervene in key regions of the world should a potentially hostile hegemon emerge was deemed superfluous; for not only where there vanishingly few potential hegemons out there, but local balance-of-power dynamics would kick in if any such hegemons were to emerge.
All of this was plausible between 1990 and, say, 2015. But the unipolar moment bracketed by those two dates is now well and truly over, and with its passing the conditions of possibility for a grand strategy of restraint have simply ceased to exist. The United States now faces a revisionist near-peer competitor in the form of China. This rising and revisionist power is seeking to establish leadership over the institutions of global governance, advance autocratic norms, and remake the global economy along more Sino-centric lines. Left unchecked, it may well succeed in creating a post-liberal – indeed, illiberal – international order, one that would leave the US subject to rules, norms and institutions that do not reflect its values and that might well threaten its economic wellbeing. Add to this the increasingly certain prospect of a Chinese military with global reach and enjoying qualitative parity with the US and it is clear that unipolar moment – a moment when a grand strategy of restraint was perhaps possible – has passed.
Having eliminated both the grand strategy of liberal internationalism and that of restraint, what grand strategy is left that would be suited to the realities of a post-unipolar world in which the logic of great power competition has reasserted itself?
My argument is that the only viable strategic path forward is a specific form of the traditional realist one of balancing – one that Rush Doshi in his recent book The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order has labelled “blunting.” According to Doshi, a blunting strategy would involve denying China hegemony in its home region, undermining Chinese efforts to assert its leadership regionally and globally, and preventing China from dominating the global commons, including not only the high seas, but space and cyber as well. As Doshi argues, such a strategy would have military, political and economic dimensions, for it is in precisely these domains that China is seeking to build its own forms of control. The goal of such a strategy would be essentially defensive – to prevent the emergence of China as either a regional or global hegemon.
But where Doshi sees blunting as tied to a broader strategic project of order (re)building, I do not. Rather, I see it as a stand-alone strategy, one anchored in both balance-of-power realism and the realities of the new era of great power competition. The goal of such a stand-alone blunting strategy would be nothing more than preventing the crystallization of an unfavorable balance of power in any of the world’s key regions – minimally, the traditionally defined geographic regions of Europe, the Middle East and the Western Pacific, but also the less traditional “regions” of space, the high seas, cyber, and the world’s more consequential multilateral institutions. It would not be an element of a broader strategy of reviving some half-imagined liberal or rules-based international order in the face of threats posed by the gathering forces of illiberalism and autocracy in general or China in particular. Rather, it would be a strategy for maintaining a stable balance of power – one that would be conducive both to American national security and the United States’ global economic interests.
Such a blunting strategy would by its very nature be restrained, but in a way suggested by the hypernymic meaning of the word, not the narrower sense. In other words, a blunting strategy would allow regional balances to crystallize on their own, avoiding any type of deep engagement unless absolutely necessary to thwart China or any other revisionists from decisively shaping a regional balance to its own advantage. And even then, a US balancing strategy would be ordered toward catalyzing or supporting local counterbalancing dynamics rather than playing the lead role or assuming the lion’s share of the counterbalancing burden. To be sure, such a balancing strategy might involve alliances and coalitions as circumstances dictate – indeed, such arrangements have been part-and-parcel of all balancing strategies employed in the modern era. But it would not entail a planetary network of thickly institutionalized alliances, complete with an extensive basing network, permanent deployments of troops abroad and all the other expensive accoutrements of a grand strategy of global hegemony.
Nor would it be premised on military primacy, at least not in all environments and regions and at all times. An asymmetric ability to blunt the efforts of aspiring regional hegemons – rather than a military capacity to uphold, defend and extend a comprehensively liberal order – would be all that would be necessary. Such a strategy would require robust military forces, but these could be configured for deterrence through denial – for denying an adversary the ability to use its own forces for offensive purposes – rather than for the kind of imperial policing required by liberal internationalism.
These, then, are the new geopolitical realities and the grand strategic derivatives of those realities. The only question now is, will the United States abandon the fading hope of liberal internationalism and the forlorn hope of restraint and adopt instead the only realistic grand strategy left available to it – one of prudent balancing?
Andrew Latham is a professor of International Relations at Macalester College specializing in the politics of international conflict and security. He teaches courses on international security, Chinese foreign policy, war and peace in the Middle East, Regional Security in the Indo-Pacific Region, and the World Wars.
18. The Time to Build America’s 'Smart' Military is Now
Excerpts:
Russia and China are not slowing down, nor should we. While we may have fallen as much as a decade behind China regarding the rollout of 5G, another transformative technology for the military, by focusing efforts on implementing JADC2, we can help ensure America's continued military superiority. In fact, according to a report by Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), "China has the potential to lead in all internet-based industries aided by discriminatory domestic policies such as data localization requirements.
The Pentagon has rightfully included a sizeable investment in JADC2, but that is only the first step. It is critical we make the right investments now to ensure we have a functioning system for the future instead of a disjointed low functioning program. It is understood across the military that a successful and effective JADC2 program is paramount to a strong, connected, and efficient defense system. Because of that, I encourage our military leaders and Congress to continue to focus on developing JADC2, and even more importantly, entrust the development of this important technology to those that can handle it who will deliver a product worthy of our country’s needs.
The Time to Build America’s 'Smart' Military is Now
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Recently, the Pentagon released its 2022 budget, which provided Americans a look into what the Biden administration plans to prioritize and the steps we are taking to bolster our nation’s defense.
A crucial part of the budget and the Department of Defense’s strategy to modernize is Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), a revolutionary program that aims to increase communication between the Armed Forces by connecting sensors from all the military services – Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Space Force – into a single network. This promise of greater interconnectivity between the branches of the military will revolutionize how the Department of Defense manages, secures, and leverages data as a strategic defense asset and help create a “smart” military.
Discussions of the JADC2 have been incremental over the last couple of years, but now we have our first look into some concrete details. As Lieutenant General Crall said in a June 4 press conference, “It's now implementation time. Planning is good. Talk is good. Now it's delivery time. And we've been given the clear signal to begin pushing these outcomes to the people who need them.”
While I applaud the prioritization of JADC2 and the importance being given to it, I worry that the Pentagon will overlook necessary aspects of the program that will make it successful and overall operatable in the field.
To start, it is crucial that the program is centered around secure and centralized communications. While it may sound simple, the number one focus of the program is to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Without secure and centralized communications, it will not be nearly as effective. As Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown put it, “the real challenge facing commanders in the next war will be sorting through the overflow of information coming at them as they struggle to act faster than the enemy.”
While many companies are vying for the contract to work on JADC2, including Silicon Valley giants Amazon and SpaceX, I, for one, am placing my trust in legacy contractors that have been leading programs like this for decades. This program is too important and involves too many life-or-death situations to entrust a company outside of the defense industry. These companies are skilled and experienced in dealing with consumer products, but this is a matter of national security. While an internet outage or Amazon delay may be an inconvenience, a communication outage on the battlefield would put the lives of Americans and our troops at risk.
While researching my recently published book surveying the global cyberscape, it became clear that our nation’s adversaries are ramping up their cyber capabilities to wage information warfare on the civilian populace. They are also bolstering their military capabilities, and JADC2 will be key to the future of America’s defense systems. The importance of JADC2 was laid out in a recent C4ISRNET article, saying: “With the JADC2 strategy in place, the Pentagon and its military services can focus on building the network of networks it believes it needs to fight highly capable adversaries such as Russia and China, a fight powered by high-bandwidth, resilient communications networks that pass mass amounts of data to help commanders make fast decisions.”
Russia and China are not slowing down, nor should we. While we may have fallen as much as a decade behind China regarding the rollout of 5G, another transformative technology for the military, by focusing efforts on implementing JADC2, we can help ensure America's continued military superiority. In fact, according to a report by Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), "China has the potential to lead in all internet-based industries aided by discriminatory domestic policies such as data localization requirements.
The Pentagon has rightfully included a sizeable investment in JADC2, but that is only the first step. It is critical we make the right investments now to ensure we have a functioning system for the future instead of a disjointed low functioning program. It is understood across the military that a successful and effective JADC2 program is paramount to a strong, connected, and efficient defense system. Because of that, I encourage our military leaders and Congress to continue to focus on developing JADC2, and even more importantly, entrust the development of this important technology to those that can handle it who will deliver a product worthy of our country’s needs.
Mari K. Eder is a retired Major General of the United States Army
19. Myanmar rebels suspend pair over massacre claim
An interesting development. Rarely do you see this kind of attempted accountability with rebel groups. I wonder if this suspension is a result of the influence of US NGO advisors.
Myanmar rebels suspend pair over massacre claim
Karen group to investigate government allegations its fighters killed twenty-five construction workers
A prominent ethnic rebel group in Myanmar suspended one of its key leaders and a subordinate this week, a spokesman said Saturday, as it investigates an alleged massacre of civilians on its territory.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since a February coup ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, sparking huge protests among civilians and renewing clashes between the military and ethnic rebel armies in its border regions.
The Karen National Union (KNU) – one of Myanmar’s largest rebel groups in its east which has tussled with the military for decades – has been locked in renewed conflict with the army since the coup.
In May, state-run media accused fighters from one of the group’s armed wings, the Karen National Defence Organisation (KNDO), of a May 31 massacre of 25 construction workers – an allegation KNU has said it will investigate.
Spokesman Padoh Saw Taw Nee confirmed Saturday that KNDO’s head General Ner Dah Bo Mya and his subordinate Lieutenant Saw Ba Wah have been “suspended temporarily”.
“According to the Geneva Conventions, even if they are our enemies, we just arrest them, you cannot kill like that,” he said.
“We stand firmly on our commitment to the Geneva Conventions and the international community, and we have to deal with this carefully.”
The decision – made on Monday by KNU leaders – is likely to sow discord within the rebel group, whose political divisions over the handling of the junta have spilled out in recent months to the public.
But Padoh Saw Taw Nee defended the suspension as “part of our procedures”. General Ner Dah Bo Mya could not be reached for comment.
Myanmar’s border regions are a patchwork of territories and alliances held by more than two dozen rebel groups, most of whom have fought with the military for more autonomy and resources.
Since the coup, the KNU has clashed sporadically with the Myanmar military along the Thai border.
In March, its fighters seized a military post and the army retaliated with air raids, the first in more than 20 years in Karen state.
The group has also condemned the military for the power grab, and provided shelter to dissidents working to oust the State Administration Council – as the junta has dubbed itself.
A nun pleads with police not to harm protesters in Myitkyina in Myanmar’s Kachin state amid a crackdown on demonstrations against the military coup. Photo: AFP / Myitkyina News Journal
Nearly 890 people have been killed by the junta’s security forces since February 1, according to a local monitoring group.
AFP
20. Myanmar: Free Burma Rangers cross rivers, walk up mountains and take shelter in bunkers to deliver aid
Dave Eubank and the Free Burma Rangers are doing the Lord's work.
Myanmar: Free Burma Rangers cross rivers, walk up mountains and take shelter in bunkers to deliver aid
In the inky darkness, a line of men slowly wade through knee-deep water.
Carefully, they climb over the fallen trees blocking the route.
Headlamps are the only lights illuminating the obstacles ahead.
Image: Aid and medical supplies are carried across a stream to people living in southeast Myanmar
"The Burma army is reinforcing this road so we are finding another way through," a Texan voice quietly explains.
The voice belongs to David Eubank, the director of the Free Burma Rangers which has worked in Myanmar for more than 28 years.
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Image: David Eubank is the director of the Free Burma Rangers
The video is one of hundreds shared with Sky News from a recent mission to bring aid and medical supplies to people living in southeast Myanmar's Karen State, also known as Kayin.
Karen ethnic armed forces have been battling government soldiers for more than 70 years but violence has surged since the military seized power in February, with junta troops launching air and ground attacks.
Airstrikes have forced thousands of people from their homes, many of whom are now taking shelter in the jungle.
Image: Rangers wade through water during the night to deliver aid to people in need
Since the coup, more than 177,000 residents have been displaced by violence in parts of southeastern Myanmar.
Of those, 47,600 are in Karen State according to figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The ongoing fighting makes getting aid to remote areas even more challenging.
"Most places we work in Burma and the ethnic areas in the mountains, you have to walk. Sometimes you walk one, two or three months," Mr Eubank says.
"It involves river crossings and walking up and down mountains… we move with everything on our backs or sometimes with pack animals as well."
It's exhausting work.
The team walks day and night, scrambling up muddy jungle paths, carrying a large bin full of supplies with them.
Image: Aid workers carry supplies in difficult conditions
As well as the physical challenges, they're also at risk from the ongoing shelling and violence.
"Jets over our heads right now. The Burma army bombed earlier today. Can you hear it?" Mr Eubank can be heard saying in one clip.
In another the danger of airstrikes has got too high, so they temporarily take shelter in a bunker.
Thirty rangers have been killed in service and the team is on high alert for junta security forces.
Image: The rangers sometimes use horses to carry aid and medical supplies
"Those rangers that were caught by the army, if they were alive, they were tortured to death and killed every one of them. So if we were captured or if my men were captured or my family, we could expect death. At a minimum, you're going to be arrested and taken away," Mr Eubank says.
Born in Texas, David Eubank grew up as the son of Christian missionaries in Thailand before serving in the US army.
Deeply religious, on leaving the army, he founded the Free Burma Rangers in 1997, which he describes as "a humanitarian service movement for oppressed ethnic minorities of all races and religions".
During the recent mission, which was filmed in April and May, the team visits the now deserted village of Day Bu Noh.
The villagers have all fled; their homes are no longer safe.
The crumpled shell of a bombed out school can be seen.
Image: The inside of a bombed school classroom
Holes made by munitions speckle the walls.
Black singed circles now mark the areas where houses used to stand.
Family homes have been reduced to ashes.
Such extensive footage of the destruction is rare.
Image: Building remains following airstrikes
The fighting and a media crackdown has made it hard for journalists in Myanmar to access Karen state, while foreign correspondents, like me, are not currently being given permission to enter from abroad by the military authorities.
The lack of access means we can't independently verify all of the stories shared by Free Burma Rangers, however, the damage in Day Bu Noh was also documented in a recent report by a humanitarian group, the Karen Peace Support Network.
"At 7:30 pm that night [27 March, 2021], jets began dropping bombs and firing guns into Day Bu Noh, killing three people, and injuring 10 - in the first air attack in Karen State for over 25 years, since before the fall of the KNU headquarters at Manerplaw in January 1995," it says.
Image: More than 177,000 residents have been displaced by violence in parts of southeastern Myanmar
More bombing followed.
A few days after the first airstrikes, I met a survivor from the village who had managed to cross the river to Thailand to get medical treatment.
Sitting in a wheelchair, Saw Lah Bri, 48, told me about the moment the planes appeared.
"As I ran the bomb dropped and hit us," he says, "There were six people in our group, one died."
He was being treated for shrapnel wounds and damaged hearing.
During their visit to the village, Free Burma Rangers filmed the floor of a house that was covered in bloodstains.
"This is the blood of a man who was killed in here by the airstrike. He was wounded. He picked up his son who was injured, came down the stairs… and took his son to his wife… and then he died," Mr Eubank can be heard saying.
The man's widow, Naw Mu Wah Paw, has now taken her young son into the jungle for protection.
"While they were bombing, it hit my son's cheek and also the other side of the cheek. My husband was killed," she says showing the marks on her little boy's face.
Image: Many homes and buildings have been destroyed during fighting
He still has shrapnel in his neck and head.
The medics couldn't get it all out.
Naw Mu Wah Paw is taking shelter among the trees with five other families.
Mr Eubank continued: "Conditions are very hard, some of them lost family members to the airstrikes or ground attacks, many of them are sick and there's no school… they're hiding in the jungle now and it's the rainy season.
"So it's psychologically hard, it's emotionally very hard and physically it's hard. And sicknesses rise in these circumstances."
We asked Myanmar's military for comment on allegations including claims that villages had been targeted in their airstrikes - but it hasn't responded.
Free Burma Rangers has worked in conflict zones around the world including in Syria and Iraq.
But they're not without critics.
Image: People displaced by fighting in northwestern Myanmar between junta forces and anti-junta fighters are seen at a camp in Chin State, Myanmar
The Burmese army has previously accused them of training and assisting armed rebels.
Mr Eubank insists the people of Myanmar invited them to help and their focus is on those in need: "We are not a militia, we're not part of any of the armed groups. We are also not pacifists.
"We believe people have the right to defend their own lives. It's a basic human right. And to defend others. Our teams go to give help, hope and love and not to fight. However, they can defend the people they're with. But whether they defend them or not, they can't leave them."
21. Revised UN Counterterrorism Strategy Has Stronger Rights Focus
Excerpts:
The challenge now is to translate these advances into action. Already, Human Rights Watch and coalition partners have begun pressing Secretary-General António Guterres to establish a full-time human rights mechanism to watch over the entire UN counterterrorism system, using the assessment that the resolution assigns him. The coalition also continues to call for increased civil society engagement.
Abusive counterterrorism measures flout international human rights and humanitarian law. They can also backfire by alienating local communities and fueling violent extremist narratives. That warning comes not only from groups like Human Rights Watch: it is contained in the UN Counter-Terrorism Strategy itself.
Revised UN Counterterrorism Strategy Has Stronger Rights Focus
Associate Director, Crisis and Conflict Division
A wide view of the Security Council meeting on peace and security in Africa, with a focus on countering terrorism and extremism in Africa on March 3, 2020 © 2020 Loey Felipe/UN Photo
But in an overdue shift, language in the latest revision of the strategy could help ensure rights and security go hand in hand.
The strategy renewal resolution that the UN General Assembly approved on June 30 retains several rights-protecting provisions and even adds a few new ones. Significantly, it calls on the UN secretary-general to assess whether the UN needs human rights oversight of its counterterrorism agencies and programs, which have expanded dramatically since the September 11, 2001 attacks. Independent, impartial oversight is sorely needed.
The strategy still contains problematic provisions and negotiations around revisions were largely opaque. Yet thanks in no small measure to concerted public and private advocacy by a coalition of nongovernmental organizations including Human Rights Watch, this year’s review was far more positive and inclusive than in the past.
The challenge now is to translate these advances into action. Already, Human Rights Watch and coalition partners have begun pressing Secretary-General António Guterres to establish a full-time human rights mechanism to watch over the entire UN counterterrorism system, using the assessment that the resolution assigns him. The coalition also continues to call for increased civil society engagement.
Abusive counterterrorism measures flout international human rights and humanitarian law. They can also backfire by alienating local communities and fueling violent extremist narratives. That warning comes not only from groups like Human Rights Watch: it is contained in the UN Counter-Terrorism Strategy itself.
22. Plagues, liberal society and the future after Covid
Some interesting arguments from history from the end of history, the free market to the Chinese "lying flat."
But this conclusion is important for all of us to understand in many contexts more than just COVID:
To be useful and avoid future mistakes, history must be accurate. But if it’s accurate, it can’t be used for propaganda. Then are we walking blind into an uncertain future where also a massive environmental disaster could loom larger? So it seems, as it’s not just about the plague or the economy, it is a change of times.
Plagues, liberal society and the future after Covid
We both fear death and feel guilty for survival in the Covid era. The lack of trust between China and the West is largely to blame
The extraordinary leap in wealth and wellbeing of the last two centuries came about also from the political order based on independent states set from the Treaty of Westphalia and the English Revolution, both in 1648. Yet these landmarks came also from the outcome of a plague, not too different from the present Covid.
The last great plague of the Western world occurred in 1630, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War. Some Swiss mercenaries paid by the Habsburgs passed through Milan and northern Italy, and on their way spread a deadly virus. Over a quarter of the total population in northern Italy, some one million people, died because of the epidemic in one year.
After that, the war took an even more bitter turn. The Habsburgs, who were the lords of Milan, then the richest part of Europe, hurt badly. They withdrew from their trade with China and poured American silver not into the purchase of Chinese vases and silk but into weapons for their fight.
After imports of Mexican silver halted, the Chinese economy suffered massive inflation that in ten years quadrupled the value of silver, starved millions of peasants, and kindled the Li Zicheng’s uprising that toppled the Ming dynasty then ruling China.
In Europe, the flow of Mexican silver proved insufficient in plugging the loss of the Italian economy. The Habsburgs basically lost their bet in affirming their rule over Europe and the Mediterranean and had to come to an agreement in Westphalia in 1648 that essentially set the basis for the modern world and modern capitalist development that for the first time in human history created a progressive quantum leap in economic, technological and social progress.
Something in those times is similar to the present world with Covid. Similar to the 1630s plague, Covid also started with tensions that now we politely don’t want to call “war” but search for all kinds of synonyms. The outbreak of Covid in Wuhan certainly expanded into a full-scale epidemic because of a lack of mutual trust between China and the Western world.
China was cagey about the spate, and it is still reluctant to have a full opening of its data for fear that foreigners would find it guilty in one way or another of it. Americans and the Western world also didn’t believe China at the outset and grossly underestimated what was going on in Wuhan, confused by many contradictory reports.
The other lesson we may have from the 1630 plague is that the worst is yet to come. The Thirty Years’ War took 18 more years to end after the plague, and changed the face of the world. Now similarly, we may think that Covid has just opened a new phase of the “war” with China and the worst is yet to come.
China and the US have played the blame game over the Covid-19 pandemic. Illustration: Asia Times
Revolution!
Right at the same time of the Treaty of Westphalia, England experienced the first modern revolution. In 1649, Cromwell gained power and the king of England was beheaded, it was the end of the king’s divine right to rule and the beginning of the principle of people’s sovereignty. In the same years, the Manchu took over China.
From that, we have two basic elements that would shape human life in the following centuries up to today: a clear-cut political order based on states with their own prerogatives, and a move toward a liberal society based on people’s sovereignty and freedom.
This would entail another extremely important gnoseological element. Knowledge and thus decision-making would no longer be the preserve of a few privileged enlightened people but open to all who could contribute to the state and the economy.
It was the beginning of the liberal world, which created unprecedented development and miracles in human history: demographic explosion, extension of life and improvement in the quality of life, and mass perception of wealth and welfare.
Moreover, the market exchange was being based in the following centuries of liberal society on the idea of “transparent costs” building up a final price adding the price of the machinery, the salaries, the land, the raw material and a reasonable profit.
Before that market exchange was the place of trickery, where a good bargain could be obtained by withholding knowledge of the true value of your goods, and the possibility of forcing the other party into accepting the bargain by force or the threat of force. Markets for centuries had been under the protection of God Hermes, the deity of knowledge, exchanges, theft and trickery.
Then, this liberal order is not “natural.” It was achieved after millennia of strife and failed attempts against political systems that, for most of history, concentrated power, and thus knowledge and wealth, in the hands of the few.
In fact, this historical trend for concentration of power is so stubborn that liberal societies had to fight their way through against old absolutist monarchs in the 18th and 19th centuries and absolutist totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century.
Now they are challenged by greater or smaller autocratic temptations in the world and also within liberal societies.
Liberal societies are extremely fragile, delicate, and unstable. They have to be defended, safeguarded, and advanced with great political attention. This work is relentless and can’t be stopped as liberal societies and democracies can always slip into totalitarian regimes. Competition was first with absolute monarchic rule, then with totalitarian regimes.
Donald Trump supporters lay siege to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Image: Facebook
Unnatural Free Market
The present problem started after the Cold War, when the United States apparently forgot that the intricacies of the free market and society depended very much on a safe, sound, and delicate political environment.
It took for granted that history had ended, and believed that the liberal world would impose its rules naturally and not thanks to the strenuous efforts of politics, and it thought that the main strife was not about affirming more solidly and firmly liberal values and markets that created development and wealth for everybody, but the clash of civilizations between Western and non-Western worlds.
Those theories were extremely “sexy.” They flashed out like a science fiction novel: ideas that would stick in people’s minds very easily and had all-encompassing explanations. Conversely, the effort of building and reinforcing fragile political liberal environments was drudgery, gray, unsexy, and boring. It was something that was totally unappealing in a world where the United States felt it had managed to impose its values against an extremely formidable enemy, the USSR.
Then now what will come out of this epidemic, which was possibly more formidable than the 17th-century epidemic and like that epidemic occurred in the middle of a historic confrontation? There are no answers yet, and everything is up in the air. Liberal societies are fragile and autocracies are very strong. There are no certain outcomes. But history doesn’t bode well.
In the past, liberal societies drove change and development in the world, although not without a large amount of suffering due to slavery and colonialism. Yet in the competition with socialism in the 20th century, liberal society learned and improved its system by becoming more caring, more humane, and thus also, they discovered, more effective and efficient in the long run.
In socialist China, the challenges of foreign liberal societies also brought lots of improvements to its own system. Still in the wake of the Covid epidemic, one wonders whether either system improved enough. Chinese Socialism is appealing for its results but how about its own internal system? Moreover, Western democracy has its own issues.
In its latest issue, The Economist summarizes the status of American democracy, the bulwark of the present global order. American democracy is based on three principles that have been quickly eroded in recent months:
“The first is the principle that the loser concedes. Mr. Trump ditched that one in 2020. The second is the integrity of local election officials, no matter what their partisan allegiances. Despite coming under great pressure to do otherwise last year, they stood firm. As a reward, their powers have been stripped away or new felonies created that may be used to browbeat them. Many Republican officials who certified the election results have been censured by their local party committees and have also received death threats. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, was notable in 2020 for his willingness to stand up to Mr. Trump when he was directly asked to “find” the votes needed to overturn the results. Georgia’s state legislature has responded by taking away some of his authority. That leaves the third fail-safe—the courts. These too performed well under stress, and they probably would do so the next time round. Yet to put the primary responsibility for making elections legitimate onto the judicial branch in election after election risks overloading it and, ultimately, breaking it. How long would it be before a Supreme Court decision were ignored?”
If democracy in America fails, the clash with China won’t disappear.
Actually, it could accelerate and become grounded just on competing imperial aims, not based also on global values. A democracy can find a compromise if the adversary is or becomes a democracy.
Empires clashing with one another find it more difficult to compromise because they have to win over the enemy or split the world with it. In this case, the US and American allies in Asia feel China has to be contained within its present borders.
A younger generation of Chinese are lying flat. Image: Twitter
Meanwhile, in China more young people feel attracted to a simple life, tangping or lying flat: do nothing and live only with what’s essential. This philosophy has deep roots in China. It harks back to Zhuangzi, the 3rd century BC proto-Taoist who in a time of great turmoil and great political engagement chose to withdraw from the world and refuse any involvement.
The tradition was carried on by Buddhist hermits after the fall of the Han empire in the 3rd century AD. At the time people chose to withdraw because it was safer and made more sense than dying in senseless, mortal combat in grim, bloody wars or in palace plots that would benefit only the winning ruling monarch and not the people or any particular individual.
There is no answer as to why now young Chinese people want to lie flat. But presently, it’s getting harder to strike it rich, chances are getting rarer. Increases in salaries, which presently are already sometimes even higher than in developed countries, aren’t easy.
Taking part in political life and change is also very difficult and risky, with little or no chance of emerging on top. And for what? Once, officials could make money on the side; now this is forbidden. It’s just a useless rat race.
But the spread of lying flat makes the lure of wealth and development (the stock and barrel of the popular consensus for the party in the past 40 years) less attractive. The lying flat “philosophy” resonates in the Oscar-winning film Nomadland, by Chinese director Chloe Zhao. But there, in America, if one wants to get out of the rat race, that person has freedom and respect. In China?
Both in China and the rest of the world, there is an immense sense of displacement created by being thrown up and down on the senseless rollercoaster of the plague, with the continuous fear of death and the recurring elation of survival. The economy will change, and politics domestically and internationally is also changing in every single country.
We fear death and economic disgrace, and feel guilty for survival. In all of this, we all need to confess our faults, real or perceived, and we need forgiveness. Confession and forgiveness will be far more important in the following months and years as the long-term fallout from Covid becomes more apparent.
In this, China should look closely at history. Yet because history in China is used for propaganda purposes, it is inaccurate and therefore doesn’t help in learning lessons for the future.
To be useful and avoid future mistakes, history must be accurate. But if it’s accurate, it can’t be used for propaganda. Then are we walking blind into an uncertain future where also a massive environmental disaster could loom larger? So it seems, as it’s not just about the plague or the economy, it is a change of times.
This story originally appeared on the Settimana News website and is republished with permission. To see the original, please click here.
23. Black Sea drills showcase strong NATO-Ukraine defense ties
Black Sea drills showcase strong NATO-Ukraine defense ties
AP · by DMYTRO VLASOV · July 10, 2021
ABOARD USS ROSS (AP) — Ukraine and NATO have conducted Black Sea drills involving dozens of warships in a two-week show of their strong defense ties and capability following a confrontation between Russia’s military forces and a British destroyer off Crimea last month.
The Sea Breeze 2021 maneuvers that ended Saturday involved about 30 warships and 40 aircraft from NATO members and Ukraine. The captain of the USS Ross, a U.S. Navy destroyer that took part in the drills, said the exercise was designed to improve how the equipment and personnel of the participating nations operate together.
“We’d like to demonstrate to everybody, the international community, that no one nation can claim the Black Sea or any international body of water,” Cmdr. John D. John said aboard the guided missile destroyer previously deployed to the area for drills. “Those bodies of water belong to the international community, and we’re committed to ensure that all nations have access to international waterways.”
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The Russian Defense Ministry said it was closely monitoring Sea Breeze. The Russian military also conducted a series of parallel drills in the Black Sea and southwestern Russia, with warplanes practicing bombing runs and long-range air defense missiles’ deploying to protect the coast.
Last month, Russia said one of its warships in the Black Sea fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs in the path of the HMS Defender, a British Royal Navy destroyer, to chase it away from an area near Crimea that Moscow claims as its territorial waters.
Russia denounced the Defender’s maneuver as a provocation and warned that next time it might fire to hit intruding warships.
Britain, which like most other nations didn’t recognize Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, insisted the Defender wasn’t fired upon on June 23 and said it was sailing in Ukrainian waters when Russia sent its planes into the air and shots were heard during the showdown.
The incident added to the tensions between Russia and the NATO allies. Relations between Russia and the West have sunk to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, its support for a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, accusations of Russian hacking attacks, election interference and other irritants.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that the incident with the Defender wouldn’t have triggered a global conflict even if Russia had sunk the British vessel because the West knows it can’t win such a war. The statement appeared to indicate Putin’s resolve to raise the stakes should a similar incident happen again.
Aboard the Ross, John said the Sea Breeze participants were exercising their right to operate in international waters. He described the drills as “a tangible demonstration of our commitment to each other for a safe and stable Black Sea region.”
AP · by DMYTRO VLASOV · July 10, 2021
24. ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off
A little known fact is that master's program are huge revenue generators for universities. Columbia is not the only one.
‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off
Columbia and other top universities push master’s programs that fail to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans
WSJ · by Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller
The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data.
Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master’s program in the U.S., the Journal found. The New York City university is among the world’s most prestigious schools, and its $11.3 billion endowment ranks it the nation’s eighth wealthiest private school.
For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid.
Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master’s students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture.
Passersby at Dodge Hall, home to Columbia University’s School of the Arts on the school’s main campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.
Photo: Desiree Rios for The Wall Street Journal
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said the Education Department data in the Journal analysis can’t fully assess salary prospects because it covers only earnings and loan repayments two years after graduation. “Nevertheless,” he said, “this is not what we want it to be.”
At New York University, graduates with a master’s degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000 and had an annual median income of $42,000 two years after the program, the data on recent borrowers show. At Northwestern University, half of those who earned degrees in speech-language pathology borrowed $148,000 or more, and the graduates had a median income of $60,000 two years later. Graduates of the University of Southern California’s marriage and family counseling program borrowed a median $124,000 and half earned $50,000 or less over the same period.
“NYU is always focused on affordability, and an important part of that is, of course, to help prospective students make informed decisions,” said spokesman John Beckman. Northwestern spokeswoman Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the speech-language pathology program is among the best in the world, leading to a “gratifying career path that is in high demand.” USC spokeswoman Lauren Bartlett said providing students financial support and employment opportunities was a priority for the school.
Undergraduate students for years have faced ballooning loan balances. But now it is graduate students who are accruing the most onerous debt loads. Unlike undergraduate loans, the federal Grad Plus loan program has no fixed limit on how much grad students can borrow—money that can be used for tuition, fees and living expenses.
It has become the fastest-growing federal student loan program and charged interest rates as high as 7.9% in recent years.
The no-limit loans make master’s degrees a gold mine for universities, which have expanded graduate-school offerings since Congress created Grad Plus in 2005. Graduate students are for the first time on track to have borrowed as much as undergraduates in the 2020-21 academic year, federal loan data show.
“There’s always those 2 a.m. panic attacks where you’re thinking, ‘How the hell am I ever going to pay this off?’ ” said 29-year-old Zack Morrison, of New Jersey, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in film from Columbia in 2018 and praised the quality of the program. His graduate school loan balance now stands at nearly $300,000, including accrued interest. He has been earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year from work as a Hollywood assistant and such side gigs as commercial video production and photography.
Highly selective universities have benefited from free-flowing federal loan money, and with demand for spots far exceeding supply, the schools have been able to raise tuition largely unchecked. The power of legacy branding lets prestigious universities say, in effect, that their degrees are worth whatever they charge.
“Students gravitate to Columbia because Columbia’s Columbia, right?” film professor and writer-director Katherine Dieckmann said in a 10-minute video about the program that the school posted on YouTube in 2019. “It’s a world-class, Ivy League institution with access to all kinds of other departments, other ideas. It’s a world-class university. And the next thing is it’s in New York City. And I think that combination of elements is pretty seductive.”
That was the case for Columbia film MFA student Patrick Clement, who attended community college in California before transferring to the University of Kansas for his bachelor’s degree.
Photo: PATRICK CLEMENT
“As a poor kid and a high-school dropout, there was an attraction to getting an Ivy League master’s degree,” said Mr. Clement, 41. He graduated in 2020 from Columbia, borrowing more than $360,000 in federal loans for the degree. He is casting for an independent film, he said. To pay the bills, he teaches film at a community college and runs an antique shop.
Columbia grad students who borrowed money typically held loans that exceeded annual earnings two years after graduation in 14 of the school’s 32 master’s degree programs tracked by the Education Department, the Journal found. In about a dozen Columbia master’s programs, the majority of recent graduates weren’t repaying the principal on their loans or took forbearance, according to data released for the first time this year.
Julie Kornfeld, Columbia’s vice provost for academic programs, said master’s degrees “can and should be a revenue source” subsidizing other parts of the university. She also said grad students need more financial support.
In the past four years, Columbia School of the Arts said it has increased average scholarships by about a third to nearly $24,000. The length of the MFA film program also was reduced to a maximum of four years from five.
In April, Columbia announced a $1.4 billion fundraising campaign aimed at financial aid. Mr. Bollinger said administrators have yet to settle on how much will go to students in master’s degree programs.
Debt counselors recommend students not borrow more than they will earn right out of school. Yet about 38% of master’s programs at top-tier private universities in the U.S. failed that test, according to the Journal’s analysis of salary data for graduates from the 2015 and 2016 classes, the latest available.
At for-profit schools, a common target of regulators for high student debt and poor job prospects, 30% failed to meet the debt counselors’ advice.
Photo: Daniel Christensen
Whether or not students should have better weighed the personal consequences of borrowing heavily to pursue lower-paying careers, the burden is far-reaching. After 20 to 25 years on an income-dependent payment plan, the balance on Grad Plus loans—roughly $11.2 billion issued in the school year that ended in 2020—can be forgiven. Taxpayers will bear any losses.
At least 43% of the people who recently took out loans for master’s degrees at elite private universities hadn’t paid down any of their original debt or were behind on payments roughly two years after graduation, the available data show.
Universities, which receive their tuition up front, have an economic incentive to expand graduate degree programs and face no consequences if students can’t afford to pay the federal loans after they leave.
“They’re not really held accountable for the myth they’re selling to students,” said Ozan Jaquette, an associate professor of higher education at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. His doctoral dissertation was on the growth of master’s programs. “We should not be giving federal-aid dollars to these programs that systematically saddle students with high debt,” he said.
Jumping classes
Matt Black graduated from Columbia in 2015 with an MFA in film and $233,000 in federal loans. He signed up for an income-based repayment plan that in leaner years requires no remittance from him. With interest, his balance stands at $331,000.
Mr. Black, a 36-year-old writer and producer in Los Angeles, said he grew up in a lower middle-class family in Oklahoma. He earns $60,000 in a good year and less than half that in dry stretches. The faculty at Columbia was stellar, he said, but he blamed the school for his “calamitous financial situation.”
“We were told by the establishment our whole lives this was the way to jump social classes,” he said of an Ivy League education. Instead, he said he feels such goals as marriage, children and owning a home are out of reach.
During a car ride last year with three friends from the film program, Mr. Black said, they calculated they collectively owed $1.5 million in loans to the federal government. “Financially hobbled for life,” he said. “That’s the joke.”
School of the Arts Dean Carol Becker in 2019.
Photo: Gonzalo Marroquin/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
An offer to attend Columbia is hard for many to pass up. Founded in 1754, the school boasts graduates who became U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices and stars in the arts, medicine and business.
More than 800 people applied this year for roughly 72 spots in the film MFA program, which can total nearly $300,000 for tuition, fees and living expenses. Students aspire to join the lineage of successful alums who include Kathryn Bigelow, the director of “The Hurt Locker,” and Jennifer Lee, screenwriter and co-director of “Frozen.”
“The top anything tends to be more expensive than something that isn’t quite as good,” said Keith Goggin, a private investor in New York who until June was chairman of the Columbia Alumni Association. “I’d like to think the outcomes coming out of Columbia justify the cost.”
Like many of its Ivy League peers, Columbia offers generous financial aid to undergraduates. The neediest students pay next to nothing. Low-income Columbia undergraduates who received loans borrowed a median $21,500, according to the latest federal data covering students who received federal Pell Grants. Yet 2015 and 2016 master’s graduates from low-income backgrounds borrowed more than double that amount in every Columbia master’s program for which the Education Department publishes data.
Mr. Bollinger said undergraduates have “the most moral claim” to financial aid: “They are the people among us who are most trying to begin their lives and to build a base of education.”
Since fall 2011, Columbia has increased published rates for most master’s programs by a greater margin than it did for its undergraduates. In the most recent academic year, it kept tuition flat for undergraduate students because of the pandemic but raised charges for nearly every master’s degree.
‘Take more loans’
At least as far back as 2016, students said, they complained to top administrators about debt.
Mr. Morrison, who owes nearly $300,000, said he was invited to a fireside chat for graduate students at Mr. Bollinger’s Manhattan townhouse that year.
Mr. Bollinger asked for a show of hands by those who felt prepared to pay off their student loans and to succeed in the workplace, Mr. Morrison recalled. The grad student didn’t raise his hand, and Mr. Bollinger asked him why.
Mr. Morrison said the job market for aspiring screenwriters and directors looked bleak for someone with a six-figure debt load. He recalled Mr. Bollinger saying he understood the concern but that Columbia was a really good school.
“My immediate takeaway is that there’s a huge disconnect between the administration’s perception of the School of the Arts,” Mr. Morrison wrote to a faculty member a few days after the meeting, “and what’s actually happening for students.”
Mr. Bollinger said he recalled asking a question like that, and “I’m very much aware of what the School of the Arts needs in terms of financial aid support.”
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger speaking at the school’s 2019 commencement.
Photo: Xinhua/Zuma Press
That same year, more than 160 MFA film students petitioned Mr. Bollinger and School of the Arts Dean Carol Becker, lamenting how little financial support Columbia offered. They didn’t hear back from the president. Ms. Becker told them in meetings her hands were tied by the university administration, according to five students present.
Although the school created an emergency fund for international students, Americans “were just told to go and take more loans,” said Paul Carpenter, a 2018 film MFA graduate who joined the petition. Columbia said it also offset some student fees.
Scholarships cover only a small slice of Columbia master’s program costs.
Columbia MFA theater student Brigitte Thieme-Burdette, 31, negotiated up to $30,000 a year in scholarships but said the program remained a financial burden. She has so far borrowed $102,000 in federal loans. She said the school directed her to the federal loan application when she had financial questions, and didn’t say she could take out less than the maximum amount.
Columbia’s theater graduates who borrowed took on a median $135,000 in student loans, four times what they earned two years after graduation, the data show.
“There’s a virtual army of young people, most of whom may be naive about the financial obligations they’re undertaking,” said James Bundy, dean at Yale University’s drama school, which in June announced it would eliminate tuition. “I think there are some schools with debt loads that are indefensible.”
Photo: Edward Lee
Christian Parker, a Columbia theater department faculty member and former department chair, said he and colleagues talked constantly about student debt. “I’ve never been to an all-school faculty meeting where it wasn’t brought up and where faculty were not advocating and agitating for this issue to remain at the front of the list of priorities for the dean’s leadership,” he said.
While Columbia is wealthy, it isn’t as wealthy as schools like Yale, limiting the funds available for scholarships, Mr. Bollinger, three Columbia deans and other top university administrators said.
Among the other priorities for Columbia, whose annual budget runs about $5 billion, is a 17-acre campus expansion in upper Manhattan that broke ground in 2008. Allocating school resources requires a complex set of judgments, and improving campus facilities can draw donors, Mr. Bollinger said.
The university said recent increases in grad-student aid weren’t reflected in the federal data the Journal analyzed. For example, the School of Social Work increased the number of full-tuition awards for new master’s students to 12 from two a few years ago.
The fall 2020 entering class had around 560 students.
Dog walkers
One foreign student said he notified School of the Arts officials in 2016 that he may need to drop out of the film program because he could no longer afford tuition and living expenses. International students aren’t eligible for federal loans. He received an email that August from an administrator.
“I was informed that you might be interested in additional on-campus work opportunities,” said the message, viewed by the Journal. “We were contacted by the Office of President Bollinger who hires students for dog caretaking.”
Mr. Bollinger said he didn’t know about or condone officials making the offer in response to the student’s situation. He said the job of caring for his yellow Labradors, Arthur and Lucy, while he traveled was intended to give students pocket money and wasn’t meant to address serious financial need.
In 2018, a group of almost 130 film students and alumni detailed their financial concerns in a letter to a faculty committee conducting a scheduled program review. The review criticized the School of the Arts for leaving students mired in debt, said a film professor who read the report. Columbia said the results of such reviews were confidential.
Ms. Becker said she was working to secure more donor support.
Outside of Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts on the new Manhattanville campus, about 10 blocks north of the main campus.
Photo: Desiree Rios for The Wall Street Journal
Around two-thirds of domestic students in the MFA film program take federal loans. The median debt for 2017 and 2018 graduates of Columbia’s film program who borrowed fell 5% from two years earlier but still topped $171,000, according to the latest federal debt figures, which combine the MFA and Master of Arts degrees.
Grant Bromley, 28, accumulated $115,000 in federal loans while getting his Master of Arts in film and media studies at Columbia. He had hoped to advance into academia after graduating in 2018. Instead, he moved back home with his parents in Knoxville, Tenn., for a year, taking a job at the TJ Maxx where he had worked as a teenager. He now works at a TJ Maxx near Chattanooga.
He is working on his third feature film in his spare time and credited Columbia for giving him the chance to pursue his passion.
For now, Mr. Bromley earns around $16 an hour and can’t afford to pay down his loan balance, which is $156,000, including undergraduate debt and interest. “It’s a number so large that it doesn’t necessarily feel real,” he said.
Editor’s note: Andrea Fuller is an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University.
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WSJ · by Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller
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FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
