Quotes of the Day:
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
- Leo Tolstoy
"Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining."
- Robert M. Hutchins
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
1. The Last Commander (General Miller)
2. Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran
3. Senior Biden officials finding that Covid lab leak theory as credible as natural origins explanation
4. U.S. Offers $10 Million Rewards In Effort To Stop Ransomware Attacks
5. First Woman Completes Training for Elite U.S. Navy Program
6. Biden’s Afghan blunder
7. How the Intelligence Community Can Get Better at Open Source Intel
8. The Road Ahead for Taiwan-US Relations
9. The U.S. Navy's leadership crisis | Opinion
10. G-7’s counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative is welcome, but needs more coherence
11. What Lies Between China’s Nationalism And Growth? – Analysis
12. China missing from itinerary of U.S. diplomat's second Asia tour
13. A good plan would deter China and protect Taiwan — but we don't have one
14. The Geopolitics Of Cuba Unrest – Analysis
15. Facebook catches Iranian spies catfishing US military targets
16. PETA demands Marines stop drinking snake blood in jungle training: A ‘gruesome frat party-like event’
17. Biden’s Cybersecurity Team Gets Crowded at the Top
18. Lawmaker: Special Operations Must Adapt to Gray Zone Conflict
19. The Iraqi Spies Who Helped Defeat ISIS (Book Review)
20. Airborne Assault to Occupy South China Sea Features?
21. The Next War’s ‘Butcher’s Bill’ Will Match WWII’s—Unless the US Adapts, Milley Says
1. The Last Commander (General Miller)
A good article about a good man given a tough and thankless job. There is probably no other uniformed person who has spent more time in Afghanistan than General Miller.
Conclusion:
“But when I arrived in Afghanistan with our forces in 2001, it was quite clear to us and the American people that we were here to protect our home. The men and women I served with understood the risks and the costs to their families, but we also knew we had that important objective to rally around.”
Over the years, as the deployments and inevitable roll call of casualties mounted and memories of 9/11 dimmed, that once simple calculus grew more complicated. Yet, as Miller pointed out in our interviews, in that long stretch of time the United States did not suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack, counter to what many terrorism experts had predicted at the time, and not because the terrorists quit trying.
“While each casualty and loss takes something away and hurts deeply, I’ve been able to focus on the overriding sense of purpose and goodness of the men and women I’ve served with and led, and the personal risk and sacrifice they’ve been willing to accept,” Miller wrote. “For most of us, and for me in particular that’s the place I’ve always been able to land. We do this to protect the American people and keep our homeland safe.”
Lately Miller has taken to reading books about other generals and officials who were ordered to wind down and end bitter wars, notably Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.” Sorely profiles legendary General Creighton Abrams, former chief of staff of the Army and namesake of the Abrams battle tank, who was the last U.S. commander of major forces in Vietnam. Abrams struggled late in the war with diminishing manpower and resources as he tried to prepare South Vietnamese forces to stand and fight on their own, even as North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces advanced, diplomats raced to find an elusive political resolution, and the clamor grew in Washington to bring the troops home.
In the final analysis, their efforts and the unfathomable questions would be judged by history. And as he hopes for a better ending in Afghanistan and prepares to retire, Scott Miller has made his peace with that fact. As the last commander of the final rotation, he would unpack the emotional piece when he finally makes it home from war.
The Last Commander
Magazine
General Austin “Scott” Miller found a new way to push the Taliban back in Afghanistan. Then, instead of pressing the fight, he became the man in charge of pulling America out.
Illustration by Valerie Chiang / AP, Getty Images
By JAMES KITFIELD
07/16/2021 04:30 AM EDT
James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress.
On a cool and clear October day in 2018, General Austin “Scott” Miller looked out from his helicopter at a landscape that mingled beauty and mystery, the towering peaks of the Hindu Kush giving way to a sea of dun-colored desert the farther south they flew. It was a land, he knew, that a soldier or an entire army could get lost in.
Miller was just weeks into his job as the top commander of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, but he and his senior leadership team had spent so many repeat deployments in Afghanistan over the previous two decades that the war could seem like a reunion, albeit one shadowed by tragedy. By the time he assumed command, some of the soldiers were the sons and daughters of old colleagues, young volunteers with no living memory of the terrorist attacks that brought America to this land two decades ago.
The operation in Afghanistan now was named Operation Resolute Support, and its mission had long since changed from U.S. troops directly fighting the Taliban to backstopping the Afghans’ own army and police. After 18 years of some level of American presence, the Taliban had been gaining power again, and the U.S.-backed Afghan government in Kabul was struggling to maintain control of the country.
Miller was the latest of 18 officers from seven countries to command the overall NATO deployment in Afghanistan. The final nine of them had been American generals, but Miller’s experience was uniquely well-suited to the job in front of him. A former elite Delta Force officer, Miller had spent much of his career commanding the Pentagon’s secretive “black operations” troops as they hunted and fought terrorists in some of the most hostile corners of the globe. On earlier Afghan deployments, Miller had been part of a team that helped start an innovative program called Village Stability Operations, in which U.S. special forces worked as trainers and mentors to local police and other authorities in Afghanistan’s many far-flung villages.
The program put the Americans in direct, consistent contact with small Afghan communities. And, as Miller recalled in an interview, the more he learned about the complex tribal dynamics in Afghanistan, the more he realized how much he would never fully understand about the country he was charged with stabilizing.
That experience also gave him contacts with a deep network of Afghan security officials down to the district level. Probably none was more effective and charismatic than police General Abdul Raziq, a police commander in his early 30s to whom Miller was traveling to consult. Many Afghans considered Raziq the most powerful government official in the former Taliban headquarters of Kandahar, a historic crossroads and still a stronghold for the insurgency.
When Miller spoke that October with Raziq and Kandahar’s provincial governor, the discussion only reinforced his sense of alarm about the stability of Afghanistan. The Taliban had launched a new offensive as he took command that summer, and intelligence indicated that the U.S.-backed government in Kabul securely held just over half of the country’s 407 districts. A terrorist organization called IS-Khorasan—the local affiliate of the Islamic State—had launched a series of high-profile bombings that had killed hundreds of civilians inside Afghan cities. Afghan president Ashraf Ghani had demanded the resignation of his entire national security team, creating additional upheaval and uncertainty for an incoming U.S. commander.
After meeting with Raziq and the provincial governor at the governor’s compound, Miller and his entourage were waiting for their helicopter to take them back to Kabul. As Miller stepped away from the Afghan officials to talk with some U.S. soldiers nearby, a loud burst of automatic weapons fire erupted only a few yards away on the helicopter landing pad. Miller drew his pistol and crouched behind a vehicle and directed others to do the same. The shooter, a Taliban infiltrator working as a security guard, was quickly gunned down. When the gunfire stopped, the provincial governor was wounded, along with Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Smiley and two other Americans. Two Afghan officials were dead, including Lt. Gen. Raziq.
It was clear to Miller that the U.S. needed a new approach, urgently.
“The killing of Raziq had a major impact on the psyche of the Afghans,” said Miller in an interview. “He had a larger-than-life reputation as this very anti-Taliban figure who was kind of invincible, and for many he was seen as the ‘Hero of Afghanistan.’ His death only exacerbated a very tenuous security situation.” As Miller put it: “My assessment was that the Taliban had seized the tactical initiative.”
Adopting ideas he’d absorbed commanding special forces in the fight against ISIS over the past few years, Miller quickly put into place a streamlined counterterrorism model of operations, using U.S. intelligence and precision airstrikes to help push back the Taliban, bolster Afghan forces and—crucially—drive Taliban leaders to make the necessary concessions in peace talks that had just begun the month before.
That deal, the Doha Agreement, was signed in February 2020. The U.S. agreed to withdraw all its troops by May 2021, and the Taliban agreed to make its own moves toward a sustainable peace.
All sides understood that time and patience for the long war in Afghanistan were running out in Washington. And as the U.S. military began to fly its troops out, stretching Miller’s resources thinner and thinner, the Taliban again went on the offensive. And instead of demanding that the Taliban honor their side of the agreement, President Joe Biden made the end official. Last April, he ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by no later than September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that drew the United States into its longest war.
The irony, in a war full of them, is that a commander almost uniquely qualified to fight it was instead ordered to walk America off the battlefield for good. And as helicopters and cargo planes rapidly moved U.S. troops and equipment out of bases in Afghanistan, Scott Miller has been charged with finding answers to the difficult questions the rapid American withdrawal has raised: Can Afghan security forces possibly hold without U.S. military advisers on the ground and U.S. helicopters and warplanes overhead? Can the Taliban be trusted in their promise not to let international terrorist groups like al Qaeda use the country as sanctuary from which to attack the West once again? Have the United States and its allies purchased enough progress in 20 years to avoid a repeat of Afghanistan’s 1990s civil war? With the Taliban on the rise again, what will become of those Afghans who put their faith in the U.S. and NATO enterprise, especially Afghan interpreters and civil society and women’s rights groups?
“Those questions weigh on you, and it’s not just me,” Miller said in an interview shortly before departing Afghanistan earlier this week. “There are a lot of other people in this ‘last rotation’ in Afghanistan that have served here on multiple deployments, and we all have relationships with the Afghan people … And even as we’re leaving, with the risk to the Afghan people and nation on the rise, I’ve been struck by how gracious they are towards us as we depart. So, we have felt a strong obligation to try and conduct this withdrawal in the right way, and not just to our Afghan partners. We feel that obligation to all those who served here, including those that served and went home wounded, and especially those who served and didn’t make it home.”
After recently vacating Bagram Air Base, the last and largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, Miller officially furled the mission flag and marked the symbolic end to Operation Resolute Support on July 12, the longest-serving U.S. combat commander. In a short farewell ceremony attended by many senior Afghan officials, Miller pledged that “the people of Afghanistan will be in my heart, and on my mind, for the rest of my life.”
Retired General Dave Perkins, Miller’s former boss as the head of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, knows something about the difficulty of the mission Miller was handed in April: Perkins helped spearhead the invasion of Iraq, and then eight years later he was tasked with helping to organize the withdrawal of all U.S. troops. Perkins said that Miller has had his hands full closing down forward operating bases, constantly redesigning a force protection scheme as his troop levels have dropped, maintaining the focus and morale of departing troops, all while trying his best to keep faith with the Afghan people.
“Scott Miller has never blinked an eye when given the hardest tasks, and he’s always had the discipline and commitment to do what he thinks is right, and that has meant doing his best to disengage in a way that the Afghan government doesn’t crumble, and people are not hanging onto our helicopters as they pull out,” said Perkins. “Because believe me, it’s a lot easier to invade a country than to leave it in an orderly manner.”
As of this writing, a force of roughly 650 U.S. troops now remains in-country to guard the U.S. Embassy and help secure the international airport in Kabul. Though President Biden last week pushed up the technical deadline for final withdrawal to August 31, Miller himself is now in transit back to the United States, and America’s longest war is, effectively, over.
In recent weeks, I’ve communicated with Miller in two in-depth phone interviews and a lengthy written correspondence and have spoken with a number of his peers and former mentors in the tight-knit community of senior U.S. military leaders and combatant commanders. What emerges is a picture of a preternaturally focused officer, one who avoids the media spotlight and publicity that some generals welcome. Many of his peers are convinced there was no one in uniform better qualified, by temperament or expertise in counterterrorism, to write the final chapter in America’s long post-9/11 wars.
Miller is known for a relatively quiet leadership style marked by careful listening, rather than the bluster and swagger of some senior officers. He is also famously well read, especially in military history; he’ll quote from memory General Ulysses S. Grant’s memos to his commanders on the eve of the Battle of Vicksburg, or Henry Kissinger’s musings from his memoir “Ending the Vietnam War.”
Miller’s career has seen him through a remarkable number of America’s most complex and difficult conflicts—and along the way he’s had a front-row seat to the steep costs of losing focus, or of wavering national commitment. As a 28-year-old Delta Force captain, he fought in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, in which 19 U.S. troops were killed; it was later made famous by the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.” As a special operations lieutenant colonel in Afghanistan in 2001, Miller participated in what seemed at the time like a quick victory in helping topple the Taliban regime from power in a matter of weeks—and surrounding Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants in the Tora Bora cave complex. Then U.S. commanders naively trusted Afghan warlords to close the noose, only to watch in frustration as they allowed bin Laden and al Qaeda’s senior leadership to melt away into the tribal lands of Pakistan.
Two years later, Miller was serving in Iraq, fighting an insurgency that the Defense Department didn’t yet acknowledge, when his vehicle was ambushed near Baghdad, and he was shot and wounded. He later returned to Iraq as Delta Force’s deputy commander and commander several times, taking part in the successful hunt for archterrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and running Special Operations Forces in brutal fighting in western Anbar Province, where terrorists were infiltrating from Syria. That operation was part of the largely successful U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq, and the “Anbar Miracle” that seemed to herald another victory—until the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal allowed al Qaeda in Iraq to reconstitute itself as the fearsome Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Miller returned to Afghanistan during the 2010-11 “surge,” when U.S. forces numbered more than 100,000, and returned yet again in 2013-14 to serve as commanding general of the Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan. He would command across both theaters of war during 2016-18 as head of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, operational headquarters for America’s elite commandos such as Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team Six.
His career has been built, in part, on his understanding of the on-the-ground dynamics of conflict. But by the eve of his departure from Afghanistan earlier this week, Miller and NATO’s Resolute Support Command had withdrawn its liaison officers in the field, and thus lost visibility into what is happening with the Afghan security forces trying to hold off the Taliban. Recent reports suggest the Taliban now control more than 160 of the country’s 407 districts—up from about 61 in 2018—with whole garrisons of Afghan troops surrendering, in some cases without a fight. The Afghan defense minister has ordered a “strategic consolidation” of his troops, concentrating them in the major cities while surrendering much of the countryside to the Taliban. In what some experts interpret as a sign of desperation, the Afghan government is even forming alliances again with independent armed militias with a history of animosity toward the Taliban, in a bid for survival if it comes to all-out civil war.
In a recent discussion with Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the seasoned diplomat who has led U.S. peace talks with the Taliban, Miller discussed the recent negative trend lines inside Afghanistan. The two Americans most personally identified with recent efforts to end the war agreed that Afghanistan was a peculiar country, where events can take a sharp turn very quickly. Miller acknowledged some pessimism in our interviews: There’s every possibility, he said, that Afghan Security Forces won’t be able to hold.
“The Afghan Security Forces almost to a unit are less confident, and its leaders are obviously worried, because a big part of this business is about confidence—and in the face of the Taliban’s aggressive offensive and the surrender of some ASF garrisons, that’s in short supply right now,” he told me.
The Ministry of Defense’s strategic consolidations of forces into the major cities is sound tactically, he said. “But the question is, will that be enough?”
Miller took command of Operation Resolute Support believing that commanders can learn more from the aspects of operations that are going badly than those that are going well. In 2018, that meant the 14,000 U.S. and 6,500 NATO troops and their leaders in Afghanistan as the bulwark of Resolute Support were learning a lot, and in a hurry.
Miller immediately set about establishing a high-tempo battle rhythm, an approach that came from the intense, physical culture of the Special Operations Forces. Each day began with physical training, even at the command level. Miller’s workday started with poring over a voluminous situation report detailing every significant event in the Afghan theater over the previous 24 hours, followed on most days by an in-depth briefing on the day’s operations and intelligence.
As a Delta Force commander in Iraq in the mid-2000s under the mentorship of then-JSOC commander General Stanley McChrystal, Miller had helped birth a new, relentless style of operations that McChrystal wryly called the “Amazon.com” of counterterrorism—using a mix of intelligence-gathering and surprise attacks to keep adversaries constantly off balance.
In adapting that model to Afghanistan, Miller started by reducing reports and other internal paperwork, cutting hundreds of positions at headquarters, and drafting some of the best officers from across the armed services, and from Special Forces, to come serve as liaisons coordinating operations with the Afghan security forces that were now supposed to be the country’s main defenders. The group of high achievers he assembled included noted leaders like Lt. Gen. James Rainey and Command Sergeant Major Tim Metheny, as well as standout performers from other NATO countries.
Carter Malkasian was a former State Department official with years of experience in Afghanistan, including as a senior adviser to Marine General Joseph Dunford, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Miller enlisted him as an adviser on the new ‘Ops Design.’ Though he’s been critical of the U.S. approach to Afghanistan, he saw Miller as a uniquely effective leader in that environment.
“None of his predecessors was able to create the kind of change at the tactical level achieved by General Miller,” Malkasian said in an interview. While close air support may sound like a matter of just dropping a lot of bombs, he noted, creating a system that is able to detect and quickly and accurately target the enemy in real time, with very few troops in-country, is a surprisingly complex art.
Malkasian called it “the most effective and efficient operational design that the United States had in two decades of war.”
Miller, he said, “created a machine that with a very small number of troops could launch so many accurate airstrikes that it was difficult for the Taliban to capture territory. I know because in our negotiations with Taliban leaders they constantly complained about the airstrikes, and they wanted them stopped.”
Miller told me in one of our interviews that he had learned from long experience never to become “seduced by direct action” into believing that the targeted killings or airstrikes were a war-winning strategy. Any gains they achieved even in reducing violence tended to be temporary. The strikes were a means to a long-term end: A political resolution to the conflict.
Miller thus dropped the reluctance of some of his earlier predecessors and fully supported peace talks with the Taliban. He traveled the region with Khalilzad to meet directly with Taliban leaders, including regular visits to Doha, Qatar, where a team of Taliban negotiators was staying.
Those negotiations culminated with the signing to much fanfare of the Doha Agreement in February 2020. In exchange for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by May 1, 2021, Taliban leaders agreed to make significant progress toward reaching a political power-sharing and peace agreement with Afghan government officials; reduce violence across the country; and demonstrate the will and ability to prevent groups like al Qaeda and ISIS from again using Afghanistan as a platform for terrorism aimed at the United States or its allies.
After Doha was signed, the U.S. military immediately began reducing force levels in Afghanistan as called for in the agreement. President Donald Trump had set a goal of just 2,500 troops in-country by the end of the year, and the intensity of Miller’s air campaign slackened noticeably as he lost forces and resources and focused on shrinking the U.S. footprint. The Taliban limited their direct attacks on U.S. personnel, but otherwise made no moves to live up to their end of the deal. Yet still the U.S. troop reductions continued apace.
By the time the Biden administration took charge earlier this year, the U.S. intelligence community had issued a classified assessment of the situation: If U.S. troops left before the Taliban and the Afghan government reached a firm power-sharing deal, the extremist group was likely to re-impose control on the Afghan people within two or three years. A congressionally mandated Afghan Study Group reported in February that it would likely take even less time than that for al Qaeda to reestablish a working base in Afghanistan.
When asked why the Taliban were never seriously pressured to hold up their end of the Doha bargain, Malkasian was blunt. “I think many military leaders and myself believed that if the Taliban failed to keep their promises to reduce violence, break ties with al Qaeda and engage in good faith dialogue with the Afghan government, then the United States would at some point respond by halting troop withdrawals,” he said. “Unfortunately, that never happened.”
Instead, after a lengthy internal policy debate, Biden announced the full withdrawal.
Senior U.S. military leaders had hoped to sustain a force of a few thousand troops in Afghanistan. (Miller, as an active-duty general, was consulted on the decision but has not made his own views public.) That, they thought, would be enough to continue some focused counterterror operations and backstop the Afghan Security Forces. But Miller also knew when he took the job as commander of Resolute Support that patience in Washington for the operation was nearly exhausted.
In the weeks after the order for full withdrawal was given—a “retrograde” is the official term—Miller and his team set about conducting what military leaders consider one of the single most difficult and risky operations in the Pentagon playbook: pulling out of a still contested battlespace. The logistics alone, of moving or disposing of mountains of military equipment while constantly shrinking and readjusting protection measures, were daunting. The roar of aircraft engines provided nearly constant background noise around Bagram in recent months as the U.S. military flew hundreds of loads of equipment and material out of the country, while designating thousands more pieces of equipment for destruction by the Defense Logistics Agency. In the process Miller’s command handed over seven bases to the Afghan military, finally passing along the keys to Bagram Air Base on July 2.
As he counted down to Zero Day for Operation Resolute Support, Miller’s focus also turned to an effort to create a continuing support structure for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the collective group of army, air force and police charged with keeping the Taliban at bay, which on paper still number more than 300,000 troops and police.
Some of the support will be financial: During a June trip to Kabul, Khalilzad promised Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that Washington will provide $3.3 billion annually for the next two years. The Pentagon is also exploring various options for providing the ASF training and logistical support from afar, for offering intelligence and reconnaissance help, and possibly for carrying out airstrikes to target terrorists from “over the horizon.” While none of that support is impossible on paper, all of it is extremely difficult and falls far short of ensuring the viability of the ANSF.
In the meantime, the Afghan defense minister has ordered a “strategic consolidation” of his troops, concentrating them in the major cities as a last defense while necessarily surrendering much of the countryside to the Taliban offensive. In what some experts interpret as a sign of desperation, the Afghan government is also once again forming alliances with independent armed militias with a history of animosity toward the Taliban, in a bid for survival if it comes to all-out civil war. A similar dynamic played out in Iraq when its government faced an existential threat from the advance of ISIS forces, and, though Iranian-backed Shiite militias were important in fighting the terrorists, they have broken the government’s all-important monopoly on the use of force, destabilizing a still fractured Iraqi state.
“Afghan government officials are not aligning themselves with militias because they fail to see the risks involved,” Miller said. “They are doing it because they think such alliances are necessary for their survival.”
As Zero Day approached and the situation continued to darken in Afghanistan, Miller was blunt in assessing the situation. He has never forgotten serving in Iraq in the early days of the conflict, when the powers that be in the Pentagon and Washington refused to admit even to themselves that the mission wasn’t accomplished, and that the U.S. was indeed fighting an organized insurgency.
Just in recent weeks Taliban insurgents have intensified battlefield attacks against government forces. A new U.S. intelligence assessment that takes note of those negative trends posits that the Afghan government could fall within six to 12 months of a U.S. military departure, as opposed to the two- or three-year window that the intelligence community assessed just months ago. Earlier this month, more than 1,000 Afghan troops fled into neighboring Tajikistan to escape the Taliban onslaught in the north, and the Taliban captured Afghanistan’s main border crossing with Iran to the west.
While there is no denying that the American public supports what they see as the long-overdue end to a “forever war,” the Afghans have acutely felt the U.S. decision to leave as abandonment. Miller registered the shock on the faces of Afghan government officials and security force leaders when they were informed of the decision to pull out all U.S. troops. He also noted the extreme nervousness and understandable worry of leaders of Afghan civil society and women’s rights groups.
“Civil society and women’s rights groups are very worried that the Taliban will once again take control of the country and return to the brutal ways of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in the 1990s,” Miller said. “And they should be, given the targeted killing taking place, the majority of it conducted by the Taliban.”
He was referring to an assassination and bombing campaign that has killed scores of Afghans this year, including the deputy governor of Kabul, the head of a radio station, a women’s rights activist and two female judges. A horrific terrorist bombing of the Sayed Al-Shuhada girl’s school in Kabul in May killed 85 Afghans and wounded 147 others, most of them young girls just released from class. Counterterrorism experts suspect ISIS-Khorasan, which has conducted similar attacks in the past. Videos have also recently surfaced of Taliban fighters summarily executing 22 unarmed members of an Afghan Special Forces unit after it surrendered.
Miller certainly has no confidence in Taliban assurances that Afghan women will still be allowed to go to school and enter the workforce in areas they control, or that the group is ready to break long and enduring ties to al Qaeda terrorists.
“There is a public face of the Taliban negotiators and spokesmen in Doha that make public statements like that, and they sound rational, but I contrast that to what we’re seeing on the battlefield and in the treatment of people in places already under Taliban control,” Miller said. While there are pragmatists under the Taliban umbrella who understand that aligning themselves once again with al Qaeda is risky, he noted, there are also true believers who will never break those ties for ideological and cultural reasons. “The danger, of course, is that the pragmatists don’t win that internal argument. As I sit here today, we see al Qaeda terrorists present today in Afghanistan among the Taliban fighters.”
In the face of Taliban gains, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently created a high-level team to help coordinate with the State Department the possible evacuation of tens of thousands of Afghans who served as interpreters, drivers and assistants to U.S. forces and diplomats, possibly to the U.S. territory of Guam, where their visa requests to move to the United States could be processed. Such an emergency evacuation would present the Pentagon with another in a long list of “Sophie’s Choices,” and make parallels to Saigon in 1975 unavoidable, given the U.S. military’s emergency evacuation of more than 100,000 South Vietnamese to Guam that year.
“I’m confident militarily that we could execute an evacuation plan, but that decision lies with policy makers [in Washington],” said Miller. “You would have to worry about what such an exodus would look like to those Afghans left behind, and how it would impact their outlook on the likely outcome of the conflict.”
Retired General Dave Rodriguez, a four-star general who previously commanded the International Security Assistance Force - Joint Command in Afghanistan, and served there with Miller, notes that the United States has a checkered history in withdrawing U.S. military forces from inconclusive wars, notably in Iraq and Vietnam. “Scott Miller had to spend a lot of time making sure his people remained focused on the really demanding mission at hand and getting out in the best possible manner,” he said. “But believe me, memories of Army helicopters pulling people off the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975, and the chaotic turn this type of mission can take, all that goes through your mind as a commander.”
Earlier this week, General Scott Miller stood on a podium half a world away from the leaders in Washington who had ordered him to pull out, trying to make sense of the memories and inevitable flood of emotions. Looking out over the gathering of senior Afghan government and U.S. military officials, he spoke of the sense of purpose that had united them in this dangerous and often bloody mission over so many years, and the terrible sacrifices it exacted. Over the 20 years since U.S. warplanes and helicopters first blackened the skies over Afghanistan 2,312 U.S. service members had been killed in action. More than 20,000 had been wounded, many of them grievously.
“As I depart Afghanistan, I believe that it’s very appropriate to remember sacrifice. The countries that have served here, many have lost service members and civilians. Our Afghan partners have lost service members, they’ve lost civilians,” Miller told the crowd. “Over time, our job is now just not to forget. With the families that have lost people across this conflict, it will be important to them to know that someone remembers, someone cares, and that we’re able to talk about that in the future.”
Twenty years earlier, Miller had also been gathered with fellow soldiers, this time for a backyard barbecue on Memorial Day. At midday they had marked the occasion by calling out the names of their fallen comrades with a toast. The younger members of the unit recited the names of the older members fallen in battle to create a shared legacy and bond.
Just a few months after that 2001 barbecue, terrorists flew commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and in response the U.S. sent Miller and Delta Force into Afghanistan. Over the next 20 years, the recitations of the names of the fallen at Memorial Day gatherings of the U.S. military grew steadily longer. Miller would lose friends and innocence in roughly equal measure.
Was it worth it? The question is never far from the mind of military commanders at the end of a combat deployment, and I asked him directly in our first interview. At the time, he offered a perfunctory answer about victories and failures and the need at some point to go back and do “an honest evaluation” of both, so the United States would be better prepared in the future.
Days later, I received something unexpected: a lengthy letter from Miller over email, wrestling with the question far more deeply.
“Jim, I thought I could provide better and more thoughtful answers to your questions. I also probably should have picked a better day than Memorial Day to speak with you—not surprisingly that day hit me hard this year especially—perhaps it’s the 20-year mark or the closing chapter of Afghanistan,” Miller wrote.
“You asked me if it was ‘worth it?’ That’s obviously a tough question in the best of times—and certainly in the shadow of the losses it is even more difficult. As a leader, and I know that I’m not unique in this, I am often asked this question by family members, and sometimes by the forces that I lead. And knowing the cost of each fatality or hard wounded—each casualty hurts deeply, and they always should hurt—sometimes it’s difficult to know whether the casualty on a target on a given day was worth it.
“But when I arrived in Afghanistan with our forces in 2001, it was quite clear to us and the American people that we were here to protect our home. The men and women I served with understood the risks and the costs to their families, but we also knew we had that important objective to rally around.”
Over the years, as the deployments and inevitable roll call of casualties mounted and memories of 9/11 dimmed, that once simple calculus grew more complicated. Yet, as Miller pointed out in our interviews, in that long stretch of time the United States did not suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack, counter to what many terrorism experts had predicted at the time, and not because the terrorists quit trying.
“While each casualty and loss takes something away and hurts deeply, I’ve been able to focus on the overriding sense of purpose and goodness of the men and women I’ve served with and led, and the personal risk and sacrifice they’ve been willing to accept,” Miller wrote. “For most of us, and for me in particular that’s the place I’ve always been able to land. We do this to protect the American people and keep our homeland safe.”
Lately Miller has taken to reading books about other generals and officials who were ordered to wind down and end bitter wars, notably Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.” Sorely profiles legendary General Creighton Abrams, former chief of staff of the Army and namesake of the Abrams battle tank, who was the last U.S. commander of major forces in Vietnam. Abrams struggled late in the war with diminishing manpower and resources as he tried to prepare South Vietnamese forces to stand and fight on their own, even as North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces advanced, diplomats raced to find an elusive political resolution, and the clamor grew in Washington to bring the troops home.
In the final analysis, their efforts and the unfathomable questions would be judged by history. And as he hopes for a better ending in Afghanistan and prepares to retire, Scott Miller has made his peace with that fact. As the last commander of the final rotation, he would unpack the emotional piece when he finally makes it home from war.
2. Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran
Wow.. If this reporting is accurate...just wow.
Again this is going to be studied in civil-military relations and PME leadership classes for decades to come.
Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran
Inside the extraordinary final-days conflict between the former President and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
By Susan B. Glasser
July 15, 2021
The last time that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with President Donald Trump was on January 3, 2021. The subject of the Sunday-afternoon meeting, at the White House, was Iran’s nuclear program. For the past several months, Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power. The chairman secretly feared that Trump would insist on launching a strike on Iranian interests that could set off a full-blown war.
There were two “nightmare scenarios,” Milley told associates, for the period after the November 3rd election, which resulted in Trump’s defeat but not his concession: one was that Trump would try “to use the military on the streets of America to prevent the legitimate, peaceful transfer of power.” The other was an external crisis involving Iran. It was not public at the time, but Milley believed that the nation had come close—“very close”—to conflict with the Islamic Republic. This dangerous post-election period, Milley said, was all because of Trump’s “Hitler”-like embrace of the “Big Lie” that the election had been stolen from him; Milley feared it was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.
To prevent such an outcome, Milley had, since late in 2020, been having morning phone meetings, at 8 A.M. on most days, with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in the hopes of getting the country safely through to Joe Biden’s Inauguration. The chairman, a burly four-star Army general who had been appointed to the post by Trump in 2019, referred to these meetings with his staff as the “land the plane” calls—as in, “both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck, we’re in an emergency situation. Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January.”
This extraordinary confrontation between the nation’s top military official and the Commander-in-Chief had been building throughout 2020. Before the election, Milley had drafted a plan for how to handle the perilous period leading up to the Inauguration. He outlined four goals: first, to make sure that the U.S. didn’t unnecessarily go to war overseas; second, to make sure that U.S. troops were not used on the streets of America against the American people, for the purpose of keeping Trump in power; third, to maintain the military’s integrity; and, lastly, to maintain his own integrity. He referred back to them often in conversations with others.
As the crisis with Trump unfolded, and the chairman’s worst-case fears about the President not accepting defeat seemed to come true, Milley repeatedly met in private with the Joint Chiefs. He told them to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump and not to carry out any such orders without calling him first—almost a conscious echo of the final days of Richard Nixon, when Nixon’s Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, reportedly warned the military not to act on any orders from the White House to launch a nuclear strike without first checking with him or with the national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger. At one meeting with the Joint Chiefs, in Milley’s Pentagon office, the chairman invoked Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, saying they should all hang together. To concerned members of Congress—including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—and also emissaries from the incoming Biden Administration, Milley also put out the word: Trump might attempt a coup, but he would fail because he would never succeed in co-opting the American military. “Our loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution,” Milley told them, and “we are not going to be involved in politics.”
This account of a behind-the-scenes struggle over Iran involving Milley and Trump—a secret backdrop to the public drama unleashed by Trump’s unprecedented refusal to accept the Presidential-election results—comes from some of the nearly two hundred interviews, with a variety of sources, that I have conducted along with my husband, the Times reporter Peter Baker, for a book on the Trump Presidency that will be published next year. Some of the other details reported here about Milley’s actions have been disclosed in recent days by the authors of two new books about Trump and 2020—Michael Bender, of the Wall Street Journal, and Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, of the Washington Post—and been independently confirmed by me. Milley has not addressed the revelations publicly.
In a statement released on Thursday, reacting to reports about the Rucker and Leonnig book, Trump said, “I never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government.” He added, “If I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley.” Trump said he selected Milley for the post only because he wanted to spite his then Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, who, he said, “could not stand him.” “I often act counter to people’s advice who I don’t respect,” Trump noted. The former President posited that Milley, a career military officer, was allowing these accounts to circulate “to curry favor with the Radical Left.”
Milley had been in full-alarm mode since the summer of 2020. On June 1st, Trump had used the general as a prop in his infamous Lafayette Square photo op: Trump had marched through the plaza minutes after it had been violently cleared of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters, and following him was Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a pack of his White House advisers, and Milley, who was dressed in combat fatigues, as if at war inside America. Milley, an Irish-Catholic from outside Boston who worships the Constitution and the military’s tradition of political neutrality, considered that photo op his “Damascus moment,” as he would later call it: a few short minutes of misjudgment that would haunt him forever. He considered resigning but instead decided to do his penance. “I’ll fight from the inside,” he told his staff. The following week, during a previously scheduled commencement address, he apologized publicly for taking part in a political display that was completely inappropriate for the leader of America’s apolitical armed forces.
On June 3rd, in the Pentagon briefing room, Esper announced that he was opposed to invoking the Insurrection Act against protesters and said that he tried to remain apolitical in his job. Soon after Esper’s statement to the press, Esper, Milley, and the CENTCOM commander, Frank Mackenzie, were scheduled to attend a White House meeting on Afghanistan. Trump, enraged, lit into Esper before Milley could even sit down. The President went “apeshit” on Esper, Milley told associates, one of the worst such reamings-out he had ever seen. Trump would go on to fire Esper days after he lost the 2020 election. Milley told his aides that he, too, was prepared to be fired, or even court-martialled. In another meeting after Milley’s speech, Trump, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, demanded to know why Milley had apologized; apologies, Trump told him, according to an account that Milley later repeated, are a sign of weakness. “Not where I come from,” Milley replied, as he later told associates. Milley said he had to ask for forgiveness because he was a soldier in uniform who did not belong at a political event. “I don’t expect you to understand,” Milley had said, “It’s an ethic for us, a duty.” (In his statement on Thursday, Trump referenced his anger at Milley’s apology. “I saw at that moment he had no courage or skill, certainly not the type of person I would be talking ‘coup’ with. I’m not into coups!”)
A running concern for Milley was the prospect of Trump pushing the nation into a military conflict with Iran. He saw this as a real threat, in part because of a meeting with the President in the early months of 2020, at which one of Trump’s advisers raised the prospect of taking military action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons if Trump were to lose the election. At another meeting, at which Trump was not present, some of the President’s foreign-policy advisers again pushed military action against Iran. Milley later said that, when he asked why they were so intent on attacking Iran, Vice-President Mike Pence replied, “Because they are evil.”
In the months after the election, with Trump seemingly willing to do anything to stay in power, the subject of Iran was repeatedly raised in White House meetings with the President, and Milley repeatedly argued against a strike. Trump did not want a war, the chairman believed, but he kept pushing for a missile strike in response to various provocations against U.S. interests in the region. Milley, by statute the senior military adviser to the President, was worried that Trump might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified. Trump had a circle of Iran hawks around him and was close with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was also urging the Administration to act against Iran after it was clear that Trump had lost the election. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley would say.
Finally, on January 3rd, after Trump had flown back from his Christmas vacation at Mar-a-Lago, he convened the Oval Office meeting on Iran, asking his advisers about recent reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear activities. Both Mike Pompeo and the national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien, told Trump that it was not possible to do anything militarily at that point. Their attitude was that it was “too late to hit them.” After Milley walked through the potential costs and consequences, Trump agreed. And that was that: after months of anxiety and uncertainty, the Iran fight was over.
At the very end of the meeting Trump brought up the forthcoming rally of his supporters on January 6th, asking Milley and the acting Defense Secretary, Christopher Miller, if they were prepared for what Trump had already promised, on Twitter, would be a “wild” protest. It was a short conversation, Milley later recalled to associates, no more than a couple of minutes at the end of an hour-long meeting. “It’s gonna be a big deal,” Milley heard Trump say. “You’re ready for that, right?” It was the last time the President would ever speak to his Joint Chiefs chairman.
Just three days later, on January 6th, a version of Milley’s nightmare scenario played out anyway: an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to stop Congress from ratifying Biden’s victory. Milley had not envisioned it, not exactly—his fears had been largely about street violence, involving running battles between pro-Trump thugs and left-wing opponents that Trump might use as a pretext for demanding martial law. This was the analogy to Germany in the nineteen-thirties that Milley had in mind. When January 6th happened, it wasn’t quite like that, of course. But Milley told others on that awful day that what they had dreaded had come to pass: Trump had his “Reichstag moment” after all.
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3. Senior Biden officials finding that Covid lab leak theory as credible as natural origins explanation
While there will be (and are) the inevitable "I told you so's" I am reminded of a few wise quotes.
"Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?" Dr. Paul Samuelson, who was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in economics.
"Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit. Its only advantage, so far as I have been able to see, is that it spans change. A young person sees the world as a still picture, immutable. An old person has had his nose rubbed in changes and more changes and still more changes so many times that he knows it is a moving picture, forever changing. he may not like it – probably doesn't; I don't – but he knows it's so, and knowing it is the first step in coping with it."
- Robert Heinlein - Time Enough for Love
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
- John Adams
General Melchett:
“If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.” (Blackadder Goes Forth)
“You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters.”
- Plato
Senior Biden officials finding that Covid lab leak theory as credible as natural origins explanation
CNN · by Natasha Bertrand, Pamela Brown, Katie Bo Williams and Zachary Cohen, CNN
Washington (CNN)Senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild -- a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory.
Still, more than halfway into President Joe Biden's renewed 90-day push to find answers, the intelligence community remains firmly divided over whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab or jumped naturally from animals to humans in the wild, multiple sources familiar with the probe told CNN.
Little new evidence has emerged to move the needle in one direction or another, these people said. But the fact that the lab leak theory is being seriously considered by top Biden officials is noteworthy and comes amid a growing openness to the idea even though most scientists who study coronaviruses and who have investigated the origins of the pandemic say the evidence strongly supports a natural origin.
Current intelligence reinforces the belief that the virus most likely originated naturally, from animal-human contact and was not deliberately engineered, the sources said. But that does not preclude the possibility that the virus was the result of an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronavirus research was being conducted on bats -- although many scientists familiar with the research say such a leak is unlikely.
On Thursday, the director-general of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it had been "premature" to dismiss the possibility that a lab leak had spawned the pandemic and urged China to provide "direct information on what the situation of these labs was before and at the start of the pandemic."
Also on Thursday, China's foreign ministry spokesperson released a statement saying that "since the beginning of the epidemic, China has taken a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude in tracing the origins of the virus."
As more US officials have come to see the lab leak theory as credible, their tone toward Beijing has also become firmer. Days after Biden announced the renewed probe, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the administration had been pressuring Chinese officials through diplomatic channels to allow international investigators full access to the data China collected in the early days of the outbreak.
For their part, scientists who have found strong genetic evidence that the virus came from an animal say they also would like access to what China knows about the beginnings of the pandemic, saying they can't make their case without access to early samples.
As the review has progressed, however, the White House has begun making public threats as well.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during a press briefing on February 4, 2021.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan warned Beijing of potential consequences last month, telling Fox News that China will face "isolation in the international community" if it does not cooperate with probes moving forward. He told CNN's State of the Union that same day that "if it turns out that China refuses to live up to its international obligations, we will have to consider our responses at that point."
A source familiar with the ongoing review said that several top administration officials, including Sullivan, view the accidental lab leak theory as equally plausible to the natural origins theory. Intelligence agencies that were skeptical of the lab leak theory a year ago, like the CIA, also now view it as a credible line of inquiry, this person said.
"There has been a shift in their point of view," this person added.
'Key intelligence needs'
While many individual officials hold their own personal opinions as to the likely origin of the pandemic, with some finding the lab leak theory more credible than others as they continue to receive and interpret the intelligence, people familiar with the probe said no one official's opinion is driving the pace or direction of the overall review.
Political appointees have sought to give the intelligence community and national labs wide latitude to complete the review without dictating their findings, and US officials say CIA Director Bill Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and other top intelligence officials are getting regular briefings on the progress.
A memo distributed to the intelligence community on June 11 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and obtained exclusively by CNN, tasked officials with obtaining more data on both the animal and lab leak theories, citing "key intelligence needs" that could help determine the origins of the virus.
The memo called for more examination of several topics including any "detections of the virus in wild or domestic animals," the "breadth of high-risk Chinese and regional wildlife activities," any viruses that "could serve as the backbone for genetic engineering purposes," and the "breadth of Chinese biological research and related activities."
The memo also called on the intelligence community to study the "breadth of Chinese actions that may have inhibited World Health Organization or other origins investigations."
Intel community still split
The intelligence community has also been consulting with outside experts and examining raw information that may have been missed— including information the State Department had collected in the Trump administration — and analyzing more open source information, such as peer reviewed studies out of China, said a source with knowledge of the probe.
People familiar with the progress of the review, however, said the intelligence community as a whole is still in much the same place it was when Biden ordered his review in late May: Two agencies assess with low to moderate confidence that the virus originated naturally, while one assesses with the same lukewarm confidence that it escaped from a lab.
In an interview with CNN, Bill Evanina, the top counterintelligence official under President Donald Trump, said that early on the intelligence community did not prioritize determining the origins of Covid the way it has now with the 90-day review.
"Identifying the origins of the pandemic probably did not rise to a level of weapons of mass destruction, or identifying the plans and intentions of foreign leaders," Evanina said.
The person familiar with the probe said there will likely not be a definitive answer as to Covid's origins at the end of the 90-day review— instead, any final assessment will likely lay out both theories and evaluate their pros and cons. The source said the relationship with China is too delicate to make an endorsement of one theory over another without smoking gun evidence, which doesn't exist right now.
"As I've listened to the analysts, I really see why it is that they perceive these two theories as being in contest with each other, and why it's very challenging for them to assess one over the other," Haines, the national intelligence director, told Yahoo! News in late June.
Asked directly if she had a feeling which competing possibility was more plausible, she replied: "I don't."
Gaining traction
For the better part of 2020, advocates for the lab leak theory had to fight against claims they were being xenophobic or racist — in part thanks to anti-Chinese rhetoric from then-President Trump, who embraced the theory. An inquiry launched last fall by Trump's State Department, which sought to investigate whether China's biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemic's origin in Wuhan, was shut down early on in the Biden administration.
Residents walk in front of a closed of Huanan seafood market on February 9, 2021 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.
An open letter published in February 2020 in the Lancet, an influential scientific journal, also set the tone early by declaring the virus to have a natural origin.
But the lab leak theory has gained more traction in recent months, especially following reports that the intelligence community found evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell seriously ill with a mysterious virus in November 2019 -- although it's not clear whether they contracted Covid-19 and no further evidence has emerged to corroborate that report.
The existence of another classified report issued last year by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which concluded it was possible that Covid-19 might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, also became public.
Popular opinion has also shifted.
A POLITICO-Harvard poll conducted earlier this month found that 52% of US adults now believe Covid-19 leaked from a lab, up from 29% in March 2020.
"The growing public discourse has sharpened the [Science] Committee's focus on several topics within our jurisdictional mandate," said an aide to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, one of a handful of panels on Capitol Hill that is now actively investigating the matter.
The search for evidence
"We're hoping to find a smoking gun, but it might not happen," Haines told Yahoo.
Pandemics in the past have emerged from natural transmission through animals, known as zoonotic transmission, and it often takes months or years to discover the host that the virus passed through as it adapted to infect humans. In some cases, as in Ebola, the original natural source has never been identified. It took years to find the evidence that an animal called a civet was the source of the 2003-2004 SARS outbreak. Despite tests of thousands of animals, the host for SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be found -- but scientists say China's not giving them the access they need to find the source.
But there is also no smoking gun for the lab leak theory, according to multiple sources.
Still, the renewed acknowledgment of the lab leak theory, coupled with fierce political interest on Capitol Hill, has spawned a number of congressional investigations that advocates say have developed new evidence.
Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, plans to release a Covid-19 origins report at the end of this month that stitches together a narrative of the lab leak theory and makes "a pretty declarative statement," according to a congressional aide.
"I believe we have found the answer to the question," McCaul proclaimed at a recent GOP hearing on the pandemic's origins.
CNN · by Natasha Bertrand, Pamela Brown, Katie Bo Williams and Zachary Cohen, CNN
4. U.S. Offers $10 Million Rewards In Effort To Stop Ransomware Attacks
RFE/RL is broadcasting this message into Russia. WIll there be any takers?
I think this is a useful transition for State's Rewards for Justice program which must of us associate with counter terrorism.
U.S. Offers $10 Million Rewards In Effort To Stop Ransomware Attacks
July 16, 2021 06:23 GMT
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U.S. Offers $10 Million Rewards In Effort To Stop Ransomware Attacks
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The United States is offering $10 million rewards for information leading to the identification of cybercriminals after a series of ransomware attacks by hackers believed to be located in Russia.
The U.S. State Department said in a statement on July 15 that it would pay $10 million to anyone who can identify or locate a person who attacks U.S. critical infrastructure online "while acting at the direction or under the control of a foreign government."
The rewards are part of an existing State Department program called Rewards for Justice. It will offer a dark web channel to help protect the safety of any tipsters. Possible relocation and reward payments by cryptocurrency may be available to eligible sources, it added.
U.S. officials have said that many of the recent ransomware attacks originate in Russia, but a link between the cybercriminals and the Russian government has not been established. Russia denies responsibility.
President Joe Biden raised cybersecurity last month in his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and last week in a phone call urged Putin to "take action" against ransomware groups operating in Russia.
Biden told Putin that the United States will take "any necessary action" to defend Americans and critical infrastructure threatened by cyberattacks, the White House said.
The U.S. on July 15 also unveiled a website that offers guidelines to businesses, groups, and individuals on how to protect themselves and how to respond to attacks.
In another move, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said it would work on more rapid tracing of ransomware proceeds, which are paid in virtual currency.
The moves are an attempt to "bring all our tools to bear” against cyberattacks, Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
The most recent attack exploited a software product of U.S. company Kaseya and affected an estimated 1,500 businesses around the world. Other prominent ransomware attacks this year disrupted a major U.S. fuel pipeline and a Brazilian meat processor.
Some $350 million was paid to malicious cyberactors last year, a spike of 300 percent from 2019, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
With reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2021 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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5. First Woman Completes Training for Elite U.S. Navy Program
It is interesting the NY Times would dredge up the Katie Wilder story as part of reporting on the news member of the SWCC and Naval Special Warfare team
First Woman Completes Training for Elite U.S. Navy Program
The Navy said the woman was the first graduate of a special warfare training pipeline that feeds the Navy SEALs and other elite commando forces.
SEAL candidates in Coronado, Calif., last year.Credit...Mc1 Anthony Walker/U.S. Navy, via Associated Press
By
July 16, 2021
A woman has joined a United States Navy special warfare unit for the first time, the latest gender barrier to fall in the five years since women became eligible to apply for any combat job in the military.
The service on Thursday said the woman was the first female graduate from a Navy special warfare training pipeline that directly supports the SEALs and other elite commando units.
A Navy spokeswoman said the woman would not be identified, which is a standard policy for members of the special forces.
In a statement, Rear Adm. Hugh W. Howard III, the commander of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command, said the woman’s graduation represented “an extraordinary accomplishment.”
“Like her fellow operators, she demonstrated the character, cognitive and leadership attributes required to join our force,” he said.
The Navy said in a news release that the servicewoman was among 17 graduates of a program to become what it calls special warfare combatant-craft crewmen.
S.W.C.C. personnel specialize in what the Navy calls “covert insertion and extraction” operations using small, stealthy, heavily armed watercraft capable of high speeds that can operate independently, or be delivered by larger ships and helicopters.
In addition to receiving training in weapons and navigation, S.W.C.C. sailors also go through parachute training in order to drop their speedboats into the ocean from cargo planes, such as during the 2009 mission to rescue Americans aboard the hijacked ship Maersk Alabama in the Indian Ocean.
Only about 35 percent of S.W.C.C. candidates graduate, the Navy said.
The woman who graduated on Thursday will be among the operators on three special boat teams that transport Navy SEALs and conduct their own classified missions, The Associated Press reported.
She is one of 18 women who have tried out to be a S.W.C.C. or a SEAL, the spokeswoman said. Fourteen of them did not finish the special warfare training. Three other women are currently training to become Navy SEALs or S.W.C.C. operators, the spokeswoman said.
The share of women in the U.S. military has been inching upward for decades. When the draft ended in 1973, women accounted for 2 percent of enlisted forces and 8 percent of the officer corps in the U.S. military, according to an analysis of Defense Department data by the Council on Foreign Relations that did not include statistics from the U.S. Coast Guard. By 2018, those figures had risen to 16 percent and 19 percent.
Chief Master Sgt. JoAnne S. Bass of the U.S. Air Force became the first woman to serve as the highest ranking noncommissioned member of a U.S. military service.
Forty years earlier, another woman, Kate Wilder, fought for her right to be recognized after she passed the Special Forces Officer Course but was told by the head of the school that she would not be graduating.
In 1981, after an Army investigation and about six months after she finished the course, she was assigned the “5 Golf” code for Special Forces officers and sent a certificate of graduation backdated to Aug. 21, 1980.
She retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2003 after 28 years of service, proudly wearing her Special Forces tab for the remainder of her career.
But for all the recent advances, even high-ranking female officers still face gender-based discrimination.
6. Biden’s Afghan blunder
Would this really be a better option?
Biden had a better option: the US could have maintained a small residual force in Afghanistan, in order to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces. Yes, that would have violated the deal Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, struck with the Taliban in February 2020. But the Taliban have already violated that Faustian bargain. Biden was happy to overturn many of Trump’s other actions, making his insistence on upholding this deal difficult to understand.
Biden says the US is ‘developing a counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability’ that doesn’t require a physical presence in Afghanistan. But if Afghan security continues to unravel, over-the-horizon operations will make little difference. The more likely scenario will be an emergency evacuation of US embassy personnel and other American citizens from Kabul, much like the evacuation from Saigon in 1975. India, for one, has already begun such an exodus, evacuating its consulate staff from Kandahar.
Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defence under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in 2014 that Biden ‘has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades’. The hurried US withdrawal from Afghanistan is set to extend that pattern.
Biden’s Afghan blunder | The Strategist
Afghanistan is on the brink of catastrophe, and it is US President Joe Biden’s fault. By overruling America’s top generals and ordering the hasty withdrawal of US troops, Biden opened the way for Taliban terrorists to capture more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s districts. Now, the Taliban are pushing towards Kabul, and the United States is looking weaker than ever.
The US effectively ended its military operations in Afghanistan on 1 July when it handed over to the Afghan government the sprawling Bagram airbase, which long served as the staging ground for US operations in the country. In fact, ‘handover’ is too generous a description. In a sign of what’s to come, US forces quietly slipped out of the base overnight after shutting off the electricity. The resulting security lapse allowed looters to scavenge the facilities before Afghan troops arrived and gained control.
Biden has vehemently defended his decision to withdraw, arguing that the US ‘did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build’ and that ‘staying would have meant US troops taking casualties’. He has also stood by his rushed approach, insisting that ‘speed is safety’ in this context. ‘How many thousands more of America’s daughters and sons are you willing to risk?’
The implication was clear: questioning the wisdom of the US withdrawal is tantamount to supporting the endangerment of Americans. But it is Afghans who are really in jeopardy.
Recall the last time the US left a war unfinished: in 1973, it hastily abandoned its allies in South Vietnam. The next year, 80,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were reportedly killed as a result of the conflict, making it the deadliest year of the entire Vietnam War. It’s also worth noting that in 1975, the US effectively handed Cambodia to the China-backed ultra-communist Khmer Rouge, who went on to carry out unimaginable horrors.
Now, the US is leaving Afghans at the mercy of a marauding Islamist force—one with a long history of savage behaviour. Already, the Taliban offensive has displaced tens of thousands of civilians. And while the Afghan government in Kabul teeters, the Taliban are seizing American weapons from the Afghan military and showing them off as they march across the country.
America’s justification for rushing out of Afghanistan is much weaker than its reasoning for leaving Vietnam. Whereas 58,220 Americans (largely draftees) died in Vietnam, only 2,448 US soldiers (all volunteers) died over the course of 20 years in Afghanistan. Moreover, since it formally ended its combat mission on 1 January 2015, the US have suffered just 99 fatalities, including in non-hostile incidents. During the same period, more than 28,000 Afghan police officers and soldiers have been killed.
None of this is to minimise the blood and treasure the US has sacrificed in Afghanistan, let alone suggest that American troops should stay indefinitely. On the contrary, ending America’s longest war is a worthy goal. But Biden’s approach entails effectively admitting that a terrorist militia has defeated the world’s most powerful military, and then handing Afghanistan back to that militia. This undercuts global trust in the US, jeopardises Afghan and regional security, and threatens to trigger a resurgence of terror worldwide.
The Taliban’s impending return to power will surely energise and embolden other terrorist groups in the larger global jihadist movement. Furthermore, the Taliban, a creature of Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, still receive significant aid from Pakistan’s military. So, while Biden says that Afghanistan’s future is now in its own hands, it is actually mostly in Pakistani hands, as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani recently noted.
Among those facing the most acute risks is India. When the Taliban were last in power, from 1996 to 2001, they allowed Pakistan to use Afghan territory to train terrorists for missions in India. The group’s return to power could thus open a new front for terrorism against India, which would then have to shift its focus from the intensifying military standoffs with China in the Himalayas.
The Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan helps China in other ways, too. Given that Pakistan is a Chinese client, the US withdrawal paves the way for China to make strategic inroads into Afghanistan, with its substantial mineral wealth and strategic location between Pakistan and Iran.
China would achieve this by offering the Taliban the two things they desperately need: international recognition and economic aid. With Russia also likely to recognise the Taliban’s leadership in Afghanistan, the group will have little incentive to moderate its violence, despite its current attempts to polish its image.
Biden had a better option: the US could have maintained a small residual force in Afghanistan, in order to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces. Yes, that would have violated the deal Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, struck with the Taliban in February 2020. But the Taliban have already violated that Faustian bargain. Biden was happy to overturn many of Trump’s other actions, making his insistence on upholding this deal difficult to understand.
Biden says the US is ‘developing a counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability’ that doesn’t require a physical presence in Afghanistan. But if Afghan security continues to unravel, over-the-horizon operations will make little difference. The more likely scenario will be an emergency evacuation of US embassy personnel and other American citizens from Kabul, much like the evacuation from Saigon in 1975. India, for one, has already begun such an exodus, evacuating its consulate staff from Kandahar.
Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defence under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in 2014 that Biden ‘has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades’. The hurried US withdrawal from Afghanistan is set to extend that pattern.
7. How the Intelligence Community Can Get Better at Open Source Intel
I am a great believer in open source information (it takes some analysis to use information to support intelligence). Regardless of what you think about the media, members of the 4th Estate are some of the best "collectors" in the world.
Excerpts:
The ubiquity and accessibility of this public data disrupts the assumed superiority of the government’s proprietary intelligence sources of methods—a reality the national security community has been slow to recognize and accept. The open-source intelligence, or OSINT, derived from the vast pools of publicly/commercially available information, or PAI/CAI, in the public domain will not replace traditional intelligence—but at the very least it can enrich and enhance this data, and for many intelligence requirements it may be a better, safer and cheaper option of first resort. OSINT can also provide overwatch for areas and topics that fall outside the zone of active IC coverage.
I think I belong to this "cottage industry" (I have been sending out my daily emails since 1996)
OSINT, on the other hand, remains a distributed activity that functions more like a collection of cottage industries. While OSINT has pockets of excellence, intelligence community OSINT production is largely initiative based, minimally integrated, and has little in the way of common guidance, standards, and tradecraft. The conspicuous absence of common standards, community coordination, and enterprise governance make PAI/CAI more difficult to use in all-source assessment than classified information produced by the IC’s more established disciplines. SIGINT, GEOINT and HUMINT reporting, for example, is well understood by analysts, has established tradecraft, and is supported by a deep bench of specialists who help interpret and evaluate the reporting. In the world of open source, the lack of common tradecraft and reach-back support to discipline specialists makes evaluating the accuracy and validity of PAI/CAI challenging, and all-source analysts may be understandably reluctant to use that reporting—substantially diminishing the value of a significant resource. The intelligence community must make OSINT a true intelligence discipline on par with the traditional functional disciplines, replete with leadership and authority that enables the OSINT enterprise to govern itself and establish a brand that instills faith and trust in open source information. Only then will OSINT have the advocacy, commitment, and structure to move from a cottage industry to the core discipline it must become.
How the Intelligence Community Can Get Better at Open Source Intel
Several factors make it harder to use publicly available information in all-source assessment than classified information
By BOB ASHLEY and NEIL WILEY
During his House Appropriations Committee testimony on May 27, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley presciently stated that a country must master ubiquitous intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance to win the next major war. Indeed, in an era in which the United States can no longer rely on economic or military overmatch to guarantee its security, we need a more intimate understanding of an adversary’s goals, intentions, capabilities, and actions to safeguard our national interests. The chairman’s challenge begs important questions. How do we ensure that our civilian and military leaders enjoy decision advantage in an increasingly contested environment? Channeling the mindset of Sun Tzu, how can we win before the first shot is fired—or prevail without any shots at all?
Senior leaders consistently assert that the key to decision advantage in an ISR construct is timely acquisition and analysis of the best information. Historically, the analysis produced to meet intelligence requirements was based predominantly on data acquired by government collectors and government technologies. Unlike open data sources, intelligence officers can task sensitive intelligence sources and methods to target the specific people, places and events that drive the intelligence needs of our policymakers and commanders.
But the world has changed. In today’s digital age, people and organizations carry out activities using technology that projects data about their background, actions, and preferences onto public platforms. Simultaneously, private companies have built business models around co-opting the two pursuits that animate most intelligence work—identifying and predicting personal behaviors. The combined result of these phenomena is a data ecosystem that couples extraordinary quantities of information with sophisticated processing tools to produce stunningly diverse insights—including insights relevant to the hardest intelligence problems.
The ubiquity and accessibility of this public data disrupts the assumed superiority of the government’s proprietary intelligence sources of methods—a reality the national security community has been slow to recognize and accept. The open-source intelligence, or OSINT, derived from the vast pools of publicly/commercially available information, or PAI/CAI, in the public domain will not replace traditional intelligence—but at the very least it can enrich and enhance this data, and for many intelligence requirements it may be a better, safer and cheaper option of first resort. OSINT can also provide overwatch for areas and topics that fall outside the zone of active IC coverage.
Unfortunately, we are poorly postured to realize these benefits because technology and industry have far outpaced the law, policy, and governance required to optimize the use of OSINT in the national security community. Current national security frameworks did not anticipate the explosion of internet-based PAI, the increased demand for public-private sector collaboration, or the wide availability of certain data aggregated and sold by private companies that the government could not legally collect on its own. We need an expedited policy response that generates the laws, policies, resources, and tradecraft required for the IC to confidently bring the full force of OSINT to bear on the serious threats we face, while ensuring that the acquisition and exploitation of PAI/CAI protects the privacy of U.S. persons and adheres to the ethics and practices of the intelligence profession.
One of the most formidable obstacles to this end-state is cultural. Within the IC the production of OSINT is not regarded as a unique intelligence discipline but as research incident to all-source analysis or as a media production service. This approach was reasonable when open data sources consisted primarily of media and academic output. Now, however, given the volume and diversity of internet-derived PAI/CAI, OSINT more closely resembles SIGINT than library research. In the IC, the SIGINT discipline is a strong center of gravity—managing a diverse array of unique data types, each with its own unique collection, discovery, processing, exploitation, tradecraft, sharing and oversight processes—governed and championed by a dedicated agency.
OSINT, on the other hand, remains a distributed activity that functions more like a collection of cottage industries. While OSINT has pockets of excellence, intelligence community OSINT production is largely initiative based, minimally integrated, and has little in the way of common guidance, standards, and tradecraft. The conspicuous absence of common standards, community coordination, and enterprise governance make PAI/CAI more difficult to use in all-source assessment than classified information produced by the IC’s more established disciplines. SIGINT, GEOINT and HUMINT reporting, for example, is well understood by analysts, has established tradecraft, and is supported by a deep bench of specialists who help interpret and evaluate the reporting. In the world of open source, the lack of common tradecraft and reach-back support to discipline specialists makes evaluating the accuracy and validity of PAI/CAI challenging, and all-source analysts may be understandably reluctant to use that reporting—substantially diminishing the value of a significant resource. The intelligence community must make OSINT a true intelligence discipline on par with the traditional functional disciplines, replete with leadership and authority that enables the OSINT enterprise to govern itself and establish a brand that instills faith and trust in open source information. Only then will OSINT have the advocacy, commitment, and structure to move from a cottage industry to the core discipline it must become.
A second significant obstacle is resources. OSINT activity is not funded at a level nearly commensurate with its value, though congressional intelligence oversight committees have pressed repeatedly for greater use of OSINT. Foreseeably, the absence of a dedicated OSINT advocate and champion results in severe underinvestment in open source information at a time that our national security posture demands a Manhattan Project mentality to harvesting the immense intelligence value of open source data. Instead, the nascent OSINT initiatives in each intelligence community element compete within their organization’s budgetary Thunderdomes, leading to predictably anemic outcomes.
Finally, we need to update the antiquated data handling rules and policies designed to regulate older technologies and mitigate different risks. The astronomical volume of internet derived information, innovative machine analytics, and the proliferation of private commercial data providers present a unique opportunity for the intelligence community to achieve a scope of geographic and topical coverage unimaginable ten years ago. However, the lack of enterprise-wide legal and policy guidance impedes the widespread use of PAI/CAI, and increases the risk of inappropriate activity when the scant existing guidance is interpreted inconsistently by agencies across the community. The question of what constitutes an inherently governmental collection function, for example, directly influences the formation of partnerships between the intelligence community and commercial data providers. The private sector is witnessing a proliferation of commercial companies which not only provide unique data, but also bundle that data with analytic tools that enable new and striking insights. Maximizing the utility of OSINT requires the open source community to partner with industry in much the same way that the GEOINT community currently partners with commercial imagery providers. We need anticipatory policy that enables the IC to safely, effectively and ethically team with the private sector to evolve critical open source collection and analytic capabilities.
Operationalizing OSINT is crucial to the success of the intelligence community and to the security of our nation. Creating a foreign-intelligence OSINT capability for an era of peer adversaries and heightened global uncertainty will be challenging. Adjusting structure, policy, and resourcing will require a concerted effort across Congress, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Defense. The intelligence community must act boldly to shift OSINT into a true intelligence discipline. Policy and oversight must keep pace with efforts to nurture the public-private partnerships that enable government to leverage the rapid technical advances occurring in the commercial and NGO sector. Resource programming must support these efforts and align budget expenditures to realize the tremendous and growing value of OSINT to the intelligence mission.
The adversaries our nation faces are very real, very capable, and very dangerous. We can no longer afford complacency. Now is the time for audacious action to realize the Chairman’s vision of ubiquitous ISR, and aggressive exploitation of PAI/CAI will be the linchpin. The competition for decision advantage starts well before the first shot is fired and spans all the national instruments of power: diplomatic, information, military, and economic. Technology and data available in the public domain could close critical knowledge gaps now. Government must match and embrace these capabilities with commitment, policy, and resources. Failure to do so risks disastrous consequences. Our adversaries will capitalize on these opportunities and so must we – we are already behind.
The views expressed are the authors’ and do not imply endorsement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or any other U.S. government agency.
Bob Ashley is a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and now an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Neil Wiley is former Principal Executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a former Chair of the National Intelligence Council.
8. The Road Ahead for Taiwan-US Relations
Excerpts:
One of the Biden administration’s achievements is that it has internationalized Taiwan’s security by building support among U.S. partners and allies. Peace and security in the Taiwan Strait have been mentioned — for the first time — at the G-7, Japan-U.S., South Korea-U.S. and Australia-Japan summits. In Taiwan, there is support for what’s seen as a grand strategy of maneuvering a power network to constrain China. But the downside of getting more countries involved means the need to spend more time to build consensus. Some wonder if the United States has time to build such coalitions given China’s rapid rise, particularly as internationalization is likely to increase the chance of Chinese pushback.
The final test for the Biden administration will be Taiwan’s presidential election in January 2024, ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. A term-limited Tsai will not be able to run again. If the DPP is returned to power, this may be the trigger for a cross-strait crisis. If the opposition Kuomintang is elected, the United States will have to decide how to interpret this. From the KMT side, an important part of the relationship is that the U.S. understands that any thaw in cross-strait relations need not be seen as a betrayal of U.S. interests.
Whoever is in the Presidential Office and the White House, there remain fundamental challenges in Taiwan-U.S. relations. Because increased support will heighten expectations, any honeymoon will always be short. Maintaining the positive views he has built up in Taiwan will be a continuing challenge for Biden.
The Road Ahead for Taiwan-US Relations
Increased U.S. support has raised hopes in Taiwan – and some of those expectations may be difficult for Washington to meet.
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One of President Joe Biden’s achievements in restoring U.S. leadership in Asia has been in Taiwan, which was staunchly pro-Trump. But while Biden has executed a great turnaround in winning over the Taiwanese, that doesn’t mean that it’s an easy road ahead.
There are both bilateral and wider issues that mean that Taiwan-U.S. relations will remain challenging for the the next three and half years.
Bilaterally, there are issues around trade and industry policy. Taiwan would like to develop formal economic ties – which might open the door for other countries to follow. While the Biden administration has responded to Taiwan’s requests to restart economic dialogue under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA), a trade agreement will be harder for a Democratic administration that has to focus on the U.S. economy first. The results of Taiwan’s referendum on U.S. pork imports may be a factor as well.
Industry policy around semiconductors will also be an area of tension. With the United States focusing on securing supply chains and reshoring jobs, there will be pressure on Taiwanese companies to relocate more factories. Taiwan may placate the U.S. by moving some, but it will not want to give away areas like research and development. Taiwan sees its global importance in semiconductors as a bargaining chip in its favour. But with China-U.S. tech competition, there is the danger that Taiwan will be caught in the crossfire.
More broadly, there is a danger that increases in U.S. support – such as in arms sales, diplomatic contact, or vaccines – will lead to heightened expectations from Taiwan. According to one Taiwanese policymaker, “If you give more hope there will be more disappointment in the future.” This is rooted in Taiwanese fear and anxiety: “When the U.S. is willing to offer more support, we fear the support to be temporary and conditional, and seek more and stronger U.S. commitments.”
Some of the raised expectations may be difficult for the United States to meet.
On the security side, there are demands to help Taiwan build a next generation military, including consistent arms sales (of the right type and at a cost that Taiwan can afford), covert or overt military exchanges, and even joint military exercises. And among some there is an expectation that the United States will help Taiwan improve its defense effectiveness, even push for reform in Taiwan’s military.
On the diplomatic side, there will continue to be a desire for high-level contact to normalize the relationship and support for Taiwan’s international participation, such as in the World Health Assembly. One specific test will be Biden’s Summit for Democracy, a campaign promise, which looks like it may be held in 2022. Finding a way to include Taiwan – one of only seven societies in Asia rated as free by Freedom House – is crucial. This means that it cannot just be a summit of states.
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The wider issue is how the United States will respond to Chinese pushback whenever and however it occurs. China has continued to ramp up pressure on Taiwan with incremental increases, such as a record incursion of Chinese planes into Taiwan’s air defense zone following the G-7 Summit. The question is whether there will be a change in the type of pressure, rather than in intensity. If China does change tactics, how will the United States respond?
There has been sufficient discussion around whether the U.S. will end its position of strategic ambiguity that it has raised expectations. Asia policy czar Kurt Campbell’s recent comment that the United States does not support Taiwanese independence – a statement of the official U.S. position – was greeted with some unhappiness among the Taiwanese public. The leadership of the governing Democratic Progressive Party knows that the United States will not support de jure independence; its political challenge is managing supporters’ expectations given the reality that the best on offer is U.S. friendship and partnership.
One of the Biden administration’s achievements is that it has internationalized Taiwan’s security by building support among U.S. partners and allies. Peace and security in the Taiwan Strait have been mentioned — for the first time — at the G-7, Japan-U.S., South Korea-U.S. and Australia-Japan summits. In Taiwan, there is support for what’s seen as a grand strategy of maneuvering a power network to constrain China. But the downside of getting more countries involved means the need to spend more time to build consensus. Some wonder if the United States has time to build such coalitions given China’s rapid rise, particularly as internationalization is likely to increase the chance of Chinese pushback.
The final test for the Biden administration will be Taiwan’s presidential election in January 2024, ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. A term-limited Tsai will not be able to run again. If the DPP is returned to power, this may be the trigger for a cross-strait crisis. If the opposition Kuomintang is elected, the United States will have to decide how to interpret this. From the KMT side, an important part of the relationship is that the U.S. understands that any thaw in cross-strait relations need not be seen as a betrayal of U.S. interests.
Whoever is in the Presidential Office and the White House, there remain fundamental challenges in Taiwan-U.S. relations. Because increased support will heighten expectations, any honeymoon will always be short. Maintaining the positive views he has built up in Taiwan will be a continuing challenge for Biden.
9. The U.S. Navy's leadership crisis | Opinion
Conclusion: The military's paramount responsibility is to fight and win to protect Americans and our way of life. Civilian leadership must force the military to make major changes, and fast. We have no time to lose.
The U.S. Navy's leadership crisis | Opinion
Newsweek · by Rebeccah Heinrichs , Senior fellow, Hudson Institute On 7/15/21 at 6:30 AM EDT · July 15, 2021
The Chinese Communist Party is determined to supplant the United States—and building a navy to do it. America's next major war will likely play out in the Pacific Ocean, and our Navy will win or lose the day. But recent events like warships colliding in the Pacific and U.S. sailors surrendering to Iranian terrorists do not instill great confidence in the competency of our Navy. The Navy's problems begin with its leadership. A recent nonpartisan and seriously researched report jarringly concluded that, rather than focusing on training our sailors to fight and win, the Navy's most senior officials are, as a group, adrift.
The report was conducted by Marine Corps Lieutenant General (Ret.) Robert E. Schmidle and Navy Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery at the direction of Senator Tom Cotton and Congressmen Jim Banks, Dan Crenshaw and Mike Gallagher. The study was informed by long-form interviews with 77 unique current and recently retired Navy personnel. The results are staggering:
When asked whether incidents such as the two destroyer collisions in the Pacific, the surrender of a small craft to the IRGC in the Arabian Gulf, the burning of the Bonhomme Richard and other incidents were part of a broader cultural or leadership problem in the Navy, 94% of interviewees responded "yes."... This sentiment, that the Navy is dangerously off course, was overwhelming.
The Navy's leadership problems are myriad. It kneecaps effective leaders and is paralyzed by risk aversion. It is overly focused on identity politics at the expense of lethality and survivability. Rather than instilling a warrior ethos, Navy leadership is overly sensitive to media-driven trivialities, and overly sensitive, generally.
In this crucial moment, we cannot afford to fire men and women with the skills and experience needed to win against countries like China and Russia. The report affirms that some offenses and patterns of character unbecoming of an American service member—such as racism, assault and corruption—of course warrant career-ending consequences, but points out that "isolated infractions such as an alcohol-related indiscretion [or] a poor choice of words with no malice or offense intended" too often end the careers of individuals the nation needs.
One individual who was interviewed for the report "suggest[ed] that none of the four key Admirals who led victorious fleets in World War II would have made it to the rank of Captain in today's Navy." The report concluded that, in the eyes of many current and former Navy personnel, "The general unwillingness to rehabilitate one-off mistakes, the disinclination to weigh errors against the totality of a naval career, and the practice of discipline-by-paperwork were broadly understood to be a drain on the Navy's retention efforts."
US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81), part of Destroyer Squadron 2, anchors in Port Sudan on March 1, 2021. -/AFP/Getty Images
And the power that the Navy effectively—if unintentionally—permits the media to have over its day-to-day business is dangerous. A free and independent press should, of course, hold the military to account, and no official should be off limits for public scrutiny. But, according to the report, the Navy is placing far too much importance on how media, including social media, portrays it. It identified "an inversion of the chain of command" brought on by social media, in which "it is easy for a disgruntled junior officer or sailor to grind their axe with targeted leaks" online or to outside journalists. "This ease of access," the report said, "combined with the Navy's proclivity, or at least perceived proclivity, to bend the knee when a reporter files a negative story, has instilled in junior officers and sailors a notion that they can effortlessly exercise power over their senior officers."
Senior military leaders and strategists are demanding that Congress work with the Department of Defense to invest in the weapons capabilities and operations we need to deter our adversaries. We must adapt quickly and cannot be bogged down with bureaucracy and a culture of risk aversion. But that is precisely what the report concludes is plaguing the Navy. One anonymous interviewee lamented, "lethality, I don't think, was touted or promoted, or a warrior culture." The interviewee added that innovation "was not encouraged and generally frowned upon. And it was very much a put the check in the box and a very risk averse culture."
Senator Cotton and Congressman Crenshaw, among others, have received criticism for their attention to the negative impact of an identity-obsessed culture in the top echelons of the military. But the report supports their case. By focusing on sociological matters, military leaders necessarily take invaluable time away from the core functions of the Navy.
"Sometimes I think we care more about whether we have enough diversity officers than if we'll survive a fight with the Chinese navy," said one lieutenant currently on active duty. "It's criminal. They think my only value is as a black woman. But you cut our ship open with a missile and we'll all bleed the same color." One recently retired officer lamented, along the same lines, "I guarantee you every unit in the Navy is up to speed on their diversity training. I'm sorry that I can't say the same of their ship handling training."
Of all the recommendations of the report, one stood out as the most dire:
Get politics and media out of the wardroom. Renew the Navy's noble tradition of remaining out of politics. Limit social media accounts and activities by Navy officials, discourage use of toxic platforms by sailors, remove all political and sociological topics from Professional Military Education and replace them with essential warfighting courseware. Modernize public affairs training.
The military's paramount responsibility is to fight and win to protect Americans and our way of life. Civilian leadership must force the military to make major changes, and fast. We have no time to lose.
Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek · by Rebeccah Heinrichs , Senior fellow, Hudson Institute On 7/15/21 at 6:30 AM EDT · July 15, 2021
10. G-7’s counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative is welcome, but needs more coherence
A view from India. We are not seeing much about B3W in the media. Where is our IO supporting plan for B3W? Who is in charge of managing B3W?
Conclusion: "China is focussed on its agenda and far ahead. It has also tried to rope in more countries and raised the acceptance level of BRI over time through the BRI summit, Boao Forum for Asia, China-Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Belt and Road Forum, etc. The counter proposal of B3W is certainly a welcome step to contain the adverse implications of a Chinese mega plan. However, B3W lacks coherent thoughts and proper planning at this stage. Nevertheless, it is better late than never. Moreover, it remains to be seen what role India will play in B3W since it has been a strong opponent of China’s BRI."
G-7’s counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative is welcome, but needs more coherence
It remains to be seen what role India will play in Build Back Better World since it has been a strong opponent of BRI, which is designed by China to establish strategic dominance in trade, foreign policy and geopolitics.
G-7 leaders finally came around with the proposed Build Back Better World (B3W) to counter China’s rising influence across 100-plus countries through Belt Road Initiative (BRI) projects. The proposal, though at a nascent stage, aims to address the infrastructure investment deficit in developing and lower income countries — the space which has been increasingly captured by China through 2,600 BRI projects with trillions of dollars of investment. BRI projects are perceived as corrosive tactics or debt traps laid by China for its strategic dominance in trade, foreign policy and geopolitics in the world. So B3W is a welcome step but late.
The counter-strategy is necessary to bring down Chinese leverage. A macro view of BRI projects across geography — quantum and pattern of investment — clearly reflects the motive of China-centric international economic integration, production networks, hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and, eventually, the global economy. Since the inception of the BRI in 2013, outward investment by Beijing has been aggressive as China’s FDI outflow to inflow ratio increased to 1 from around 0.34 during 2001-10. In volume terms, the FDI outflow increased to an average of $140 billion in 2016-19 from an annual average $25 billion during 2001-10. China’s share of FDI outflows increased from 2.3 per cent during 2001-10 to 10.7 per cent during 2016-2019.
China had an overall exposure of around $750 billion — $293 billion investment and $461 billion construction contracts —between 2013 to mid-2020. After BRI, there is a sudden increase in investment — around $40 billion annually during 2013-19 — in BRI countries, though investment has slowed down due to the pandemic. Since the onset of BRI, China has signed diverse projects worth $548.4 billion, including four-fifths in the BRI participating countries ($461 billion). Post 2013, there was a sudden rise in infrastructure investment in BRI projects compared to investment in non-BRI projects.
Since 2013 to mid-2020, China has an exposure of vast contracts worth around $123 billion in SSA, mainly with Nigeria, Zambia, Ethiopia, Angola, Tanzania and Kenya, mostly focusing on hydro and oil energy, shipping and rail transport. China has strategically made Kenya the African hub and plans to connect it with other land-locked countries in the region, including Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda, etc.
Central, South and West Asia is China’s second preferred region under the BRI as construction contracts worth $110 billion are under way, and 80 per cent contracts are concentrated in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, Iran and Kazakhstan. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the Bangladesh-China, India, the Myanmar Economic Corridor (BCIM) and the Colombo Port City Project in Sri Lanka, amongst others, are important BRI projects. China has a plan to complete 4,000 km of railways and 10,000 km of highways within the Central Asian region as part of BRI, with an estimated cost of $16 billion. Some of the major projects include freight trains between China, Turkey and Kazakhstan, and gas pipelines (Siberia and Altai) for production and transportation of oil and natural gas.
China has signed construction contracts worth around $96 billion under BRI, largely focusing on Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt, with 70 per cent allocation of total regional contract agreements. China is investing in Africa to lay a comprehensive transportation network.
Since the launch of BRI, China has signed various contacts worth $90 billion with the East Asian region. The biggest contracts have been with Indonesia, Malaysia and Laos worth $18.5 billion, $17.1 billion and $11.2 billion respectively, mostly focusing on transportation, railways, roadways and waterways, for better integration between China and ASEAN countries.
Since the onset of the BRI, the total exposure of China with Europe stood at around $23 billion by mid-2020. Major projects include a freight train project from Ukraine to Kazakhstan through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and, eventually, China, covering a distance of 5,475 km. The Greek port Pireaus, the China-Belarus Industrial Park, and the Green Ecological Silk Road Investment Fund are other major projects. These initiatives would help trade facilitation for China and better delivery of goods and services.
The BRI projects broadly aim to facilitate cross-border transportation of goods, access to energy, creating demand for existing excess capacity in Chinese industries. Though the objectives of the projects undertaken in different countries vary, the overall focus is on developing transportation, logistics and communications, which would reduce trade and transaction cost for China’s trade, give more market access to Chinese markets and ensure stable supply of energy and other resources. Many countries, including India, would see an adverse trade impact on their products’ competitiveness, market access, resource extraction etc. due to Chinese competition.
China is focussed on its agenda and far ahead. It has also tried to rope in more countries and raised the acceptance level of BRI over time through the BRI summit, Boao Forum for Asia, China-Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Belt and Road Forum, etc. The counter proposal of B3W is certainly a welcome step to contain the adverse implications of a Chinese mega plan. However, B3W lacks coherent thoughts and proper planning at this stage. Nevertheless, it is better late than never. Moreover, it remains to be seen what role India will play in B3W since it has been a strong opponent of China’s BRI.
This column first appeared in the print edition on July 17, 2021 under the title ‘A counter-strategy called B3W’. The writer is professor, Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), Delhi University.
11. What Lies Between China’s Nationalism And Growth? – Analysis
Excerpts:
During their countries’ economic renaissance, a number of Japanese and South Korean writers demanded greater national autonomy and assertion, such as a ‘Japan that can say no’. They saw businesses generate national glory which further motivated development. Chinese leaders have noted this phenomenon. Thirty years ago, now politburo member Wang Huning wrote about Japanese companies’ desire to ‘build the nation’ and win Japan international prominence: ‘Motivated by this political goal, Japanese enterprises … expanded investment, enhanced competitiveness, and penetrated the world market’. Chinese leaders may behave differently with newfound riches than Japanese or South Korean leaders did, not least given China’s size and single-party system. But Chinese individuals’ basic motives and sentiments — and their implications for China’s growth — should be recognisable to people elsewhere.
It remains to be seen how China’s national identity and search for prestige will adjust in the future. China might express a Confucian-inspired identity that can win international admirers and provide a basis for China’s greater global role, a vision some Chinese and Western intellectuals propose. Alternatively, nationalism might become a stronger driver of China’s growth while deepening tensions with other countries. To understand its effects, observers must not simply dismiss China’s nationalism, but approach both its inherent risks and the rationales, sentiments and enthusiasm of ordinary individuals.
What Lies Between China’s Nationalism And Growth? – Analysis
By Zeying Wu and Richard Yarrow
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China appeared with national pride and confidence and declared its claim for greater global status. China has shed a low profile in international relations, expressing a desire to compete with the world’s leading nations. China’s competitive motivation, in areas from trade to maritime disputes, reflects a spreading national consciousness among many Chinese citizens.
Western commentators often depict Chinese nationalism and patriotic pride as harmful for China — a propaganda-derived burden which sows inter-ethnic conflict, protectionism against foreign businesses and tension with neighbouring countries. Many observers reduce Chinese national identity to nationalism’s negative connotations in the West — of racial or cultural arrogance, productivity-destroying protectionism, despotic politics and aggressive expansionism.
These interpretations can be true to some extent for nationalism in any country but are one-sided and view Chinese nationalism and identity narrowly and without context. Chinese nationalism resembles the basic spirit of ‘national’ or ‘patriotic’ pride in other countries and extends from aspirations to win China prestige in a world of nation-states. Nationalism does not definitively harm China’s growth or global standing, and in some ways has helped both.
Nationalism ties individuals’ personal dignity to their national identity, encouraging ‘nationals’ to search for higher prestige for their nation in comparison or competition with other nations. It came to signify a belief in the fundamental equality of members of a national community, sovereignty residing in the national populace and a secular view of a world composed of different peoples. In China, nationalism spread after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 among intellectual, political and economic elites.
Yet efforts to broadly instil national consciousness across China had little success. In 1944, despite years of Nationalist Party rule, Henan villagers disarmed some 50,000 Chinese soldiers during a retreat from Japanese forces. Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping famously overestimated how many overseas students would return to China early in the post-Mao era — very few did. As writers like Lu Xun, Mao Dun or Zhang Ailing depicted, many Chinese people well into the 20th century lived with traditional ethics and social structures long predating China’s nationalist revolutions. Many remained indifferent to values of membership in a national community and sovereignty based on a populace of equal ‘nationals’.
This situation changed dramatically with Deng’s ‘reform and opening’. The government made economic activity a condition or guarantor for one’s welfare and involved the public in ‘building a rich country’. Citizens gained opportunities to elevate their social status through economic activities. They could see their entrepreneurial work leading clearly to their own and their society’s wellbeing, inspiring pride in the society to which they contributed. They gained a framework to justify profit-seeking and personal pursuits — previously discouraged by traditional and Maoist ethics — through benefits to the nation. As economic activities became a greater part of individual and societal pride, business success could bestow a sense of heroism, with social honours for improving the nation alongside personal riches.
Though government promoted people’s sense of national identity, market-oriented developments helped spread the sense of a stake in the nation regardless of propaganda. As China accumulated economic successes, more Chinese — especially in cities and coastal areas — could feel pride in China’s growth and a connection between their own status and achievements and their nation’s rising prestige. This connection helped motivate many individuals’ commitment for China to compete globally.
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Nationalism helped propel new industries. As HNA Group’s Chen Feng declared, ‘we need a batch of world-class companies to emerge from China to help the country’s growth’. Similar sentiments contributed to China’s technology sector, which has become key to China’s sense of being a strong nation. Firms like Huawei rallied consumers, employees and government supporters by pledging to make ‘Made in China’ a symbol of industrial might and reliable quality. This was often done with an explicit focus on ‘national interest’ and implication that business growth should enhance national power.
During their countries’ economic renaissance, a number of Japanese and South Korean writers demanded greater national autonomy and assertion, such as a ‘Japan that can say no’. They saw businesses generate national glory which further motivated development. Chinese leaders have noted this phenomenon. Thirty years ago, now politburo member Wang Huning wrote about Japanese companies’ desire to ‘build the nation’ and win Japan international prominence: ‘Motivated by this political goal, Japanese enterprises … expanded investment, enhanced competitiveness, and penetrated the world market’. Chinese leaders may behave differently with newfound riches than Japanese or South Korean leaders did, not least given China’s size and single-party system. But Chinese individuals’ basic motives and sentiments — and their implications for China’s growth — should be recognisable to people elsewhere.
It remains to be seen how China’s national identity and search for prestige will adjust in the future. China might express a Confucian-inspired identity that can win international admirers and provide a basis for China’s greater global role, a vision some Chinese and Western intellectuals propose. Alternatively, nationalism might become a stronger driver of China’s growth while deepening tensions with other countries. To understand its effects, observers must not simply dismiss China’s nationalism, but approach both its inherent risks and the rationales, sentiments and enthusiasm of ordinary individuals.
*About the authors:
- Richard Yarrow is a Fellow in the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
- Zeying Wu is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Boston University.
12. China missing from itinerary of U.S. diplomat's second Asia tour
Hardly surprising.
China missing from itinerary of U.S. diplomat's second Asia tour
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman is seen during her visit to the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul, Turkey May 29, 2021. Ozan Kose/Pool via REUTERS
WASHINGTON, July 15 (Reuters) - U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman will visit Japan, South Korea and Mongolia next week, the State Department said, making no mention of any stop in China that had been anticipated in foreign policy circles and reported in some media.
After the State Department announcement on Thursday, sources told Reuters that Washington was preparing to impose sanctions on Friday on Chinese officials over Beijing's crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong and to issue a warning to international businesses operating there about worsening conditions. read more
President Joe Biden said the situation in Hong Kong was "deteriorating" when asked about plans for the advisory at a news conference with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The United States and China are locked in a deeply troubled relationship, having had little high-level, face-to-face contact since a first senior diplomatic meeting under the Biden administration in March in Alaska, where the Chinese side expressed anger at U.S. sanctions announced just ahead of the talks.
Before that meeting, Washington had taken a flurry of actions, including a move to begin revoking Chinese telecoms licenses, subpoenas to multiple Chinese information technology companies over national security concerns, and updated sanctions over Hong Kong.
Sherman's trip will be her second to Asia in less than two months, after visits to Indonesia, Cambodia and Thailand in late May and early June. read more
The State Department said she would discuss a range of issues with officials in Japan, including the climate crisis and enhancing global health security.
It said Sherman and Japanese and South Korean counterparts would hold a joint meeting to discuss cooperation on North Korea and other issues, including climate change and global health.
She will hold further talks in Seoul before heading to Ulaanbaatar to reinforce the U.S. Mongolia Strategic Partnership, the statement said, adding the trip would run from July 18-25.
It said Sherman would "reaffirm the U.S. commitment to working with allies and partners to promote peace, security, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and to upholding the international rules-based order," language the State Department uses to refer to its efforts to push back against China.
On Friday, Biden will take part in a virtual meeting of leaders of the Asia-Pacific trade group, APEC, which will discuss ending the COVID-19 pandemic and supporting the global economic recovery, the White House said.
It said it would be Biden's first engagement with many APEC leaders, particularly those in Southeast Asia, and he would "emphasize the importance he places on the region as well as his vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific."
Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a virtual meeting with counterparts from the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN) this week and said Washington rejects China's "unlawful" maritime claims in the South China Sea and stands with Southeast Asian countries facing Chinese "coercion." read more
That meeting came amid concerns among diplomats and others that Washington has not been paying sufficient attention to a region crucial to its strategy to counter China.
Reporting by David Brunnstrom, Susan Heavey and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall, Mark Heinrich and Peter Cooney
13. A good plan would deter China and protect Taiwan — but we don't have one
An integrated deterrence plan with a component of unconventional deterrence would be helpful.
Interesting conclusion:
Bipartisan agreement on national defense strategy is good for national security, but there remains significant uncertainty about how to implement the strategy. Congress should have this discussion now. We need a holistic Pacific plan that includes credible protection of Taiwan, and a defense budget large enough to support these aims. Some are arguing for a reduced budget, specializing DOD on naval and air missile forces while taking risks against the posture and ground combat capability required to win in the Pacific. Before accepting these risks, Congress should ask, “What if we are wrong?”
A good plan would deter China and protect Taiwan — but we don't have one
The Hill · by John E. Whitley, opinion contributor · July 15, 2021
The current bipartisan consensus on defense strategy is a bright spot in a highly polarized Washington, but also masks disagreement on our Pacific approach, including how to protect Taiwan and defense budget requirements. After two decades of counter-insurgency warfare in the Middle East, most agree that our military needs to refocus on (near) peer competitors. And most agree that China is the long-term concern. Congress should take advantage of this remarkable continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations to develop a credible Pacific deterrence plan.
The loss of Taiwan would be devastating, breaking open the island chain that constrains China’s aggression. In addition to destabilizing the region, it would provide the Chinese Communist Party a stepping stone for global maritime expansion that would not only put at risk the estimated one-third of global shipping that passes through the South China Sea, but would fundamentally weaken our ability to protect American interests globally.
Defending a military attack on Taiwan can be broken into two phases. First, we degrade and, if possible, deny an amphibious attack through conventional missile strikes. Second, we counter the landing in Taiwan to restore Taiwanese sovereignty and force the war’s end. When I led the Department of Defense’s (DOD) central analytic office, we closely studied the first phase because it provides a stressing test bed for tough technological problems such as how to penetrate the “anti-access, area-denial” environment China has created and how to reduce decision time between sensing systems and shooters.
But some go further and want DOD to focus its capabilities on this first phase. This view contends that we can absorb shrinking defense budgets by taking risk against “all-domain conflict,” focusing scarce resources on a more specialized naval and air missile exchange capability. This is not surprising. Ignoring the messy follow-on phases of combat — when the challenge moves from high technological “shock and awe” to the hard-nosed realities of regaining sovereignty and bringing war to closure — is nothing new. Post-invasion Iraq is a recent example, but a more apt Pacific example is the bloody Korean War, when planners had assumed new technology (atomic weapons) reduced the need to prepare for the entire range of wartime challenges.
Are we about to repeat these mistakes? Focusing on the “deny phase” of the Taiwan challenge to identify key technology gaps is sound, but specializing regional posture investments, DOD’s global mix of forces, and the overall defense budget for the first half of the conflict could be catastrophic for two reasons.
First, it could make the loss of Taiwan more likely. To justify focusing on denying the landing, advocates assume aggressive actions such as striking the Chinese mainland, sinking the Chinese Navy, and authorizing these actions early when intelligence is ambiguous. But is this credible — has President Biden signed on to authorizing mainland strikes against a nuclear power, even if allied resolve and intelligence is uncertain? In reality, galvanizing American and international support for the defense of Taiwan will take time once a conflict starts. We will need Taiwan to hold on. If the plan relies on mainland strikes that never occur, and we don’t have the posture or forces required for the second phase, what will the effect be on Taiwanese resolve?
A credible plan requires partnering with Taiwan and our allies now — based on clear-eyed assessments of force and posture requirements — to deter and, if necessary, defeat Chinese aggression.
Second, such a specialized force would increase risk across the globe. Taiwan is only one of China’s expansionist objectives and China is only one potential adversary. China is engaging throughout Asia — the most recent Chinese shooting skirmish was with India — attempting to divide countries and coerce them into China’s sphere of influence. My experience as the acting Secretary of the Army was that success in the Indo-Pacific region requires a holistic approach with U.S. military-to-military engagement across the region. In addition, a military force unable to sustain operations in Europe could embolden an already aggressive Russia, placing countries such as Ukraine at further risk. And a diminished military deterrent against regional threats could jeopardize hope for diplomatic gains with places such as Iran.
Bipartisan agreement on national defense strategy is good for national security, but there remains significant uncertainty about how to implement the strategy. Congress should have this discussion now. We need a holistic Pacific plan that includes credible protection of Taiwan, and a defense budget large enough to support these aims. Some are arguing for a reduced budget, specializing DOD on naval and air missile forces while taking risks against the posture and ground combat capability required to win in the Pacific. Before accepting these risks, Congress should ask, “What if we are wrong?”
John E. Whitley served in the Trump administration as Assistant Secretary of the Army for Financial Management and Comptroller and served in the Biden administration as the Acting Secretary of the Army. The views expressed here are his alone.
The Hill · by John E. Whitley, opinion contributor · July 15, 2021
14. The Geopolitics Of Cuba Unrest – Analysis
Intersting scenarios.
Excerpts:
Cuba is a small nation whose recent history and current internal situation elicit a great deal of ideological controversy. However, a deeper analysis reveals that even if it is impossible to accurately predict the country’s path in the near future, the impersonal influence of geopolitical realities will be consequential regardless.
The stakes are much larger than a mere domestic political shift, and events are doubtlessly being closely monitored by great and regional powers. Sooner or later, they will start moving their pieces, assuming their involvement on the Cuban chessboard has not already begun.
The Geopolitics Of Cuba Unrest – Analysis
By Jose Miguel Alonso-Trabanco
The recent wave of horizontal and leaderless demonstrations that have engulfed Cuba was certainly unexpected, but not surprising. After all, various forecasts had predicted that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic could encourage turmoil in fragile states. In this particular case, discontent is the combined result of the inability of the country’s healthcare system to effectively deal with the ongoing sanitary crisis, worsening economic hardship due to declining tourism ‒ a crucial source of hard currency for the island ‒ and a growing sense of overall political dissatisfaction with Cuba’s current state of affairs. Furthermore, social media platforms played an initial role catalyzing the protests.
The Cuban government and its supporters explicitly claim that these events are being masterminded by the United States for the purpose of provoking the implosion of the Cuban regime. Considering that such clandestine action, which would involve components like covert influence and/or destabilizing psychological operations, is usually carried out under a thick cloak of secrecy, it is impossible to determine if such accusations are accurate based on what is available in open sources. However, it is no secret that mutual animosity between the United States and Cuba has not diminished, even after diplomatic bilateral relations were restored less than a decade ago. Moreover, the coercive economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration have certainly increased tensions in the relationship.
On the other hand, covert intervention can be instrumental so that great powers can influence the course of events in accordance with their agendas. Nevertheless, it has its limits. Specifically, such ‘active measures’ ‒ like the instigation of uprisings ‒ can seldom be successful unless legitimate popular discontent reaches a critical boiling point. Therefore, although the prospect of subtle American interference behind-the-scenes cannot possibly be discarded (especially considering historical precedents), the facts on the ground strongly suggest that this situation is mostly triggered by internal factors.
That does not mean that the crisis cannot be taken advantage of by external players, though.
In order to keep things in perspective, it is essential to emphasize that, after the Cuban Revolution that took place in 1959, the Caribbean nation has not managed to achieve industrialization, development, or shared prosperity. During the Cold War, Cuba relied heavily on generous subsidies from Moscow and the exchange of Cuban sugar for Soviet oil. After the fateful fall of the Soviet Union itself, Cuba found a new benefactor in Venezuela under the rule of Hugo Chávez and it cultivated key tourism and remittance flows.
Nonetheless, the Cuban economy remains largely outdated, vulnerable, underdeveloped, and stagnant. Its underlying structure is focused on commodities ‒ sugar, metallic minerals, shellfish, and honey, amongst others ‒ and products with little added value, such as cigars and alcoholic beverages. Although minor reforms have been implemented since the 90s and some foreign investments have been authorized, this fundamental economic reality has not changed in a meaningful way.
On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that the significance of recent events is underscored by Cuba’s pivotal geostrategic position. Even though it lacks the critical mass to shape the course of global events, its location has been historically coveted by great powers. For instance, for the Spanish Empire Cuba was a navigational gateway for the military conquest and administrative management of its colonies in the American hemisphere, as well as a crucial geoeconomic bridge for transatlantic trade.
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In turn, as a rising power, the United States military took Cuba from Spain in the late 19th century to consolidate its sphere of influence through the exclusion of the last European power with a significant presence in the region. It must be noted that, in American geopolitical thinking, the Caribbean is the equivalent of the Mediterranean because it operates as an interconnected and dynamic maritime corridor. Likewise, during the Cold War the Soviet Union courted the Cuban communist regime in order to secure a position from which the American soft underbelly ‒ including the mouth of the Mississippi river, the core of the US oil industry, important ports and transited shipping lanes ‒ could be threatened.
Moreover, Cuba itself is an important and discreet geopolitical player that often punches far above its weight. In fact, Havana’s diplomatic skills have fostered the development of collaborative ties with extra-regional states interested in a foothold in the American hemisphere, such as China, Russia, and Iran. Moreover, its formidable foreign intelligence capabilities and its network of assets have projected Cuban state influence abroad, particularly through Latin America.
Finally, the relevance of Cuba’s natural resources cannot be overlooked. Its location is suitable for growing tropical crops like sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco. Likewise, its deposits of metals like nickel, zinc, lead, and gold are valuable resources for several processes of industrial transformation. More importantly, the island’s untapped potential in terms of fossil fuels has attracted the active involvement of Chinese and Russian state-owned energy companies.
Needless to say, heated and controversial opinions about Cuba are common in mainstream media outlets. Both the regime’s ardent supporters and its staunchest critics are equally vocal. Accordingly, most forecasts are filtered through the observers’ ideological preferences. In this regard, although it is hard to envisage precisely how the situation will unfold in the following weeks and months based on a dispassionate perspective, several conceivable scenarios have to be examined. Interestingly, all of them entail far-reaching implications that pose meaningful challenges for statecraft, security, strategic intelligence, and foreign policy.
Scenario 1: Abrupt Regime Change
Unless the protests reach a critical mass that undermines the effective control of the state’s coercive instruments or acts of indiscriminate repressive violence weaken its legitimacy, the opposition’s attempt to carry out a color revolution does not represent enough political firepower to bring down the Cuban government. At least for the time being, this outcome does not seem likely.
Moreover, the sudden fall of the Cuban regime would probably provoke tectonic geopolitical ramifications beyond the island itself. A new government won’t necessarily be willing to undertake internal political reforms, let alone reshuffle geopolitical alignments, particularly when it comes to Cuba’s US policy.
Besides, the course of events might not proceed so smoothly. A transition that is not carefully managed according to sound political criteria could lead to a chaotic failed state in which dysfunctional governments are endlessly replaced by even more dysfunctional successors – a vicious cycle resembling what Haiti has gone through for decades. In this case, coups, power struggles, and instability could become the norm.
Another concern related to this scenario is that it is unclear what would happen if personnel of the Cuban security services were to suddenly become unemployed. The internationally competitive quality of their tradecraft would make them valuable assets as hitmen, spies, and fighters for organized crime rings, terrorist networks, paramilitary squads, private security companies, and insurgent forces in the American hemisphere and elsewhere.
Nevertheless, this scenario could unfold in different ways. If top military commanders believe that the position of the civilian national leadership is ultimately unsustainable, even through the use of force, there will be a temptation to simply abandon the regime and hasten its relatively nonviolent dismissal, just like the Bolivian military withdrew its support for Evo Morales in 2019.
Should this scenario come to pass, the military would take over in order to manage an orderly transition, preserve its structures, negotiate under favorable conditions, make sure that its interests are taken into consideration in the ensuing political process, and maybe even establish a new stronger government in which they hold all the cards. In other words, the Cuban military might seek to replicate what their Egyptian counterparts did when the Muslim Brotherhood started losing power and control.
Thus, it is mistaken to assume that a regime change would automatically lead to democratic change.
Scenario 2: Civil War
One of the most instructive lessons of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ is that popular discontent directed against an authoritarian government does not necessarily bring harmony, stability, democracy, or prosperity. In fact, an escalating political clash under circumstances in which none of the contenders is willing to concede or find a mutually acceptable compromise might unleash violent forces that cannot be stopped. In this case, the example of the Syrian war ‒ originally ignited by the rise of food prices and water scarcity ‒ should be seen as an ominous reminder of how things can easily spiral out of control if an effective political solution is not promptly formulated.
This is by far the most dangerous scenario. Considering Cuba’s geopolitical significance, a civil conflict would likely attract external stakeholders in one way or another, including the US government, the Cuban-American community, China, Russia, and even Latin American states aligned with or hostile to the Bolivarian axis. With so many overlapping strategic interests, this situation would create a major diplomatic crisis in the American hemisphere. The most troublesome aspect of this possibility is that there is no certain way to predict how and when it will end once Pandora’s box has been opened.
Another consequence would be a large exodus of refugees to nearby countries. This development would pose complex political, economic, and humanitarian challenges for the United States and Mexico, but also for other states located in the Caribbean, the Central American isthmus, and South America. The resulting dynamics might act as a vortex of regional tensions.
Scenario 3: Direct Foreign Intervention
In a dramatic statement, Miami mayor Francis Suarez claimed that US military strikes against Cuba should be seriously contemplated by the Pentagon. However, such incendiary rhetoric is mostly for the domestic consumption of local constituents. In fact, if Washington wanted to remove the Cuban regime through military power, it could have easily accomplished said objective shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After all, it is widely known that the US Defense Department has designed contingency plans to intervene in Cuba. However, not even the neoconservative crusade launched by President George W. Bush targeted the island.
Nevertheless, in the last few decades, the United States has tolerated Cuba’s communist regime despite its firm opposition to American regional and global interests. Said position is a recognition that, without the strong presence of a hostile great power from Eurasia, Cuba by itself represents little more than an irritant for American national security.
Yet, the aforementioned perspective might change if the situation triggers dangerous shockwaves for regional security. Under such circumstances, the US military might be inclined to intervene in order to avoid the prospect of contagious chaos or a political vacuum that could be filled by the Sino-Russian emerging bloc.
In the grand scheme of things, a US military invasion of Cuba would be relatively easy. However, the ensuing occupation would bedeeply problematic. Hostile great powers might exploit the opportunity to instigate a bloody quagmire that drains and weakens US power. Even if that does not take place, as the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate, efforts to export liberal democracy and implement ambitious nation-building projects can be counterproductive as they elicit a strong nationalist backlash from the local populace against what as seen as imperialist endeavors motivated by foreign interests.
Scenario 4: Preservation of the Status Quo
Journalists and pundits from various countries are already declaring the imminent demise of the Cuban government. Nevertheless, it must be borne in mind that the Cuban regime is exceedingly resilient. After all, it has not been undermined by dangerous problems like the Cuban Missile Crisis, strong geopolitical tensions during the Cold War, devastating natural disasters, the constant threat of American military intervention, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, chronic bureaucratic mismanagement, widespread poverty and sharp economic downturns. Thus, it is too early to ascertain if a dramatic change in the correlation of forces in underway.
Moreover, the balance of power overwhelmingly favors the regime. Its control of the military, intelligence, security and law enforcement agencies ‒ all of which are highly skillful and disciplined ‒ remains unshaken. It also has the power to mobilize its political agents and supporters in the streets to counter dissident demonstrations. In contrast, the eruption of protests does not seem to be organized and there is no clear political or tactical leadership. Moreover, it looks like the opposition does not have access to weapons, intelligence, or substantial financial resources.
On the other hand, although it is too soon to tell, the public expressions of self-criticism ‒ something traditionally unheard of in Cuba ‒ made by President Miguel Díaz-Canel could be a subtle hint that there is a certain political willingness to find a negotiated solution, even if the resulting settlement is temporary rather than definitive. At the very least, the most pressing concerns formulated by the public (i.e. those related to the availability of vaccines and satisfying essential economic needs in the short term) would have to be convincingly addressed.
Therefore, it seems the Cuban government is going to resort to a combination of carrots (incentives such as policy adjustment, the implementation of emergency measures to alleviate the crisis, and perhaps even some sort of dialog) and sticks ‒ arrest of key opposition figures, internet restrictions, censorship, etc. ‒ in order to restore governance and make the protests subside. However, time is a crucial factor in the equation and the risk of failure would be catastrophic. After all, patience is limited when essential human needs are not being covered.
It must be borne in mind that one of the reasons why the Cuban nomenklatura is terrified of granting political concessions is because they believe that such course of action might lead to the disintegration of the regime. In other words, they are not eager to follow Mikhail Gorbachev’s footsteps. Hence, they would prefer to emulate the example of Deng Xiaoping: an ambitious program of structural economic modernization, carried out in the context of politically authoritarian conditions. After all, prosperity can provide legitimacy, even under undemocratic circumstances.
In case the regime manages to survive, then it would have powerful incentives to strengthen its strategic, security, diplomatic, economic, commercial and financial links with Both Moscow and Beijing. Such an alliance might provide a protective shield for Havana from both internal and external rivals. In this regard, it is pertinent to remember that the Eurasian powers have supported regimes which tend to oppose Western interests, not out of ideological sympathy, but because this serves their strategic ambitions.
Concluding Thoughts
Cuba is a small nation whose recent history and current internal situation elicit a great deal of ideological controversy. However, a deeper analysis reveals that even if it is impossible to accurately predict the country’s path in the near future, the impersonal influence of geopolitical realities will be consequential regardless.
The stakes are much larger than a mere domestic political shift, and events are doubtlessly being closely monitored by great and regional powers. Sooner or later, they will start moving their pieces, assuming their involvement on the Cuban chessboard has not already begun.
15. Facebook catches Iranian spies catfishing US military targets
Facebook catches Iranian spies catfishing US military targets
Getty Images
If you’re a member of the US military who's gotten friendly Facebook messages from private-sector recruiters for months on end, suggesting a lucrative future in the aerospace or defense contractor industry, Facebook may have some bad news.
On Thursday, the social media giant revealed that it has tracked and at least partially disrupted a long-running Iranian hacking campaign that used Facebook accounts to pose as recruiters, reeling in US targets with convincing social engineering schemes before sending them malware-infected files or tricking them into submitting sensitive credentials to phishing sites. Facebook says that the hackers also pretended to work in the hospitality or medical industries, in journalism, or at NGOs or airlines, sometimes engaging their targets for months with profiles across several different social media platforms. And unlike some previous cases of Iranian state-sponsored social media catfishing that have focused on Iran's neighbors, this latest campaign appears to have largely targeted Americans, and to a lesser extent UK and European victims.
Facebook says it has removed "fewer than 200" fake profiles from its platforms as a result of the investigation and notified roughly the same number of Facebook users that hackers had targeted them.
"Our investigation found that Facebook was a portion of a much broader espionage operation that targeted people with phishing, social engineering, spoofed websites, and malicious domains across multiple social media platforms, email, and collaboration sites," David Agranovich, Facebook's director for threat disruption, said Thursday in a call with press.
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Facebook has identified the hackers behind the social engineering campaign as the group known as Tortoiseshell, believed to work on behalf of the Iranian government. The group, which has some loose ties and similarities to other better-known Iranian groups known by the names APT34 or Helix Kitten and APT35 or Charming Kitten, first came to light in 2019. At that time, security firm Symantec spotted the hackers breaching Saudi Arabian IT providers in an apparent supply chain attack designed to infect the company's customers with a piece of malware known as Syskit. Facebook has spotted that same malware used in this latest hacking campaign, but with a far broader set of infection techniques and with targets in the US and other Western countries instead of the Middle East.
Tortoiseshell also seems to have opted from the start for social engineering over a supply-chain attack, starting its social media catfishing as early as 2018, according to security firm Mandiant. That includes far more than just Facebook, says Mandiant vice president of threat intelligence John Hultquist. "From some of the very earliest operations, they compensate for really simplistic technical approaches with really complex social media schemes, which is an area where Iran is really adept," Hultquist says.
In 2019, Cisco's Talos security division spotted Tortoiseshell running a fake veterans' site called Hire Military Heroes, designed to trick victims into installing a desktop app on their PC that contained malware. Craig Williams, a director of Talos’ intelligence group, says that fake site and the larger campaign Facebook has identified both show how military personnel trying to find private-sector jobs pose a ripe target for spies. “The problem we have is that veterans transitioning over to the commercial world is a huge industry,” says Williams. “Bad guys can find people who will make mistakes, who will click on things they shouldn’t, who are attracted to certain propositions.”
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Facebook warns that the group also spoofed a US Department of Labor site; the company provided a list of the group's fake domains that impersonated news media sites, versions of YouTube and LiveLeak, and many different variations on Trump family and Trump organization–related URLs.
The threat of Iran-based hacking operations—and particularly, the threat of disruptive cyberattacks from the country—may have appeared to subside as the Biden Administration has reversed course from the Trump administration's confrontational approach. The 2020 assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in particular led to an uptick in Iranian intrusions that many feared were a precursor to retaliatory cyberattacks that never materialized. President Biden has, by contrast, signaled that he hopes to revive the Obama-era deal that suspended Iran's nuclear ambitions and eased tensions with the country—a rapprochement that has been rattled by news that Iranian intelligence agents plotted to kidnap an Iranian-American journalist.
But the Facebook campaign shows that Iranian espionage will continue to target the US and its allies, even as the broader political relations improve. "The IRGC are clearly conducting their espionage in the United States," says Mandiant's Hultquist. "They're still up to no good, and they need to be carefully watched."
16. PETA demands Marines stop drinking snake blood in jungle training: A ‘gruesome frat party-like event’
Give me a ________ break!
PETA demands Marines stop drinking snake blood in jungle training: A ‘gruesome frat party-like event’
The Washington Post · by Gina HarkinsJuly 16, 2021|Updated yesterday at 2:46 p.m. EDT · July 16, 2021
The U.S. Marines snap photos as they huddle around a dead king cobra — one of the fiercest venomous snakes they might encounter in the jungle. Then they cheer one another on as the instructor holds the reptile above their mouths, spilling its blood onto their tongues.
“It was oddly sweet — didn’t taste like blood,” one Marine said after drinking cobra blood in 2019.
That was after the Marines ate tarantulas, scorpions and bugs during the annual exercise as Thai troops shared tips for surviving deep in the jungle. The exercise has been happening every year for about four decades, and Marines often document the training with their cellphones and GoPro cameras.
But not everyone finds the rituals to be entertaining. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals submitted a formal complaint on Thursday to the Navy Department’s top watchdog not only calling on him to ban the use of animals in the exercise, but to punish those refusing to comply.
“The Marine Corps’ reputation takes a hit every time someone shows a photo of a Marine sucking down cobra blood,” Ingrid Taylor, a PETA veterinarian, said in a Thursday statement, which called on the service branch to “end the use of animals in this gruesome frat party-like event and reprimand any senior officer who orders Marines to throw decency aside in favor of bloodlust.”
The complaint escalates the group’s calls to halt the use of live animals in the exercise. Last year, PETA wrote letters to top Marine Corps Gen. David Berger and then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
But military videos show Marines still drank snake blood and ate jungle creatures in the 2020 exercise. Now the inspector’s general office will have to review PETA’s complaint and determine whether to investigate it.
“Participation in unnecessary acts of cruelty to animals betrays [Marine Corps] values,” the complaint states.
The Marine Corps officials did not respond to a request for comment. The service is undergoing a massive shift away from decades of ground-operations in the Middle East toward naval-based missions focused on deterring China, which defense leaders say is the U.S. military’s top competitor.
The Thailand-based jungle exercise, known as Cobra Gold, runs every spring for about two weeks. It’s designed to allow U.S. and local troops to share tactics and skills that could prove useful in a fight against a common enemy.
For Thai marines, that means teaching U.S. troops how to survive in the jungle.
“The reason we drink cobra’s blood is we’re searching for water,” Thai Chief Petty Officer 1st Class Phairoj Prasansai, said of the training in 2019. “Thailand has tropical forests, but finding water in the jungle is hard."
“We don’t do this for fun,” he added, “but to survive.”
PETA goes as far in its complaint as to suggest that Marines drinking snake blood violates military law. The group argues that animal cruelty could be punishable under the military justice system because it brings “discredit upon the armed forces.”
But Gary Solis, a retired Marine judge advocate, said there is no written or verbal order prohibiting Marines from drinking snake blood. That means the ritual would not be considered a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s article on disobeying lawful orders.
“No," Solis said, “drinking snake blood is not contrary to military law.”
PETA says Marines need to turn to plant-based food sources in the jungle instead of relying on live scorpions and cobra blood, which the group says casts the Marines “in a light suffused with … barbarism.”
“The availability of alternatives that don’t involve smearing cobra blood across Marines’ faces reinforces the idea that killing these animals involves unnecessary bravado that doesn’t equip troops with actual survival skills,” the complaint states.
More reading:
The Washington Post · by Gina HarkinsJuly 16, 2021|Updated yesterday at 2:46 p.m. EDT · July 16, 2021
17. Biden’s Cybersecurity Team Gets Crowded at the Top
Excerpts:
They’ll also need to navigate long-simmering tensions between their respective agencies and their relative funding. CISA was formed only in 2018, out of what had long been a convoluted and shape-shifting DHS component known most recently as the National Protection and Programs Directorate. It’s been on a hiring spree this spring, bringing on hundreds of new cyber professionals, but it's still only a quarter to a third the size of Cyber Command, and not even a tenth the size of the NSA. It has few true authorities to compel cooperation across the private sector, or even sometimes inside government.
And these are hardly the only complications facing anyone seeking to make a coherent government response to still-growing threats online. Beyond the “big five” outlined above, the US Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement both also share online enforcement duties, and many Americans were surprised to find this spring amid the Colonial Pipeline incident that the Transportation Security Administration, best known for its blue-uniformed airport security screeners, actually oversees the cybersecurity of the nation’s pipelines, among other odd corners and jurisdictions.
Despite the multitude of agencies with a slice of the cyber pie, important gaps remain. No agency has real ownership over identifying, combating, and fighting disinformation and misinformation online, although there are early indications that Biden’s DHS may try to take some control over that issue in the months ahead. The component seemingly interested in stepping into the information operations space? Yet another player: DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, whose new leader this month, John Cohen, is himself a 30-year veteran of law enforcement and intelligence.
Biden’s Cybersecurity Team Gets Crowded at the Top
GARRETT M. GRAFF
07.17.2021 07:00 AM
It’s a lot of talent, but the US now has five overlapping roles jockeying for limited budgets, authorities, and bureaucratic victories.
Wired · by Condé Nast · July 17, 2021
It’s a lot of talent, but the US now has five overlapping roles jockeying for limited budgets, authorities, and bureaucratic victories.
Jen Easterly jumped right into the fray on her first day this week as the second-ever director of the federal government’s domestic cybersecurity agency. Easterly, who most recently worked in the private sector with Morgan Stanley, was confirmed by the Senate on Monday as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, after Senator Rick Scott (R-Florida) held up her nomination for nearly a month. By Tuesday, Easterly was already addressing US election officials as part of CISA’s role securing the nation’s voting infrastructure.
After Donald Trump spent years stripping down and cutting cybersecurity agencies—and firing a number of high-profile cyber officials—the Biden administration suddenly finds itself with the opposite challenge: coordinating a glut of high-powered, accomplished people in leadership positions. The good news is that it’s the most serious constellation of cyber talent ever assembled in the US government. The potentially bad news is that the US now has five overlapping roles jockeying for limited federal budgets, authorities, and bureaucratic victories. It's an embarrassment of talent to throw at what remains one of the nation’s most complex and stickiest policy problems. Rather than helping solve the cyber challenge, though, it could very well end up being simply too many cooks in the kitchen.
Beyond Easterly at CISA—which oversees the federal government’s civilian cybersecurity efforts and interfaces with election officials and critical infrastructure sectors to protect local, state, and tribal systems, as well as private company networks and industries—General Paul Nakasone holds the so-called “dual hat” role of heading the National Security Agency’s signals-intelligence efforts and US Cyber Command, the nation’s offensive cyber military capability. He is also in charge of securing the military’s own communications and computer networks.
That shared NSA DNA is a belated admission of how long cybersecurity took a back seat in the government’s wider bureaucracy.
At the White House, Biden created a new senior-level post for Anne Neuberger, now deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology. Neuberger acts as the internal coordinator for Biden’s sweeping, cyber-focused executive order, and she has thus far served as the administration’s public face on cyber incidents. Biden also nominated Chris Inglis to serve in a position newly created by Congress known as the national cyber director, an amorphous and largely undefined role that is meant to serve as the president’s top cyber adviser and coordinator. Inglis was sworn into the role on Monday as well. It very much remains to be seen what role he’ll carve out for himself, or even what kind of team he might build to execute his vision. The new office, which will exist in the White House as part of what’s known as the Executive Office of the President—similar to the White House drug czar or the US trade representative—will sit separate and apart from the National Security Council. It's authorized for up to 75 of its own staff, which would make it one of the largest cyber policy shops in the entire government, although where Inglis will recruit staff and what they would do remains unclear.
Hardly least of all, there’s also the Justice Department, where deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco and principal deputy associate attorney general John Carlin have led efforts to confront foreign adversaries through indictments, bringing a groundbreaking series of cases beginning in 2014 against Chinese military hackers. Monaco and Carlin moved quickly to establish and assert the Justice Department’s role this spring amid the flood of ransomware, announcing an April task force and a surprise seizure that recovered some $2.3 million of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline.
(Disclosure: I have worked with nearly everyone mentioned in this article at the Aspen Institute, where most were engaged in the public-private Aspen Cybersecurity Group. I also coauthored a 2018 book on the US government’s approach to cybersecurity with John Carlin.)
With the exception of the Justice Department’s team, the key cyber players share a special background as veterans of Fort Meade, the base of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command. Beyond Nakasone, Inglis spent nearly 30 years with the civilian side of the NSA, rising to be its deputy director. Before her appointment earlier this year, Neuberger founded and led the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate and previously served as its chief risk officer, carving out a unique public voice for an agency not normally known for its public engagement. Easterly, who worked in the NSA’s elite hacking team known as the Tailored Access Operations, in 2009 helped design, along with Nakasone and others, what later became US Cyber Command.
That shared NSA DNA is a belated admission, of sorts, of how long cybersecurity took a back seat in the government’s wider bureaucracy. When the Biden administration went looking post-election for senior, respected leaders who had worked and thought about these issues for years, it really only had one talent pool to draw from.
The NSA and Cyber Command, for its part, moved rapidly during the Trump administration to regularize more aggressive offensive cyber operations. Nakasone, as WIRED reported last fall, has carried out more offensive operations online in his nearly three years heading the dual-hat arrangement than the US government had ever done prior to his tenure—combined. In recent months, US Cyber Command has begun to focus its attention not just on nation-state adversaries but also on transnational organized crime, which US officials increasingly point to as having risen to a scale and sophistication that equals the threat from established online adversaries like Iran and China.
The Biden White House, though, is still very much sorting out its own approach to cyber issues, from Chinese tech companies to ransomware. While Inglis, Neuberger, Monaco, Easterly, and Nakasone are friendly and collegial, they have differing philosophies, and they now find themselves arrayed across government with very different equities, tools, and capabilities.
How Inglis and Neuberger work together and share power inside the White House going forward will be one of the biggest questions of the Biden administration’s approach to the internet, as will the question of how Easterly and Nakasone balance the government’s civilian and military approach online. The answers will have a bearing not just on current technology and security policy but the future of US cyberdefense. If the NSA and Cyber Command split in two at the conclusion of Paul Nakasone’s tenure, then Neuberger, Inglis, and Easterly are among the obvious candidates—along with current NSA director of cybersecurity Rob Joyce—to take the reins of the intelligence agency.
They’ll also need to navigate long-simmering tensions between their respective agencies and their relative funding. CISA was formed only in 2018, out of what had long been a convoluted and shape-shifting DHS component known most recently as the National Protection and Programs Directorate. It’s been on a hiring spree this spring, bringing on hundreds of new cyber professionals, but it's still only a quarter to a third the size of Cyber Command, and not even a tenth the size of the NSA. It has few true authorities to compel cooperation across the private sector, or even sometimes inside government.
And these are hardly the only complications facing anyone seeking to make a coherent government response to still-growing threats online. Beyond the “big five” outlined above, the US Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement both also share online enforcement duties, and many Americans were surprised to find this spring amid the Colonial Pipeline incident that the Transportation Security Administration, best known for its blue-uniformed airport security screeners, actually oversees the cybersecurity of the nation’s pipelines, among other odd corners and jurisdictions.
Despite the multitude of agencies with a slice of the cyber pie, important gaps remain. No agency has real ownership over identifying, combating, and fighting disinformation and misinformation online, although there are early indications that Biden’s DHS may try to take some control over that issue in the months ahead. The component seemingly interested in stepping into the information operations space? Yet another player: DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, whose new leader this month, John Cohen, is himself a 30-year veteran of law enforcement and intelligence.
Senator Angus King (I-Maine), who helped lead the Solarium Commission that recommended the creation of the national cyber director office and increased investment in government cyber roles, trumpeted this week’s new staffing on Monday.
“Now,” he said in a statement to The Hill, “it’s time for us all to get to work.”
More Great WIRED Stories
Wired · by Condé Nast · July 17, 2021
18. Lawmaker: Special Operations Must Adapt to Gray Zone Conflict
I would just say the two SOF trinities are quite capable of SOF operations in the gray zone and conducting irregualr warfare which is the military contribution to political warfare. And political warfare is the essence of great power competition.
• The Two US SOF “Trinities”
1. Irregular Warfare
2. Unconventional Warfare
3. Support to Political Warfare
• The Comparative advantage of SOF:
1. Governance
2. Influence
3. Support to indigenous forces and populations
• With exquisite capabilities for the no fail CT and CP national missions
Lawmaker: Special Operations Must Adapt to Gray Zone Conflict - USNI News
A U.S Navy SEAL secures the deck of a ship, and conducts board, search, and seizure (VBSS) training with British Royal Marine Commandos and Ukrainian Special Forces in Odessa, Ukraine on June 21, 2021. US Army Photo
Increasing gray zone conflicts around the world means U.S. Special Operations Command must adapt to the era of great power competition while still being a counter-terrorism force, a key House lawmaker said Wednesday.
Disinformation campaigns by China, Russia and others and attacks by cybercriminals “may be one of the biggest security threats we’re facing,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) and vice chair of the House Armed Services intelligence and special operations subcommittee said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. For nations, terrorist organizations and criminals, gray zone operations are “a low-cost way to disrupt” our country to their advantage.
Having served in the Pentagon for the assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict just after Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, she added, “there’s a SOF element” to countering these activities, particularly disinformation and propaganda.
“SOF is a place where you can incubate ideas,” she said.
After touring the command’s Military Information Support Operations WebOps Center at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., Murphy said she came away impressed with its ability to address this growing threat. SOCOM has the lead in the Pentagon in exposing and countering propaganda and disinformation.
Earlier this year, SOCOM commander Army Gen. Richard Clarke told lawmakers China has ramped up an information operations campaign in the Indo-Pacific. He said SOCOM has established a task force there “to tamp down some of the disinformation” China spreads about its own activities, in addition to those of the United States and its allies and partners.
At the CSIS event, Murphy said China, “with suitcases full of money,” has “much more of a transactional relationship” with other nations in the Indo-Pacific and Africa than the United States. Special Operations Command is responsible for some of that perception.
Murphy used the counterterrorism American special forces have performed in the Philippines for more than a decade as an example. A long-term effort like that, “gives [the United States] reach conventional military may not have.”
Other pluses she mentioned were interoperability with partners and establishing long-term “relationships our competitors don’t have.”
Murphy said these efforts also free up conventional forces to train for high-end conflict.
On the impact of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Murphy, said, “the onus is on our military” to alert policymakers to ensure the United States remains capable of monitoring terrorist organizations’ activities there and abroad. She added the “over-the-horizon” response as now explained to Congress “is an eight- or nine-hour flight if we can’t get any closer in.”
The congresswoman, whose family fled Vietnam in a boat when she was an infant in 1979, also said she was very concerned about protecting Afghans – particularly interpreters, security guards and embassy clerks and their families – who helped American and coalition forces during the war. A vote in the Senate to change the visa program for these Afghans is expected soon. The House passed its version in late June.
“Now we have to monitor the situation” as the Taliban gains ground and peace talks with the government remain stalled.
On building diversity in the command, SOCOM “needs to look at each unit in the SOF community” from civil affairs to Navy SEALs “to understand what the barriers are” in each because the requirements to carry out missions vary widely from organization to organization and component to component.
Murphy said, “I remember what it looked like” when she visited the command – male and largely white – as a “bureaucrat” with a Vietnamese heritage. “They’re making progress.” She said she was paying particular attention to SOF deploying to Latin America, which had been part of her portfolio in the Pentagon.
Murphy said she now sees “a blend not just from a linguistic perspective but a cultural perspective.”
There are about 75,000 service members and civilians assigned to the command.
Related
19. The Iraqi Spies Who Helped Defeat ISIS (Book Review)
Excerpts:
Coker’s portrait of modern-day Iraq reveals a society that, liberated from political dictatorship, remains crushed by the weight of social and religious custom. Harith al-Sudani volunteered for his near-suicidal assignment because his personal life had been ruined after his parents forbade his marriage to his university sweetheart because she was a Kurd — whom they described as something between a witch and an animal. Both men and women suffocate under authoritarian family patriarchies — which themselves are bound into broader structures of tribal kinship and hierarchy. Those able to escape through education and talent find their paths blocked by the openly sectarian division of the public services and employment. This was the path of the book’s anti-hero, Abrar al Kubaisi, a talented graduate and chemist who ends up becoming a would-be-ISIS-bombmaker. At the book’s end, we find the relations of those caught up in the misery and war of the past 20 years not declaiming how “Love Trumps Hate,” or worrying about “threats to their democracy,” but longing for the return of a dictator to punish their sectarian enemies. This is a political world in which bias is emphatically not “unconscious.”
The first of these lessons may lead young people to condemn their country — the second should help them to appreciate it.
The Iraqi Spies Who Helped Defeat ISIS
An Iraqi soldiers walks past an ISIS emblem during fighting north of Mosul, Iraq, January 2017. (Khalid al Mousily/Reuters)
The Spymaster of Baghdad: A True Story of Bravery, Family, and Patriotism in the Battle against ISIS, by Margaret Coker (Dey Street Books, 336 pp., $28.99)
In one of the many deep and characteristically self-effacing passages of A Promised Land — Barack Obama’s celebrated memoir — soon-to-be Candidate Obama ruminates upon the significance of the political campaign he is about to launch. His election, he writes, “would mean that . . . the world didn’t have to be a cold, unforgiving place, where the strong preyed on the weak.” It could signal the dawn of a new era in which people weren’t always “lashing out against the unknown and huddling against the darkness.” Nay, an Obama presidency might even mean an end to “clans and tribes,” those ancient social organizations that we have known since the dawn of human history.
The memo, about the significance of President Obama’s coming, must not have made it to Iraq, the country whose fate he became substantially responsible for in January 2009. Margaret Coker, a veteran journalist with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, frequently seems to struggle for words to describe the violence that consumed Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of 2003 and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Covering events in Baghdad over some 16 years, she watched a “kaleidoscope of horror” unfold in the city and surrounding countryside. From the urban insurgency and ethnic cleansing of 2004, through the sectarian civil war that followed the Samarra Shrine bombing in February 2006, to the intra-Shiite clashes of 2008 — Baghdad was a “synonym for murder and mayhem.” At one point the city’s morgues were stuffed with over 10,000 bodies that couldn’t be identified because they were so disfigured.
And yet the worst was still to come — after, not before, the withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq in December 2011. While official Washington set about preening over yet another progressive political victory in ending the war in the Middle East, Iraqi society rapidly became (to borrow a phrase) “a colder and more unforgiving place” as its predatory, sectarian government carried out a vendetta against the country’s Sunni minority. The result was the rise of the Islamic State movement, which quickly set a new standard in modern barbarity, and the outbreak of a three-year war against their Caliphate, costing another hundred thousand Iraqi civilian lives.
Then Coker returned to Baghdad in mid 2017 and found a city transformed. Baghdad, she writes,
was safer than it had been since the U.S. invasion. New cafes were opening weekly. Families strolled through riverside parks dotted with repaired playgrounds without fear of a terrorist attack. Young men and women packed nightclubs to hear live rock music and flirt.
What happened? The answers to this question have been tied up in partisan political debates — over whether ISIS’s defeat was, for example, the achievement of the Trump administration’s revamped military strategy, or another of President Obama’s, delivered from beyond the grave, as it were. In The Spymaster of Baghdad, Coker gives us an account instead situated in Iraq’s history: in the untold story of a collection of heroic Iraqi security and intelligence officials, who infiltrated ISIS’s Caliphate and helped to turn the tide in the bloody war that was being fought out in the streets of its capital.
The “Spymaster of Baghdad” is Abu Ali al-Basri, an unassuming and smartly dressed bureaucrat who Coker tells us could have come out of a John Le Carré novel. The son of a father who had been “disappeared” under the Saddam Hussein regime, al-Basri was one of thousands of Iraqi exiles who returned to Iraq after 2003, hoping to contribute to the country’s transition. In Iraqi émigré circles in Damascus in the 1980s, he had met one Nouri al-Maliki, leader of the Shiite Dawa’ Party. Reacquainted with al-Maliki in Baghdad 20 years later, al-Basri quickly rose to become chief of the then prime minister’s personal security.
But al-Basri was a professional, not simply a sectarian appointee — and when the Iraqi capital was being rocked by a wave of al-Qaeda bombings in 2009, he was designated Iraq’s point-person with the U.S. Special Forces, given a handful of men, and tasked with scoring some kind of victory over the insurgents ahead of the 2010 elections. In just one month his new unit, “the Falcons,” through a combination of good luck and well-placed informants, managed to capture the country’s most-wanted al-Qaeda leader, Manaf al-Rawi. And al-Basri then managed to persuade al-Rawi to make a deal — all without resorting to the methods that were making the Maliki government notorious. The result was a massive haul of intelligence on al-Qaeda’s operations and networks in Iraq, which the Falcons were only too happy to share with their American allies.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, al-Basri and his team viewed the subsequent U.S. departure bitterly as an “abandonment.” But the Falcons were expanded in the years that followed as an elite Iraqi counter-intelligence agency, and also managed to keep aloof from the sectarian security operations that contributed to Maliki’s downfall. So when the Islamic State burst onto the scene in June 2014 — beginning their blitzkrieg assault toward Baghdad, and unleashing a new campaign of mass terror attacks against the cities that they failed to conquer — a new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, naturally turned to the Falcons for solutions. Al-Basri’s answer was simple: They needed to get a mole inside ISIS.
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Only one man came forward for this dangerous mission, “Operation Lion’s Den”: Harith al-Sudani. Hailing from Baghdad’s notorious Shiite slum, Sadr City, Harith had been recruited into the Falcons by his younger brother, Munaf (who became his handler) and volunteered for the mission after witnessing the horror of an ISIS market bombing near his home in early 2015. The assignment involved months of training: studying up on the Islamic State’s radical theology, acquiring the correct Baghdad Sunni accent, and perfecting a cover-story as “Abu Suhaib,” a disaffected Baghdad driver and Anbar Province native, captivated by the prospect of joining the jihad. The Falcons first plugged Harith into ISIS circles online, and then, after being accepted as a recruit in December, he moved into an ISIS training camp located at a farmhouse in Tarmiyya, 20 miles north of Baghdad.
The balance sheet for Operation Lion’s Den is certainly impressive. “Abu Suhaib” was first assigned the task of ferrying ISIS suicide bombers into Baghdad — which he did, directly into the arms of waiting teams of Falcons. The Iraqi government then issued press releases reporting successful “attacks” with appropriate casualties figures, leading Abu Suhaib’s ISIS commandos to view him as one of their most successful operatives. In the summer of 2016, he was promoted and made responsible for selecting targets in Baghdad for attacks — making it even easier for his colleagues to secure the scene, detain or kill the would-be attackers, and set off a decoy explosion. All this, moreover, was in addition to the stream of high-grade intelligence that was now being funneled from top ISIS masterminds — via Abu Ali al-Basri, soon appointed Iraq’s national security adviser — to the highest levels of the Iraqi government.
To be sure, the Falcons may not, as the book’s U.K. subtitle suggests, have “turned the tide against ISIS” — this was the result of overwhelming U.S. aerial power, supporting Iraqi army units, and militias slogging it out on the front lines. But their contribution to this effort should not be underestimated. In one year undercover, their agent is estimated to have prevented as many as 30 planned suicide attacks and 17 vehicle bombings in Baghdad.
In early 2017, however, communication from their mole went silent. Their last operation, in December, had involved a difficult decoy truck-bombing in central Baghdad, and Harith’s fellow Falcons feared the worst, especially after a raid on the ISIS farmhouse where he had been located found it abandoned. Indeed, six months passed before they saw Harith al-Sudani again, in interrogation and execution videos discovered on the mobile phone of a captured ISIS suspect.
What their courageous colleague must have been through in his final days, after having his cover blown, is a reminder why — as Coker stresses at the outset of the book — the triumph over ISIS and the final killing of its caliph was bittersweet for most Iraqis. The most moving part of the book is its pictures: photographs of the Falcons at work and play, of brothers Harith and Munaf on a holiday their team sent them on to Beirut before the mission commenced, and finally of his parents, his widow, and his children grouped around the portrait of the “hero and martyr,” which now holds pride of place in the al-Sudani family home.
Reviewers have praised The Spymaster of Baghdad for being “better than spy fiction” and reading like a novel. It’s true — and the point at which our leading journalists began aspiring to write like novelists (rather than, say, historians) will probably one day be identified as the moment that journalism entered its current heady decline.
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In fact, the gripping account just related — namely, the “untold story of the elite Iraqi intelligence cell that turned the tide against ISIS” — makes up probably less than a quarter of The Spymaster of Baghdad. The remainder is given over to what one can only assume is Coker’s treatment for a Netflix serialization, in which we are taken at length through the psychological complexes, emotional lives, and family dramas of the main characters. These are packed with “real life” details that the author cannot possibly have known — and that contribute the dramatic effect and psychological insight of a soap opera. (“That thought spurred Um Harith to roll over on her sleeping mat and stand up slowly, testing her arthritic knees. . . .”; “Harith woke up feeling lost, the scent of sea in his nose. . . .”; “As he drew the tobacco smoke into his lungs, Munaf could see. . . .”; et cetera.)
Worse: Much of the dialogue is narrated in a pastiche Iraqi-style English — with everyone constantly calling each other “Brother” and repeating things for emphasis. God forbid that I should ever be found charging anyone with “Orientalism” — that last refuge of the intellectual scoundrel — but it is difficult to imagine anyone doing this sort of thing with a book about Italians and being taken very seriously.
A serious history of Iraq through the first quarter of the 21st century should be taught at high schools — if space can be found between sessions on CRT and the 1619 Project. It might offer an obvious lesson about, for example, the dangers of hubris — how an invasion sold in the name of utopian visions of democracy and freedom resulted in a state of raw anarchy and horrifying civil war. But there is another, more valuable lesson here, too — about the real meaning of the “diversity” of the societies of the world.
Coker’s portrait of modern-day Iraq reveals a society that, liberated from political dictatorship, remains crushed by the weight of social and religious custom. Harith al-Sudani volunteered for his near-suicidal assignment because his personal life had been ruined after his parents forbade his marriage to his university sweetheart because she was a Kurd — whom they described as something between a witch and an animal. Both men and women suffocate under authoritarian family patriarchies — which themselves are bound into broader structures of tribal kinship and hierarchy. Those able to escape through education and talent find their paths blocked by the openly sectarian division of the public services and employment. This was the path of the book’s anti-hero, Abrar al Kubaisi, a talented graduate and chemist who ends up becoming a would-be-ISIS-bombmaker. At the book’s end, we find the relations of those caught up in the misery and war of the past 20 years not declaiming how “Love Trumps Hate,” or worrying about “threats to their democracy,” but longing for the return of a dictator to punish their sectarian enemies. This is a political world in which bias is emphatically not “unconscious.”
The first of these lessons may lead young people to condemn their country — the second should help them to appreciate it.
20. Airborne Assault to Occupy South China Sea Features?
Excerpts:
These recent Chinese aerial activities may indicate the probable logic behind the recent PLAAF flight near Malaysian airspace.
First, China may be trying to probe Malaysia’s air defence and its political responses. China may announce that its aircraft were flying in international airspace, and since Malaysia has responded with combat aircraft interceptions it may unilaterally declare its own South China Sea ADIZ to protect its right to monitor the airspace. This would augment Chinese claims across the South China Sea by controlling its airspace.
Second, China may be testing the possibility of conducting airborne operations as a new innovative tactic to assert its claim. For example, in a hypothetical case, China could use its military aircraft to transport para-marines and equipment in a large coordinated airborne assault operation to occupy multiple uninhabited South China Sea features (such as islands, rocks or reefs) simultaneously. It may then undertake fast building of platforms, structures and foundations on these features, supported by fleets of surface vessels.
The recent PLAAF flight near Malaysian airspace indicated the potential risks of China utilising its air power to claim the South China Sea. While there is a lot of attention on countering Chinese maritime surface tactics – such as using coastguard vessels, fishermen and militia (also known as ‘greyzone tactics’) – the tempting prospect of using the air dimension to gain effective control over the South China Sea should not be dismissed. Other littoral claimant states and major powers subscribing to the international rules-based order in the South China Sea should take grave note.
Airborne Assault to Occupy South China Sea Features?
Adam Leong Kok Wey
15 July 2021
6 Minute Read
The recent deployment of 16 People’s Liberation Army Air Force aircraft near Malaysian airspace may hint at a new tactic for China to assert its claims over the South China Sea.
On 31 May 2021, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) flew squadron-sized multi-role strategic airlifters, consisting of Ilyushin Il-76 and Xian Y-20 aircraft, over Malaysia’s Exclusive Economic Zone waters and the South Luconia Shoals (Beting Pattingi Ali), and reached about 60 miles off Sarawak’s coast. After repeated requests by air controllers for identification and the purpose of the PLAAF flight went unanswered, the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) scrambled Hawk 208 light fighter jets to intercept, which resulted in the PLAAF formation turning back. According to the RMAF, the PLAAF aircraft flew in tactical formation over the maritime waters that are claimed by China as part of its ‘nine-dash line’ contention over the South China Sea.
The real intention of this flight is not known, but it may indicate that China could also be planning to assert its South China Sea claims by using air power.
Shrewdness and Stealth
For years, China has been using surface maritime means to enforce its claims; coastguard vessels, fishing boats, armed maritime militia and even mobile oil rigs have been deployed for this purpose. Furthermore, Beijing has been consistently showing its inventiveness in asserting its maritime claims as demonstrated in 2014, when China placed a mobile oil rig near the Paracel Islands, sparking a tense standoff with Vietnam. This was followed by the establishment of ‘fishermen outposts’ in reefs/islands in international waters off the South China Sea – another Chinese ‘innovation’.
China also covertly built an artificial island complete with a large airstrip on Fiery Cross Reef in 2015. This artificial construct now hosts radars, sensors, and possibly air defence systems and land-based anti-ship missiles. However, because such aggressive island-grabbing operations have gained substantial attention, similar operations have become more difficult to conduct, if only because other South China Sea littoral states are more vigilant to these threats. For example, in early March this year, a large armada of more than 200 Chinese fishing boats docked on Whitsun Reef (also known as the Julian Felipe Reef in the Philippines) close to the western Philippine province of Palawan in the South China Sea. This latest action by China has resulted in vigorous protests and demarches from the Philippines government, including sending South Korean-made FA-50 light combat aircraft to watch these fishing boats. The docked fishing boats subsequently dispersed but remained in Philippines-claimed waters. The state’s vocal response demonstrated that China’s assertive maritime operations are now frequently met with strong resistance. At the very least, they create enough opposition so as to attract more attention than Beijing had bargained for.
A Change of Tactics?
The close monitoring of China’s tactic of using surface maritime operations has made it increasingly difficult to assert claims in this manner, and may have precipitated its potential use of airpower to assert its claims and airborne operations to occupy South China Sea features.
China has been actively using its air assets to monitor and occasionally probe other regional competitors’ air spaces. For example, Japan – which claimed the Senkaku Islands together with China – has seen a surge in daily military overflights in this area since 2012, when it bought three of the islands from their private owner. A year later, China declared an East China Sea Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) stretching from the East China Sea to the Senkaku Islands which overlapped with Japan, Taiwan and South Korea’s ADIZs. Increasingly larger groups of Chinese aircraft – sometimes consisting of a mixture of H-6K strategic bombers, Tu-154 electronic warfare aircraft, Sukhoi SU-30 and Shenyang J-11 fighter aircraft – overflew the Senkaku Islands regularly in multiple simultaneous routes. The Japan Air Self-Defense Forces (JASDF) regularly deploy their fighters to intercept Chinese flights as it is Japan’s policy to demonstrate its strong resolve in challenging China’s assertion. For example, in 2019, Chinese military aircraft flew near the Senkakus 675 times. They were intercepted by JASDF aircraft each time.
More recently, the PLAAF has been flying within the Taiwanese ADIZ on an almost daily basis. Since last year, the PLAAF has sent aircraft into Taiwan’s ADIZ nearly every day and regularly crossed the median line, buzzing Taiwan’s air defence systems. From January to October 2020, the Taiwanese air force (Republic of China Air Force, ROCAF) has scrambled its fighters 2,972 times to intercept PLAAF aircraft in this area. By late March this year, the cost of scrambling fighters had finally taken its toll on Taiwanese resources (it cost Taiwan approximately US$1 billion, or 9% of its defence budget, in 2020). The ROCAF has now decided not to scramble its aircraft every time PLAAF aircraft enter the ADIZ – instead, it will use its radars and air defence missile systems to track them.
China has not lowered the tempo of these near-daily flights. On 12 April, the PLAAF conducted its largest overflight to date with 25 aircraft, which included 14 Shenyang J-16 strike fighters, four Chengdu J-10 multirole fighter planes and four Xian H-6 strategic bombers.
These recent Chinese aerial activities may indicate the probable logic behind the recent PLAAF flight near Malaysian airspace.
First, China may be trying to probe Malaysia’s air defence and its political responses. China may announce that its aircraft were flying in international airspace, and since Malaysia has responded with combat aircraft interceptions it may unilaterally declare its own South China Sea ADIZ to protect its right to monitor the airspace. This would augment Chinese claims across the South China Sea by controlling its airspace.
Second, China may be testing the possibility of conducting airborne operations as a new innovative tactic to assert its claim. For example, in a hypothetical case, China could use its military aircraft to transport para-marines and equipment in a large coordinated airborne assault operation to occupy multiple uninhabited South China Sea features (such as islands, rocks or reefs) simultaneously. It may then undertake fast building of platforms, structures and foundations on these features, supported by fleets of surface vessels.
The recent PLAAF flight near Malaysian airspace indicated the potential risks of China utilising its air power to claim the South China Sea. While there is a lot of attention on countering Chinese maritime surface tactics – such as using coastguard vessels, fishermen and militia (also known as ‘greyzone tactics’) – the tempting prospect of using the air dimension to gain effective control over the South China Sea should not be dismissed. Other littoral claimant states and major powers subscribing to the international rules-based order in the South China Sea should take grave note.
Adam Leong Kok Wey is an Associate Professor in Strategic Studies, and the Deputy Director of Research in the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies at the National Defence University of Malaysia.
The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.
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21. The Next War’s ‘Butcher’s Bill’ Will Match WWII’s—Unless the US Adapts, Milley Says
A powerful warning from the Chairman. Adapt or die.
The Next War’s ‘Butcher’s Bill’ Will Match WWII’s—Unless the US Adapts, Milley Says
NATO militaries must master new technologies, from AI to next-gen long-range fires, within 15 years, Joint Chiefs chair warns.
New technologies are so altering the “character of war” that the United States and allies who don’t hold the advantage may suffer another slaughter on par with World Wars I and II, warned the U.S. military’s top officer.
“If we don't get there first-est with the most-est, and we don't put the pedal to the metal and do this right over the next 10 to 15 years, we are condemning a future generation to what happened 76 years ago,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said Thursday, at the NATO’s new operational headquarters, Joint Force Command Norfolk in Virginia.
The mission of the now fully operational command is to fight a future Battle of the Atlantic, if necessary, and deter another great power war like those of World War I and World War II, which killed 150 million people globally.
“That is the butcher’s bill of great power war. That's what this international order that's been in existence for seven and a half decades is designed to prevent. That's what JFC Norfolk is all about, is to prevent that outcome,” he said.
The world is not just experiencing a challenge to the established international order but also another significant change in the “character of war,” Milley said, meaning how countries fight, which technology is used, and through which organizations, such as NATO. The chairman argued that the last time there was such a change occurred between the two world wars, Milley said, when available technologies evolved to include radios, tanks and aviation. Countries like the United States, Britain, and Russia were applying them in different ways, but Nazi Germany did it better, combining and adapting them to their way of war-fighting and leadership development, allowing them to overwhelm Eastern Europe within 18 months.
The United States and NATO militaries must master within the next 15 years the numerous technologies becoming available today, from long range fires to artificial intelligence and robotics, he said.
“I would argue that the country that masters those technologies, combines them with their doctrine, develops their leadership to take maximum advantage of them, is likely going to have significant—perhaps even decisive—advantage at the beginning of the next war. And in fact, that may be as long as the war lasts,” Milley said.
The 2022 Pentagon budget requests $112 billion to fund research, development, test, and engineering in areas such as hypersonics, cyber, and biotechnology. The technology investments are seen as a means to compete against near peer adversaries such as China and Russia, the former of which already has several advantages in this area.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
