Quotes of the Day:
“Beware of over concern for money or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cars for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.”
- Rudyard Kipling
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
- Carl Jung
“When books are rung out of school classrooms, and even out of school libraries, I etc kids, “Don’t get mad, get even, Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to he nearest non school library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.”
- Stephen King
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN UPDATE, JULY 11 (Putin's War)
2. The West Worries Too Much About Escalation in Ukraine
3. Will Republicans Cut Off Ukraine?
4. Philippine Foreign Secretary Hails South China Sea Ruling on 6th Anniversary
5. Schiff seeks rule that would block oversight of some military operations
6. What Xi Jinping’s Personality Means for Taiwan’s Deterrence
7. ‘Statesman Abe’s strategic vision was impressive’
8. Shinzo Abe Invented the ‘Indo-Pacific’
9. Equipping U.S. Partners in Cyberspace is a Must
10. Iran’s Economy is Growing, But So Is Iranian Discontent
11. U.S. Marines: Manage Your Message to Win in Strategic Competition
12. The Legacy of Shinzo Abe
13. President Xi’s Art of War in Sri Lanka
14. How Interactions with Antifa Can Fuel White Supremacist Groups
15. Giant Explosions Rock More Russian Ammunition Depots In Ukraine
16. On-the-Ground Truth and Force Design 2030 Reconciliation: A Way Forward
17. Weak States and Loose Arms: Lessons and Warnings, from Afghanistan to Ukraine
18. #Reviewing The Immigrant Superpower
19. The Koch-Soros Crackup
20. Why NATO Is Outdated, Dangerous And Deserves To Be Abolished
21. Ukraine Is Massing 1 Million Troops To Fight the Russian Military
22. Effectiveness of Ukraine's HIMARS Fuels Concern in Russia - The Moscow Times
23. Their Son Is Talking About School Shootings. Should They Call the Police?
24. Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes, and Disinformation A Prime
25. Is A Good World Order A Dead One? – OpEd
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN UPDATE, JULY 11 (Putin's War)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN UPDATE, JULY 11
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 11
Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan
July 11, 7:10 pm ET
Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is likely continuing to grant Russian forces access to Belarusian airspace to demonstrate at least nominal support to Russian President Vladimir Putin without risking direct military involvement of Belarusian Armed Forces in operations in Ukraine. Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Department of the Ukrainian General Staff Oleksiy Gromov previously reported on July 7 that the Belarusian government transferred use of the Pribytki airfield in Gomel Oblast to Russia.[1] Independent Belarusian monitoring organization The Hajun Project similarly reported on July 11 that a Russian Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft flew into Belarusian airspace for the first time since April 4.[2] The Hajun Project noted that the Belarusian government introduced new airspace restrictions along the border with Ukraine where the AWACS aircraft patrolled between July 10 and 11.[3] Taken together, these data points likely indicate that Lukashenko is attempting to provide support to Putin's war in Ukraine short of direct Belarusian military intervention in an effort to respond to the pressure Putin is likely putting on him. As ISW has previously assessed, the likelihood of direct Belarusian involvement in the war in Ukraine remains low due to the effect that might have on the stability and even survival of Lukashenko’s regime.[4]
Key Takeaways
- Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is likely continuing to allow Russia access to Belarusian airspace to indicate support to Russian President Vladimir Putin without risking the consequences of direct Belarusian military involvement in Ukraine.
- Russian forces conducted limited and unsuccessful ground assaults northwest of Slovyansk and west of Donetsk City.
- Russian forces continued air and artillery strikes around Siversk and Bakhmut.
- Russian forces conducted localized ground assaults northwest of Kharkiv City.
- Russian forces continued to focus on defensive operations along the entire Southern Axis.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
- Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
- Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces conducted a limited ground assault northwest of Slovyansk and otherwise fired heavily on Ukrainian positions in the vicinity of the E40 Izyum-Slovyansk highway on July 11.[5] Russian forces reportedly conducted an unsuccessful attack on Krasnopillya, a settlement directly along the E40 highway within 20km northwest of Slovyansk.[6] Luhansk People‘s Republic (LNR) Deputy Internal Minister Vitaly Kiselyov claimed that Russian troops took control of Bohorodychne, but Ukrainian sources continued to indicate that the settlement is under heavy artillery fire and that Russian forces have yet to fully capture the village.[7] Russian forces conducted air and artillery strikes on areas northwest of Slovyansk including Dolyna, Dibrovne, Mazanivka, Adamivka, and Kurulka, and struck Cherkaske to the northwest of Kramatorsk.[8] Russian forces will likely continue to strike the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk area from positions to the northwest along the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border to prepare for eventual assaults on both Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.[9]
Russian forces continued offensive operations west of the Luhansk Oblast border around Siversk on July 11. The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces did not conduct any active ground assaults around Siversk, but Russian Telegram channels reported that Russian forces are fighting around Ivano-Darivka (less than 10km southeast of Siversk) in order to advance to Vyimka and gain access to the T0513 highway that runs northward into Siversk.[10] While ISW cannot independently confirm Russian claims of ground attacks to the south of Siversk, Russian troops are likely continuing various offensive operations, including intensive shelling, in the area in order to prepare to advance on the city.[11] Russian forces additionally shelled Zakitne, Serebryanka, Hryhorivka, Bilohorivka, Verkhmokamyanske, and Zvanivka.[12]
Russian forces conducted artillery and airstrikes to the west, south, and east of Bakhmut on July 11.[13] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces shelled Chasiv Yar (10km directly west of Bakhmut), Klishchiivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut), and Zaitseve (20km south of Bakhmut).[14] Russian forces also shelled areas to the northeast of Bakhmut, including Spirne, Berestove and Pokrovske.[15]
Russian forces conducted a limited and unsuccessful ground attack west of Donetsk City on July 11.[16] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces retreated after a failed attack on Mariinka, about 20km west of Donetsk City.[17] Russian forces also continued artillery strikes along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City frontline and seemingly intensified air and artillery operations in the direction of the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border.[18]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)
Russian forces continued to conduct localized ground assaults northwest of Kharkiv City on July 11. The Derhachi City Council reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults towards Tsupivka, Dementiivka, Velyki Prokhody, and the Zolochiv-Kozacha Lopan direction.[19] Russian forces continued air, artillery, and missile strikes on Kharkiv City and settlements to the north, northeast, and east of Kharkiv City.[20]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces did not launch offensive operations on the Southern Axis on July 11 and focused on maintaining defensive positions.[21] Russian forces continued air, artillery, and missile strikes along the entire Southern Axis line of contact.[22] Ukrainian sources reported that Russian fighter jets launched four Kh-31 missiles at an unspecified coastal settlement and three Kh-31 missiles at an unspecified agricultural area in Odesa Oblast from positions over Crimea, likely aiming at production and other critical infrastructure.[23]
Ukrainian forces continued to strike Russian ammunition depots and command points in Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblast on July 11. Advisor to Kherson Oblast Military Administration Head Serhiy Khlan reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian command center and equipment concentration in Tavriisk (approximately 62km east of Kherson City).[24] Khlan stated that Russian forces moved a military equipment unloading site from Oleskhy (5km southeast of Kherson City) to Radensk (25km southeast of Kherson City), likely in response to increased Ukrainian strikes on Russian military infrastructure in and around Kherson City.[25] Khlan also stated that Russian forces are preparing for urban warfare in case a Ukrainian counteroffensive does reach Kherson City and have strengthened security and filtration measures around the city.[26] Ukrainian Strategic Communications Center noted that Ukrainian forces also struck a Russian ammunition depot in Tokmak, approximately 50km northeast of Melitopol on July 11.[27]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian forces continue to face desertion and personnel shortages. Pro-Russian Telegram channel Moscow Calling published an image of a billboard listing 300 servicemen of the 205th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 49th Combined Arms Army who refused to participate in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[28] The Ukrainian General Staff had previously reported that the 205th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (based in Budyonnovsk, Stavrolpol Krai) was deployed to Mariupol and Zaporizhia Oblast efforts on March 3.[29] The billboard further supports the Ukrainian General Staff’s report that Russian forces are seeing increasing cases of disobedience and desertion within Russian forces.[30]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
Ukrainian partisans continued to target Russian collaborators and Russian occupation authorities on July 10 and July 11. The Ukrainian Resistance Center and Russian Telegram channels confirmed that unknown assailants killed Russian-appointed Head of Velyky Burluk (northeastern Kharkiv Oblast) Yevgeniy Yunakov by planting an explosive device on his car.[31] The attack happened only four days after Russian occupation authorities announced the creation of the Russian occupation administration in occupied settlements of Kharkiv Oblast.[32] Russian milblogger Yuri Kotyenok also reported that unknown assailants (presumably Ukrainian partisans) attempted to assassinate Russian-appointed Kherson Oblast Military-Civil Administration Head Vladimir Saldo by planting an improvised explosive device along his drive.[33] Russian media also reported that “Ukrainian regime militants” attempted to kill Melitopol District Head Andrey Sigutu on July 11.[34]
The Kremlin continues to set annexation conditions for Ukrainian territories outside of Donbas. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that simplifies the process for all Ukrainians to obtain Russian citizenship.[35] The law had previously simplified passport distribution in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR), Kherson, and Zaporizhia Oblasts, and may indicate the Kremlin’s intention to annex other occupied territories like Kharkiv Oblast. LNR Ambassador to Russia Rodion Miroshnik also claimed that 20 occupied Luhansk Oblast settlements paired with separate administrative districts and oblasts in Russia.[36]
2. The West Worries Too Much About Escalation in Ukraine
Worrying makes you weak. Worrying about escalation may increase the chance of escalation if the opponent thinks you are weak and fear escalation more than anything else. But holding back because of fear of escalation cedes the initiative and gives the opponent room to maneuver. And the decision to escalate will be based on the opponent's analysis of the ability to accomplish his objectives and he will not be dissuaded from escalation by our restraint.
Excerpts:
Certainly, this policy comes with costs and challenges. Serious obstacles to interoperability could emerge involving languages, communications equipment, ammunition, and spare parts. Yet Ukraine faces some of those difficulties already as it exhausts the old Soviet equipment it is using and transitions to NATO-provided weapons. Because Ukraine needs trained soldiers more than brand new recruits, NATO states must make it easier for soldiers to temporarily resign to fight for Ukraine. They must ensure that medical care and other benefits will be ready for these soldiers—and that volunteers can smoothly rejoin when they return. Their prospects for promotion should reflect their hard-won combat experience. The hardest part of this policy will be accepting casualties among the volunteers without retaliating. This is why they must truly be volunteers, unlike the soldiers Russia ordered into Crimea and the Donbas as “green men” in 2014. Not all NATO members will embrace these obligations, but with U.S. participation, some would be enough.
To mitigate risks, NATO should start small by focusing on expertise more than numbers. Russia will be loath to start an unwinnable war with NATO over a few hundred more volunteers fighting for Ukraine—even if organized more purposefully by NATO governments. Tacitly tolerating their deployment will make it harder for Russia to deter the next hundreds, which gradually become the next thousands.
Ever since proposals for a no-fly zone failed, the desire to do more for Ukraine has struggled to crystallize around a prudent and realistic plan. Foreign volunteers is the right policy to explore. Coupled with abandoning unnecessary limits on which arms NATO members send to Ukraine, this is how NATO can more effectively support Ukraine without starting World War III.
The West Worries Too Much About Escalation in Ukraine
NATO Can Do More Without Provoking Moscow
July 12, 2022
As the world looks on while Ukrainians fight for their lives and their freedom, many feel a burning desire to do more to support them. The problem is not a lack of forces or resources—it is fear of provoking a wider, perhaps nuclear, war with Russia. That fear is why U.S. President Joe Biden and other NATO leaders have consistently made clear that they will not intervene directly in the conflict, instead limiting their help to weapons, money, intelligence, and sanctions. As devastating as events in Ukraine are today, a nuclear war with Russia could kill more people than Ukraine’s entire population of roughly 44 million.
NATO leaders understand that they must walk this fine line between aiding Ukraine and risking war with Russia, but they have no theory of how to do it. The German and French governments hem and haw about whether to provide Ukraine with tanks. When Poland proposed a plan to transfer MiG-29 fighter aircraft to Ukraine, the United States refused. U.S. Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby warned that it “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance” and therefore was not “tenable.” Yet the United States was already shipping Javelin antitank missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Soon after, it began sending other weapons, including M777 howitzers and now HIMARS multiple rocket launchers. What is the difference? Those weapons do more to strengthen Ukraine’s combat power than MiG-29s, so the theory cannot be that Russia reacts more strongly to policies that do more harm to its interests. Why, then, missiles and artillery but not planes? The answer is that there is no answer. It is simply arbitrary.
NATO needs a strategy predicated on a theory of what it can do to aid Ukraine without widening the war to a direct conflict between it and Russia. Lessons from past crises point to the principles that should guide such a strategy. History shows that NATO would recklessly risk war only by crossing two Russian redlines: openly firing on Russian forces or deploying organized combat units under NATO-member flags into Ukraine. As long as NATO stops short of unmistakably crossing those lines, it can do more to help Ukraine at an acceptable risk of war.
Arms transfers and sanctions are both wholly consistent with this approach, so it is tempting to conclude that NATO members are doing all they can. They are not. They should build on current policies by dispensing with arbitrary limits on the types of conventional weapons they are providing Ukraine and expanding sanctions. Moreover, there is a third way to support Ukraine besides arms and sanctions—one that NATO is neglecting. It is time for NATO to encourage, organize, and equip its soldiers to volunteer to fight for Ukraine.
WALKING THE LINE
NATO should pursue a strategy of going as far as possible in Ukraine without plainly crossing Russia’s redlines—meaning refusing to openly attack Russian forces or send combat units into the country. The United States prevailed in the gravest crises of the Cold War by using this approach.
The Cold War’s first major showdown—the Berlin blockade of 1948–49—evinced this strategy. Although easily able to overwhelm U.S., British, and French troops in what would become West Berlin—an enclave deep inside Soviet-occupied East Germany—Soviet leader Josef Stalin did not seize the territory. To do so would have meant attacking those troops and thus provoking war. Instead, he imposed a blockade that choked off food and coal for two million Berliners. When Soviet troops blocked the roads and railways, Western leaders declined to attack them to reopen supply corridors. They resorted to an airlift instead, betting that Stalin would not attack defenseless transport aircraft. In the end, the vaunted Berlin airlift succeeded.
More than a decade later, American leaders decided to impose a blockade in lieu of launching an open attack—this time, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Angered by the Soviet Union’s attempt to sneak nuclear missiles into Cuba and Moscow’s lies about it, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was initially inclined to destroy the missiles with airstrikes. He and others around him, however, decided the risks were too great. Director of Central Intelligence John McCone deemed airstrikes too risky, writing in a memo that the “consequences of action by the United States will be the inevitable ‘spilling of blood’ of Soviet military personnel.” He went on: “This will increase tension everywhere and undoubtedly bring retaliation against U.S. foreign military installations.” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev recognized this, too. According to a transcript of his remarks at a Soviet Presidium meeting, he feared that a U.S. attack would spark a war: “The tragic thing—they can attack, and we will respond. This could escalate into a large-scale war.” Kennedy chose neither to attack nor to accept the missiles as a fait accompli. He instead blockaded Cuba. In history’s gravest nuclear crisis, neither leader ordered an attack.
It is time for NATO to encourage, organize, and equip its soldiers to volunteer to fight for Ukraine.
One attack did occur, however, when Soviet generals on the ground in Cuba decided to launch surface-to-air missiles to shoot down an American U-2 spy plane that had entered Cuban airspace. The attack killed U.S. Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr., the pilot. Khrushchev’s fears of war peaked at that moment, and Moscow chastised the generals who carried out the attack. Before retaliating, Kennedy gave diplomacy one last chance. Shared fears about the implications of that shootdown led both sides to make concessions that helped resolve the crisis. In the end, the United States prevailed by taking risks without attacking.
The United States and the Soviet Union also engaged in proxy wars to avoid attacking each other directly and starting World War III. Both countries used large-scale arms shipments and sometimes soldiers fighting as volunteers to support local forces. Designed to avoid escalation, such covert wars are a common tactic in international politics. During the Korean War, Soviet pilots secretly fought in the Chinese air force. Soviet arms equipped North Vietnam, and Soviet soldiers even operated surface-to-air missile batteries against U.S. aircraft. Despite its losses, the United States decided to tolerate this Soviet participation rather than widen either war. The Soviets also allowed similar behavior from the United States on other battlefields. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, for example, the United States armed and financed the mujahideen resisting it. The Soviet Union eventually withdrew. As recently as 2018, Russian Wagner Group mercenaries in Syria unsuccessfully attacked U.S. forces operating alongside Kurdish forces. The United States did not treat it as an attack by the Russian government.
HOW FAR CAN NATO GO?
These examples underscore that pushing as far as possible without openly attacking is often the best way to compete while managing escalation risks. Creative policymaking can engineer options that achieve objectives without crossing redlines, thus preventing a wider war. Providing intelligence that Ukrainian forces use to kill Russian soldiers is not the same as NATO openly attacking Russia, nor is support in cyberspace. Lithuania’s restrictions on Russia’s use of its territory to ship goods to Kaliningrad meet this standard. Even enlarging NATO to include Finland and Sweden and deploying forces eastward to defend NATO members bordering Russia entail acceptable risks; such actions do not constitute an attack on Russia. In fact, there is good reason to think that NATO can do even more in Ukraine without provoking a wider war.
Some believe that Russia’s nuclear weapons and greater interests in Ukraine give it the advantage over NATO. This is mistaken. It is true that NATO leaders prioritize avoiding war with Russia over aiding Ukraine, but it is just as true that war with NATO would cost Russia far more than would abiding most forms of aid to Ukraine. After all, Russia is already struggling mightily against Ukraine. It cannot simultaneously win a conventional war with NATO. And no one would win a nuclear war.
Interests alone do not determine who has the advantage when both sides wish to avoid war. Instead, the advantage goes to the side that puts the other in the difficult position of choosing whether to escalate or accept a limited defeat. The side that must start the war is in the more difficult position. Russia has tolerated NATO’s sanctions and arming Ukraine for precisely that reason.
To be sure, it would be wrong to conclude that NATO can get away with anything. Most important, Russia will not accept NATO openly attacking Russian forces. If NATO can shoot down a Russian aircraft with impunity—for instance, to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine—where would it end for Russia? Why would NATO not keep attacking? How could Russia credibly threaten to retaliate for the second plane after not doing so for the first? What about the third? The tenth? What, then, would stop NATO from bombing Russian forces in Ukraine? Russia cannot allow the precedent of consequence-free attacks on Russian forces.
Borders are Russia’s other vital redline. NATO forces openly operating in Russia are plainly unacceptable, and NATO should also rule out deploying organized combat units in Ukraine. Sending units to Ukraine to fight Russian forces risks war. NATO troops in Ukraine for purposes other than combat—such as deterring Russia from advancing into certain areas—would do less to strengthen Ukraine on the frontlines. And their presence would risk Russian attacks against them, intentional or unintentional.
CALL TO ARMS
Within these limits, there are three primary ways to aid Ukraine. The first is arms, and on that, NATO can do more. The current limits on NATO arms to Ukraine are not grounded in any theory or strategy. NATO can provide Ukraine with modern tanks, fighter aircraft, advanced surface-to-air missiles, and more at acceptable risk. The second is sanctions, and NATO can do more there, too—starting with further curtailing European imports of Russian natural gas.
The third way is by supplying foreign volunteers—a strategy NATO has largely neglected. Although some volunteers are already there fighting as individuals or in Ukraine’s International Legion, NATO members should encourage, equip, and fund their soldiers and veterans who are willing to fight for Ukraine. To limit the risk of war with Russia, these soldiers would fight wearing Ukrainian uniforms under the Ukrainian chain of command.
States recruit foreign soldiers to gain expertise and to forestall military defeat. In Ukraine’s case, if used adeptly, foreign volunteers could help Ukraine bolster its proficiency with combat skills that take years of training and expertise to master, and use advanced weapons more quickly and effectively. This is essential as Ukraine exhausts its Soviet-era stocks and transitions to more advanced NATO weapons. In the longer run, numbers also matter. If Ukraine turns the tide against Russia, Moscow may react by fully mobilizing for war, banking on its larger population to ultimately overwhelm Ukraine in a war of attrition. A growing stream of foreign volunteers would upend Russia’s calculation that it could win a long war. NATO has already removed the upper limits on the quantities of weapons Ukraine can bring to bear. It is time to do the same for the troops on the ground.
The benefits of organizing volunteers exceed the risks. Data on more than 230 cases of states recruiting foreign soldiers—often amid ongoing war—supports this conclusion. According to Elizabeth Grasmeder, who collected and analyzed this data, not once did recruiting foreign volunteers provoke the state fighting against those soldiers to go to war with the state supplying them. Only a few cases led to limited attacks to discourage the recruitment.
Russia cannot allow the precedent of consequence-free attacks on Russian forces.
Certainly, this policy comes with costs and challenges. Serious obstacles to interoperability could emerge involving languages, communications equipment, ammunition, and spare parts. Yet Ukraine faces some of those difficulties already as it exhausts the old Soviet equipment it is using and transitions to NATO-provided weapons. Because Ukraine needs trained soldiers more than brand new recruits, NATO states must make it easier for soldiers to temporarily resign to fight for Ukraine. They must ensure that medical care and other benefits will be ready for these soldiers—and that volunteers can smoothly rejoin when they return. Their prospects for promotion should reflect their hard-won combat experience. The hardest part of this policy will be accepting casualties among the volunteers without retaliating. This is why they must truly be volunteers, unlike the soldiers Russia ordered into Crimea and the Donbas as “green men” in 2014. Not all NATO members will embrace these obligations, but with U.S. participation, some would be enough.
To mitigate risks, NATO should start small by focusing on expertise more than numbers. Russia will be loath to start an unwinnable war with NATO over a few hundred more volunteers fighting for Ukraine—even if organized more purposefully by NATO governments. Tacitly tolerating their deployment will make it harder for Russia to deter the next hundreds, which gradually become the next thousands.
Ever since proposals for a no-fly zone failed, the desire to do more for Ukraine has struggled to crystallize around a prudent and realistic plan. Foreign volunteers is the right policy to explore. Coupled with abandoning unnecessary limits on which arms NATO members send to Ukraine, this is how NATO can more effectively support Ukraine without starting World War III.
3. Will Republicans Cut Off Ukraine?
The only thing worse than our over worrying about escalation is this kind of dangerous "strategic" thinking by political leaders. If this comes to pass we may as well disengage from world affairs and become the hermit kingdom (oops that name is already taken).
Will Republicans Cut Off Ukraine?
If control of Congress flips, a small but growing number of America-first lawmakers could derail American support for the war against Russia.
U.S. military aid for Ukraine could dry up if Republicans retake control of the House or Senate in the November midterm elections, conservative analysts predict.
Nearly five months into the Russian invasion, support for U.S. military and financial assistance to Kyiv is shrinking among the GOP’s right-wing base, a group that has been primed by its leaders and top media personalities to oppose the Biden administration's plans for American intervention or even side with Russia’s illegal invasion. With Russia pausing its most recent offensive in Ukraine’s east to reset and rearm its frontline forces, some observers wonder just how much longer Americans–especially right-wing voters and lawmakers–will fund a costly stalemate bewteen Kyiv and Moscow. Few predict Ukraine can win without significantly more firepower, ground forces, or direct military involvement by NATO-member neighbors. Should the GOP win control of Congress, whether the United States continues to arm Ukraine could depend on who controls the policy and pursestrings: the internationalist moderate Republican leaders sitting atop key committees or isolationist far-right party superstars.
In May, Congress approved $40 billion in weapons and military and economic assistance for Ukraine by an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote, with only 57 Republicans voting against the package in the House and 11 voting no in the Senate. Because it passed so quickly, some analysts say Republican lawmakers were not fully aware of GOP opposition to the aid at the time of the vote. Since then, party sentiment has shifted, as influential conservative groups ramp up their messaging.
"The vote in the House was fairly successful given the fact that most of the reaction in the grassroots happened after," said Russ Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America and former director of the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget. "If it happened today, I think you’d have 100 Republicans opposed to it, and much more GOP in the Senate as well."
Ukraine is rapidly exhausting the ammunition sent by the West. Ukrainian forces are using tens of thousands of shells per day, France 24 reported on Thursday, as the defense of the Donbas rages on and the war becomes one of attrition—where the victor is likely to be the nation with the biggest stockpiles.
In Europe last month, President Joe Biden promised the United States will support Ukraine “as long as it takes.” Other world leaders expressed similar confidence in the long-term commitment of the United States, no matter the outcome of the midterm election.
“I don’t think the major position of the United States will change about Ukraine,” Slovakian Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad told Politico. “I think it’s quite clear to the whole democratic world what is actually happening in Ukraine and that we need to help the Ukrainians, so I don’t expect any significant changes, whatever happens after the midterm election.”
That view is “a bit naive,” said Dan Caldwell, vice president of foreign policy at Stand Together, a network of nonprofits funded in part by Charles Koch, as some parts of the Republican caucus shift toward an America-first view, and away from the more traditional interventionist foreign policy views that dominated the party for decades.
Some Democrats are warning that a Republican-controlled Congress puts aid to Ukraine in the crosshairs.
“Fact is if the Republicans take over the House in 2022 US support to Ukraine will come to a halt,” Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., tweeted last week. “They will not be able to stop @RepMTG & @mattgaetz from dictating our Ukraine policy,” referring to two of the GOP’s most extreme isolationist personalities, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga, and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.
The push to give aid to Ukraine started out as a very bipartisan one, with many Republican leaders in foreign-policy calling on Biden to do more to arm troops in Kyiv, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, a veteran who sits on the Armed Services Committee.
“Defending freedom in Ukraine is defending freedom everywhere,” she said in March.
But far-right GOP leaders and personalities from Trump’s camp have not relented their opposition to U.S. involvement in the conflict. As the war continued, Republican support for helping Ukraine began to fracture. Some GOP senators criticized the administration for sending so much money abroad instead of focusing on domestic issues—including inflation and supply chain shortages—but others did not support the aid because of other concerns, such as inequitable burden sharing with European allies, a lack of oversight over the money once it reached Ukraine, and a desire for offsetting domestic spending reductions.
Vought said his organization shares some of these concerns, including the fact that America has sent the most aid to Ukraine, even though the war is happening in Europe's backyard. Vought also noted Russia’s inability to score a decisive victory in Ukraine proves the military is not as strong as the West once thought, and argued that Ukraine has no incentive to end the war through negotiations as long as they have a blank check with no expiration date from the West.
"At the beginning, there was a bum rush by neoconservatives using everyone’s outrage at Putin and Biden’s inability to project strength," he said. "I think the outrage of that moment has settled into a realistic assessment of where we are, and that is: we can’t be in a situation where we are telling a country like Ukraine that was once a part of Russia 'as long as it takes.'”
"You have to think through, do you have concerns with the package going to Ukraine, or do you just not like the process?" he continued. "We don’t like the process, but our main fundamental concern is we don’t subsidize a government that’s told 'as long as it takes.'"
The Biden administration will need to ask Congress for another supplemental funding bill for Ukraine at some point. Since lawmakers approved the $40 billion in aid in May, the White House has announced more than $3 billion in weapons shipments, but the supplemental also includes money for humanitarian and economic aid, plus plans to replenish American munition stockpiles depleted to support Ukraine.
If the next large request comes after January 2023, the Biden administration may face an uphill battle. Republicans are “favored” to win the House in November, according to FiveThirtyEight projections. The Senate, however, is rated a “toss-up.” Among those seats in Congress, the small but growing “America First” wing of the Republican party has been critical of sending aid to Ukraine. Greene has called the aid a “money laundering scheme.” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., called on Congress to give every American a $1,000 stimulus check instead of sending money to Ukraine. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., also voted against the aid.
“Nation building in Ukraine is a major mistake, just like it was in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Hawley said in a statement to Defense One on Thursday. “Our European allies must do more for their own security and we must focus our national security efforts abroad on countering China, and at home, on our southern border.”
Several candidates who share these views and are backed by Trump are on the ballot this fall. J.D. Vance, who is running for the Senate in Ohio, earned wide praise and criticism when he said he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” and then walked back the statement. Blake Masters, who is running for the Senate in Arizona, said that “geography is real. Ukraine is crucial to Russian security, not to ours.”
“This is a European problem invited by weakness and magical thinking. It should cause Europeans to wake up to the reality of a dangerous world. But we cannot let it become a world war,” Masters tweeted in March.
But many other Republicans, including those in congressional leadership positions, reject the Trump wing. Last month, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee who is retiring after this term, urged Biden to spend the supplemental money faster and to send more advanced weapons systems to Ukraine. McConnell has also publicly countered that the aid to Ukraine is “not some handout.”
Some more traditional Republicans are starting to disagree with these mainstream leaders. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., voted for the more than $40 billion aid package in May, but said afterward that Biden “should not assume Congress will rubber stamp his next request” if the president cannot defend why spending in Ukraine keeps Americans safer at home. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, also voted in support of the supplemental spending, but has since retweeted opinion pieces that are critical of open-ended support, including one titled, “We Can’t be Ukraine Hawks Forever.” Cornyn tweeted one line from the story: “And just as urgently, we will need to shift some of the burden of supporting Kyiv from our own budget to our European allies."
Stand Togehter’s Caldwell said, "Because of this sea change that’s occurring on the right around foreign policy, a Republican Congress may not be reflexively supportive of more aid to Ukraine or larger security commitments to Europe.”
Beyond Washington, polling shows most Republicans do not support increased American intervention in Ukraine and a greater share of Republicans than Democrats oppose direct U.S. troop involvement. Sixty percent of Republicans oppose sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, compared to just 36 percent of Democrats, according to a Concerned Veterans for America poll released July 1. More than 4 in 5 Republicans also have an unfavorable view of how Biden has supported Ukraine so far.
Those figures reflect similarly divergent attitudes among Republicans and Democrats about U.S. military interventions abroad. More than half of Republicans but only about one-third of Democrats say America should be less militarily engaged in conflicts around the world. Just 8 percent of Republicans, but 16 percent of Democrats, called for more intervention. .
"Skepticism of more intervention abroad is likely going to continue to increase on the right,” Caldwell said. “The assumption was the invasion of Ukraine was going to kill the noninterventionist strain that’s emerging on the Right, the polling and recent votes on Ukraine aid shows that’s not true."
America-first Republicans overwhelmingly say they do not support helping Ukraine because they don’t support long-term help for a foreign government. Others in the party who are more fiscally conservative have raised objections over the cost.
Even conservative organizations once at the heart of national security policy are struggling to thread the needle of supporting Ukraine while demanding restraint. Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy group affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, lobbied against the last aid package because of its price tag and scope, but supports more limited aid to militarily support Ukraine, according to a spokesman for the group.
“If there’s a second supplemental, we’ll come out against it if they don’t offset the spending, but that doesn’t mean we’re against Ukraine,” said James Carafano, a vice president and fellow at the foundation.
4. Philippine Foreign Secretary Hails South China Sea Ruling on 6th Anniversary
But the Chinese have not accepted or abided by the ruling.
Philippine Foreign Secretary Hails South China Sea Ruling on 6th Anniversary
Enrique Manalo described the 2016 award as the precondition of “stability, peace, and progress” in the disputed waterway.
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The Philippines’ newly appointed Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo has pledged to uphold the landmark arbitral ruling that found most of China’s claims in the South China Sea invalid, describing its findings as “conclusive” and “indisputable.”
The July 2016 ruling from an arbitral tribunal based at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague rejected most of the Chinese government’s claims to the crucial waterway, including its expansive “nine-dash line” maritime claim.
In a statement today marking the sixth anniversary of the award, and the 40th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), on which the ruling was based, Manalo said that it was “no longer within the reach of denial and rebuttal.”
“The Award is final,” Manolo said in his statement. “We firmly reject attempts to undermine it; nay, even erase it from law, history, and our collective memories. At the same time, we welcome the support of a growing list of countries for the Award.”
He described the arbitral ruling and UNCLOS as “the twin anchors of the Philippines’ policy and actions on the West Philippine Sea,” as Manila refers to its sections of the South China Sea.
The Philippines brought the case against Beijing in 2013, not long after a prolonged standoff over the Scarborough Shoal, which finished with China in control of the feature. The tribunal ruled that the claim of historic rights to resources within the sea areas falling within the “nine-dash line” had no basis in law. It also upheld the Philippines’ sovereign rights and jurisdiction within 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, a large swathe of which is lopped off by China’s “nine-dash line.”
But the award was immediately set aside by President Rodrigo Duterte, who had taken office just days earlier. Duterte said that he would prefer to talk directly with China about the South China Sea issues. He also hoped to gain access to Chinese infrastructure funding under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in order to beef up his domestic economic agenda.
The statement from Manalo, a career diplomat who was appointed foreign secretary by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. a few days after his own inauguration on June 30, seems to suggest that the new administration will break with Duterte’s accommodating position on the South China Sea disputes.
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But the statement follows several months of mixed messaging from the Philippines’ new leader. During election campaigning in January, Marcos said that he would follow Duterte in setting aside the arbitral award and negotiate directly with Beijing over the disputes. Then, in May, he pledged to uphold the ruling and said that as president he would not allow “a single millimeter of our maritime coastal rights to be trampled upon.”
The six-year term of his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte was marked by a similarly volatile swings from indifference toward the ruling, which Duterte once likened to a piece of “paper,” and pledges to uphold it. All the while, the Department of Foreign Affairs was diligent in calling out the repeated Chinese incursions into the Philippines’ EEZ, which earlier this year prompted outgoing Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin to tell China to “get the f*** out” of Philippine waters.
This gap between the bureaucracy and a vacillating executive leadership makes it hard to draw binding conclusions from Manalo’s statement. But it adds to the existing evidence that the accommodating position of the Duterte administration will become a thing of the past.
STAFF AUTHOR
Sebastian Strangio
Sebastian Strangio is Southeast Asia editor at The Diplomat.
5. Schiff seeks rule that would block oversight of some military operations
I am confused. A congressman wants to block congressional oversight? And even worse- restrict oversight of the use of the military in domestic operations?
I am completely confused by this article. Restricting oversight will prevent misuse of the military for domestic purposes? How? I have read this article twice and I just can't figure what the amendment is really all about, what it does, and how it would work.
Excerpts:
“Yes, I’m very concerned about it, and Republicans need to fight back against it in the House and Senate to make sure it doesn’t pass,” Rep. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “Democrats know we are going to take back the majority and are already trying to tie our hands when we do.”
Schiff aides said Republicans are misrepresenting the amendment, which will get a vote before the House Rules Committee on Tuesday. The amendment is expected to pass and be included in the final legislation for a vote later this week.
“It should come as no surprise that Republican conspiracy theorists have misrepresented Rep. Schiff’s amendment,” Schiff spokeswoman Lauren French said. “The measure prevents presidents, of any party, from unlawfully using our nation’s armed forces in a domestic law enforcement capacity against Americans exercising their constitutionally protected rights. This is something both parties should support and did support when it passed the House by voice vote in 2021. This amendment deters violations of the law by prohibiting the use of unlawfully obtained evidence by the government in a court or other legal proceeding — it would not prevent any congressional oversight as some conspiracy theorists have falsely claimed. By ensuring the government cannot prosecute Americans using evidence obtained illegally, we can protect our fundamental freedoms.”
Schiff seeks rule that would block oversight of some military operations
Rep. Adam B. Schiff, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wants a defense policy bill to include language blocking Congress from oversight of the military and National Guard in some cases of domestic deployment.
The amendment is poised to be added to the National Defense Authorization Act, which the House plans to take up this week, and it has drawn criticism from Republicans who fear Mr. Schiff is trying to preemptively block them from oversight if their party wins the House majority in November elections.
“This un-American amendment will fundamentally and irreparably erode Congress’ constitutional oversight responsibility,” Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a member of the Armed Services Committee and chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, told The Washington Times. “House Democrats led by Adam Schiff are attempting to cover up for the national security crises of the weakest commander in chief in U.S. history.”
The exemption from congressional oversight is narrowly focused on the domestic deployment of troops, but Mr. Schiff’s free pass for the Pentagon could impact a range of oversight from border security to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Mr. Schiff, California Democrat, first introduced the measure in 2020. He cited then-President Trump’s proposal, which he never carried out, to deploy the U.S. Army to quell social justice riots that were ravaging cities across the country.
Advocates touted the Schiff measure as a bill that would suppress evidence obtained by the military during unlawful deployment domestically.
The Brennan Center for Justice was among dozens of groups to back the measure. They said it would “establish clear consequences to deter the government” from wrongfully deploying the military in civil law enforcement situations under a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act.
The 1878 law prohibits the Army or Air Force from enforcing U.S. laws unless authorized by the Constitution or Congress.
Transparency advocates say Mr. Schiff’s proposal, which would suppress evidence and expand the act to all military branches, is overly broad and goes too far in shielding the military from scrutiny. It could also block Republicans in Congress from planned oversight of the Biden administration.
“This is the opposite of a good governance and transparency amendment,” said Charles Stimson, the deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal Judicial Studies and manager of the National Security Law Program at The Heritage Foundation. “And it really stinks to high heaven.”
Mr. Stimson, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense under President George W. Bush, said the measure would block the courts and Congress from oversight of the military and information collected by the military if the deployment is deemed in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
“If somebody from the armed forces, or perhaps even the National Guard, who were brought up into service under federal authority, were given a direct order which they thought were lawful, but it was actually not a lawful order, but they didn’t have the gumption to know whether it was or not, they can’t be brought before the House or subcommittee of the House,” Mr. Stimson said.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Schiff said no Republican opposed the measure in 2021 when it passed by voice vote as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. The language was cut from the House-Senate compromise that Congress passed in December.
House Republicans are paying closer attention to the Schiff amendment now that they are poised to reclaim the majority and the oversight gavel. They plan investigations and hearings on the Biden administration’s handling of the illegal immigration surge along the southern border, where thousands of Texas National Guard troops have been deployed.
Republicans also plan to examine security failures in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the building. They want to know why congressional leaders rejected help from the National Guard in advance of the riot.
“Yes, I’m very concerned about it, and Republicans need to fight back against it in the House and Senate to make sure it doesn’t pass,” Rep. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “Democrats know we are going to take back the majority and are already trying to tie our hands when we do.”
Schiff aides said Republicans are misrepresenting the amendment, which will get a vote before the House Rules Committee on Tuesday. The amendment is expected to pass and be included in the final legislation for a vote later this week.
“It should come as no surprise that Republican conspiracy theorists have misrepresented Rep. Schiff’s amendment,” Schiff spokeswoman Lauren French said. “The measure prevents presidents, of any party, from unlawfully using our nation’s armed forces in a domestic law enforcement capacity against Americans exercising their constitutionally protected rights. This is something both parties should support and did support when it passed the House by voice vote in 2021. This amendment deters violations of the law by prohibiting the use of unlawfully obtained evidence by the government in a court or other legal proceeding — it would not prevent any congressional oversight as some conspiracy theorists have falsely claimed. By ensuring the government cannot prosecute Americans using evidence obtained illegally, we can protect our fundamental freedoms.”
6. What Xi Jinping’s Personality Means for Taiwan’s Deterrence
Conclusion:
The implication for Taiwan is that Xi is deterrable, and is unlikely to make the desperate gamble of an amphibious invasion without a modicum of superiority. Xi’s designs for war will be entirely driven by the instrumental political benefit to him of consolidating his power over the CCP. However, his Maoist inspired ruthlessness means he has no compunction for crossing the frightening threshold to war if he perceives it to be to his advantage. Furthermore, Xi is likely comforted by his awareness that authoritarian leaders protected by a robust internal security police, that are then defeated in wars, are only ejected from office fifty percent of the time, compared with ninety percent for democratic leaders. However, any calculus by Xi is likely to be distorted by a significant element of miscalculation given to him by his poorly informed cabinet and sycophantic advisors.
What Xi Jinping’s Personality Means for Taiwan’s Deterrence
July 12, 2022
Taiwan’s security depends on a robust deterrence, tailored to the threat of a Chinese attack decided in the specific decision-making circumstances in Beijing. This depends to a large extent on the personality and objectives of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, particularly as he is most likely to be leader at the moment of the Chinese power transition supplanting the United States. Deducing foreign policy from personality profiles has a dubious record, especially because leaders are sufficiently rational to dominate a political system by adapting to it. However, in cases of highly centralized totalitarian systems, particularly in instances where individuals rule with small cabinets, decision-making may become dangerously optimistic regarding the use of force.
Most assessments of Xi, such as that by George Washington University professor David Shambaugh in China’s Leaders, identify him as far more politically authoritarian than his three predecessors: Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao. Geremie Barmé, elaborating on Fang Zhou’s 2022 Objective Evaluation of Xi Jinping, concludes that Xi, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, is under the spell of totalitarian nostalgia. Xi idolizes Mao Zedong and is pursuing every means in order to remain in power indefinitely, including a dramatic increase in repression, erosion of the rule of law, and feeding of a cult of personality. Xi’s pursuit of absolute power increases the war proneness of China by creating a difunctionally misinformed Politburo.
Xi, based on his upbringing and experience as a young adult, can be characterized as politically insecure and an admirer of Mao’s ruthlessness, but there is no evidence that he finds war intrinsically glorious, or that he is an exceptional risk taker. To the extent that Xi would consider a war against Taiwan, it would be to instrumentally cement his hold on power, rather than subscribing to an historically romanticized legacy, like Russian President Vladimir Putin. The implication is that sufficient force and a well communicated threat by Taiwan and its allies will deter an invasion.
Xi’s privileged early youth as a member of the Princeling faction made the benefits of CCP’s nepotism unequivocally obvious. However, in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, Xi’s father – Xi Zhong Xun 習仲勳 (later known as one of the Eight Elder’s during Deng’s tenure), was politically demoted, and then confined from 1968 to 1978. Shockingly, Xi’s mother participated in the condemnation of both her husband and son. At the age of 13, without a father figure and son of an enemy of the social class, Xi suffered harassment and isolation during his high school years, and was subjected to special indoctrination. In Beijing, between August and September 1966, nearly 1800 people died of persecution, including Xi’s sister, who hanged herself in a washroom. In 1968, at the age of 15, as part of his re-education, Xi was “volunteered” for the Down to the Countryside Movement 上山下鄉運動. Unable to endure the harsh treatment, he escaped to Beijing, was arrested for four months, and humiliatingly returned to his assigned village. By the age of 20, Xi had attempted to join the Communist Youth League中共青年團 eight times but was repeatedly rejected due to his father’s disgrace.
Xi’s formative childhood experience inculcated both an awareness of elite entitlement, victimhood, self-reliance, and compromised emotional security associated with the absence of a father figure. Xi’s ironic adulation of Mao Zedong and his authoritarianism began at this time, likely addressing his aspiration for status, the security of a father figure, and most of all, as an emulatable path to power. Xi inherited none of his father’s reformist and patriotic ideology, nor did Xi assimilate his father’s post-mortem anthology critical of communist injustice and violence.
Xi was rehabilitated into the CCP as a result of the post-Cultural Revolution redress movement, and his restored status gave automatic admission into China’s elite Tsinghua University 清華大學. Xi is an ambitious bureaucrat rather than an intellectual, and is only definitively known to have read Nikolai Ostrovsky’s communist inspirational book How the Steel Was Tempered. Xi was granted an abbreviated and proforma degree. However, Xi never demonstrated a sophisticated historical patriotism, beyond a commiserated regret with Vladimir Putin of the collapse of the USSR. In fact, Xi’s status insecurity and anti-intellectual education is evident in his occasional public boasting, which carries more appeal with his domestic than international audiences. In France, 2014, Xi remarked unconvincingly that he had read and vividly remembered the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Henri de Saint-Simon, Fourier, Sartre, and two dozen more thinkers.
While Xi most often promotes himself as a man of the people, with whom he is generally very popular, he also portrays himself as a visionary leader. “Xi Jinping Thought” 習近平新時代中國特色社會主義思想, is a banal text mixed with ideas that are not authored by him, but elevated and appended into the CCP Constitution, and included as a mandatory text in elementary and higher education curricula.. Xi’s pursuit of status may be a personality craving, but also instrumental as Chinese publics expect their leaders to fit the stereotype of wise rulers 明君.
Xi’s early political assignments were the result of his communist aristocratic status, but subsequent promotions in the 1980s and 1990s were the result of his administrative competence and party reliability. As Provincial Premier from 2002 to 2006, Xi benefitted from the high growth of Zhejiang, driven by market demand in Shanghai, and this good fortune propelled him into higher national leadership. Lacking an independent powerbase, Xi’s key promotion was as a compromise candidate between the Jiang and Hu factions in 2007, with his ascension as leader in 2012.
However, Xi Jinping’s relative lack of political achievement rendered him politically vulnerable, and he resorted almost immediately to a widespread purge to install loyalists, under the guise of “Ideological Re-Alignment.” Between 2012 to 2017, Xi replaced an unprecedented 18 Central Committee members and 17 alternative members, equalling the same number removed in the 63 years between 1949 to 2012. Xi bypassed the CCP Central Commission for the Discipline and Inspection to personally direct the judicial actions taken against all deputy minister level officials. Xi’s purges after 2012 netted 9,942 individuals with fixed prison terms, 67 jailed for life, and 51 executions. At stake was control of the 95 million members of the CCP. China’s Ministry of State Security, his main instrument of surveillance, has an annual budget of US$111 billion, which is greater than China’s entire yearly naval and air force procurement outlay. Xi’s anti-corruption policies were similar to the practices of the radical left wing 左派of the CCP already underway at a much lower level of intensity, which was in turn mimicking Mao’s practice of perennial purges, known as the Three Counters, Five Counters – 三反 五反.
Isolated political factions prioritize group conformity, leading to self-censorship and sycophancy, a dysfunction that distorts decision-making called groupthink. Small cabinets also reduce the availability of information, worsen policy quality, increase inter-state crisis escalation by 12 percent, as well as unintended wars. Democracies, with large cabinets, win wars 81 percent of the time, whereas non-democracies win about half the time, precisely because of their inability to fashion reliable alliances due to the sidelining of foreign affairs in lieu of military violence. This tends to lead authoritarian states fighting alone, outnumbered (termed Self-encirclement), leading to defeat. Winston Churchill’s wartime inner cabinet, by comparison, rose from five to eight ministers, plus military representatives, comprising Conservative, Labour, and Liberal party members.
The implication for Taiwan is that Xi is deterrable, and is unlikely to make the desperate gamble of an amphibious invasion without a modicum of superiority. Xi’s designs for war will be entirely driven by the instrumental political benefit to him of consolidating his power over the CCP. However, his Maoist inspired ruthlessness means he has no compunction for crossing the frightening threshold to war if he perceives it to be to his advantage. Furthermore, Xi is likely comforted by his awareness that authoritarian leaders protected by a robust internal security police, that are then defeated in wars, are only ejected from office fifty percent of the time, compared with ninety percent for democratic leaders. However, any calculus by Xi is likely to be distorted by a significant element of miscalculation given to him by his poorly informed cabinet and sycophantic advisors.
7. ‘Statesman Abe’s strategic vision was impressive’
Cleo Paskal interviews Grant Newsham on Abe's legacy.
‘Statesman Abe’s strategic vision was impressive’ - The Sunday Guardian Live
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Published : July 9, 2022, 6:03 pm | Updated : July 9, 2022, 6:03 PM
Abe recognised the usefulness of India in the Indo-Pacific. The Japanese, and Abe, really pushed for India, including with the Quad: Grant Newsham.
In this edition of Indo-Pacific: Behind the Headlines, we speak with Grant Newsham, a retired United States Marine Corps Colonel, about the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Newsham was the Marine Attaché in Tokyo and the first Marine Liaison Officer to the Japan Self-Defence Forces. In the latter role he helped create Japan’s “Marine Corps”.
Q: How did Shinzo Abe change Japan, and the world?
A: There have been around twenty Japanese Prime Ministers since Yasuhiro Nakasone was Prime Minister from 1982 to 1987. Nakasone was the last one you would call a statesman. Since then the only one who deserved that title was Shinzo Abe.
Abe managed to do the almost impossible. He shifted Japan’s basic approach to foreign affairs and defence. Before him, the widespread approach was one of mindless pacifism—pretending the country faced no threats and didn’t have to defend itself, and Japan had little influence regionally or globally—other than what its money could buy temporarily.
Abe turned that around to where today the common wisdom is that Japan is in a dangerous neighbourhood, needs to beef up alliances with the US and others, and is an important power. That was unthinkable before Abe. Anyone trying and saying what he did would have been called a warmonger looking to redo World War II.
Q: What were some of the changes he made?
A: In the decade before he took office took office in 2012, the defence budget was cut year after year. After, it was increased year after year.
He got the Japan Self-Defence Force (JSDF) taken more seriously. He was convinced the JSDF had a role to play in defending the nation. And a military was for fighting, if needed.
He had the JSDF go out in the region and do exercises, including with other countries. That would have been unthinkable a few years before.
He got laws reinterpreted for collective self-defence, which meant Japan could support the Americans and potentially were able to support other friendly countries.
He also had the defence guidelines with the US redone to make Japan a more useful ally to the Americans.
He also really wanted to get the Constitution changed to get JSDF recognised as a normal military. He didn’t achieve that, but the current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida might try to get it done after the next election.
Internationally, he saw Japan’s role in the region and the world differently than all others, and he travelled around the world and spoke well about Japan and what its interests are at home and abroad. He also knew enough to keep his mouth shut about some of his views.
He patiently tried to make friends with South Korea, and saw Taiwan as a nation essential to Japan’s defence. And he also almost sold submarines to the Australians, and that would have been a strategic earthquake in a good sense, but the Australian administration of Malcolm Turnbull went insane. Abe saw Japan’s interest in a global sense.
During his administration, there was a clear recognition that Japan’s economic strength was something to capitalise on. You saw it when Abe kept the idea of the Trans-Pacific Partnership alive even when the United States backed off. That showed leadership.
At the same time, he also did a very good job of engaging with Obama and Trump—and those weren’t only ones he did well with.
In terms of diplomacy he made a lot of progress for Japan. He kept the US alliance and made it even stronger. He built other alliances and spoke up for Taiwan. He increased defence spending—as much as he could (which wasn’t so much), and also increased defence capabilities—he was very strong on those points. And his comments about China were similarly strong.
It took political courage and a lot of effort to get it done. Turning all that around was hard and slow—like turning around a cruise ship. But Abe did it—now even a lot of academia and media like Asashi Shimbun don’t complain much anymore.
His strategic vision was impressive. He was a force—you take him out and where is that voice? I can imagine they are launching some toasts in Beijing today. That’s how important he was.
Q: Did he face opposition?
A: I’ve seen some gleeful commentators talking about his killing. Abe was often called a right-winger, an extreme nationalist, he was none of those. At best you might call him a conservative. In the US many of his policies would be considered on the left, like national health care. He is pigeonholed by the foreign commentariat and media. It shows a real lack of understanding of Japan.
Grant Newsham
He always faced plenty of opposition. What he accomplished is even more impressive given that opposition. But in accomplishing all this he was really viciously hated by people within and outside his party, academia, media, some in the international community. The shooting is almost a predictable outcome from that real vitriolic hatred.
And, while he had plenty of enemies, he was also very influential among a large number of the body politic. He was much more popular than any Prime Minister I can remember.
Q: How did India fit into Shinzo Abe’s worldview?
A: If you visit Yasukuni shrine you’ll see the memorial to Justice Pal who wrote in favour of the Japanese defendants at the War Crimes trial after World War Two. Abe’s grandfather, Kishi, had been arrested by the Americans. Abe’s views of that era are very different than mine, and they did shape him.
Abe had real feelings for India and Indians. He saw India (other than the colonial administration) as having been aligned with Japan during World War II and tried to build on that. He saw the Japan and India relationship as historic and he worked to support it.
In modern times, Abe recognised the usefulness of India in the Indo-Pacific. The Japanese, and Abe, really pushed for India, including with the Quad. Bringing India into that dynamic is essential, and he worked hard on it.
The idea of the Quad really originated with him. Also the “security diamond” and the Free and Open Indo-Pacific concept. I think he had those ideas a long time before and, when he finally got the chance, he moved with it. Of course, he had people around him, but he deserves credit for all of these things.
Q: What happened after Mr Abe stepped down?
A: One thing did surprise me—I thought once he stepped down, Japan would lose momentum. In Japan politicians always just moved money around and didn’t really have much interest in foreign affairs. I thought Japan would lose focus again.
To my surprise that momentum and direction continued. And, even after leaving office, Mr Abe had been very clear spoken about the need for Japan to really improve its defence. And to help defend Taiwan. There’s that expression, Taiwan’s defence is Japan’s defence.
He’s also talked about Japan having access to nuclear weapons. American nuclear weapons ideally, but implicit in that is Japanese as well. Not everyone in Japan listened to him, but he was influential. And having him say those things is sort of like firing for effect. It was adding to the momentum that Japan has now.
I think the Kishida administration is going to keep it going. The advisors at a number of levels think a lot like Abe.
The real threat to Japan—i.e. from China—is one that is so widely accepted now it is almost common wisdom, from the general population to the military and political class and even the media—though there is still opposition, not least from the business community and hold-outs in the bureaucracy.
Q: How can Japan’s friends help now?
A: What would help now is if the Americans say what they need, clearly, to be able to work effectively with Japan against their common threat.
And for others, such as India, to be more with the Japanese, to make the military, economic, political relationship more concrete. Indians, if they have initiative and desire, could play a bigger role with the Japanese regardless of the Americans
Q: How will Japan, and the Kishida administration, respond?
A: This really is unusual. A shock to all Japanese. I think they will respond to Abe’s killing in a pretty good way, after they catch their breath. It will be a reminder of what is already known—that Japan is in a dangerous neighbourhood and does have enemies. And it may result in even more support for the sort of policies represented by Abe. That’s how it will be interpreted—it can have a bracing effect, to not lose focus. I’m optimistic Kishida’s administration could keep it going, that Abe’s ideas are going to continue via the Kishida administration.
He was a rare figure that doesn’t come along very often. He was immensely important. He will be missed.
8. Shinzo Abe Invented the ‘Indo-Pacific’
Shinzo Abe Invented the ‘Indo-Pacific’
He broadened the world’s view of Asia, much to the consternation of the Chinese Communist Party.
By
Matt Pottinger
July 10, 2022 4:27 pm ET
Shinzo Abe visits New Delhi.
Photo: Sipra Das/The The India Today Group via Getty Images
President Trump visited Asia in November 2017. In Vietnam, he delivered a speech declaring a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” It signified a shift in the language leaders use to describe the world’s most populous region.
Mr. Trump actually borrowed the phrase from Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving postwar leader. Abe, who was killed by an assassin Friday, died knowing that his signature geopolitical vision—and the vocabulary used to describe it—has been thoroughly embraced across much of the region and beyond.
Of all the allied leaders who visited the Trump White House, none were more welcome than Abe. Leveraging their mutual love of golf, the two leaders built a friendship that provided crucial ballast to the U.S.’s Pacific alliances at a time when they were increasingly threatened by China’s militarism and America’s perennial temptation toward isolationism. By my reckoning, Mr. Trump had more conversations with Abe than with any other leader. Language was never a barrier; Abe’s favored interpreter, Takao Sunao, rendered the Japanese leader’s upbeat staccato into resonant English, even while clinging to the back of a racing golf cart.
The two leaders negotiated a bilateral trade deal, coordinated responses to North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests, and indulged in a four-year, open-ended conversation about China. Abe understood the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions long before most Western leaders did. That’s what compelled him to reimagine the way nations should think about Asia.
An early outline of Abe’s vision emerged in a speech in 2007 in India, during his first stint as prime minister. He called for a “broader Asia” spanning not only the Pacific, but the Indian Ocean as well—“seas of freedom and prosperity, which will be open and transparent to all.”
Abe knew the phrase “Asia-Pacific” conjures the geography of East Asia, with China at the center. He wanted people to zoom out and behold a much grander tableau that included India and that situated the youthful maritime nations of Southeast Asia, rather than China, at the conceptual heart of the region. He began using the phrase “Indo-Pacific.”
In addition to counterbalancing China geographically, Abe sought to offset Beijing’s authoritarian, statist model with a more appealing philosophy. Speaking in 2016, he described a region “that values freedom, the rule of law, and the market economy, free from force or coercion, and . . . prosperous.”
He traveled his newly defined region incessantly, establishing a close camaraderie with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and putting Japan’s development-assistance apparatus to work on infrastructure projects.
Regional capitals began to view Abe’s vision as a noncorrupt alternative to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s opaque Belt and Road lending program. Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in 2018 described China’s loan-sharking as a form of “unequal treaties”—a scathing critique in postcolonial Asia. Mr. Mahathir shuttled to Tokyo to restructure his nation’s debts.
To buttress his regional framework, Abe also promoted a new diplomatic initiative: the Quad. Envisaging Japan, India, Australia and the U.S. as a giant baseball diamond to constrain Beijing’s swing toward empire, Abe patiently shepherded the format for years through a series of false starts. Senior-level gatherings finally took place starting in 2017 and were gradually elevated to cabinet-level meetings by the end of Mr. Trump’s term. Since President Biden’s inauguration, the Quad has convened in formal leader-level summits four times already. While not a military alliance, it has nonetheless become a marquee forum for addressing disinformation, supply-chain blackmail, debt-trap diplomacy, illegal fishing and other misconduct by Beijing.
In 2017, when the Trump administration was looking for a slogan to encapsulate its strategy for the region, my colleagues and I saw virtue in amplifying Abe’s motto of a free and open Indo-Pacific. Other countries caught the spirit, too. Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in November 2017 announced a policy of realizing “a secure, open and prosperous Indo-Pacific.”
The Chinese Communist Party understands the power of terminology in shaping people’s thinking. It directed its diplomats to warn neighboring countries never to say “Indo-Pacific.” The threats failed, however, and the term spread. Southeast Asians, led by Indonesia, announced a new Indo-Pacific Outlook. Capitals as far as Brussels and Berlin drafted Indo-Pacific strategies. Paris promoted a (curiously nouned) Indo-Pacific “axis.”
By defining the region on their own terms, not China’s, countries took a stand for their national sovereignty. Abe understood sovereignty as a basis for solidarity between nations—no matter their form of government—when confronted by neighbors dreaming of empire. Even countries that may not be entirely free at home still want to be free from coercion from abroad. Hence the standing ovation Mr. Trump received in Vietnam after he spoke of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” as “a beautiful constellation of nations, each its own bright star, satellites to none.”
In a May policy speech about China, Secretary of State Antony Blinken used similar terms. “The United States shares the vision that countries and people across the region hold: one of a free and open Indo-Pacific where rules are developed transparently and applied fairly; where countries are free to make their own sovereign decisions.” Mr. Blinken mentioned the words “sovereign” or “sovereignty” nine times in his address.
When he was killed on Friday, Abe was wearing a blue lapel pin signifying his determination to bring home Japanese who had been abducted by North Korea and forced to work as language instructors to the Kim regime. The subject was a defining one for Abe, who asked Mr. Trump to meet with relatives of the missing. Mr. Trump obliged each time he visited Tokyo. I never saw Abe without that pin, a symbol of the human dignity at the heart of his vision. The vision has survived the visionary. It’s up to the living to keep it that way.
Mr. Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser, coordinated Asia policy at the White House, 2017-21.
Appeared in the July 11, 2022, print edition.
9. Equipping U.S. Partners in Cyberspace is a Must
Excerpts:
Cyber capacity building requires persistence and can take years to take effect. Washington needs to establish or enhance funding to assist key allies and partners in responding and countering adversarial influence in cyberspace. The State Department should receive funding for cybersecurity-specific efforts in a number of programs including: ESF, Foreign Military Financing, Assistance to Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia, International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement, and the Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity Partnership.
Similarly, CYBERCOM should continue to expand funding for its hunt forward operations. The limited impact of Russia’s cyberattacks against Ukraine has demonstrated the value of a resourced cyber capacity building program, including efforts from the Department of State, USAID, and CYBERCOM to defend Ukraine’s critical networks.
Ultimately, the U.S. and its key allies and partners must enforce responsible state behavior in cyberspace and increase allied and partner nation-states’ capacity to mitigate, recover, and prevent future cyberattacks. Working with our partners and assisting them in creating a proactive defensive posture are pivotal to defending common interests and resources in cyberspace.
Equipping U.S. Partners in Cyberspace is a Must
Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is a senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he is also a senior fellow. He directs CSC 2.0, which works to implement the recommendations of the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission, where he previously served as executive director. Follow him on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery
Co-author Jiwon Ma is a program analyst at CCTI, where she contributes to the CSC 2.0 project. Follow Ma and Montgomery on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery and @jiwonma_92.
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — As the Russia-Ukraine war continues to rage, the resilience of the Ukrainian critical infrastructure in the face of Russian cyber assaults has been an unexpected bright spot.
After the damage Russia has inflicted on Kyiv with cyber tools in previous years, Ukraine has become “quite good at cyber defense,” National Cyber Director Chris Inglis observed earlier this month. The dramatic improvement in the capabilities of Ukrainian defenders is due in part, to U.S programs that bolster the ability of key allies and partners to keep their critical infrastructure secure from authoritarian influence and other malicious cyber activity. Without these programs, Russia’s cyberattacks might have caused cascading damage across Europe and the United States. Insufficient U.S. funding, however, has hindered the growth of cyber capacity building efforts in vulnerable allies and partners, weakening U.S. security in the process.
Cyber capacity building takes many forms: training programs for foreign law enforcement agencies to include enhanced investigative capabilities, network detection and response activities, and joint military cyber exercises, all with the intent of equipping allies and partners with the tools necessary to better plan for, mitigate, prevent, and respond to cyber threats.
According to the March 2020 report of the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission, these cyber capacity building programs provide long-term benefits to our allies by enhancing their cyber resilience and improving their ability to provide effective cybersecurity.
Ukraine has participated in several aspects of U.S. capacity building programs. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided Ukraine with over $40 million in development assistance since 2017, to strengthen Ukraine’s legal and regulatory environment, enhance public-private partnerships that secure Ukraine’s critical infrastructures, and develop Ukraine’s cyber workforce. The State Department has funded countries with similar, limited cyber capacity building efforts through the Economic Support Fund (ESF).
In addition, U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) has conducted “hunt forward” operations with Ukrainian operators. General Paul Nakasone states hunt forward missions were “directly in support of mission partners.” During these defensive operations, operators from both nations observe, identify, and remediate malicious cyber activity.
This year, CYBERCOM conducted its first hunt forward operation in Lithuania as part of the U.S. effort to strengthen our allies’ digital defenses against Russian threats. In the last four years, CYBERCOM has deployed to 16 different nations for 28 hunt forward operations, including 11 operations that were vital in defending the U.S. during the 2020 elections against foreign threats.
These hunt forward operations not only strengthen allied or partner networks’ resilience against cyber threats, but also provide insights that inform the U.S. homeland defense. All cyber capacity building programs have a ripple effect on U.S. national security interests in a number of ways.
First, improving the overall capacity of allies and partners to prevent, mitigate, and recover from cyberattacks can enhance U.S. economic stability and national security. For instance, to pressure Taiwan to cease resisting Beijing’s push toward unification, China could attack key supply chains, such as those for global semiconductors. Washington would then face a choice between abandoning a key partner or a global economic meltdown. But capacity building efforts such as CYBERCOM-led hunt forward operations could increase Taiwan’s cyber resilience, enabling Taipei to fend off a Chinese attack that would otherwise harm U.S. national security and the global economy.
Second, cyber capacity building programs help the critical infrastructure of allies and partners, including electrical power grids, water systems, rail lines, ports, and airfields, to remain operational in the face of adversarial attacks — enabling U.S. armed forces to rely on this infrastructure to conduct military operations if necessary.
Finally, a collective approach can reduce the burden on one nation by sharing information and intelligence on ongoing cyber threats. Collective action also carries more weight, particularly in enforcing cyber norms. For example, as the European Union and its member states condemned Russia’s malicious cyber activity against Ukraine, it also reaffirmed its political and financial support to Kyiv to strengthen Ukraine’s cyber resilience.
Opportunity for Action
Cyber capacity building requires persistence and can take years to take effect. Washington needs to establish or enhance funding to assist key allies and partners in responding and countering adversarial influence in cyberspace. The State Department should receive funding for cybersecurity-specific efforts in a number of programs including: ESF, Foreign Military Financing, Assistance to Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia, International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement, and the Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity Partnership.
Similarly, CYBERCOM should continue to expand funding for its hunt forward operations. The limited impact of Russia’s cyberattacks against Ukraine has demonstrated the value of a resourced cyber capacity building program, including efforts from the Department of State, USAID, and CYBERCOM to defend Ukraine’s critical networks.
Ultimately, the U.S. and its key allies and partners must enforce responsible state behavior in cyberspace and increase allied and partner nation-states’ capacity to mitigate, recover, and prevent future cyberattacks. Working with our partners and assisting them in creating a proactive defensive posture are pivotal to defending common interests and resources in cyberspace.
10. Iran’s Economy is Growing, But So Is Iranian Discontent
Excerpts:
Despite the growth of the past two years, Iran’s real GDP is still smaller than what it was in March 2018, just before the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal and began re-imposing sanctions. Thus, what is left after regime insiders, supporters, and foreign proxies take their share is very limited and is further depreciated by the inflation that the Raisi administration’s subsidies reform is making so much worse.
Hence, protests and strikes are likely to continue and intensify over the next few months. The regime’s response is likely to be greater repression.
Iran’s Economy is Growing, But So Is Iranian Discontent
Why is Iran’s economic growth not translating into a better quality of life for Iranians?
The Iranian economy is growing at an impressive rate, but daily strikes and protests have become the norm. The benefits of growth do not appear to be trickling down to the Iranian people, although rampant inflation keeps pushing down the value of their wages. Rather than the people, the likely beneficiaries of growth are corrupt officials and the security apparatus responsible for keeping the people down while waging proxy wars abroad.
Real GDP increased 4.3 percent in the Persian year of 1400, according to Iran’s Statistics Center. The oil and gas sector experienced the fastest rate of growth, as it did the previous year. But the service sector, the economy’s largest, also grew 4.5 percent, whereas previously it shrank.
The country’s foreign trade also continued growing. In the first quarter of the Persian year of 1401 (spring 2022 on Western calendars), non-oil foreign trade grew by 19 percent, quarter to quarter, reaching $25.5 billion. That figure consisted of $13 billion in exports and $12.5 billion in imports, generating a trade surplus of half a billion dollars. The good news from the first quarter follows the export of $48 billion of non-oil goods last year, the highest amount in the country’s history.
The country’s export of oil has also increased. An informed source at the oil ministry told pro-regime media that Tehran exported more than one million barrels of oil per day in the spring of 2022, bringing in 60 percent more revenue than in the spring of 2021.
Despite these trends, Iranians remain angry. Retirees marched across the country last month. In Isfahan they chanted, “Sedition of ‘57’ is the cause of nation’s poverty”, ‘57 referring to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, or 1357 on the Persian calendar. The media also reported several labor strikes and teachers protests across the country, while the regime arrested tens of teachers.
Regime officials accuse “foreign hands” of being behind the strikes and protests and warn of conspiracies to create a gap between the “system” and the people. A recent poll shows only 28 percent of Iranians are satisfied with the performance of President Ebrahim Raisi. His administration brags about growth, but the only growth Iranians see is growing prices.
The country’s twelve-month point-to-point inflation in June 2022 jumped to 52.5 percent, 13.2 percentage points higher than the previous month. Prices rose 12.2 percent in June alone, 8.7 points more than in May. Making matters worse, Raisi’s subsidies reform increased the inflationary pressure on essential goods such as bread, which comprises a large share of the basket of goods used by low-income Iranians.
Official and unofficial reports show that 30 percent of the Iranian population is living below the absolute poverty line. Experts and regime insiders estimate that the share of the population below the relative poverty line is 60 to 70 percent.
Why is Iran’s economic growth not translating into a better quality of life for Iranians? Inflation is part of the answer, but the problem runs much deeper. First, the regime is corrupt, even by its own admission, and the fruit of any growth goes first into the pockets of officials and their families. Second, while a minority of Iranians support the regime, that minority is concentrated in the massive machinery of oppression that includes the Basij paramilitary, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Law Enforcement Force, and the clergy. All of these groups receive preferential treatment in the distribution of financial resources and economic benefits. Third, the regime prioritizes foreign adventures over domestic prosperity, spending heavily on proxies like Lebanese Hezbollah and clients like Bashar al-Assad.
Despite the growth of the past two years, Iran’s real GDP is still smaller than what it was in March 2018, just before the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal and began re-imposing sanctions. Thus, what is left after regime insiders, supporters, and foreign proxies take their share is very limited and is further depreciated by the inflation that the Raisi administration’s subsidies reform is making so much worse.
Hence, protests and strikes are likely to continue and intensify over the next few months. The regime’s response is likely to be greater repression.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor on Iran and financial economics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Iran Program and Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). Follow Saeed on Twitter @SGhasseminejad. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
Image: Reuters.
11. U.S. Marines: Manage Your Message to Win in Strategic Competition
Excerpts:
Bottom line, managing the information environment is a 24/7/365 job. Drift off while a singleminded competitor like China wages “three warfares” to mold opinion all day, every day, and you’re apt to find yourself at a disadvantage in the war for perceptions.
MDCP-8 is not a perfect document. What document is? (Apart from this one.) For example, the coauthors try to distinguish between a narrative—a good thing, apparently because it’s what we do—and propaganda—a bad thing because that’s what our opponents do. But why not try to rescue the term propaganda from the stigma it has taken on over the decades? Both narratives and propaganda are ventures in storytelling for advantage. Both appeal to the intellect and emotions of target audiences if well crafted. And both can be true or false in whole or in part. American narratives should tell the truth well. And if we tell the truth well, there’s little need to shy away from the word propaganda.
But I quibble. Read the whole thing.
U.S. Marines: Manage Your Message to Win in Strategic Competition
Late last month U.S. Marine Corps headquarters issued MCDP-8, a doctrinal publication titled Information. Sounds like a snoozer, right? And indeed, tracts belaboring military doctrine can be deadly dull. But this one is well-written and interesting on the whole. More importantly, it plumbs the substance of “information operations” in more depth than documents found elsewhere in the joint community.
For comparison’s sake take a gander at the official Pentagon definition of the phrase, from the most recent update to the DOD Dictionary of Military Terms. Information operations, says the dictionary, refers to “the integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.” Closely related concepts listed include electromagnetic warfare, military deception, military information support operations, and operations security.
The Pentagon’s definition is fine so far as it goes, but it sounds overly mechanical, bureaucratic, and abstract, as though decision-making flow charts are marching off to war. It slights the all-important human factor. By contrast, MCDP-8 dwells on the human dimension of international competition and conflict. The treatise shows how marines should ply their trade amid a befogged “information environment” replete with uncertainty, chaos, dark passions, and of course opponents, allies and friends, and bystanders determined to get their way.
That’s a tough setting. But if successful, say the document’s framers, managing the information environment confers three benefits. One, it boosts marines’ combat power, helping them attain “systems overmatch” relative to rival forces. This is the technical and tactical dimension of information operations, bolstering U.S. and allied forces’ ability to scout out, track, and target foes while foiling hostile efforts to detect, track, and target friendly forces. Two, effective information operations propagate a beneficial “narrative,” shaping how parties to the competition interpret marine units’ words and actions. As an example of a simple, straightforward narrative about marine prowess, MCDP-8 approvingly cites retired marine general and secretary of defense James Mattis’s one-liner maintaining that there is no better friend, no worse enemy than a U.S. Marine. Such a narrative is likely to lodge in people’s craniums—provided marines back it up with real-world deeds. And three, adroit information operations engrave “resilience” on the maritime force, helping it resist opponents’ efforts to mold the information environment in their own favor and to the detriment of American purposes.
And this is all fitting. While military implements are important without a doubt, strategic competition and warfare are ultimately decided in the realm of human consciousness. This is doubly true in strategic competition short of war, in the murky realm often termed the “gray zone.” Martial sage Carl von Clausewitz defines war as “a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter,” adding that “moral strength must not be excluded, for psychological forces exert a decisive influence on the elements involved in war.” In other words, combatants take up the sword—Clausewitz’s “physical forces”—when unable to get their way through peaceful means. But at the same time an irresolute combatant—a combatant deficient in “moral forces,” or morale—stands to falter in a contest of physical forces. Weapons do not wield themselves; they must be wielded with vigor and resolve.
In the gray zone, though, no actual contest of physical forces takes place. That’s the point of gray-zone aggression—to make geopolitical gains by increments without open resort to arms. In so doing the aggressor withholds a casus belli that might see its aims thwarted in battle. That being the case, we might reframe the Clausewitzian definition of war, portraying gray-zone competition as a trial of moral and physical forces carried on chiefly through the medium of moral forces. Strategist Edward Luttwak labels efforts to deter, coerce, or hearten various parties short of war “naval suasion” or “armed suasion.” The contender that flourishes military implements to more awe-inspiring effect in peacetime operations casts itself as the likely winner should competition flare into open combat.
It persuades—or dissuades—depending on the audience.
After all, it’s human nature to side with a likely winner, or refrain from tangling with it, while shunning a likely loser. Few willingly pool their fortunes with a loser for fear of sharing the bitter wages of defeat. If the combined U.S. Navy-Marine Corps fleet and affiliated joint forces position themselves in the minds of observers as the probable victor in any armed showdown, they will deter rivals while giving heart to allies and friends. They will cast what Luttwak likens to a “shadow” across councils in hostile capitals, giving potential aggressors pause while emboldening friends to stand up for their own rights. They will prevail in the arena of moral forces, winning the war of perceptions.
There’s another intriguing facet to MCDP-8 that sounds as though the document’s coauthors modeled it on Clausewitz. The coauthors espy a sort of “compression” of the levels of war owing to the speed of modern communications and the fact that everyone is toting around a smartphone or is otherwise plugged into the information environment most of the time. That means information—whether wholly or partly true or wholly false—can spread with lighting quickness to masses of people. In other words, the effects of tactical-level actions can reverberate almost instantly up to the strategic and political levels, for good or ill.
This evokes Clausewitz’s claim that strategy “draws near to tactics” in the aftermath of a major battlefield triumph. By this he means a signature victory tends to impart momentum to the victor’s cause while deflating the vanquished. The psychological impact of a contest of physical forces lets the winner extract strategic and even political value from the tactical verdict of arms. In the optimal case a decisive battlefield victory might even lead directly to peace, putting an end to the fighting in an afternoon. It’s doubtful there is any such thing as a decisive victory in gray-zone competition. Still, a Clausewitzian outlook on strategic competition alerts marines and their joint-service comrades to remain mindful of the positive, negative, or indifferent impact their actions on the tactical level could have on the course of the strategic competition. Even daily routine could influence the competition one way or the other.
Bottom line, managing the information environment is a 24/7/365 job. Drift off while a singleminded competitor like China wages “three warfares” to mold opinion all day, every day, and you’re apt to find yourself at a disadvantage in the war for perceptions.
MDCP-8 is not a perfect document. What document is? (Apart from this one.) For example, the coauthors try to distinguish between a narrative—a good thing, apparently because it’s what we do—and propaganda—a bad thing because that’s what our opponents do. But why not try to rescue the term propaganda from the stigma it has taken on over the decades? Both narratives and propaganda are ventures in storytelling for advantage. Both appeal to the intellect and emotions of target audiences if well crafted. And both can be true or false in whole or in part. American narratives should tell the truth well. And if we tell the truth well, there’s little need to shy away from the word propaganda.
But I quibble. Read the whole thing.
A 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.” The views voiced here are his alone. Holmes also blogs at the Naval Diplomat.
12. The Legacy of Shinzo Abe
The Legacy of Shinzo Abe
Friday brought news of the shocking assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. A remarkable stream of tributes followed on all forms of media. I wish to add my own tribute, not as a unique contribution to scholarship, but as a tribute to a remarkable man I was honored to meet on occasion before and during his most recent term as Prime Minister of Japan.
Reflecting on a Legacy
When he passed, he left a legacy of major contributions to Japan’s defense, U.S. policy in Asia, our military alliance, Japanese and U.S. support for Taiwan, and even our trade policies. And he did it with skill and grace, and a touch of humor.
PM Abe recognized the threat from China while the U.S. was still concentrating on engagement and building relationships. He knew that a U.S. presence and defense contribution was essential and made that well known and accepted.
On a 2015 visit to the United States, the first official visit by a Japanese PM in nine years, he previewed substantive defense changes. In remarks to Congress and to other audiences, he “told a story” to preview the need to change Japan’s policy on collective self-defense. This right of all nations, long sanctioned by the United Nations, was considered proscribed by Japan’s constitution. Bi-lateral military contingency planning was therefore proscribed.
Abe’s illustrative story asked his audience to imagine an American Aegis ship engaged in missile defense of Japan coming under attack by some other means. Abe asked why Japan should not be able to aid the defense of that ship. Rolling this story out publicly in a supportive America had a bracing effect on Japanese lawmakers and the public, and soon led to a new interpretation of Japan’s constitution. Collective Self-Defense is now accepted.
Abe conducted many public events to signal that U.S.’s contributions to the common defense were a good thing. In 2015 he paid an extended call on the USS Ronald Reagan, our nuclear-powered aircraft carrier based in Japan. He even wore a Naval Aviator flight jacket. In 2016 he was the first Japanese PM to visit Pearl Harbor. He later hosted President Obama on a visit to Hiroshima.
Domestic and Strategic Policy
Abe paid attention to policy too. The “Quad”, a group of democracies including Japan, Australia, India, and the United States, was initiated with his “security diamond.” Japan was also the first to call for a Free and Open Indo Pacific, or FOIP for short, in 2016. Both initiatives endure.
After the leading presidential candidate of each U.S. political party disavowed our own Transpacific Partnership (TPP) ahead of our 2016 presidential election, Japan and PM Abe assumed leadership. They renamed it the Comprehensive and Progressive Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP). This helped salvage the system of international trade and commerce favored by democratic nations. Japan kindly left the door open for the U.S. to rejoin when the country rediscovers the group’s historic, and profitable, support for international trade.
He reorganized Japan’s national security sector, with the creation of a National Security Council to enforce coordination across the government and Self-Defense forces, and to ensure effective emergency responses. Never again would the PM and his office be out of the loop in a disaster like the 3-11 Triple Disaster in 2011.
Japan’s Defense Policy Adopted Under Abe
Defense industrial policy changed. Since 1945, Japan prohibited military equipment export. PM Abe turned that around, lashing the industry to compete internationally. Very shortly after that, Australia made known its interest in new conventional submarines. As a result, Japanese industry became aware of the sharp elbows and sharper politics and economics in international arms sales competition by entering perhaps the toughest challenge possible. The submarine venture failed, but other arms transfers did succeed and more will continue, to the benefit of other countries and regional deterrence.
After departing the PM’s office, Abe exploited his position in the Liberal Democratic Party to continue his leadership. He raised issues that were awkward, to say the least, for those in office.
As North Korea and others rattled their nuclear sabers, Abe said it was time for the U.S. and Japan to talk about “nuclear sharing.” Another notable contribution was the observation that Taiwan’s security is Japan’s security. He also helpfully called for the United States to move away from “strategic ambiguity” toward a declarative policy on the defense of Taiwan.
Most noticeable was Abe’s interpersonal skill and his use of the power of image. He understood persuasion and leadership. As the result of the 2016 U.S. presidential election became known, Abe was a “first mover.” With the aid of Japan’s embassy in the U.S., Shinzo Abe became the first foreign leader to visit President-Elect Trump while other leaders kept their distance. Even better, Abe brought a gift, a gold-plated driver, specifically a Honma Berras S-05 with a 9.5-degree loft. It is said to be particularly helpful to correct a slice. It was worth about $3,500 then. Abe clearly knew his new friend. He was also the first foreign leader to visit Mar-a-Lago. This bonding over golf created a relationship that was not equaled with any other leader. The relationship thus created benefited both nations very well.
Today’s Japanese leadership comes from the same tree. Its solid leadership will be necessary, and likely soon challenged. So will we. We must maintain Abe’s legacy together.
Lieutenant General Wallace “Chip” Gregson joined The Roosevelt Group as a Senior Advisor after over 30 years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps. Prior to retirement, Chip served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. He also served as Commanding General of Marine Corps Forces Pacific and Marine Corps Forces Central Command, where he led and managed over 70,000 Marines and Sailors in the Middle East, Afghanistan, East Africa, Asia, and the United States.
13. President Xi’s Art of War in Sri Lanka
Excerpts:
With the removal of pro-Western Prime Minister Wickremasinghe and pro-Chinese President Rajapaksa by protesters, it is now possible that the proposed credit aid conference led by China, India, Japan, and most importantly, the United States, will guide Sri Lanka’s future. The immediate goal is to stabilize the collapsed economy and alleviate human suffering while helping the island recover from foreign debts. As China has remained relatively muted during the Aragalaya, US Ambassador Chung has seized the opportunity to encourage peaceful protest, restrain violent military response, and protect freedom of speech and Internet communications.
Indeed, it is morally imperative for all lenders—including the Asian Development Bank and the IMF—to jointly help the paradise-island nation. For China, as Sun Tzu counseled, President Xi would most likely build for his Indian and US opponents a “golden bridge” to retreat across; otherwise, the opponent “will engage in battle and fight like a caged and cornered tiger,” when economic incentives run out for India and the United States. Both democracies need to realize the importance of economic development within the island over their own military interests in a geopolitical endgame with China.
Thus, the tragic saga of the teardrop island might remain so, as China tries to use its economic power to advance Beijing’s ultimate goal: to be the comprehensive global power in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Given the latest events in Colombo, however, it appears that the paradise island may not be completely turned into a Chinese colony—as long as the Sri Lankan people continue to advocate for their own destiny as a free nation.
President Xi’s Art of War in Sri Lanka
Will China Subdue the United States without a Fight to Dominate the Indian Ocean?
Dr. Patrick Mendis, a former American diplomat and a military professor in the NATO and Indo-Pacific Commands of the US Department of Defense, is a distinguished visiting professor of transatlantic relations at the University of Warsaw in Poland as well as a distinguished visiting professor of global affairs at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. A non-resident senior fellow of the Synergia Foundation in Bangalore, India and the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei, Prof. Mendis served as a distinguished visiting professor of Sino-American relations at the Yenching Academy of Peking University in Beijing. He is a former commissioner to UNESCO and the secretariat director of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the US Department of State. The views expressed in this analysis do not represent the official positions of his current or past affiliations nor governments.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka officially declared on June 22, 2022 that the national economy had “completely collapsed.” A month earlier, the increasingly debt-laden island nation of 22 million people defaulted on its US$50 billion foreign debt to China and other international creditors, bringing the entire country to a grinding economic standstill. Massive protests in the capital city of Colombo erupted on July 9 with the ransacking of the presidential secretariat and the newly appointed Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe’s official residence, followed by his private home being set ablaze. President Rajapaksa fled the city and promised to resign as protesters have peacefully been demanding for months.
The so-called “perfect tropical paradise” that is shaped like a teardrop falling from the southern tip of India has indeed now become an island of tears. This reality is largely a result of the autocratic and corrupt Rajapaksa family who has ruled the strategically located island in the Indian Ocean—except for a brief period from January 2015 to November 2019—for almost two decades. For the past several months, however, shortages of fuel, gas, electricity, and food items and medicines, coupled with staggering double-digit inflation, has prompted the people to protest peacefully against the government. Despite the heavy police and military presence and imposed island-wide curfew, pro-Rajapaksa mobs still assaulted protesters “agitating peacefully” outside the president’s office and the prime minister’s residence. Without violence for months, the protesters continued to demand the resignation of Gotabaya, his eldest brother Prime Minister Mahinda, his youngest brother former Finance Minister Basil, and other ministers and family members in the parliament.
After winning the nearly 30-year “civil war” in May 2009, the triumphant Gotabaya—then secretary of the Ministry of Defense and Urban Development under his brother, President Mahinda—said, at the third Galle Dialogue on Maritime Security in December 2012, that Hambantota Port is not part of China’s “string of pearls” military strategy to encircle India or to keep the United States away from the Indian Ocean. It is an over US$1 billion investment for transshipment of Chinese goods and resources from the Middle East and Africa. Nonetheless, Gotabaya clarified that “the Chinese investment in Hambantota Port is a purely economic one.” Indeed, Sri Lanka is the “crown jewel” of China’s multibillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) across the Indo-Pacific region, which connects the Hambantota Port, the Colombo Port City (CPC), the Colombo Lotus Tower, and many other overwhelming infrastructure projects. These ports could easily be converted into dual-purpose military and civilian use compounds, making Sri Lanka a potential “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for China. During his historic visit to Sri Lanka with two Chinese submarines in September 2014, President Xi Jinping described the island as a “splendid pearl,” while the two countries signed over twenty bilateral agreements in Colombo.
With President Xi’s “New Era” of national rejuvenation, Sri Lanka has now discreetly become a strategic “colony” of battleships with massive projects to advance the Chinese interests against India and the United States in the Indian Ocean. In The Art of War, Chinese General Sun Tzu once advised that a leader must remember that “to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” Xi seems to believe he can strategically achieve his national goals by peacefully defeating his enemies—India and the United States—before war even breaks out. Now, a key opportunity has presented itself to Beijing, with the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy, to get the upper hand over the United States and India in the Indian Ocean and beyond.
China’s Eyes on the Crown Jewel
For the last phase of the civil war that ended in 2009, China provided the needed “economic support, military equipment, and political cover at the United Nations to block potential sanctions.” The war was mainly a clash between “the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgent group,” which “hoped to establish a separate state for the Tamil minority.” During these years of bloodshed and human rights violations on both the government and LTTE sides, the Rajapaksa government was afraid of the powerful lobbying efforts by the Tamil diaspora in the West, encouraging the Western governments to support UN sanctions against Sri Lanka. The Colombo administration had been equally distressed by another “direct Indian intervention”—with the mounting pressure coming from India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu—in neighboring Sri Lanka’s internal affairs.
Against this backdrop, paying tribute to Chinese patronage at the third Galle Dialogue, Defense Secretary Rajapaksa reaffirmed that “China was an obvious nation to approach” among other traditional donor nations such as Japan, India, South Korea, and the United States. Victorious as war heroes during the decade of 2005-2015, his elder brother Mahinda—then-president of Sri Lanka—and his three brothers controlled “many government ministries and around 80 percent of total government spending.” These strongmen also “negotiated directly” with China while considering the island nation as an extended family business enterprise.
12 years later, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa—until recently in office since November 2019 with family members still sitting in parliament—has brought the paradise island into an unprecedented socio-economic turmoil with mismanaged economic policies and systemic corruption by successive governments. Once the leading nation in the UN Human Development Index for life expectancy, literacy rate, and GNP per capita in South Asia, Sri Lanka is now entangled in enormous “debt trap” projects with China and loans from Japan and international financial institutions. Such ventures involve Chinese “white elephant” schemes, including the US$104 million Colombo Lotus Tower for Beijing’s “espionage” operation in South Asia and the US$209 million Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport in Hanbantota—the “emptiest” airport in the world. Moreover, the massive Sooriyawewa Cricket Stadium and the International Conference Hall in Hambantota as well as the nearly US$200 million unused roads and bridges made Rajapaksa’s ancestral home district with golden statues “a throne to the vanity of a political dynasty.” Like other nationalist and narcissistic dictators do, the Rajapaksa clan bloated the bureaucracy and enlarged the military with their associates and supporters while erecting tributes to themselves at the expense and suffering of ordinary citizens.
The Peaceful ‘Aragalaya’
Earlier this year, the autocratic Rajapaksa regime completely bankrupted Sri Lanka, and the country defaulted on “the entirety of its foreign debt amounting to about US$51 billion.” This led to crippling food shortages with no gas for cooking, long lines waiting for petrol for vehicles, no access to medicines, and diminished electricity supplies. This economic collapse has devolved into mass protest (“aragalaya”, or struggle) in Colombo and elsewhere in the country. Violence erupted when the Rajapaksa allies attacked the peaceful protesters who demanded the embattled President Gotabaya’s resignation, chanting “Gotta Go home” for several months. His elder brother Mahinda—the prime minister who had previously been president—was forced out from power in May and his other brother Basil—the finance minister—resigned from the cabinet in June 2022. Gotabaya himself has now surrendered to the power of people, leaving the island nation after relentless calls for him to do so.
The complete removal of the pro-Chinese Rajapaksa family presents an existential threat to China’s interests in Sri Lanka—especially when President Gotabaya appointed five-time Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe back to the post for just two months, replacing the president’s brother Mahinda. The unpopular but veteran prime minister and his United National Party has only one seat out of 225 in the parliament. At the same time, however, pro-American Wickremesinghe had been viewed by protesters as a strange bedfellow in the name of political expediency and a crisis manager for Gotabaya, who wanted to remain in the powerful presidency to protect his family’s financial interests and political ambitions.
The new prime minister promised the nation that he would resolve the current shortages of oil, gas, electricity, medicine, and other imports necessary for daily survival. Wickremesinghe also vowed to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and other lenders. It was a matter of concern for China because the transparency required by these institutions would expose the nature of Chinese loans and bribery schemes, its exorbitant interest rates and kickbacks, and the secret negotiations conducted by the members of the Rajapaksa family and their associates. After learning that the “20 percent” kickback “monies were paid as commissions” to the Rajapaksa family and associates, the Aragalaya protesters have been pushed to the brink, taking to the streets to demand change to improve their desperate national situation.
The Chinese Paradox and Autocratic Regimes
Prior to these most recent developments, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in Sri Lanka in January 2022 at the request of the Rajapaksa government to restructure debt payments and alleviate the financial troubles of the island that have exacerbated since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. During the visit, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that Western media was “unfairly hyping [the] debt issue,” adding that “calling the cooperation projects between China and Sri Lanka ‘white elephants’ is completely untrue” as “bilateral cooperation is welcomed by local people.”
It is true that debt owed to China now accounts for only 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s total US$35 billion of foreign debt, similar to Japan, making China only the fourth-largest lender, preceded by the international financial markets, the Asian Development Bank, and Japan. Unlike the other lenders, however, China’s motivations are driven by its communist statecraft and geopolitical calculus in the Indian Ocean region. When Sri Lanka failed to repay Chinese debt stemming from the Hambantota Port, for example, the Colombo government agreed to a debt-for-equity swap and gave Beijing a 99-year lease of the port with the 15,000 acres neighboring the wildlife sanctuary.
Moreover, the nearby Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport was built with the possible intention of a dual civil-and-military installation for future use. With China’s first military base at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and the latest Ream naval base in Cambodia, Beijing may aim to use the world’s emptiest international airport in Sri Lanka to develop its emerging Indian Ocean military theater against the United States, its allies, and India. All these projects were initially promoted within the BRI as development assistance. In fact, the BRI has been the ambitious foreign policy strategy of China to bring developing countries under its realm of influence as shown in the “cautionary tale” of Sri Lanka.
American Interests in the Paradise Island
When China refused to extend additional credits for oil import to the failed state, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa called on President Vladimir Putin of Russia for assistance for oil shipments in July. Understanding the desperate measures taken by Gotabaya, US Ambassador to Sri Lanka Julie Chung reminded that Sri Lanka must consider “our sanctions globally on Russian banks, logistics, transportation, and financing;” however, she assured that “the US does not have sanctions against third world countries on import of oil.”
To remove misinformation that the United States and the international community are holding back support during a time of need, Ambassador Chung announced that President Biden has granted US$20 million in “humanitarian assistance including for the most vulnerable segments of society,” the poorest of the poor. In addition, the US Development Finance Corporation (DFC) committed US$150 million for private sector-led initiatives and US$80 million for renewable energy as well as recent commitments to technical support for the Sri Lankan Treasury.
Misinformation on US involvement in Sri Lanka was widespread during the brief but tumultuous administration of President Maithripala Sirisena (2015-2019); since then, anti-American sentiments have prevailed. When visiting US Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia Alice Wells, for example, referred to Sri Lanka as an important piece of “real estate” for its strategic location in major maritime shipping routes, it was perceived as real estate owner-turned President Donald Trump’s vision of transactional, American-centric diplomacy. The pro-western Sirisena administration, however, favored striking deals with the Trump administration, especially when Sri Lanka renewed its Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) with the United States for another ten years. The ACSA allowed the transfer and exchange of logistical supplies and refueling services for US military operations in the Indian Ocean rim region.
The pro-China Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration had refused to cooperate with American initiatives, demonstrating that Sri Lanka had chosen to partner with Beijing instead of Washington. In fact, the United States failed to renew its Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Sri Lanka, even after pledging $480 million in development aid via the Millennium Challenge Compact (MCC). Both countries spent months debating the MCC compact that promised infrastructure development projects, similar to China’s BRI projects in Sri Lanka. At the end, Gotabaya declined to sign the MCC offer and refused to renew the SOFA, speculating that the United States intended to establish a military base to counter Chinese influence in South Asia and the Indian Ocean rim countries.
The Sino-American Endgame for Sri Lanka
With the removal of pro-Western Prime Minister Wickremasinghe and pro-Chinese President Rajapaksa by protesters, it is now possible that the proposed credit aid conference led by China, India, Japan, and most importantly, the United States, will guide Sri Lanka’s future. The immediate goal is to stabilize the collapsed economy and alleviate human suffering while helping the island recover from foreign debts. As China has remained relatively muted during the Aragalaya, US Ambassador Chung has seized the opportunity to encourage peaceful protest, restrain violent military response, and protect freedom of speech and Internet communications.
Indeed, it is morally imperative for all lenders—including the Asian Development Bank and the IMF—to jointly help the paradise-island nation. For China, as Sun Tzu counseled, President Xi would most likely build for his Indian and US opponents a “golden bridge” to retreat across; otherwise, the opponent “will engage in battle and fight like a caged and cornered tiger,” when economic incentives run out for India and the United States. Both democracies need to realize the importance of economic development within the island over their own military interests in a geopolitical endgame with China.
Thus, the tragic saga of the teardrop island might remain so, as China tries to use its economic power to advance Beijing’s ultimate goal: to be the comprehensive global power in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Given the latest events in Colombo, however, it appears that the paradise island may not be completely turned into a Chinese colony—as long as the Sri Lankan people continue to advocate for their own destiny as a free nation.
14. How Interactions with Antifa Can Fuel White Supremacist Groups
Excerpt:
It is clear from our research that violence by counter-protesters and those identifying as Antifa fuels the fire of radicalization and extremism, convincing the violent extremists that their cause is just and noble and that they are indeed under attack. At best, threats by Antifa might raise the cost of overt participation in white supremacist activities to the point that an individual disengages from their group, but there is no evidence that this would lead to deradicalization, wherein the individual experiences an attitudinal change and denounces the white supremacist ideology. Alas, disengagement without deradicalization can leave the individual vulnerable to re-engagement, especially if they feel that they have lost and not replaced the sense of belonging, acceptance, and purpose that their violent extremist group provided to them. Therefore, we encourage those working to curb the spread of far-right violent extremism in the United States and elsewhere to focus on deradicalization through psychosocial interventions that challenge the individual’s beliefs while simultaneously addressing their grievances, real and perceived, which initially motivated them to join their groups, and providing them with a new network of social support to replace that previously provided by their violent extremist group.
How Interactions with Antifa Can Fuel White Supremacist Groups - HS Today
If Antifa’s goal is indeed to raise the cost of participating in far-right violent extremism, study results suggest that their tactics are generally ineffective.
By
July 11, 2022
In the midst of the growing Black Lives Matter protests since 2020, the word “Antifa” has increasingly appeared online and in the mainstream media. Antifa can refer to different things in different places, but is generally considered a movement or idea, rather than an organized group, which brings together individuals who want to take a stand against fascism, often using violence to do so. Antifa activists feel strongly that peaceful and law-abiding resistance is not enough to stop fascist movements from mainstreaming; hence the Antifa slogan of “Punch a Nazi in the face,” which later became “Punch a MAGA in the face.” It should be noted that the working definition of fascism, according to the Antifa activists interviewed by the first author, includes “extreme nationalism, xenophobia, scapegoating, closing borders and usually oppression of women or class of people.” The interviewees also maintain that their conception of violence excludes property damage including breaking windows, destroying property, setting fires, and spray-painting cars and buildings.
Presently, we provide the first sample (n = 51) of qualitative examinations of the effects of interactions and encounters with Antifa on current and former members of far-right, white supremacist, and hate groups. We argue that, if Antifa’s goal is indeed to raise the cost of participating in far-right violent extremism, and not simply to wreak havoc and incite violence at otherwise peaceful protests, the results of the present study suggest that their tactics are generally ineffective. Rather, interactions with Antifa, according to current and former members of white supremacist groups, provide fuel for the proverbial fire in a few different ways.
1. Members of white supremacist groups tend to look for fights but may be instructed by their leadership not to act violently except in self-defense in order to portray themselves as a legitimate political movement. Thus, encounters with Antifa give members with pent-up aggression exactly what they need – an opportunity to fight and to frame such violence as self-defense.
For example, Fred describes Antifa as “a decentralized body like Anonymous, but when it comes to White Power national socialist[s], that’s when they gather and extend. Tires slashed, windows broken, they’d find out where our cars were parked. They’d start [by throwing] bottles of urine at us, [trying] to attack us.” He explains, “There are two sides of the extreme who hate each other. They are both sides. Antifa and NSM [National Socialist Movement] clash only becomes stronger. Bonds inside the groups strengthen on both sides. [We had] stun guns, flashlights, and batons to defend [ourselves]. Worrying about Antifa always brought us closer. Two extreme groups pushing against each other’s opposite force.”
2. Attacks by Antifa serve as post hoc justifications for violence, as they can be used by white supremacist leaders and recruiters as evidence that “the left” is indeed trying to violently silence “conservative” viewpoints. Specifically, wearing neo-Nazi attire or carrying hateful symbols on flags allows these groups to knowingly provoke attacks from Antifa but remain physically nonviolent in order to maintain their stance that they are being targeted for peacefully expressing their political views.
TM, who led the KKK’s branch in Germany, said that his group would take similar actions with Turkish gangs as the NSM took with Antifa: “We got in violent clashes, street fights with Turkish gangs. We would go into a part of town more populated by immigrants to get attacked, but we wanted to blame them for attacking us [and say that] they are the bad guys. One time a girl got hit over the head with a beer mug. One got stabbed one time, and I got shot. [We’d say], ‘Look how uncivilized, savage, they are.’ It justified what we believe in.”
3. Violent brawls with Antifa or being subjected to projectiles or doxxing solidifies in-group bonding and bolsters bravado and reputations of white supremacists within their groups.
Russell describes a fight with Antifa in which he claims he was protecting protesters outside of a Planned Parenthood: “I told our group, if they get violent this week, we need to respond. [It’s] okay to use self-defense. They lit a flag on fire; I saved the flag. [The] Antifa leader kicked me on the hand. We went after them […] We whipped the crap out of them. They way outnumbered us [but] they ran away crying. They never showed up again.”
4. Being doxxed and fearing attacks by Antifa as one tries to exit such groups can raise barriers to disengaging and deradicalization and make it seem impossible to do so.
Greg argues that many fear that others knowing about their previous hateful affiliations will prevent them from living improved lives. After leaving his skinhead group, Greg started removing others’ racist tattoos for free: “I’ve had people say let them live with [the tattoos], let them pay for it, [but] we are people, we make mistakes, we are human beings. It’s easy to hate a Nazi, but having compassion for a person that made a mistake, that’s hard.” He describes the difficulty that many formers have in reintegrating into mainstream society: “I had a client three months ago, huge swastika on his stomach. [He had] mixed race grandchildren and a Hispanic son-in-law. He was invited to go to the pool. He has a swastika on his belly from 20 years ago. They have no idea. He can now enjoy life with his family. [He] doesn’t have to worry about his grandchildren wondering why he has a Nazi symbol on his stomach. [He gets to] get rid of causing fear and hatred.”
5. Unruly action by Antifa at otherwise peaceful protests allows white supremacists to conflate all of the protesters (particularly Black Lives Matter) as being violent and extreme and also allows white supremacists to position themselves as being aligned with law enforcement, which helps them to recruit current and former members of the military and law enforcement.
Josh P. says that he was initially driven to join the Proud Boys because of his encounters with Antifa. He says that on the day of the “Million MAGA March” in November of 2020, members of Antifa followed him to a bar and tried to jump him, but they were prevented from doing so by a group of Proud Boys. As he explains, “I hung out with them that day. There were some scuffles with Antifa, three fights. They all swung at me first. I am a trained fighter. One swung a knife at me. Another one stabbed right in front of me. None of us [Proud Boys] to my knowledge had weapons. No one was able to hit me. I had a knife swung at me. I moved his arm and knocked him out after.” Other times, he claimed, he wanted to fight Antifa in defense of the police. He says that he heard that Antifa was using “spray bottles of piss at the cops. I was infuriated.” He continues, “I wanted to protect the cops,” and told his police officer friends, “I can do what you are not allowed to do.” After January 6th, however, Josh was arrested in part because of his violent actions toward the Capitol Police and for rioting in the Capitol.
It is clear from our research that violence by counter-protesters and those identifying as Antifa fuels the fire of radicalization and extremism, convincing the violent extremists that their cause is just and noble and that they are indeed under attack. At best, threats by Antifa might raise the cost of overt participation in white supremacist activities to the point that an individual disengages from their group, but there is no evidence that this would lead to deradicalization, wherein the individual experiences an attitudinal change and denounces the white supremacist ideology. Alas, disengagement without deradicalization can leave the individual vulnerable to re-engagement, especially if they feel that they have lost and not replaced the sense of belonging, acceptance, and purpose that their violent extremist group provided to them. Therefore, we encourage those working to curb the spread of far-right violent extremism in the United States and elsewhere to focus on deradicalization through psychosocial interventions that challenge the individual’s beliefs while simultaneously addressing their grievances, real and perceived, which initially motivated them to join their groups, and providing them with a new network of social support to replace that previously provided by their violent extremist group.
15. Giant Explosions Rock More Russian Ammunition Depots In Ukraine
As they should (execute a campaign targeting Russian logistics).
Excerpts:
The attacks, which included some over the weekend, are part of a concerted Ukrainian effort to use the HIMARS and other systems to go after Russian ammunition depots, according to The Telegraph.
Clearly, a campaign is underway to undercut Russia's ability to massively bombard target areas by going after the very munitions needed to do so. How effective this will be at blunting the Russian Army's artillery juggernaut is still too early to be seen, but it certainly won't help them, that's for sure.
Giant Explosions Rock More Russian Ammunition Depots In Ukraine
It’s clear that Ukraine is executing a major campaign targeting Russian ammo depots in order to blunt their terrifying artillery assaults.
BY
JUL 11, 2022 9:10 PM
More dramatic video is emerging of what is said to be a Ukrainian campaign against Russian ammunition depots using U.S.-supplied M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, and other artillery systems.
The latest videos show explosions and fires at what is claimed to be Russian ammunition storage facilities in Nova Kakhovka, a city in the Kherson Oblast.
The Russians lost a “warehouse with ammunition,” Serhiy Khlan, an advisor to the head of the Kherson regional military administration said on his Facebook page early Tuesday morning Ukraine time. “People are flying out their windows, but they are still happy... because that means the Armed Forces of Ukraine is close.”
The shock waves were felt nearly 2,000 feet from the blast site, witnesses said.
The Russians, however, claim Ukraine hit a “warehouse with humanitarian aid" and that there were civilian casualties.
“As a result of the UAF's strike on Novaya Kakhovka, warehouses with mineral fertilizers and saltpeter exploded, explosions continue," the Russian news agency TASS quoted Vladimir Leontiev - the head of the military-civilian administration of the Kakhovka district of the Kherson region - as saying. “There are victims, a hospital, a market, and residential buildings were damaged, windows flew out within a radius of two kilometers.”
There is one thing both sides appear to agree on.
“According to preliminary information of the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the time of the strike, there was a large fleet of vehicles at the base of the invaders in Nova Kakhovka, including at least 50 fuel trucks, as well as about 200 missiles for the Smerch MLRS and many personnel,” the pro-Ukrainian News From Kherson Telegram channel reported. “Well, is there anything else for HIMARS?”
Russian Telegram sites agreed that HIMARS was involved.
“2 Russian accounts confirm what I presumed that Ukraine launches Uragan or Grad MLRS and then launches HIMARS or Tochka-U to make it more difficult for Russian air defenses to counter them. It is no coincidence that Tochka-U have been more effective since Ukraine received HIMARS,” Rob Lee said in a Tweet.
Russian bloggers and commentators seem despondent and outraged over the attacks using HIMARS.
When asked for comment by The War Zone about what was targetted and whether HIMARS were used, the Pentagon deferred questions to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The attacks, which included some over the weekend, are part of a concerted Ukrainian effort to use the HIMARS and other systems to go after Russian ammunition depots, according to The Telegraph.
Clearly, a campaign is underway to undercut Russia's ability to massively bombard target areas by going after the very munitions needed to do so. How effective this will be at blunting the Russian Army's artillery juggernaut is still too early to be seen, but it certainly won't help them, that's for sure.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
16. On-the-Ground Truth and Force Design 2030 Reconciliation: A Way Forward
Excerpts:
I grew up around cars, in a Ford family. My grandfather raced at Le Mans and elsewhere, often driving Ford GT40s. So it was with great interest that I clicked on an article by a fellow marine, Owen West, drawing lessons from the auto industry — the failure of the Edsel — for the commandant’s reforms of the Marine Corps. I came away dissatisfied with the analogy and the article’s representation of Force Design 2030.
...
It’s time to end the internecine war over Force Design 2030. The commandant has the Marine Corps on the right trajectory. This trajectory is fully supported by civilian leadership in the Department of Defense, Congress, and the White House. Similarly, the trajectory is fully supported by senior U.S. Navy leadership and the combatant commanders. Additionally, the trajectory is directly in line with the most recent 2022 National Defense Strategy, which doubles down on identifying China as the pacing threat and the Indo-Pacific as the priority theater. And fortunately, because this trajectory paces against the most challenging threat, the Marine Corps is now even better postured to respond to crises throughout the world, as Task Force 61/2 has recently demonstrated.
Now, let’s do everything possible to move out — together — to further accelerate transforming the Marine Corps to achieve the Force Design 2030 vision.
On-the-Ground Truth and Force Design 2030 Reconciliation: A Way Forward - War on the Rocks
I grew up around cars, in a Ford family. My grandfather raced at Le Mans and elsewhere, often driving Ford GT40s. So it was with great interest that I clicked on an article by a fellow marine, Owen West, drawing lessons from the auto industry — the failure of the Edsel — for the commandant’s reforms of the Marine Corps. I came away dissatisfied with the analogy and the article’s representation of Force Design 2030.
Around the same time as the Edsel and Mustang decisions, Ford embarked on a highly secretive and ultimately highly successful effort to build the GT40 to beat Ferrari at Le Mans. The effort succeeded specifically because Ford’s chief executive officer, Henry Ford II, ultimately chose not to follow the recommended organizational change principles that West lays out in his article.
This is not to say that the Marine Corps should be taking its cues from the auto industry. War-making and car-making are, after all, different activities. But this was one of many examples of selection bias in West’s article that left me convinced that Gen. David Berger’s detractors are missing the bigger picture and getting some of the facts and context of Force Design 2030 wrong.
I hope to provide some much-needed clarity to the ongoing force-design discussion by focusing on three matters. First, I explain the reforms’ logical, political, and strategic foundation that began with then-Defense Secretary James Mattis’ January 2018 speech at Johns Hopkins University, where he described the Department of Defense’s priorities changing from counterterrorism in the Middle East to great-power competition with China and Russia. Next, I describe Force Design 2030’s primary objective based on this foundation while also addressing concerns raised by a group of senior retired marines, many of whom I have looked up to for decades, just as I have long admired Owen and his father, Bing West.
Finally, I offer recommendations that I hope can help in bringing an end to the current internecine war over force design that is raking the Marine Corps. These observations and recommendations are based in part on my experience participating as a planner in the 36th and 37th commandants’ transformation efforts. They are also based on recent experiences implementing the 38th commandant’s vision while serving as a battalion and naval task unit commander for Task Force 61/2, a Marine-led organization within 6th Fleet dedicated to employing amphibious forces, including experimental reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance elements, in support of the fleet commander’s priorities in Europe and Africa.
The Foundation
Mattis’ visit to the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University focused on the release of the National Defense Strategy. In his remarks, he emphasized that the strategy provided a “clear-eyed appraisal” of America emerging from 20 years of “strategic atrophy” in which the Department of Defense’s “competitive military advantage has been eroding.” China topped the list of countries rapidly closing the gap on the U.S. military, and was therefore identified as the “pacing threat.” This assessment was directly in line with the new White House National Security Strategy. This strategy explicitly stated: “China seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.” Russia was also a priority in both strategic guiding documents, although a distant second. As a result of these growing threats, Mattis declared that “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”
Soon after the strategy’s release, Mattis published more detailed guidance for each of the services. The guidance built on the strategy’s four-layered (“contact,” “blunt,” “surge,” and “homeland”) global operating model. The Marine Corps was tasked to prioritize operating in the maritime littoral contact and blunt layers or zones, while pacing combat development against China as the service’s top priority. Marines operating in the contact layer were charged with competing “more effectively below the level of armed conflict,” while those in the blunt layer were to “delay, degrade, or deny adversary aggression.” For a service that had spent 11 out of the previous 15 years with more than 20,000 marines fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan’s deserts and river valleys under combined/joint force land component commander constructs, the new defense strategy was a shock to the system.
New guidance from the Pentagon’s senior civilian leaders wasn’t the only thing shocking the Marine Corps. America’s most influential national-security-focused legislators, including the late Sen. John McCain as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also demanded immediate change, emphasizing that America “has entered a renewed era of great power competition with its military advantage eroding — and eroding fast.” And it was growing increasingly clear that the Marine Corps, of all the services, had a bullseye on its forehead. Six months after the National Defense Strategy’s publication, McCain’s committee drafted language for inclusion in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that led one correspondent to write an article titled, “SASC Seeks Sweeping ‘Roles & Missions’ Report: Wither [sic] the Marines?” The committee challenged decades-old Marine Corps beliefs on why the service exists, including questioning “whether amphibious forced entry operations against peer competitors should remain an enduring mission for the joint force considering the stressing operational nature and significant resource requirements of such missions.” If all of this was not enough, the language also suggested that the Marine Corps of the future might only be focused on low-intensity operations. Further, the language identified growing congressional skepticism on the future of “large-deck amphibious ships.” This was fueled by an increasing number of think–tank reports questioning the Marine Corps’ future value. One of these reports went so far as to state, “The Marines need to find a new role for themselves, separate and distinct from joint forcible entry/amphibious operations or once again risk extinction.”
How did the Marine Corps respond? The strategic guidance documents released in late 2017 and early 2018 arrived at an awkward time for the service. Gen. Robert Neller had been the Marine Corps’ 37th commandant for just over two years at this point, and the service was already “advancing to contact” on his planning guidance, issued in January 2016. Of note, neither China nor the Pacific were mentioned a single time in the guidance’s 13 pages, yet anyone in Headquarters Marine Corps in those days knows that he was not a passionate advocate for the status quo, even if the things that he identified as driving change were not specifically focused on China. His oft-forgotten force development effort, Future Force 2025, represented his view of the increasing importance of naval integration in the littorals, operations in the information environment, and long-range precision fires as displayed in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. In addition, Gen. Neller was prepared to resource these efforts by cutting infantry, specifically by shrinking the size of the squad or even dropping a rifle company per battalion, and replacing them with ones mobilized in times of war from the reserve component. While these specific proposals were not ultimately adopted, the service was tacitly acknowledging that the status quo was no longer suitable. Regardless, the omission of any references to China in Gen. Neller’s planning and force-development guidance was in accordance with the White House guidance to the Department of Defense of 2016, which was nearly 180 degrees different than the 2017 and 2018 documents issued by the Trump administration. In 2015 and 2016, under the Obama administration, Department of Defense leaders were directed to use less inflammatory diction when talking about China and to avoid the use of “great-power competition.” Further, President Barack Obama precluded U.S. naval forces from “operating within a 12 nautical mile zone of China’s reclaimed islands” in the South China Sea, which McCain described as a “dangerous mistake” granting “de facto recognition of China’s manmade sovereignty claims.” Yet, Mattis’ 2018 guidance now required the Marine Corps to develop and implement new tactics, techniques, and procedures for operating “below the level of armed conflict,” while prepared to “delay, degrade, or deny adversary aggression” in this specific region, among other contested littoral areas in an era of “great-power competition.”
Over the next few years, a passionate, professional, and civil debate amongst marines ensued about what the Marine Corps should do next. Perhaps the most notable article was entitled, “Sir, Who Am I? An Open Letter to the Incoming Commandant of the Marines.” It created a stir and was cited by Gen. Neller at the final Ground Awards Dinner of his tenure. Marines of many ranks and occupational specialties participated in this debate. Unlike the service’s maneuver warfare debates mentioned in West’s article, which occurred primarily in monthly, paper copies of the Marine Corps Gazette, the multiyear debate about the Marine Corps’ future occurred mostly online in War on the Rocks, with frequent back-and-forth exchanges that — based on recent comments — appear to have been missed by those most strongly opposed to Force Design 2030. Extensive dialogue also took place across a diverse array of outlets, venues, and modern forms of communication that are far different from the maneuver warfare debates, which predated the iPhone by a quarter-century.
By any measure of word count, podcast minutes, or tweets, it is difficult to imagine a Marine Corps topic being discussed more than force design. It was the most robust debate that the Marine Corps had witnessed in generations. Even more notable, the dialogue has attracted a diverse audience extending far beyond uniformed members. From allied national security practitioners to academics to congressional members, many are active in the marketplace of dialogue. Congressional responses have ranged from opinion articles, congressional memorandums, and statements during hearings that have yet to yield any concerns about Gen. Berger’s direction on force design. In fact, the responses have been just the opposite, with members consistently reinforcing their overwhelming support for Force Design 2030, including requesting that the naval services receive even more funding, in order to implement it more quickly.
While the debate about the Marine Corps’ future has played out, within the Department of Defense the analytical framework used to determine joint-force capability requirements has changed. Between 2002 and 2017, the framework was built on a scenario-based analytical process. This framework was intended to serve as a point of departure for each of the military services to determine how their current and projected capabilities fit best within joint-force constructs envisioned to address each scenario. The 2018 National Defense Strategy highlighted the myriad problems within this framework, particularly those associated with having no method for “examining innovative ideas for future force capabilities on a threat-informed basis.” Beginning in 2019, a new joint construct was developed to comprehensively address the Pentagon’s new strategy, including during both conflict and competition. In this construct, past service capability preferences not tied to implementation of the 2018 National Defense Strategy would not fare well in overall departmental budget-prioritization efforts. For the Marine Corps, this meant that decades-long service positions on requirements, such as needing 38 L-class amphibious ships to provide joint force commanders a two Marine expeditionary brigade-assault echelon capability, no longer had a solid foundation. Instead, Marine leaders were incentivized to invest in capabilities that enabled the service to meet its maritime littoral tasks within the strategy’s contact and blunt layers.
Addressing the Critics’ Concerns
Gen. Berger had a front-row seat to the foundational changes in U.S. national security and defense strategies between 2016 and his becoming the service’s 38th commandant in 2019. During this period, he served initially as the senior officer responsible for employing all Fleet Marine Forces in the Indo-Pacific and subsequently as the service’s deputy commandant for combat development and integration. No two successive billets prior to becoming the commandant could have better prepared him for understanding what needed to change within the service to best achieve explicit and clear U.S. civilian orders. Further, during this period, he, along with many of the marines taking part in the debates about the service’s future, also participated in numerous wargames alongside naval leaders such as Adm. Scott Swift, then the commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet. Gen. Neller, the Marine Corps’ 37th commandant, was also involved in some of these events, including one in which the chief of naval operations asked all marines present to do the following: First, explain how the Marine Corps’ current short-ranged, shore-based fires will be employed against the pacing threat; second, explain how Marine forces will deploy from Okinawa so as not to be stuck there, when all domains will be actively contested; and third, explain how these forces will help the fleet or combined force maritime component commander accomplish any of their tactical or operational level tasks. His questions were representative of the growing skepticism within the national security community over the pre-Force Design 2030 Marine Corps.
Despite the impetus for change from leaders across the national security community, Gen. Berger’s force design vision — “to produce a Marine Corps that is prepared to operate inside actively contested maritime spaces in support of fleet operations that are themselves nested within overarching joint campaigns” — has encountered a surprising level of scrutiny from a small, highly regarded, group of retired marines. Their force-design critiques have primarily focused on five areas: first, a perceived lack of an inclusive and extended participatory reform process informing decisions; second, perceived capability degradations within the service’s ground-combat element; third, perceived capability degradations within the service’s aviation combat element; fourth, perceived logistical capability deficiencies required to achieve the goals of the stand-in forces and expeditionary advanced base operations concepts; and fifth, a perceived lack of support from senior U.S. Navy leaders as well as joint force leaders outside U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. The first, I addressed in the previous section. The next four, I take in turn.
The Force Design 2030 Ground Combat Element
Despite concerns about Gen. Berger jeopardizing U.S. national security with the ongoing changes to the Marine ground combat element, what is actually occurring is that the Marine Corps’ tip of the spear is becoming far more capable. Let’s start with the infantry to understand why this is the case. Detractors have asserted that the commandant is reducing infantry capacity by more than 41 percent. Neither by percentage nor tangible capability is this assertion accurate. What are the real numbers? Force Design 2030 decreases the number of infantry battalions from 24 to 21 and also is projected to decrease the number of marines per infantry battalion by anywhere from 60 to 100 marines out of a baseline of 896. Ultimately, this will lead to an overall infantry reduction of between 10 to 20 percent, depending on the results of ongoing experimentation efforts.
For example, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, one of the service’s lead Force Design 2030 experimental infantry battalions, just finished its pre-combat deployment certification exercise. During the exercise, each of the battalion’s companies achieved apex status in both traditional core infantry tasks and distributed operations tasks. The core tasks included each company successfully executing non-illuminated, reinforced live-fire attacks against prepared enemy positions. They also required the marines to move under load over long distances for days. One company, for example, moved 72 miles (116 kilometers) on foot during the exercise. Additionally, to better enable distributed operations, the changes incorporate intelligence collection and fusion capabilities at the battalion and company level, whereas before these capabilities resided at the regiment, if not division, level. Finally, on the equipping front, the changes enable infantry squads, platoons, companies, and battalions to sense and kill at ranges more than 10 times what they were able to do only a few years ago, while exponentially increasing their ability to fight in low-light conditions.
A marine with 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, posts security during a night raid as part of a Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation in June 2022. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Jennifer E. Reyes)
Marine Gunner Steven LaRose recently described the impact of these changes and what they will mean for the Marine Corps going forward. Having closely observed and at times participated in these transformational efforts, I am confident in stating that Force Design 2030 is continuing what Gen. Neller started when it comes to transforming the Marine infantry in accordance with Mattis’ guidance on infantry lethality.
Now let’s look at two more specific ground-related concerns: the elimination of tanks and reduction in cannon artillery. Does the decision to eliminate legacy M1A1 tanks make the service less capable of supporting its infantry in close combat? As a marine who likely wouldn’t be alive right now had it not been for exceptionally courageous acts performed by numerous Marine tank crews in Iraq between 2003 and 2005, I am not emotionally unbiased on this matter. At the same time, though, it’s important to not let emotions from past combat experiences bias what is best for the Marine Corps of the future. Well before Gen. Berger became commandant, his predecessors decided not to modernize the service’s M1A1 tank inventory. This was only in part due to cost. The bigger reasons were grounded in the practical realities of the service’s requirement to operate seamlessly at and from the sea, as well as on the ground in the littorals. The basic initial M1 tank weighed around 60 tons, or 120,000 pounds. These tanks possessed the lethal 120-millimeter smoothbore cannon that thousands of Marine infantrymen came to swear by in cities such as Baghdad, Fallujah, Najaf, Ramadi, and Qaim. What they didn’t possess, however, were the essential capabilities required to have a chance for surviving on most modern battlefields, namely protection from top-down attack munitions and modern anti-tank guided missiles. More than a thousand Russian tank crews have lost their lives in Ukraine learning these lessons. Unfortunately, incorporating these capabilities to modernize the Abrams in the M1A2 system enhancement package version three makes each tank weigh nearly 80 tons. Increasing survivability and firepower would have had significant effects downstream. In addition to having to figure out ways to provide even more fuel for the modernized tanks, which already have relatively limited roads and bridges to travel on, the Marine Corps would have had to work with the Navy to buy more powerful surface connectors, as the landing craft air cushion is incapable of moving the modernized M1A2 version. Moreover, the modernized tank’s weight would have posed serious center of gravity concerns when embarked on L-class amphibious ships. These hard-to-swallow truths about both the legacy and modernized M1 tank were the primary reasons behind the decision to divest of the platform.
Does this decision, however, mean that marines on future battlefields will go without armor support, if needed? Of course not. If a situation presents itself where marines require this type of combined arms support, the U.S. Army has thousands of highly trained soldiers prepared to provide it, just as the Tiger Brigade did for marines in the Gulf War, just as 1/5 and 2/7 Cavalry did for the outgunned 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Najaf in August 2004, and just as dozens of additional U.S. Army cavalry and armor units provided for marines in Iraq’s Anbar Province in the mid-2000s. Specific to Najaf, I had the privilege to serve marines as we fought shoulder-to-shoulder with 1/5 and 2/7 Cavalry tank crews. I will remain forever grateful for these soldiers’ tenacity, skill, and heroism.
What about concerns that cuts to traditional cannon batteries will reduce indirect fire support for the infantry? Similar to the potentially hard-to-swallow truths about the M1 tank, the service’s towed howitzer capabilities — of which more than a Marine expeditionary brigade’s capacity still remains with Force Design 2030 changes — are challenged a great deal by technologies that have rapidly proliferated across modern battlefields. These technologies, such as ubiquitous commercial satellite imagery and thousands of aerial drones with advanced optical systems combined with loitering munitions and even unguided longer-range rocket artillery, make the massing of cannon artillery an increasingly unviable tactic — as the Ukrainians are learning with their newly acquired M777s. Further, even if artillery crews are trained to “shoot and scoot” to complicate adversary targeting, the massive logistics convoys required to sustain this tactic have become exceptionally vulnerable on modern battlefields.
For these reasons, diversifying the service’s artillery portfolio to include an increased number of rocket systems with longer ranges is a logical decision, and one begun before Gen. Berger became the commandant. Moreover, given civilian leader orders to rapidly field capabilities that can hold adversary vessels in the littorals at risk, so do investments in capabilities such as Maritime Strike Tomahawk and Naval Strike Missile. Both of these capabilities have increasingly received priority in Department of Defense funding. Importantly, while some might consider these anti-ship capabilities as suboptimal for supporting infantrymen, recent Task Force 61/2 reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance operations in Europe’s contested littorals demonstrated just the opposite. These types of fires capabilities have proven to be precisely the type of killing assets required to support Stand-in Force units, such as the Marine unit in Estonia that I had the privilege to serve with and lead. We were tasked with increasing the 6th Fleet commander’s maritime domain awareness while simultaneously reassuring a key NATO ally.
Task Force 61/2 enhancing the 6th Fleet commander’s maritime domain awareness in the Gulf of Finland. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Dylan Chagnon)
The Force Design 2030 Aviation Combat Element
Gen. Berger’s detractors have asserted that he is “crippling” the service’s aviation capabilities by reducing its aircraft inventory by 33 percent. Neither assertion is accurate. Instead, Gen. Berger and his team have recognized the importance of not simply talking about aircraft, such as the numbers of F-35Bs or CH-53Ks, but rather, fully accounting for lifecycle costs in operating expensive aviation platforms in order to achieve a sustainable — and much larger — force that is properly balanced to meet the entire range of military operations. It is purposely addressing the decades of the past, in which the Marine Corps too often utilized the proverbial “golden hammer” for every nail, such as employing F-35Bs to bomb a Taliban factory in Afghanistan, vice having a well-balanced force with a deep tool-set from which commanders could choose the optimal answer to each situation. Force Design 2030 is also moving the service back in a direction of being more responsible and balanced with taxpayer dollars when it comes to aircraft procurement, embracing the requirement to adapt due to the service’s years-long traditionally manned aircraft pilot shortages, and, most importantly, welcoming the “democratization of airpower” by exponentially increasing the number of aircraft in the service such that the Marine air-ground task force concept is now increasingly a reality down to the infantry squad level. Consider, for example, that in the near future 3,659 armed, remotely piloted aircraft, also known as loitering munitions or “organic precision fires,” will be fielded across Marine infantry and reconnaissance formations.
Ongoing infantry battalion and Task Force 61/2 experimentation efforts reinforce the immense value of force design’s approach to future aviation combat capabilities. For example, in April 2022, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines was put through a series of rigorous distributed operations tests across wide swaths of the western United States. These tests saw the battalion’s marines operating over an area that ranged more than 550 miles from north to south and 225 miles from east to west. Exclusively supporting the battalion’s squads, platoons, and companies when executing the missions with traditionally-manned aviation would have required either pre-staging dozens of $30 to $130 million aircraft across the western United States or committing hundreds of marines and many thousands of gallons of fuel to enable the conduct of forward arming and refueling point operations. Such an expensive and large footprint approach was unnecessary, however, because 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines has its own optimized, organic aviation combat capability. Building on previous experimentation successes with Camp Pendleton- and Hawaii-based infantry battalions, this aviation element includes Drone 40s launched by hand and from grenade launchers, Skydio quadcopters, long-range Puma aircraft, long-endurance, vertical take-off and landing Stalkers, and Switchblade 300s — with the Drone 40 and Switchblade providing close air support capabilities in addition to aerial reconnaissance. During the distributed operations tests, these types of capabilities allowed 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines’ small units to have their aerial sensing requirements consistently met. They also allowed the small units to destroy adversary targets at sea, which were simulating an adversary amphibious assault.
Importantly, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines’ organic aircraft capabilities also placed far less of a support-requirement burden on platforms such as F-35Bs and the pilots that fly them. This observation is noteworthy as each F-35B costs around $130 million, flying one aircraft for just one hour costs $51,300, training a single pilot costs around $10 million, and keeping the aircraft operational has been a consistent challenge, with full mission-capable availability rates recently decreasing from an already low 23.3 percent to an even lower 15.1 percent. 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines’ distributed company on San Clemente Island experienced this latter challenge as it only had one of four initially scheduled F-35Bs available to support its sea-denial mission.
Task Force 61/2 has similarly benefitted from force design’s embrace of airpower’s democratization. When operating in the Baltic Sea’s contested sea lines of communication, for example, the task force’s infantry and reconnaissance marines routinely leveraged low-signature, low-logistics-footprint Stalker aircraft to help collect on priority intelligence requirements. These same marines frequently employed the aircraft to help correlate targeting data required to employ naval and theater weapons. Additionally, these marines benefitted from similar capabilities provided by a nearby Marine Expeditionary Unit’s V-BAT aircraft. Importantly, these aircraft had previously proven extremely valuable when supporting marines and sailors operating in the Indo-Pacific, and the service is in the process of fielding them much more widely, including providing the Stalker to all infantry battalions.
Task Force 61/2 marines preparing to launch an extended-range, vertical take-off and landing Stalker drone in Estonia. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Dylan Chagnon)
Logistics
Force Design 2030 skeptics have also expressed doubts about the vision’s logistical supportability. Detractors have insisted that marines on their own will likely be unable to support themselves. They have similarly shared concerns that the fleet won’t be able to provide support for the Marine Corps, either.
Determining any concept’s logistical supportability is a tough task, especially for one that is less than a year old. The same applies for a concept that involves marines frequently operating in the contact layer alongside U.S. mutual defense treaty allies and close security partners, including often leveraging local economies to provide some classes of supply. Nonetheless, if submarines, surface combatants, and anything else with a vertical launch system is going to be challenged and find difficulty in being resupplied in an actively contested space, then the fact that logistics will be a challenge for stand-in forces should be neither a surprise nor a reason to halt experimentation and continued combat development.
While still early in the concept’s experimental phase, Task Force 61/2’s experiences operating in the Baltic region in May and June 2022 offer multiple valuable and promising insights from a logistical perspective. First among these is that it is definitely possible for small groups of infantry and reconnaissance marines to succeed in executing fleet commander-provided mission essential tasks for extended periods within a contested littoral region while requiring minimal external logistics support. Next is that countless benefits come from operating shoulder-to-shoulder with allies. In the case of Task Force 61/2 mobile-reconnaissance marines, operating alongside Estonian naval forces provided regular and easy access to critical capabilities such as mess halls, fuel supplies, batteries, rental vehicles and trailers, and even ferries to move between islands. The relationship also provided marines with the opportunity to maximize Estonian maritime patrol craft to help extend the 6th Fleet commander’s maritime domain awareness many dozens of nautical miles into the Baltic Sea. Third among the insights is that embracing a platform-agnostic command and control, intelligence, and targeting approach to equipping marines provided countless benefits, in contrast to past paradigms that tended to focus first on putting such equipment in large vehicles and aircraft. This approach’s benefits became clear when the task force’s scheduled C-17 flights from the United States to Estonia were delayed due to U.S. Transportation Command receiving direction to prioritize logistical supply flows into Ukraine before any other movements. After six flight delays over a ten-day period, the marines simply packed their equipment in pelican cases and sea bags and moved across the world within the next 96 hours via other, primarily commercial, means. One other example (of many) of this approach’s benefit: When one of the force’s radars became inoperable because of a cable malfunction, the marines bought a new cable in an Estonian town and had the radar operational less than an hour later. Suffice it to say, actions like these occurred routinely and left all involved with an optimistic outlook on the concept’s potential.
For argument’s sake, let’s assume that Task Force 61/2 did not find tremendous success from a logistical perspective. How would an alternative force design fare — such as the previous one based on two Marine expeditionary brigade amphibious joint forcible entry operations? Was this force design logistically supportable? Absolutely not. This is why the Marine Corps came under such intense scrutiny from across the national security enterprise between 2016 and 2019 when policymakers were considering how best to implement the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Beyond the fact that the last time the service was tasked to execute anything close to the mission for which it was designed was 72 years ago, neither the Navy nor the U.S. merchant fleet possesses anywhere close to the number of logistics vessels required to support such a mission. Consider, for example, that when Marine units landed at Inchon in September 1950, 1,288 fleet logistics ships were in the U.S. inventory. Today, fewer than 50 such support ships are available on any given day to support U.S. military operations overseas. In other words, long before Gen. Berger became the commandant, America decided it no longer wanted to pay to have at the ready the mandatory logistical infrastructure required to make the primary mission for which the pre-Force Design 2030 Marine Corps was designed even feasible — regardless of whether the U.S. Navy had sufficient escort ship capabilities to protect these vessels in the first place.
The fact that the Marine Corps’ prior force design was nowhere close to logistically supportable, combined with Task Force 61/2’s successes on the logistical front, should not, however, suggest that logistics is not a challenge for the Marine Corps or the joint force going forward. Task Force 61/2’s successes occurred exclusively in the contact layer. What would have happened if an adversary started shooting and the distributed Marrine forces had to quickly transition to blunting actions? Initially at least, the equipment and ammunition required to take such actions were already forward. What if resupply were necessary, though? Skeptics are correct to emphasize that much more needs to be done — across the joint force and in close consultation with U.S. treaty allies and security partners — to answer this question. This is a core challenge when it comes to sustaining operations in Europe as well as in the Indo-Pacific’s wide expanses and requires a much broader and focused national investment discussion. This is also where the light amphibious warship requirement matters most. And as the chief of naval operations, Adm. Michael Gilday, recently testified, “It’s essential that we get this right.”
Task Force 61/2’s deputy commander briefing Estonian Navy leadership on Marine capabilities. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by CWO4 Izzel Sanchez)
The Navy and the Other Services
Gen. Berger’s detractors have also consistently asserted that Force Design 2030 lacks support outside of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, specifically from other combatant commanders and senior U.S. Navy leaders. Neither of these assertions are accurate. There have been multiple high-profile instances over the past few months in which both of these assertions have been proven invalid.
Let’s start initially with other combatant commanders’ thoughts on Force Design 2030. Aside from the Indo-Pacific commander, who has consistently expressed his strong support for Gen. Berger’s vision, arguably the other most important geographic combatant commander when it comes to National Defense Strategy implementation is the U.S. European Commander, Gen. Tod D. Wolters, who also serves as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Both the U.S. and collective NATO response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine falls squarely within his responsibilities. As such, his thoughts on Force Design 2030 are particularly relevant. In a recent House Armed Services Committee hearing, he was asked about the commandant’s vision and how marines that were trained and equipped to implement it affected operations in Europe. His responses were telling. At first, he explained that distributed operations-capable Marine forces, “dramatically enhance our options,” further emphasizing that “a brown-water force that can shoot, move, and communicate and that is very, very expeditionary is priceless for 21st Century security.” Then, when asked specifically about Task Force 61/2 and its ongoing experimental efforts conducting anti-submarine warfare and sensing operations in support of the fleet commander, he stated, “the marines are doing a fantastic job of leading from the front and showing the rest of us how to do it right.” Gen. Wolters was subsequently asked, “So you, as a combatant commander, see a lot of promise in these experimental efforts?” He responded: “Absolutely.”
Support from senior U.S. Navy leaders in recent months has echoed Gen. Wolters’ comments. I experienced these viewpoints specifically from Commander, 6th Fleet Adm. Eugene H. Black, and Commander, Naval Forces Europe and Africa Adm. Robert Burke, when serving Task Force 61/2’s mobile reconnaissance unit. Both admirals consistently expressed their support and enthusiasm for what Task Force 61/2 marines were doing across Europe’s most contested littoral regions. The chief of naval operations relayed this level of overwhelming support at the aforementioned House Armed Services Committee hearing. When asked, “is the Navy supportive of Force Design 2030, including the Stand-in Force concept and how is the Navy preparing to support this concept in implementation?” Adm. Gilday responded:
We’re doing it right now … I talked to the NAVEUR commander [Adm. Burke] yesterday … his headquarters has about 30 marines in their joint force maritime component cell. Their deputy commander is a marine. There are marine elements under his command in places like Estonia, Iceland, and Norway today … we’re working side-by-side everyday … that is where Navy-Marine integration gets real … it’s at the fleet level right now, today.
Adm. Gilday relayed similar themes days later when testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. During this hearing, he also emphasized, after learning of concerns over aspects of Force Design 2030 not being included in key U.S. Navy documents such as his own navigation plan, that he is directing an “update to my navigation plan within the month and I will take special note to be sure that I foot-stomp Stand-in Forces.”
A Better Way Forward?
Watching what has been described as an “intellectual civil war” over Force Design 2030 has admittedly been disappointing, especially the parts that have bordered on becoming personal. Many times, as I’ve read the back-and-forth, for-and-against exchanges, I’ve thought to myself that we have to be better than this as marines because the American people expect so much more from us. Debating substance is one thing. Personal attacks are quite another. The same applies for challenging our commandant’s plan while providing no viable alternative.
As I’ve reflected on these thoughts, I’ve wondered if perhaps there might be a better and more constructive way to move forward, together. These thoughts stem from reflecting on the development and experimentation with maneuver warfare in the 1980s at Camp Lejeune, combined with all the ongoing 2nd Marine Division successes, especially those involving Task Force 61/2 and 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines’ infantry battalion experimentation and combat readiness evaluation efforts. If it is indeed true that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and further that “seeing is believing,” perhaps the next step in Force Design 2030 implementation should be holding a summit in Camp Lejeune. All involved in the debate would be welcome to attend. There, they would watch Task Force 61/2 marines, recently returned from Europe, execute reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance mission profiles similar to what they did overseas when operating in support of the fleet. They would similarly watch 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines’ squads, platoons, and companies execute day and night live-fire attacks similar to those that LaRose described in his recent article. Additionally, summit attendees would have the chance to participate in wargames and briefs with all of these same marines. At the end of each day, all participants would have the opportunity to discuss the most important lessons learned together and also even, schedule permitting, with the commandant, similar to how Gen. Alfred Gray approached the maneuver warfare experiments. When complete, any points of outstanding contention would be captured, along with an attack plan to address what would be done to address these concerns in short order.
Knowing, learning from, and seeking to emulate so many involved in both sides of the Force Design 2030 debate, I can’t help but think that something like the proposed summit would help America’s Corps of Marines move forward — together — in ensuring that the service remains for decades to come “most ready, when the nation is least ready.”
Team, Team, Damn Team
It’s time to end the internecine war over Force Design 2030. The commandant has the Marine Corps on the right trajectory. This trajectory is fully supported by civilian leadership in the Department of Defense, Congress, and the White House. Similarly, the trajectory is fully supported by senior U.S. Navy leadership and the combatant commanders. Additionally, the trajectory is directly in line with the most recent 2022 National Defense Strategy, which doubles down on identifying China as the pacing threat and the Indo-Pacific as the priority theater. And fortunately, because this trajectory paces against the most challenging threat, the Marine Corps is now even better postured to respond to crises throughout the world, as Task Force 61/2 has recently demonstrated.
Now, let’s do everything possible to move out — together — to further accelerate transforming the Marine Corps to achieve the Force Design 2030 vision.
Scott Cuomo is a U.S. Marine officer. He wrote part of this article while simultaneously commanding 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion and an experimental mobile reconnaissance formation within Task Force 61/2. He completed the article soon after reporting to serve within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
17. Weak States and Loose Arms: Lessons and Warnings, from Afghanistan to Ukraine
Conclusion:
Altogether, given the high impact of small arms and light weapons set against scarce security resources following conflict or collapse, regional powers and their partners should amplify stockpile security in the immediate short-term in gaps of greatest weakness. This might entail targeted contingents of boots on the ground to fortify stockpiles or bombing campaigns to eradicate them. It will cost regional and global powers to safeguard insecure arsenals, but in the end it will cost far less than letting them loose to ignite violence anew.
Weak States and Loose Arms: Lessons and Warnings, from Afghanistan to Ukraine - War on the Rocks
The large volume of small arms and light weapons the United States left behind is more mundane yet more meaningful. Based on the 2017 Government Accountability Office and 2020 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reports, the cache exceeds 650,000 pieces ranging from rifles to rocket-propelled weapons. Unlike Black Hawks, they require little training and no expertise to use. Even fresh Taliban foot soldiers know how to fire an AK-47. Beyond that, their qualities, combined with state weakness, have led to weapons diffusion into the surrounding region, sparking and inflaming more violence. In short, the enormous stockpiles left behind have generated a “regional arms bazaar” for terrorists, criminal elements, and insurgents.
This has happened elsewhere before and will again. The risk that weapons deployed in the Russo-Ukrainian War, whenever and however it ends, will disperse across Eastern Europe and Central Asia is particularly disquieting.
Weakly governed states — whether weakened by corruption, conflict, or collapse — have looser arsenal integrity, making them more subject to opportunistic substate groups. Their weakness allows apertures into the black market, the size and reach of each being a function of how well-armed the state and how weak its stockpile security. On the smaller end, corrupt nations control a more trickling leakage of arms into the black market to a shortlist of proxies and clients, usually with conditionality. Depending on the scale, actors, and victors, post-conflict scenarios can range from a few loose arms to largescale diffusion.
On the extreme end of the state weakness spectrum, collapse generates the most pointed proliferation events, especially if the nation was well-armed. We focus on these moments as sudden, immense shifts in black market volumes and movement. Following collapse, stockpile security folds along with the government’s legitimacy, institutions, and services. In addition to the usual black-market tradesmen ready to plunder national arms depots, many regular citizens join out of desperation as a new anarchy takes hold. In fact, weak governance becomes a simultaneous cause and consequence of weapons looting since the state can neither provide security for citizens nor secure stockpiles from citizens. These reinforcing conditions — elevated demand, vulnerable supply — intensify the siphon of weapons from the state to the local black market.
The larger the stockpile and the more suddenly it devolves to nonstate actors, the more intensely it tends to diffuse into the surrounding region. Local actors arm themselves and warlords offer provincial security, but weapons are also a lucrative commodity. In insecure environments, sales might purchase safety, basic goods and services, or escape. They might buy loyalty and solidify substate alliances. With a sated national market, would-be customers having plundered their own caches to surplus, illicit entrepreneurs look abroad for markets of higher profit and demand.
We point specifically to small arms and light weapons. They are distinctly suitable for sale, in contrast to heavier systems (recall the missile-laden light attack planes in Afghanistan, for instance). The capacity requisites for complex weapons render that market significantly smaller and more specialized. Many ragtag looters lack access or would not risk exposure to such in-groups. Selling nations also maintain end-use monitoring on conventional platforms, making it even riskier. Small arms and light weapons, however, are financially and technically approachable even for foot soldiers. Existing monitoring mechanisms for the latter are also fragmented and ineffective, dramatically reducing the risk of being caught.
The qualities of small arms and light weapons also make them distinctly amenable for trafficking. Also unlike heavy weapons, they are small and modular enough to be hidden at checkpoints and among “ant-trade” transports. (Ant-trade is a term of art for the most common form of illicit weapons trafficking: Imagine ants following their routes, spaced out with one load at a time. Traffickers mimic this to avoid riskier, costlier interceptions.) They are more durable, needing minimal upkeep and maintaining value across exchanges and time. They are also more serviceable, requiring minimal cost for replaceable parts and ammunition.
Depending on the destination, dispersion could mean a number of things. We return to the Afghanistan case to demonstrate a few of them. Dispersion might simply exacerbate instability in weak zones, like it has in Afghanistan itself and certainly pockets around it in Pakistan, Iran, and India. Weapons diffusion might revitalize insurgent efforts, such as that of the separatists in Baluchistan, or strengthen existing terrorist organizations, like the Islamic State affiliate in the region and al-Qaeda. It might create political space, full of arms and anarchy, for new terrorist groups and rebellions to arise. For instance, Afghan tribal groups are coalescing in opposition to the Taliban. Perhaps worst, it can incite or bolster civil war. Factions within the Taliban are vying for dominance, and it is unclear how far the internecine struggle will escalate. We also find it feasible that Western arms abandoned in Afghanistan could be trafficked to existing conflict zones in Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, especially with Iran’s support. The upshot is that the supply of small arms and light weapons interacts with the demand dynamics at trafficking terminuses, yielding a spectrum of potential outcomes.
To summarize, weak governance exposes military stockpiles to eager nonstate actors who sell the surplus of what they can (small arms and light weapons) where they can (often elsewhere) to whom they can (violent nonstate actors of all stripes). On average, the surge of diffusion correlates with a swell in violence at trafficking terminuses. Of course, this is one process among others that can take place amid state weakness, and only one means of weapons dispersion among others. Nonetheless, it is a likely and consequential one on the heels of dire conflict or collapse. It is also an empirically precedented one, playing out in the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and the 2011 crumbling of Libya.
The collapse of the Soviet Union is a prime example of the dispersion consequences from a state armed to the teeth. The dismantling of Soviet arsenals sourced many illicit weapon bazaars and sprawling proliferation. Scholars emphasize that disaffected and desperate nonstate actors ransacked, trafficked, and sold billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of tons of small arms and light weapons across the region — Abkhazia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Tajikistan, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine. Kaliningrad in particular, geographically and politically distanced from the Soviet Union, became an immense illicit arms marketplace. Many of these locations became seedbeds of instability.
Commensurate with stockpile sizes, the breakdown of Libya followed a similar trajectory on a smaller (though still alarming) scale. In a recent study, we plot the illicit small arms and light weapons trafficking routes after Libya’s 2011 collapse. Libya had one of the largest arsenals in Africa, and its looting led to a profound episode of proliferation. Like the Soviet case, small arms and light weapons quickly crossed borders and fueled conflicts in the region.
Figure 1. Conflict events, scaled by lethality, after Libya’s collapse overlaid with illicit small arms and light weapons trafficking routes, from Oct. 20, 2011 – 2017. (Graphic by the authors)
We traced four major overland routes across 11 countries in the surrounding Sahara-Sahel and one air and maritime route into the Middle East. Violence clustered and significantly intensified at their terminuses, visible in Figure 1. In particular, newly armed Malian rebels seized several major cities and declared the Azawad independent within eight months of Libya’s collapse. Boko Haram became a key consumer of Libyan weaponry. The struggle over South Sudan escalated with the influx of weapons. Violence in the Sinai surged including the appearance of new armed groups. Libyan arms also ended up in Syria, the site of a vicious civil war.
These cases show the importance and implications of loose stockpiles. The same processes are afoot in Afghanistan and will persist. Turning to speculation, we see potential for a similar danger down the line in Ukraine, which bears some features of a weak state (especially its eastern regions). Defined as a diminished ability to exercise sovereignty in a territory, the sustained presence of Russian forces in the country and the failure to provide basic services and rule of law in areas that Ukraine still holds indicate some degree of weakness. A 2021 Small Arms Survey report determined that there were already large quantities of loose weapons and ammunition in Ukraine. Since the war began, nations have rapidly poured more basic and advanced small arms and light weapons and other weapon systems into Ukraine to reinforce fighters. Intentionally — Ukrainian resistance is a patchwork of diverse fighters — many systems are high-end yet simple to use. For example, the Javelin anti-tank missile and the Switchblade anti-tank portable drone both require less than an hour of training to use.
What will happen to all the dispensed armaments when the fighting stops? The Russo-Ukrainian War remains hot, so imagining its aftermath is more uncertain, but many might be illicitly dispersed. Whether Ukraine collapses, attains a decisive victory, or negotiates a settlement, the future of its arsenal is still worth consideration. The saturation of small arms as a national defense strategy will be difficult to undo, especially for a relatively weak state. Officials will attempt to monitor and secure the increasingly massive military arsenals. The states that sold the arms and domestic Russian and Ukrainian authorities will devote initial and primary efforts toward conventional, sophisticated platforms: aircraft, tanks, and heavy weapons, for example. In the meantime, the largest risks of proliferation lie with small arms and light weapons on hand to civilians, foreign fighters, and soldiers who might behave opportunistically as the smoke clears.
On humanitarian, geopolitical, and financial fronts, this is and should be of grave concern to states, practitioners, and scholars. As one conflict ends, the last thing stakeholders and communities need is for more to emerge in the same unstable vicinity. Thus, understanding this hydra model of war is critical to head off the diffusion of violence. This is especially true in the wake of state collapse, a rare but immense phenomenon that spills over borders more powerfully.
We offer three prescriptions to structure efforts to stem the spread of illicit small arms and light weapons during peak proliferation events. First, remember that illicit markets are regionalized. The neighboring nations that will receive the brunt of repercussions have incentives to step up to secure loose stockpiles. Other weak states have urgent reasons but weaker capacity to contain spillover, while strong states less likely to see direct negative effects ideally will contribute stockpile-security efforts in order to uphold norms and regional stability. If capacity is short or efforts are fragmented, neighbors should activate their alliance and institutional networks to help curb potential spillover. Finally, major powers with strategic or economic interests in the region might be motivated to help arrest these bursts of weapons dispersion that can have long legacies.
Second, these periods of explosive trafficking appear to be short-lived. Eventually, even vast stockpiles dry up. National dynamics shift. In Libya, local groups consolidated by 2014, leading to an increase in internal demand and consequent decrease in illicit arms outflows as territorial clashes escalated. In the loose interim, though, small arms and light weapons enabled footholds and forward movement for manifold nonstate actors. This temporal trait implies that mitigation programs should be implemented as soon as possible as stockpile insecurity mounts (insofar as shards of sovereignty allow) and certainly in the immediate aftermath of collapse or war. A boon to the domestic politics of participants, leaders can pronounce short-term commitments to high-value intervention.
Third, mediating factors determine the severity of small arms and light weapons spillover. To use an epidemiology analogy, some have greater resistance to a spreading phenomenon whether by genetics, exposure, or baseline health. Pockets of regional demand, rebel group (dis)unity, foreign fighter movements, regional capacity and coordination, the strength of interdiction techniques, the presence of external peacekeeping forces — each of these scale and structure the regional impact. These spatial traits imply that mitigation programs should be targeted based on knowledge of native inoculations along likely trafficking routes. For instance, paths to and terminuses rife with instability should be reinforced while well-governed zones can be deemphasized. Long, porous borders present a particular challenge of coverage and coordination while manageable, impassable, or intelligence-rich ones can stand alone. Stakeholders can use preexisting trafficking routes as a template, tribal travel routes and folkways as further clues, and the distribution and dynamics of regional militants as hinge points.
Altogether, given the high impact of small arms and light weapons set against scarce security resources following conflict or collapse, regional powers and their partners should amplify stockpile security in the immediate short-term in gaps of greatest weakness. This might entail targeted contingents of boots on the ground to fortify stockpiles or bombing campaigns to eradicate them. It will cost regional and global powers to safeguard insecure arsenals, but in the end it will cost far less than letting them loose to ignite violence anew.
Kerry Chávez, Ph.D., is an instructor in the political science department at Texas Tech University. Her research focusing on the domestic politics, strategies, and technologies of conflict and security has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Policy Analysis, and Defence Studies, among others. With practitioner and law enforcement experience as well as working group collaborations, she produces rigorous, engaged scholarship.
Ori Swed, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the sociology department and director of the Peace, War, & Social Conflict Laboratory at Texas Tech University. His scholarship on nonstate actors in conflict settings and technology and society has been featured in multiple peer-reviewed journals and his own edited volume. He also gained 12 years of field experience with the Israel Defense Force as a special forces operative and reserve captain, and as a private security contractor.
18. #Reviewing The Immigrant Superpower
Immigrants are a US superpower. I concur with that thesis.
Excerpt:
The Immigrant Superpower presents an analytical view of immigrants in America and their role in society. Kane tears down the common misperception that immigrants are a drain on U.S. resources by showing that in fact they add to the American economy through hard work. He seeks only to display the power immigrants bring to the U.S. While the book is opinionated in nature, it is presented professionally in an attempt to convince the reader of the value of immigrants in the U.S. This book is relevant today as Americans constantly disagree on the impact of immigrants. It will also continue to remain relevant as immigrants will always be a point of contention for years to come. The United States may not be perfect, but Kane argues for immigrants making it better, not worse. Any American would benefit from reading this book and educating themselves on the impact immigrants have on the U.S. and why they contribute to making this country a true world superpower.
#Reviewing The Immigrant Superpower
“Brawn, bravery, and brains.” Tim Kane wants to change the way you think about immigrants and their contributions to the United States.[1] The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger is his argument for why they are not only beneficial for the U.S., but necessary, despite a stigma surrounding immigrants in America. As an economist, Kane is careful with his words and approaches the topic from an analytical sense rather than a truly polemical one. This allows readers to form their own opinions about immigrants with a better idea of the footprint these foreigners leave in the American economy. Kane clearly supports immigrants in America. However, he presents his case in an unbiased manner, sharing statistics about immigrants that help the reader understand why he holds the opinion he does. The primary argument of The Immigrant Superpower is that immigrants work hard for the benefit of America, often more than native-born citizens.
Kane is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy with a double major in economics and political science. Throughout his career he has worn many hats, leading him to his current position as a research fellow in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. His focus is on economics and immigration in America. Now as a civilian Kane hosts Why America?, a podcast on the benefits of immigration. Tim Kane is beyond qualified to write a book about immigrants in America.
Through his book, Kane outlines three strengths delivered by immigrants to America: brawn, bravery, and brains. Immigrants often fill undesirable jobs, such as construction or garbage collection, and they are willing to work harder for their success than many native-born citizens. Even in desirable fields such as technology, Kane argues that immigrants are not stealing jobs from native-born citizens, despite the fact that many people claim this is happening. They instead create their own jobs, which benefits the American economy as a whole. And when immigrants do take existing jobs, they tend to take them from other immigrants, but not native-born citizens. Furthermore, immigrants serve their country by filling a large share of the military. Kane promotes the pathway to citizenship available for immigrants who are able and willing to serve in the military and argues this program is crucial to national security due to the high performance foreigners it attracts. Finally, immigrants often bring ideas and talent to the U.S. to use the resources commonly available such as research grants, computer access, and internet. It is no secret that America offers opportunity and resources to those willing to work hard. Immigrants often come to the U.S. to take advantage of this and ultimately generate a net benefit for the country as a whole. Brawn, bravery, and brains make immigrants beneficial to the U.S. and, as Kane argues, are what make America an international superpower.
Kane writes about the oath immigrants take to the United States when they become citizens. Very few Americans sign their loyalty to this country. Furthermore, Americans rarely understand the meaning of the pledge, or care about the words enough to stand by them with their honor on the line. However, immigrants are required to take the oath of allegiance to the United States of America. They protect this country, sometimes with their lives, and should be viewed as loyal to their adopted nation. Kane acknowledges and criticizes the impression of immigrants as terrorists since 9/11 and how misconstrued it is as an argument. This fear of immigrants, Kane claims, restricts progress, and only damages the country. The fact is that immigrants today bring a net positive to the U.S. and do not endanger national security.
I found the weakest aspect of this book to be Kane’s political interjections and direct criticisms of political figures. Kane is passionate in his opinions on immigrants and immigration and is quite critical of immigration policies set by U.S. political leaders. For example, Kane discusses President Trump’s inappropriate nicknames for the COVID-19 virus. Kane criticizes President Trump and argues comments like these only lead to ungrounded mistrust of Asian immigrants. While these critiques are offered with positive intentions, I felt uncomfortable due to my status as an active duty military member. Kane is respectful in his approach to criticism and defends his perspective with evidence, criticizing the policy rather than the person. However, this aspect of the book felt the most emotionally charged.
Despite my mild discomfort with the book due to some emotional critiques of politicians, I appreciate Kane’s willingness to write what he actually sees and his willingness to say how things are. Kane is a registered Republican but is still willing to criticize Trump’s policies. This adds to Kane’s credibility as an author on the topic since he is clearly presenting an argument he believes in and is willing to present the raw facts of the topic. His background in immigration research shines through his words and creates a book enjoyable to read. This approach to analysis of the topic helps strengthen Kane’s argument and fits well into the structure of the book. This approach creates a fluid argument that is easy to understand and builds trust in the credibility of the author.
Thirty-seven service members from 22 different countries take the Oath of Allegiance during a naturalization ceremony held at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan on July 4, 2013. (U.S. Army Photo)
The Immigrant Superpower presents an analytical view of immigrants in America and their role in society. Kane tears down the common misperception that immigrants are a drain on U.S. resources by showing that in fact they add to the American economy through hard work. He seeks only to display the power immigrants bring to the U.S. While the book is opinionated in nature, it is presented professionally in an attempt to convince the reader of the value of immigrants in the U.S. This book is relevant today as Americans constantly disagree on the impact of immigrants. It will also continue to remain relevant as immigrants will always be a point of contention for years to come. The United States may not be perfect, but Kane argues for immigrants making it better, not worse. Any American would benefit from reading this book and educating themselves on the impact immigrants have on the U.S. and why they contribute to making this country a true world superpower.
Gavin Kim is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy with a degree in Economics. He is a second generation immigrant. His father was born in South Korea but became a U.S. citizen as a child and served for 27 years as an Air Force Officer. The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: The Statue of Liberty, New York, New York, 2017 (Jenna Day).
Notes:
[1] Kane, Tim. The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022.
19. The Koch-Soros Crackup
The Koch-Soros Crackup - Washington Free Beacon
A few years ago, the Koch brothers and George Soros had a dream. What if the anti-war left joined forces with the isolationist right and worked together to bring U.S. foreign policy back to the 1930s?
From this unholy alliance sprung the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The mission: make America neutral again. Finally appeasers in Washington had a safe space to apologize for Russian oligarchs, Iranian terrorists, and Chinese communists.
Well, all good things must come to an end.
An all-star in the Koch-Soros foreign policy alliance, Joseph Cirincione, announced on Thursday his resignation from the Quincy Institute: "They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies," he told Politico.
Cirincione is not just some disgruntled scholar. He is the former president of Ploughshares, a grant-making organization that was not just a recipient of the Soros organization’s politicized philanthropy, but a gatekeeper and driver of it—deciding which pinkos would prosper and which would starve. Mother Jones reports that Cirincione helped connect Quincy to major donors in its early days.
His change of heart on Quincy is surely a weathervane for other elements of the Soros network. Indeed, Soros himself has been signaling in the last year that he favors a much tougher policy on China than the one offered up by the Quincy crowd, which released a major study in June that found the Chinese military build up was nothing to worry about and has warned of the perils of "threat inflation" when it comes to China’s military expansion.
Soros, by contrast, came very close to endorsing regime change. "It is to be hoped that Xi Jinping may be replaced by someone less repressive at home and more peaceful abroad," he told an audience at the Hoover Institution in January, calling Xi "the greatest threat that open societies face today."
Trita Parsi, a co-founder and executive vice president of Quincy, as well as somebody who could be confused for an Iranian agent—at least according to a federal judge—told Mother Jones he’s bewildered that Cirincione would suggest the think tank was avoiding criticism of Russia. But he acknowledges that Quincy is "not going along with the idea that it’s a good thing to change the objectives in Ukraine towards weakening Russia, because we believe that could lead to endless war."
As the Quincy Institute demonstrated so spectacularly in Afghanistan, one sure fire way to end endless war is to lose the war quickly and all at once.
As for the interpersonal drama that we assume is engulfing the Quincy Institute, and the enmity growing between teams Koch and Soros—may that war truly be endless.
20. Why NATO Is Outdated, Dangerous And Deserves To Be Abolished
Wow. Sometimes I just cannot understand these arguments. My mind must be too closed.
Excerpts:
Surreal or bizarre as it may seem, the idea that NATO might be a party to a conflict with Russia is also pretty foreign to itself and most of its advocates. The media choreography is simple: As a principle, NATO has never done anything wrong and continues to only promote “security, stability and peace” while Russia and its president act as a constant nuisance. It’s rather much like a homeowner who is not in a conflict with a thief – a criminal – but has to guard himself and his family against the thief’s evil plans.
Compared with being in a conflict, this self-understanding relieves the presumed innocent from any sense of responsibility.
From that stems the symbolic idea that NATO is a kind of home insurance. However, an insurance is paid only after the unwanted event and the destruction it wrought. Insurances do not prevent the accident, so this is pure nonsense but also never addressed.
Contrary to the pervasive positive but unreflective mainstream concepts and images of NATO that are disseminated virtually on a daily basis to millions, there is absolutely nothing sacrosanct about that old institution. And in contrast to the pious believers’ attitude to their God, NATO can and should be criticised. And replaced.
Let’s discuss the post-NATO world.
Why NATO Is Outdated, Dangerous And Deserves To Be Abolished – OpEd
Let’s look at NATO’s reaction to Russia’s ill-considered and international law-violating military action in Ukraine. From a conflict-analytical point of view, it is reasonable to say that Russia is responsible for the war but that NATO with it reckless expansion against all promises given to Russia and a series of expert warnings is responsible for the underlying conflict.
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It can safely be concluded that the Western/NATO response has moved beyond the proportionality principle, beyond rationality and a realistic image of the world and its own role in it:
NATO leaders express limitless hatred of everything Russia; historically hard and time-unlimited economic sanctions have been imposed – using the illegal method of collective punishment; weapons for an estimated US$ 60-100 billion will be pumped into Ukraine to defeat Russia there. NATO has added US$ 350 billion in military expenditures since the US-instigated regime change in Kiev in 2014 and, since then, prepared Ukraine for a role in NATO. The 2% goals is now a floor, not a ceiling. Forward reaction forces shall increase from 40 000 to 300 000; US troops in Europe up to 100 000. Russian reserves in the West – some US$ 300 billion – are frozen and will likely be stolen and used to rebuild Ukraine. Russia is, for all practical purposes, cancelled from Europe.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 310 000 have died in Syria but less than 5 000 in Ukraine. The US War on Terror has cost a million lives and forced 35-50 million to become refugees and IDPs.
We seem to have to do with an outdated militarist institution that has proven itself unable to create peace – having tried to since 1949 – and which violates it own funding Treaty on a daily basis.
TFF Associates and myself are working on a larger report – ”The Abolish NATO Catalogue” – with articles, videos and arguments on why it is time to abolish it and create something entirely new. We also argue that today’s post-Ukraine NATO is the single most dangerous institution on Earth.
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Western decision-makers and mainstream media seem to see their role as simply selling NATO. They seldom, if ever, discuss NATO as such, its strong and weak sides. An examination of a 73-year old institution would be natural, like for decades there have been debates about how to reform the United Nations. But criticism of NATO as such is hard to find.
NATO is consistently called a “defensive” alliance. One must indeed wonder how the systematic use of that particular adjective across all mainstream media has come about since there exist no valid definition of defensiveness that could possibly include NATO.
Likewise, it’s taken for granted that NATO has contributed to peace. But what kind of peace? What other factors have contributed to it – and is it at all meaningful to use the word ’peace’ about today’s Euro-Atlantic space?
NATO simply exists. It’s a saviour. Like God exists in the lives of the believers who may then expect salvation. Its fundamentally militarist values come across to the taxpayers (who finance it) as benevolent and innocent in its role as the Creator of stability, security and peace – to repeat the Secretary-General’s unsubstantiated mantra at virtually every press conference.
While there can be – and has been – intelligent philosophical debates about what a world without God looks like, there has not yet been a broad discussion about what a world without NATO might look like.
Or, to put it differently, NATO has become a kind of God to those who believe in it and there is a scholarly, media and political priesthood that propagates it to such an extent that meaningful, rational analyses of what it’s good and not so good at hardly exist.
TFF Associate David R. Loy has a more philosophical – Buddhist – approach to militarism and writes in “Why We Love War”:
“If our modern, secularized world is plagued by an unacknowledged and therefore misunderstood sense of lack, it is not surprising that war too continues to be so attractive, even addictive. War can give us the meaning we crave, because it provides a reassuring way to understand what is wrong with our lives.
War offers a simple way to bind together our individual lacks and project them outside, onto the enemy. They are evil because they want to hurt us. Since we are merely defending ourselves, we can feel good about what we do to them. The karma that results is not difficult to understand: the cause of each war is usually the previous one, at least in part.
If war is a collective response to our collective problem with lack, we cannot expect war to cease until we find better ways to address that basic spiritual problem.”
The contemporary West’s unreflective belief in violence as the solution – or militarism as the new secular religion promising salvation – and our culture’s psycho-political need for constant enemy imaging often by sheer projection of one’s own dark sides – must come from somewhere. Perhaps the lack of meaning and the need for standing together around some values and some policy. Just think “Ukraine” which has become the single event that brought the otherwise rather declining and fragmented West together, at least for a short while.
This is of particular relevance also because NATO is an alliance based on nuclear weapons; it’s an alliance that is able to wipe out humanity many times over – that is, do harm way outside its circle of member states. It is also an alliance that reserves for itself the right to be the first to use nuclear weapons even against a conventional attack.
And it’s an alliance led by the United States with a global Empire, human history’s largest military expenditures – some 40% of the world’s military expenditures – which insists on being the unchallenged global power with 600+ military basis in 130+ countries and special forces in even more.
In other words, while there is a tendency to see NATO as a predominantly Euro-Atlantic alliance because all its members minus one are European, the alliance is a de facto global military power-projecting institution because of its leader’s global power reach and imperial ambitions. We see how, at the moment Art 5 is de facto applied to Ukraine, a non-member of NATO. And at NATO’s Madrid Summit and elsewhere in NATO, China is appointed the Enemy # 1 in the future.
Surreal or bizarre as it may seem, the idea that NATO might be a party to a conflict with Russia is also pretty foreign to itself and most of its advocates. The media choreography is simple: As a principle, NATO has never done anything wrong and continues to only promote “security, stability and peace” while Russia and its president act as a constant nuisance. It’s rather much like a homeowner who is not in a conflict with a thief – a criminal – but has to guard himself and his family against the thief’s evil plans.
Compared with being in a conflict, this self-understanding relieves the presumed innocent from any sense of responsibility.
From that stems the symbolic idea that NATO is a kind of home insurance. However, an insurance is paid only after the unwanted event and the destruction it wrought. Insurances do not prevent the accident, so this is pure nonsense but also never addressed.
Contrary to the pervasive positive but unreflective mainstream concepts and images of NATO that are disseminated virtually on a daily basis to millions, there is absolutely nothing sacrosanct about that old institution. And in contrast to the pious believers’ attitude to their God, NATO can and should be criticised. And replaced.
Let’s discuss the post-NATO world.
21. Ukraine Is Massing 1 Million Troops To Fight the Russian Military
Ukraine Is Massing 1 Million Troops To Fight the Russian Military
Ukraine is getting ready a massive army: The Russian military might have had some success in the Donbas lately, but the Ukrainians are amassing a huge army to launch a theater-wide counterattack.
Million Man Army
In an exclusive interview with the London Times, Ukrainian Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov said that Ukraine is preparing and training a one million army to counterattack and retake the occupied Ukrainian from the Russian forces.
According to Reznikov, the Ukrainian government is particularly concerned about the coastal areas in southeastern Ukraine because of their significant importance to the Ukrainian economy.
Before the war, the Ukrainian military had a professional force of approximately 200,000 and about three times that number in reserves. But almost five months of war have taken their toll.
The Ukrainian military has also been suffering heavy casualties, with estimates putting the number anywhere from 100 to 200 killed Ukrainian soldiers every day. If we add to this number between 200 to 600 wounded troops (historically, there have been three wounded for every killed soldier), we are coming up a pretty bleak figure of between 300 to 800 casualties every day for Kyiv.
So, in order to reach the numbers required for the “one million army,” the Ukrainians have to enlist and train a lot more men. And this is where the British come in.
The British Are Training Ukraine
The outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the British military would be training 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers every 120 days, or four months, to be combat-ready. And although we still don’t know who the next British Prime Minister will be, institutional continuity will most likely continue the process Johnson began.
The first class of 10,000 Ukrainians has already arrived in the United Kingdom and began training. More than 1,000 British troops from the 11th Security Force Assistance Brigade are running the program that is taking place across the U.K.
“This ambitious new training programme is the next phase in the UK’s support to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in their fight against Russian aggression,” British Defense Minister Ben Wallace said in a press release.
The training program is broken down into several courses and aims to take green recruits with no military experience whatsoever and make them proper soldiers that can fight and survive on the frontlines of the war. Some of the courses include basic soldiering, marksmanship, tactical first aid, fieldcraft, patrolling, and the law of armed conflict.
“Using the world-class expertise of the British Army we will help Ukraine to rebuild its forces and scale-up its resistance as they defend their country’s sovereignty and their right to choose their own future,” the British defense minister added.
The British trainers acquired AK rifles to ensure that the Ukrainian forces would be training on the weapon systems they would actually be using on the frontlines.
1945’s New Defense and National Security Columnist, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. His work has been featured in Business Insider, Sandboxx, and SOFREP.
22. Effectiveness of Ukraine's HIMARS Fuels Concern in Russia - The Moscow Times
As it should.
Effectiveness of Ukraine's HIMARS Fuels Concern in Russia - The Moscow Times
Pro-Kremlin figures have expressed rare public concern after Western-supplied weapons allowed Ukraine to carry out a series of successful attacks on Russian targets far behind the frontlines.
Russia has suffered “large losses in both men and equipment” in less than a week, according to Igor Girkin, a former commander of separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.
“The Russian air defense systems… turned out to be ineffective against massive strikes by HIMARS missiles,” Girkin, who also goes by the alias Strelkov, wrote on messaging app Telegram on Sunday.
Alexander Sladkov, a prominent war correspondent for state-run broadcaster Rossia 1, said Monday that Ukraine had successfully attacked Russian command centers.
“Ukrainian missiles and artillery have struck decision-making centers several times. With results. The centers are small but important,” Sladkov said on Telegram.
HIMARS can hit targets up to 70 kilometers away, meaning Ukrainian troops can deploy the wheeled, high-tech lightweight rocket launcher outside the range of most Russian artillery.
Reports from authorities in separatist- and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine also indicate that attacks are becoming both more frequent, and more deadly.
Officials in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said Monday that at least three people were killed and dozens injured in the village of Stepano-Krinka following a Ukrainian HIMARS attack.
Ukrainian forces also used HIMARS to hit the city of Alchevsk and the village of Irmino over the weekend, according to the separatist authorities.
Both Stepano-Krinka and Alchevsk are dozens of kilometers behind the frontline.
HIMARS systems in use. General Staff of Ukrainian Armed Forces
In a Telegram post accompanied by videos of large fires, Russian state television journalist Andrei Rudenko said Sunday that the Ukrainian side “most likely” used HIMARS to hit ammunition stores in the towns of Shakhtarsk and Torez.
“Strong fires and explosions… The situation is horrible,” Rudenko wrote.
The Ukrainian military carried out 14 strikes on Russian ammunition stores and military bases on Russian-occupied territory in the past two weeks, the BBC's Ukrainian service reported Monday. While it is unclear whether HIMARS were used in all cases, BBC Ukrainian said the strikes’ accuracy indicated they were responsible.
“Over the last 5-6 days, more than 10 large dumps for artillery and other ammunition, several oil depots, about 10 command centers and about the same number of troop gathering points were hit,” ex-rebel commander Girkin said.
Russia's Defense Ministry claimed Monday that it had used Kalibr cruise missiles to destroy Ukrainian ammunition depots in the Dnipropetrovsk region that included rockets for HIMARS, although the claim could not be independently verified.
Russia said last week that it had destroyed two HIMARS rocket systems and ammunition depots in eastern Ukraine, but both Ukrainian and U.S. officials rejected these claims.
Washington last week announced a new weapons package for Ukraine worth up to $400 million that includes four additional HIMARS.
The new deliveries will bring the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ HIMARS arsenal to 12.
Ex-rebel leader Strelkov said the Russian Armed Forces should be trying to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure so HIMARS systems and ammunition cannot reach the battlefield.
“When will Russia’s Armed Forces start fighting to their full capacity?” he wrote.
23. Their Son Is Talking About School Shootings. Should They Call the Police?
Every parent must put themselves in these shoes.
Their Son Is Talking About School Shootings. Should They Call the Police?
For parents faced with potentially violent behavior, reporting their children to police for an act they might commit is a wrenching decision
WSJ · by Tawnell D. Hobbs and Sara Randazzo
Officers searched her son’s bedroom, where they found his journal, later detailed in an arrest warrant. He wrote of committing a massacre, calling it “destiny.” He made threats about killing his mother, her boyfriend and students and staff at an Oklahoma City school where he once attended classes. He listed who would live or die. He wrote that he would then kill himself.
Police took her son to a hospital for a mental-health evaluation after Ms. Vasquez, a 42-year-old call center manager, signed an emergency order deeming him a danger. She drove away from the hospital after filling out admittance forms, tears ready to spill. It was a decision no parent expects to make, and one that some of her own family members criticized.
“I had to save all of us from what could happen in the future,” Ms. Vasquez said. “I will do anything to make sure that my kid’s safe, and I’m safe, and that the public is safe, and I won’t apologize for that.”
As mass shootings by young people have become more common, so have the questions asked afterward: Were there signs of potential violence? Could someone have done something? The questions have grown more urgent in the wake of attacks such as the one at a July Fourth parade in Highland Park, Ill., in which seven people were killed, and at a school in Uvalde, Texas, in May, where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.
For parents faced with troubling behavior, reporting their child to police for an act they might commit is a wrenching decision. These parents fear the consequences—emotional, social and legal. Even after making the decision, they often question whether police can steer their children to the help they need.
Ms. Vasquez and her son.
Photo: The Wall Street Journal
Ms. Vasquez shivers at the thought of missing something in her son’s case. Her son, she said, has spent much of his life in counseling since he started showing signs of emotional problems at age 3. She said he was hospitalized at 7 after trying to jump out of a moving car. More recently, she said, he has had angry blowups and punched holes in walls.
He wanted a gun, Ms. Vasquez told police, but she refused to buy him one. Although he didn’t have weapons to carry out an attack when she notified the police, she said, she worried he might meet others who could help.
Her son, now back with his mother, said in an interview that at the time his journal was found, he was angry with his life, including poor progress in therapy, a tough childhood in poverty, a sense of being abandoned by his mother and being bullied in school. He wasn’t consistently taking medication for his mental health at the time, he said, and his “paranoia was through the roof.”
As for focusing on mass shooters, he called it a passing interest.
He said he doesn’t believe his mother needed to involve the police and is still unhappy that she did so. Some of Ms. Vasquez’s relatives also questioned whether she had gone overboard in involving police.
“Some people thought that maybe she turned him over to just get him out of the house,” said Susan Tate, Ms. Vasquez’s mother. Ms. Tate said she had also observed her grandson’s behavioral problems and fixation on violence.
The journal found by police, detailed in the arrest warrant, contained depictions of violent scenes, such as people hiding under tables in a school room to escape a shooter, a pledge to wreak more havoc than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and an entry calling the anniversary of the Columbine school massacre a day of celebration.
Ms. Vasquez’s son said he’s changed a lot since the time he kept his journal.
Photo: The Wall Street Journal
“I wanna kill and get vengeance on humanity the govt. administration and the other kids,” he wrote. “I have few equals. I hate ‘em all! I’ve been betrayed this world doesn’t deserve me they’ll see they’ll all see.”
Ms. Vasquez had hoped that contacting the police would help get her son long-term residential mental-health care, something she had difficulty doing. Her son has a separate medical issue, she said, and facilities told her that they didn’t have the staff to address his needs.
Instead, she said, he received short-term inpatient care. He also received a felony charge for planning an act of violence.
Trouble finding mental-health services is a frequent problem for families trying to intervene before a child turns violent, said Frank Straub, a licensed therapist and the director of the Center for Targeted Violence Prevention, which maintains a database of incidents in which school violence plots were caught before they could be carried out. Community services often have long wait lists, he said, and a dearth of adolescent-focused psychiatrists means families often turn to pediatricians or family practitioners who aren’t always equipped to look for warning signs.
In a study funded by the Justice Department, released by Dr. Straub’s center last year, researchers looked at 171 averted school violence incidents since April 1999—defined as a shooting, bombing, stabbing or other violent plot that was planned to be carried out on school property. Most of the cases involved lone actors with plans to use firearms.
Peers, who are well-placed to hear classmates talk about plots or see posts on social media, reported violent plans in about 51% of the thwarted incidents, the analysis found. School staff, including resource officers, discovered the plot 18% of the time. Parents of the suspects reported about 4% of cases.
Blake Johnson, a 10-year-old in Hudson, Fla., remembered his mother’s lesson to speak out about things he considered important when a classmate revealed in a school restroom in 2019 that he had a gun in his backpack. Blake, then 8 years old, thought it was fake at first, but the classmate pulled out the gun to prove it and threatened to hurt him if he told anyone.
“He said he’d shoot me in the head,” Blake said, adding that a friend who was also there told him not to tell anyone. When the other boys in the restroom dispersed to go to class, Blake told a school security guard what happened. A search of the backpack found a loaded 9mm handgun, according to police.
Laynie Johnson, Blake’s mother, said that her son has had some anxiety since the incident and moved to another school last year after the student who had the gun returned to the campus.
Laynie and Blake Johnson in 2020.
Photo: Eve Edelheit for The Wall Street Journal
A 2019 Wall Street Journal analysis of nearly three dozen mass school shootings found that most shooters planned the attack weeks or months in advance. Those working in violence prevention say training peers, parents and community members to speak out if they see something troubling is key. Several states, including Colorado and Florida, have developed anonymous reporting systems that students are encouraged to use.
A study after the 2018 Parkland, Fla., high school shooting, in which 17 students and staff were killed, found 69 documented instances of violent or concerning behavior from the shooter, including killing small animals, posting about weapons on social media and physically harming family members.
In Centennial, Colo., at least 10 high-school students had concerns about a classmate’s gun ownership and anger problems, another study found. One spoke to a counselor about it before the classmate shot and killed a student and himself in 2013.
Failing to act has led to consequences for some parents, though it’s rare. In December, two parents were charged with involuntary manslaughter after their 15-year-old son was accused of killing four students with a handgun at his high school in Oxford, Mich. Prosecutors contended they bought him a gun even though they knew he was troubled. The shooter and his parents had met with school officials to discuss his behavior hours before the incident. The parents pleaded not guilty, as did their son, who faces charges of murdering the four students.
Nichole Schubert struggled with what to do after she found her son’s journal on a cluttered dining-room shelf in September 2019. In it, her then-17-year-old detailed a plan for an attack on April 20, 2020, the anniversary of the Columbine school massacre, according to a police report. He would start his rampage at 5 a.m. by killing his mom and her boyfriend, the journal said. He’d end it at school, arriving at 12:20 p.m. to start shooting.
“Kill everyone possible, fight to the death or kill self after maximum damage has occurred,” he wrote in the journal, according to the police report.
Her son, who is now 20 and who doesn’t live with her, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Schubert had found what she believed to be bomb-making materials in her son’s bedroom several months earlier. At the time, she said, her son was on probation for marijuana use and violating curfew, so she reported the incident to his probation officer. She said her son was obsessed with mass killers.
She debated what to do about the journal and carried it with her that day when she had new tires put on her car. She thought about the students at the school, a few of whom had babysat for her or were related to co-workers. Heartbroken, she called police.
‘As hard as it was to turn him in, I don’t have any regrets,’ Nichole Schubert said.
Photo: Michael Hanson for The Wall Street Journal
“I felt like he was safer in jail, in juvie, than if he was out amongst the community and the public,” said Ms. Schubert, a 41-year-old bartender and cocktail waitress who recently moved to Michigan. “I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn’t make that call and something happened.”
Police arrested the 17-year-old after he got home from school and retrieved a knife with about a six-inch blade from one of his pockets.
When asked by an officer if he understood his rights, he told the officer to “f— off,” the police report said. The teen pleaded guilty to a felony threat to bomb or injure property and two gross misdemeanors for harassment-domestic violence. He was banned from returning to the high school he had allegedly planned to attack. He received 18 months of community supervision, 20 hours of community service work and was credited with serving 30 days confinement.
“As hard as it was to turn him in, I don’t have any regrets,” said Ms. Schubert. She said her son, now a high-school graduate, still needs care for depression but is doing well and working. She said he still resents her for reporting him to the police.
In Oklahoma, Ms. Vasquez said the charge against her son, now 17, was dropped after he performed community service and received counseling. He is now enrolled in a new school district and attends a specialized school that accommodates students behind in credits or with behavioral issues, she said.
The Oklahoma City Public Schools district, where he was previously enrolled, declined to comment on his case. A district spokeswoman said it has a robust reporting system to track and monitor potentially violent incidents from students, and that it trains staff and encourages students, families and the community to report suspicious behavior to a 24/7 hotline.
Ms. Vasquez said the sudden death in February of her son’s stepfather, her ex-husband, has been difficult on him. Her son had been living with him.
Ms. Vasquez said that she loves her son and wants to repair their relationship, but she’s braced for more turmoil. He has said he wants to own a gun when he turns 18. She told him he would have to leave her home.
Her son said he believes he will do better once he’s away from his mother, because they “are just toxic together.” He hopes to graduate next year and wants to be a truck driver, after family members discouraged him from his interest in being a gunsmith. He said he’s changed a lot since the time he kept his journal.
“I was in a bad state of mind,” he said. “I’m much better than I was.”
WSJ · by Tawnell D. Hobbs and Sara Randazzo
24. Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes, and Disinformation A Prime
Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes, and Disinformation
A Primer
The purpose of this Perspective is to provide policymakers an overview of the deepfake threat. It first reviews the technology undergirding deepfakes and associated artificial intelligence (AI)–driven technologies that provide the foundation for deepfake videos, voice cloning, deepfake images, and generative text. It highlights the threats deepfakes pose, as well as factors that could mitigate such threats. The paper then reviews the ongoing efforts to detect and counter deepfakes and concludes with an overview of recommendations for policymakers. This Perspective is based on a review of published literature on deepfake- and AI-disinformation technologies. Moreover, leading experts in the disinformation field contributed valuable insights that helped shape the work.
25. Is A Good World Order A Dead One? – OpEd
Excerpts;
Thus, at least 40% of the countries of the world follow a “narrative” different from the narrative of the Western world order. This can perhaps be called a return to the English version of the “Levellers “in the face of supporters of the form of the full government of “Leviathan”. Levellers’ challenge to this unilateral American world order is specifically the equality of nations on the world stage, the polarization of the world, world peace, and the global response to pervasive crises. The consequence of the growth of this policy is the restoration of the identity and independence of political units around the world, which can be described as a confrontation with the agreement with Leviathan (USA).
In this situation, what appears to be in an existential crisis is the very issue of American world order. If the goals of the American post-Cold War order are a commitment to defend, maintain, and expand international order — which includes maintaining and overseeing common norms and laws, liberal economic systems, countering land occupation, respecting national independence, and advancing democratization policy- this order can be considered coming to an end, and its survival is something that exists only on paper and in the slogans of American politicians.
The same order that has caused so much chaos in the world that Henry Kissinger, one of the former architects of this order, claims in his book “World Order” that “ No truly ‘global’ world order’ has ever existed”.” Now, more than anything else, one must ask whether it is possible to occupy a country, to impose sanctions on it and pressure and threaten it to war under the pretext of maintaining the world order. Perhaps the death of this order is a sign that peace is coming.
Is A Good World Order A Dead One? – OpEd
The proxy war waged by the United States against Russia in Ukraine can be seen as a continuation of the same keyword that Clinton used in the Kosovo war: “globalization.” Addressing the American people in the midst of the 1999 US airstrikes in Kosovo, he said that the issue of Kosovo’s independence was about globalization and the fight against tribal thinking. The political use of the dualism of tribal thinking, in which national interests take precedence over globalization, is something that has gone beyond its original idea of a model of free trade and peace between nations.
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The American political structure believes in a kind of globalization that thinks above all about the dissolution of any traditional and political forms of human societies and does not believe in the survival of national governments, indigenous and local identities, and geographical boundaries. All people and nations must be integrated into the multinational corporations and the pro-Washington political economy network, which have come together as irresponsible and transnational institutions.
Rather than being the bedrock of today’s society’s advancement, globalization has become a model for Washington’s hot and cold wars, or policies of economic sanctions and maximum pressure through which nations are put under pressure to take advantage of governments. In other words, globalization has so far been nothing but the Americanization of the world and the expansion of the domination of financial institutions and multinational corporations, even with coups and wars to plunder resources and exploit cheap labor and outsource multiple political, economic and cultural crises of the United States from the center to the periphery.
The inherent problem of globalization is that governments and nations are not evolving institutions in American laboratories and are unwilling to give up without a struggle. This globalization emphasizes the threat of countries in the periphery and the suppression of anti-globalization and nationalist movements, rather than offering the olive branch and somehow focusing on the policy of improving the world’s living conditions. Eventually, the only possible solution is military advance in the form of NATO.
It does not matter who enters the White House in the US election. It does not matter what promises are made in the election campaign. In any case, the same economic policies that the world order has imposed even on the United States are being pursued. The result of globalization today is an anomalous order defined by the movement of capital, and these capitals are able to cross national and international borders effortlessly, even if human dignity is brutally exacerbated by rising income inequality and the undermining of the foundations of democracy. Because investing, especially in the financial capital sector, can leave a country in a very short time and create an acute financial crisis, governments feel themselves in the shackles of this existing order. In short, in the “Americanization of world financial sovereignty,” domestic companies merged into capital, replacing government and people sovereignty.
What has happened is a dual paradox of world order within American politicians, known as the “America First” or” America, World Ruler” strategy. The problem is that the amalgamation of these two strategies has turned the world into a hotbed of populist and extremist groups in the United States and Europe and takfiri and jihadist groups in the Middle East, and with the discrediting of “cosmopolitan ideas for peace” has finally given rise to cold and hot war.
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In this new capitalist order, led by the United States and even China, more than anything else, the nations of the world are under the illusion of peaceful coexistence and multiple crises, and fewer people or countries coexist for peace. This strategic paradox in international relations has, above all, divided the world into camps that must either side with anti-Western Russia or, like Europe, become America’s strategic slaves, Or, like China and India, their economic potentials should serve consumption in the United States.
To better understand the changing global situation, it may be necessary to refer to the global blockade of Ukraine. Contrary to what the Western media is reporting on a unified, free world led by the United States, a major confrontation is taking place behind the scenes. The UN General Assembly vote on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on March 2 and the suspension of Russia’s membership in the UN Human Rights Council on April 7 saw countries try to break free from the yoke of US dictatorial policy or, as Obama puts it, the doctrine of leading from behind.
In this regard, apart from the five countries (Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Russia and Syria) that voted against the March 2 resolution, 19 countries voted against the proposed US resolution on April 7. To these 19 countries, if we add the 58 countries that abstained from voting on the April 7 resolution, we get close to 77 countries, which make up 40% of the total 193 members of the United Nations. Interestingly, six of these members opposed to the US resolution are members of the G20 and have significant weight in world politics.
Thus, at least 40% of the countries of the world follow a “narrative” different from the narrative of the Western world order. This can perhaps be called a return to the English version of the “Levellers “in the face of supporters of the form of the full government of “Leviathan”. Levellers’ challenge to this unilateral American world order is specifically the equality of nations on the world stage, the polarization of the world, world peace, and the global response to pervasive crises. The consequence of the growth of this policy is the restoration of the identity and independence of political units around the world, which can be described as a confrontation with the agreement with Leviathan (USA).
In this situation, what appears to be in an existential crisis is the very issue of American world order. If the goals of the American post-Cold War order are a commitment to defend, maintain, and expand international order — which includes maintaining and overseeing common norms and laws, liberal economic systems, countering land occupation, respecting national independence, and advancing democratization policy- this order can be considered coming to an end, and its survival is something that exists only on paper and in the slogans of American politicians.
The same order that has caused so much chaos in the world that Henry Kissinger, one of the former architects of this order, claims in his book “World Order” that “ No truly ‘global’ world order’ has ever existed”.” Now, more than anything else, one must ask whether it is possible to occupy a country, to impose sanctions on it and pressure and threaten it to war under the pretext of maintaining the world order. Perhaps the death of this order is a sign that peace is coming.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
