Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:


"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
~Abraham Lincoln

"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership." 
– John Kenneth Galbraith

"The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party." 
– John C. Calhoun




1. US close to sending $2 billion in security aid across the Indo-Pacific

2. Taiwan 'must rely' on itself for defence against China: FM

3. Iranian proxies attack US base in Iraq for the first time in months

4. SOUTHCOM chief calls for 'Marshall Plan' for Western Hemisphere to counter Russia, China

5. Drone Strike Hits Tel Aviv, a First During Gaza War

6. Readying for war or being prepared for crises? China’s stockpiling of resources raises eyebrows and questions

7. China’s Leaders Point to Economic Threats but Show No Sign of Changing Tack

8. Israelis Are Preparing for Another War

9. Trump-Vance US presidency could mean tougher anti-China stance, say analysts

10. Former Trump defense secretary urges Biden to do more to stop Iran's threats on officials

11. Taiwan responds to Trump comments, says defense spending has reached historic levels

12. Chinese PLAN and Russian Navy Finish South China Sea Exercise

13. Rewind and Reconnoiter: The Accelerating Threat of the Political Assassination with Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware

14. Strategic Outpost’s 2024 Summer Vacation Reading List

15. The Rising Tide of Political Violence

16. The Red Sea Crisis Goes Beyond the Houthis

17. The Senile Superpower?

18. What the Microsoft Outage Reveals

19. Intelligence: The god that failed

20. Want “Strategically Minded Warfighters?” Then Make “Intellectualism” a Military Value (SOF PME)

21. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 18, 2024

22. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 18, 2024






1. US close to sending $2 billion in security aid across the Indo-Pacific



So does our security assistance process need reform? Should it take years for FMF to be delivered? The question is whether our security assistance process is responsive to strategy and policy?


Excerpt:


While Foreign Military Financing, or FMF, can take years to deliver, the official said their goal was for aid to arrive within six to 12 months. For Taiwan, the assistance will go to the new administration’s “porcupine” style defense strategy, aimed at making the island harder to invade. This includes training for the Taiwanese military and maritime capabilities, the State official said.


US close to sending $2 billion in security aid across the Indo-Pacific

Defense News · by Noah Robertson · July 19, 2024

The U.S. is in the final stages of approving nearly $2 billion in security aid to the Indo-Pacific, one part of a broader effort to help countries defend against an increasingly aggressive China.

The package includes $1.2 billion for Taipei, $500 million for Manila and around $300 million to spread around other partners, such as Vietnam, parts of South Asia and island nations in the Pacific. The numbers aren’t yet final, since the administration is still briefing Congress, and lawmakers are allowed input. But the intent is to spend almost all of the $2 billion in Foreign Military Financing — or security assistance funded by the U.S. — passed for the region this April, said a senior State Department official.

To discuss the plans for this aid, which hasn’t yet been reported, Defense News spoke with Congressional aides, the State official and other people familiar with the discussions. Several were granted anonymity, either because they weren’t allowed to speak to the press or because of the sensitivity of the topic. Together, they described a moment of urgency for the U.S. on multiple fronts.

The first is to fortify its partners. At the start of the summer, China launched large military drills around Taiwan as a “punishment” for a presidential address that Beijing considered too pro-independence. Weeks later, members of the Chinese Coast Guard intercepted Filipino ships on their way to resupply a naval outpost and injured eight sailors. The attack toed a “red line” on what Manila would consider an act of war.

It’s also part of an effort to strengthen this administration’s work in Asia during the last six months of President Joe Biden’s first, and perhaps only, term. A bevy of U.S. officials — from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to top members of the National Security Council — are visiting the region this week to discuss security ties. America’s Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State will soon follow for meetings in Tokyo and Manila, where they plan to announce the $500 million in aid for the Philippines.

“The urgency has grown as the [People’s Republic of China] threat has grown,” the State official said.

While Foreign Military Financing, or FMF, can take years to deliver, the official said their goal was for aid to arrive within six to 12 months. For Taiwan, the assistance will go to the new administration’s “porcupine” style defense strategy, aimed at making the island harder to invade. This includes training for the Taiwanese military and maritime capabilities, the State official said.

Top of the list for the Philippines will be equipment to help defend against China’s bullying in the South China Sea. The official wouldn’t say what specific weapons either nation would purchase, though a Congressional aide said both would likely be for “asymmetric” systems, which often means missiles, drones or commercial-style arms.

Neither the Philippines’ nor Taiwan’s embassy in Washington would comment for this story.

‘Pump it up’

Largely because of threats from China, both Taipei and Manila are rushing to upgrade their militaries. Taiwan is already waiting on the delivery of $19 billion in other American arms it purchased — much of it F-16 fighter jets. The Philippines, meanwhile, is bulking its force to take on larger missions, like defending territory rather than countering terrorism.

“We need to really pump it up as quickly as we can,” Jose Romualdez, Manila’s ambassador to Washington, told reporters in late June.

The $500 million in support is also a huge vote of confidence from the U.S. Last year, the Philippines only received $40 million in such aid, and officials in Washington have before been skeptical that the country’s military is ready for more.

“There have been longstanding concerns about how much the Philippines can absorb,” said Bonnie Glaser, an expert on the region at the German Marshall Fund think tank.

A group of U.S. officials traveled to Manila in early June, shortly before the crisis in the South China Sea, where they discussed how the Philippines would spend the money and what support it needed, according to the Congressional aide and State official. Both sides ended up agreeing to different steps.

At the same time, America and the Philippines are also agreeing to a shared set of priorities, which the State official said they will likely announce during the summit later in July. This “roadmap” will help guide Manila’s military modernization for the next five to 10 years. The idea is to finish much of this logistical work ahead of time so that the Philippines can move faster once it gets the funding, the official said.

Romualdez, the ambassador, wouldn’t say whether his country also wanted weapons directly shipped from U.S. stocks, a much faster route. The Pentagon has $1.9 billion to replace any inventories sent to partners in the Pacific, though most of that will go to Taiwan, America’s top priority in the region.

“The Department of Defense supports the Administration’s efforts to utilize the significant funding for the Indo-Pacific region provided in the National Security Supplemental that Congress passed this spring,” a Pentagon spokesperson said in a statement, without confirming the aid package. “We also welcome continued actions by U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region to invest in their own capabilities, their defense ties with each other and their relationships with the United States.”

‘At stake’

The new administration in Taiwan is only two months into office and trying to reform its military: making exercises less scripted and giving more authority to junior officers, similar to the American system. But they’re doing so as the threat from China continues to evolve, particularly in the “gray zone,” or military actions that fall short of war.

“Most of our weapons are aimed at providing munitions so that they can stop the [People’s Liberation Army] from landing on the beach,” said Glaser, at the German Marshall Fund. “But that’s not helping them to deal with the growing [Chinese] coast guard threat.”

Nor will more arms sales please Beijing.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced this week that it was suspending arms control talks with the United States due to objections over American weapons sales to Taiwan, though Glaser said the discussions were cut soon after Taiwan’s new president spoke in May.

Taiwan’s political leaders are reeling this week after an interview with Bloomberg in which former President Donald Trump said that Taiwan needs to pay America for any military protection.

Zack Cooper, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, saw the comments as an omen. A second Trump administration may keep selling weapons to Taiwan, he said, but isn’t likely to fund any with American dollars.

“This is the beginning of a ramp up for the Philippines but it may be the last significant tranche for Taiwan,” Cooper said. “And we just started FMF for Taiwan.”

The administration plans to divide the remaining $300 million in aid for the region among other U.S. partners, according to the congressional aide and State official. Among the goals are to help wean countries off Russian military equipment, help island nations monitor their surrounding waters and perhaps also have others partner with the U.S. to build arms.

A small portion will be leftover, but the official expected Congress would approve the “vast majority” of the FMF funding in around the next two weeks.

Both the congressional aide and multiple people familiar with the deliberations said that the administration debated at first whether to use more of the funding to counter Russian arms. While there was always agreement that most of the money should help countries defend against China, the amount slated for the Philippines wasn’t always so high. The visit by U.S. officials to Manila in June helped ease those concerns.

“There was a lot of political pressure within the bureaucracy to support the Philippines,” said the congressional aide.

That pressure extends to Capitol Hill. This April, a bipartisan pair of senators introduced a bill to give Manila $500 million a year in Foreign Military Financing for the next five years. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, visited the Philippines in late May and later told Defense News that the country should be the second priority for American aid in the region.

And just this week, the top Republicans on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees sent a letter to the Biden administration urging a show of support for the Philippines after last month’s standoff with China.

The administration will soon have the FMF aid to show.

“I can’t imagine a partner that needs greater investment in their military modernization than than the Philippines, and a partner that is more willing and able to work with us on this,” the State Department official said. “They see what’s at stake.”

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.




2. Taiwan 'must rely' on itself for defence against China: FM



Realistic?

Taiwan 'must rely' on itself for defence against China: FM

19 Jul 2024 06:41PM

channelnewsasia.com

TAIPEI: Taiwan's foreign minister said Friday the self-ruled island must rely on itself for defence after US presidential candidate Donald Trump insisted Taipei "should pay" Washington for defence in the event of a conflict with neighbouring China.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has in recent years stepped up its military presence and sabre-rattling rhetoric towards the democratic island.

The United States has stepped up military aid and weapons sales to Taiwan to counter China, but Trump said earlier this week the island "should pay" Washington for defence.

In response Friday, Taiwan's newly minted foreign minister Lin Chia-lung said Taipei took the former president's comments "very seriously".

"Everyone should have this consensus that the threat is China," he told reporters in his first briefing with foreign media since his appointment to the Cabinet of Taiwan's new President Lai Ching-te.

"As far as national defence is concerned, we must rely on ourselves," he said, adding Taiwan has increased its military budget from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent of its GDP in eight years.

"I expect it will continue to increase," he said, adding that the budget will go not just to purchasing more weapons but also instating military reforms.

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published earlier this week, Trump had said the United States is "no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn't give us anything".

His comments cast doubt on the relationship between Washington and Taipei, which has steadily been strengthened in recent years.

Washington recently passed a multi-billion-dollar military aid package aimed at countering Beijing in the region, which has said it will never renounce the use of force to bring Taiwan under China's control.

When asked if he thinks Chinese President Xi Jinping has a timetable to invade Taiwan, foreign minister Lin called the chatter of a time frame "a cognitive operation".

"We hope that when Xi Jinping wakes up every day, even if he has a timetable in mind, he will say, not today," Lin said. "We should not be constrained by his manipulation, but we have to show him our determination and capability."

Source: AFP/ec






channelnewsasia.com



3. Iranian proxies attack US base in Iraq for the first time in months


I missed this report in the major papers (WSJ, NYT, WASPOST).


Iranian proxies attack US base in Iraq for the first time in months

militarytimes.com · by Noah Robertson · July 18, 2024

Editor’s note: This story has been updated.

An Iran-backed militant group attacked a U.S. base in Iraq Tuesday, the first such attack since at least April, the Pentagon confirmed Thursday.

Two armed air drones flew toward Al-Asad Airbase in western Iraq, Pentagon Spokesperson Sabrina Singh said in a briefing.

American forces shot one down, and the other one hit the base, with “minimal damage,” Singh said.

Singh didn’t say which group launched the attack, except that it was likely one of multiple groups supported by Iran that have all targeted American forces since last fall.

She also did not indicate whether the U.S. would retaliate for the strike, except to say that shooting down one of the drones was itself a response.

It’s not yet clear, Singh said, whether there would be more attacks to come or if this was a one-off.

Since the war in Gaza began last year, following the Palestinian militant group Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, U.S. ground forces in Iraq and Syria have come under fire from Iranian-backed proxies.

From October to February, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq launched regular drone attacks on bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, which they said was in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel in the ongoing war in Gaza and were aimed at forcing U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq.

Those attacks halted after three U.S. soldiers were killed in a strike on a base in Jordan, near the Syrian border in late January, prompting U.S. retaliatory strikes in Iraq, including one in central Baghdad that killed a militia commander.

U.S. troops on the ground in those countries have faced more than 100 attacks since October.

Meanwhile, at sea, Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have launched a near-daily barrage of missiles and drones at U.S. Navy ships and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

U.S. forces have intercepted the attacks and also struck Houthi sites in Yemen.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Correction: An earlier version of this report misstated the last time Iranian proxies had attacked U.S. ground forces in the Middle East. The last attack before this week’s incident was in April.

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.




4. SOUTHCOM chief calls for 'Marshall Plan' for Western Hemisphere to counter Russia, China


What is the new "national bird" of South American countries? The Chinese crane.


Is a "Marshall Plan" the right concept? I usually criticize those who seem to flippantly use that name. However, in Central/South America it may be the most relevant. Although not rebuilding after a war as in post WWII Europe, a big part of the mission of the Marshall Plan was to curb Soviet/communist influence in Europe. Now we are talking about curbing Chinese influence in the Western Hemisphere. Is a Marshal Plan-like plan appropriate for countering Chinese influence? Do we have the funds to do so?


SOUTHCOM chief calls for 'Marshall Plan' for Western Hemisphere to counter Russia, China - Breaking Defense

Gen. Laura Richardson told the Aspen Security Forum she also needs high-profile visitors to "tell them [local officials] and show them how important they are to this region, and to the hemisphere that we all live in," or Beijing would step into the void.

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · July 18, 2024

The commander of US Southern Command, Army Gen. Laura Richardson, accompanied by General Commander of the Colombian Military Forces, Gen. Helder Giraldo, meets with children and staff at the Institucion Educativa Cano De Oro. Richardson visited the school to announce a US government $1.1 million grant to build a new, four-classroom facility for the school. (Photo by Erica Bechard, SOUTHCOM Public Affairs)

WASHINGTON — The US should embark on a “Marshall Plan” for Western Hemisphere nations still struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic if it wants to keep Russian, and especially Chinese, influence in check in the region, the head of US Southern Command said today.

“I will tell you that I think from COVID, the impacts on the GDP, we do not understand how severe the impacts were in this region,” said Gen. Laura Richardson, commander of SOUTHCOM, whose area of responsibility includes Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

Richardson said that while “a couple of countries were okay,” for most there’s been a “severe economic downturn” that has now been exploited by transnational gangs and caused instability into which Moscow and Beijing have stepped with offers of cash or, in the case of China, Belt and Road Initiative projects.

“And we don’t have those kinds of tools in our kitbag. So how do we help with that? I firmly believe that we need a Marshall Plan for the region, or AKA an economic recovery act of like 1948, but instead 2024, 2025,” she told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum.

Richardson rattled off several ongoing American economic stability efforts in the region, including pending legislation, but suggested a more comprehensive approach was called for.

“How are we competing Team USA and Team Democracy with the tenders that are coming our from [other] countries? How are getting our US quality investment and talking about our US companies investing in the region? We have a lot of companies in the region. I don’t think we’re branding Team USA as we should. It should be better. We’ve got to be bragging about what US quality investment does,” she said.

If discussions about finance and investment seem a bit far afield for a US combatant commander, that’s because Richardson said, “I really believe that economic security and national security are going hand-in-hand here in this hemisphere.”

‘All They See Are Chinese Cranes’

Beyond investment, earlier in the discussion Richardson identified one tool she’s currently missing in the competition with China in the region, and it wasn’t a new missile or a new warship — it was attention.

“Really, in terms of this region and the strategic competition that we have, which is very stiff … we can’t get around fast enough,” SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Laura Richardson told an audience of senior national security officials, lawmakers and tech and defense industry bigwigs. “So what I would ask you, all of you, and who you know, I need more visitors to the Western Hemisphere. I need more visitors to the Caribbean. I need more visitors to Central America. I need more visitors to South America.”

The point, she said, was for high-profile visitors to “tell [local officials] and show them how important they are to this region, and to the hemisphere that we all live in,” or Beijing would step into the void.

Richardson said her military command works closely with the State Department to try and show how earnest the US is in its support of the 32 nations and 11 territories in her area of operations, but “we don’t have enough visitors and high-profile visits” to meet with the highest-ranking officials of those governments.

“They don’t see what Team USA is bringing to the countries and the investments — even though the foreign direct investment is really high — they don’t see it,” she said. “All they see are the Chinese cranes and all the development and the Belt and Road Initiative projects.”

Not helping matters, she said, are political logjams that keep US ambassadors from getting through the Senate confirmation process. Richardson highlighted that in especially “strategic” countries like Colombia, Brazil and Chile, the US is going or has gone without a confirmed ambassador for more than two years in each — five years for the international shipping hub of Panama.

“And there’s plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the aisle,” she said. “We just have to do better. When we talk about Team USA, we can’t be blocking our own field goals and sometimes we get in our way too much…

“We have to have our number one diplomat in that seat. The leaders look at that, the presidents of countries look at that as we are ignoring them when we can’t get our number one diplomat, their primary liaison to the United States, in that seat,” she said.

Richardson said that beyond the soft power influence the Belt and Road Initiative wields, she’s also concerned about China’s potential to use the projects to their strategic military advantage.

“It makes me a little suspicious when it’s in the critical infrastructure — a lot in the critical infrastructure of the countries in this region — deep water ports, 5G, cybersecurity, energy, space, there’s a lot of investment,” she said. “I’m worried about the dual-use nature of that. These are state-owned enterprises by a communist government that I worry about the flipping of that to a military application very quickly if something were to happen in the INDOPACOM [Indo-Pacific Command] region, something like that.”

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · July 18, 2024



5. Drone Strike Hits Tel Aviv, a First During Gaza War




Drone Strike Hits Tel Aviv, a First During Gaza War

Yemen-based Houthis claim responsibility for the attack on Israel’s commercial capital

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/drone-strike-suspected-as-blast-rings-out-in-tel-aviv-922182cf?mod=latest_headlines

By Anat Peled

Follow

 and Carrie Keller-Lynn

Updated July 19, 2024 6:21 am ET


An investigator collects pieces of glass from a window smashed in the Tel Aviv explosion. PHOTO: GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

TEL AVIV—A drone strike caused an explosion in Tel Aviv, slipping through the country’s vaunted air defenses in the first such attack on Israel’s commercial capital since the war in Gaza began more than nine months ago.

The Israeli military said the blast was caused by a large unmanned aerial vehicle that could travel long distances. It said it believes the device was launched from Yemen.

The drone, likely an upgraded Iranian Samad-3, wasn’t shot down and no air-raid sirens were activated ahead of the explosion due to a human error, the military said based on its initial findings.

“We are investigating the mishap—why we didn’t identify it, attack it and intercept it,” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said Friday.

The military said it did intercept an additional UAV outside Israeli territory along the country’s eastern border at around the same time and that it was investigating whether there is a connection between the incidents.

Emergency services said one person was killed and several people were injured by the blast, which hit an apartment near the U.S. Embassy’s branch office in the city shortly after 3 a.m. local time Friday. The injuries were light and were a result of the shrapnel, shock wave or anxiety, according to Israeli authorities.

The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, saying it had targeted the city with a new drone called “Yaffa” which can evade Israeli air-defense systems.

Houthi militias have previously fired missiles at Israel with a focus on the city of Eilat in southern Israel. They have also fired dozens of UAVs at Israel since the start of the war. Most of them had been intercepted by the U.S. before reaching Israeli territory or by the Israeli air force, according to the military.

The group, which has snarled vital shipping lanes with attacks on ships around the Red Sea, said that it would continue to strike Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, which Israel invaded following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks in which Israeli authorities say 1,200 people were killed and some 250 were taken hostage.


Emergency personnel at the site of the explosion in Tel Aviv. PHOTO: RICARDO MORAES/REUTERS


Investigators examine what seems to be part of an aerial device, according to a police spokesperson, at the site of an explosion in Tel Aviv. PHOTO: RICARDO MORAES/REUTERS

The new attack threatens to widen what is already a multifront fight. Israel is in conflict not just with Hamas and the Houthis but is also exchanging fire with Hezbollah along its border with Lebanon.

“The Israeli security system will come to terms with anyone who tries to harm the state of Israel or send terror against it in a clear and surprising way,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Friday. 

In April, Iran fired a barrage of more than 120 ballistic missiles, more than 30 cruise missiles and approximately 170 drones, most of which were intercepted by a combined force of Israel and a U.S.-led group of international partners.

After Friday’s attack, bystanders reported seeing debris strewn across the street, including pieces of nearby buildings. Several storefronts in the vicinity had shattered windows, they said, which police attributed to the blast’s shock wave. Police said the explosion was heard several miles beyond Tel Aviv.

Israeli drones could be heard buzzing above Tel Aviv in the blast’s aftermath, and the Israeli military said it immediately increased its air patrols to protect the country’s airspace.

Israel has world-renowned air defense systems such as Iron Dome and David’s Sling which protect it against rocket and missile attacks, but the country has struggled to defend itself from growing drone attacks from Hezbollah, Houthis and Iraqi militias since the start of the war.

“Even if Israel had more systems to deal with the new threat, even then, there would still not be hermetic defense,” said Liran Antebi, a senior researcher at the Israeli think tank Institute for National Security Studies, who focuses on drone warfare. “But it was expected that a central city like Tel Aviv would be better protected and it is certainly concerning.” 

Write to Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 19, 2024, print edition as 'Drone Strike Suspected in Tel Aviv'.




6. Readying for war or being prepared for crises? China’s stockpiling of resources raises eyebrows and questions


Readying for war or being prepared for crises? China’s stockpiling of resources raises eyebrows and questions

While China’s stockpiles are a tightly guarded state secret, analysts CNA spoke to agree that a heightened degree of resource amassing is being carried out, citing recent news reports. The question is - to what end?

Bong Xin Ying

18 Jul 2024 05:04PM

(Updated: 18 Jul 2024 06:05PM)

channelnewsasia.com · by Bong Xin Ying

SINGAPORE: What do grain, oil, copper, cobalt and iron ore have in common?

They’re but some of the key resources and minerals China has recently been amassing, according to media reports, in an alleged pattern of behaviour that has blared red for some observers and rival superpower the United States.

Chief of which is Washington’s concern that Beijing’s hoarding could be a precursor to war - specifically over Taiwan which it claims as its territory - as singled out during a hearing last month by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

While Beijing understandably keeps its cards close to its chest, analysts CNA spoke to believe preparation for war is but one piece of the overall stockpiling puzzle - and even then, it’s likely low on the priority list.

Instead, they see the latest fortification of national reserves as primarily aimed at ensuring the world’s second-largest economy is primed for potential shocks arising from a tumultuous geopolitical environment, climate change, and natural disasters.

“The focus is less on imminent war and more on long-term resilience and strategic positioning,” said Mr Andy Mok, a senior research fellow at Beijing-based think tank, Center for China and Globalization.

“By amassing critical resources, China sends a clear signal of its preparedness and determination to maintain its global standing.”

Further clarity on China's economic situation and policies is expected as China's Communist Party wraps up its third plenum on Thursday (Jul 18).

Major economic and social development goals that set the nation’s agenda for the next few years are traditionally laid out at the once-every-five-year gathering.

SECRECY IN STOCKPILING

China’s stockpiles are managed by the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration. They are a tightly guarded state secret, making it difficult to gauge, let alone track inventory levels.

Still, recent news reports have suggested that some extent of resource accumulation is being carried out.


Take oil for instance. China has asked its state oil companies to add eight million tonnes, or nearly 60 million barrels, of crude oil to the country’s emergency stockpiles to boost supply security, according to analytics company Vortexa and trading sources.

If completed, the stockpiling would be one of the country’s largest in recent years, Reuters reported.

Beijing also has eyes on cobalt, a key electric car battery metal. An estimate from specialist trading house Darton Commodities says it expects China to own or operate as much as 60 per cent of global cobalt supply by 2025.

Reuters and Bloomberg cited sources saying that China could buy around 15,000 tonnes of cobalt from local Chinese producers over the next few months for domestic stockpiles.

Stockpiles of copper and iron ore - both of which China imports heavily - have also been growing.

For copper, inventories registered with the Shanghai Futures Exchange rose to a 51-month high of 339,964 tonnes, in the week to Jun 7.

Meanwhile, China imported 1.18 billion tonnes of iron ore last year, a record high, Reuters reported citing customs data.

As for grain, state-owned agricultural stockpiler Sinograin said in an early June notice that it and its affiliated units will increase purchases of wheat produced this year from major regions for its reserves.

Most analysts CNA spoke with believe there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Beijing has stepped up stockpiling as of late, but they agree it is hard to pinpoint just exactly how much.

At the same time, they caution that stockpiling is not unique to China, nor is the country a stranger to stockpiling. “All prudent countries stockpile essential resources to ensure national security and economic stability,” noted Mr Mok.

In terms of stockpiling, China has a higher definition of what is considered to be a safety minimum, Mr Han-Shen Lin, senior adviser and China country director of The Asia Group, told CNA, adding: “(This) can be seen as alarming to other nations”.

Indeed, the warning signal flashed in June during a hearing by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), titled “China’s Stockpiling and Mobilization Measures for Competition and Conflict”.

The commission monitors and investigates the national security implications of the trade and economic relationship between the US and China, as stated on its website.

During the roughly five-and-a-half-hour session, USCC members heard from a panel of experts who provided their perspectives on China’s preparations for conflict, with some suggesting the stockpiling activities could indicate an imminent invasion of Taiwan.

A Chinese military helicopter flies over Pingtan island, the closest point to Taiwan in China's southeast Fujian province on Apr 7, 2023. (File photo: AFP/Greg Baker)

China sees the self-governing island as part of its territory to be reunified with the mainland, through force if necessary. It has ramped up military pressure over recent years, with near-daily activities around Taiwan now a reality.

Taipei’s defence ministry on Jul 11 detected 66 Chinese warplanes around the island, the highest single-day number this year. Fifty-six of them crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, which once served as an unofficial barrier between the two sides.

The fear of invasion is not without basis, at least according to Mr Gregory Wischer, founder and principal of Dei Gratia Minerals, a US-based critical minerals consultancy.

In a statement to the commission, he noted that mineral stockpiling can indicate an intent to launch a military attack, as minerals are necessary to manufacture military platforms and munitions, before and during a conflict.

But Mr Einar Tangen, a senior fellow at Taihe Institute and the founder of Asia Narratives, isn’t convinced.

“Given the US doesn't know what China has stockpiled, (reports claiming war plans) are most likely just scaremongering using Washington's favourite whipping post, China,” he told CNA.

Still, Mr Han from The Asia Group highlighted apprehension in certain policy circles on how China's imports are “heavily skewed” towards commodities like chips, crude petroleum and iron, which have dual-use applications.

Such goods are primarily designed for civilian use, but can have military applications or even potentially be used as precursors or components of weapons of mass destruction.

“Fair or not, the suspicion is that the significant levels imported exceed the requirements of China's slowing economy and therefore must be directly supporting China's military buildup or indirectly supporting Russia's war effort industrialisation through trade,” he added.

“If China wants to maximise its optionality, it would be rational to stockpile to levels which credibly signal that it has the capacity to manifest its intent (for war), if it chooses to,” noted Mr Han, who also emphasised the gap between the ability versus the intent to engage militarily.

RESOURCE CERTAINTY IN AN UNCERTAIN CLIMATE

As the conjecture is raised that China is stockpiling in preparation to wage war over Taiwan, analysts caution that even if this is the case, there are no indications Beijing is gearing up for a looming battle.

While acknowledging that the “wide variety of stock” China is accumulating is “unusual”, Senior International Defense Researcher at RAND Corporation Timothy Heath told CNA this does not in itself signal any expectation of an imminent conflict.

"There is no evidence that China is carrying out any type of mobilisation for war and little evidence of national war preparation,” he pointed out.

Mr Mok from the Center for China and Globalization said that despite “extensive preparations”, Beijing’s readiness for conflict remains uncertain due to logistical challenges and the potential international response.

Instead, observers believe China’s stockpiling efforts are primarily aimed at ensuring it has the wherewithal to weather shocks, especially as an uncertain geopolitical climate and a host of domestic challenges beckon.

Europe and the US have taken economic action against the world’s number two economy over perceived overcapacity - both have imposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, while Washington has also done so on other Chinese goods like solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.

Closer to home, China is confronting a faltering economy, debt-ridden local governments, a drawn-out real estate downturn and its spillover effects, as well as a rapidly ageing population, to name some.

A view of the skyline of central Beijing, China. (Photo: AP/Vincent Thian)

Mr Heath said the Chinese state under President Xi Jinping is grappling with “persistent discontent” over a slowing economy, unemployment, corruption and inadequate social welfare services.

“The security preparations observed in industry, defence mobilisation, the medical system and elsewhere are consistent with a country worried first and foremost about a deteriorating domestic situation and are less consistent with those undertaken by a leadership contemplating major war."

SAVING FOR A RAINY DAY

Climate change is another driving factor in China’s resource-amassing efforts as the country is acutely vulnerable to the fallout, analysts point out.

With 1.4 billion people, China has to feed nearly 20 per cent of the world’s population despite being home to less than 10 per cent of the world’s arable land and 6 per cent of global water resources, according to the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS).

China is facing hotter and longer heatwaves and more frequent and unpredictable heavy rain as a result of climate change, the weather bureau warned on Jul 4.

The China Meteorological Administration also cautioned that maximum temperatures across the country could rise by 1.7 to 2.8 degrees Celsius within 30 years.

Already in recent weeks, floods in the south and drought in the north are threatening crop harvests. Analysts have said the increasingly erratic weather could pose a longer-term risk to domestic output of grains like wheat, soybeans, rice and corn, potentially forcing the country to lean more heavily on imports.

An aerial view of flooded buildings and streets after heavy rains in Yueyang, in central China's Hunan province, Jul 2, 2024. (Photo: STR/CNS/AFP)

These would deal a hard blow to national food security, especially reliance on external parties in a global environment where China’s public image has taken a hit.

Beijing has made no bones about the weight it places on grains, and food security by extension.

There is historical precedent - in the late 1950s, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” to modernise China’s predominantly agrarian society resulted in mass starvation and famine alongside a collapse in grain production. An estimated tens of millions of lives were lost over four long years.

National grain stockpiles would be established in 1990 in a later move to achieve self-sufficiency. Fast forward to now, and food security remains a top priority of government work under President Xi.

The head of the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration Liu Huanxin declared in January that "China's grain inventories are abundant, with its stock-to-use ratio well above the international grain security threshold of 17 to 18 per cent”.

This implies as well that Beijing considers it a badge of honour to stockpile at levels far higher than required by other nations, said Mr Han from The Asia Group.

The act of storing grain is encapsulated in a Chinese idiom - wei yu chou mou - or saving for a rainy day. It is one that President Xi has over the years repeatedly used to emphasise the importance of taking precautions and safeguarding for future uncertainties.

Natural disasters are a key concern. They’ve already cost China 93.16 billion yuan (US$12.83 billion) in the first half of this year, more than double the 38.23 billion yuan worth of losses logged in the same period a year ago.

This was the country’s biggest first-half disaster-related loss since 2019, according to data from the Ministry of Emergency Management website.


REGIONAL IMPLICATIONS

Analysts note that the US is an increasingly relevant factor to how China determines the pace and scope of stockpiling.

“China pays close attention to US security and economic policies even when not directly targeted, because they can still significantly impact China,” said Mr Han.

He referred to the aggressive interest rate hikes carried out by the US Federal Reserve since March 2022 to tame inflation. “Yet the effect on China is to restrict its central bank from lowering its rates to stimulate China’s sluggish economy.”

“The concern is that rate cuts would accelerate US dollar capital outflows that would depreciate the Chinese yuan, thus making the stockpiling of global commodity imports - typically priced in US dollars - that much more expensive,” Mr Han explained.

Experts point to the regional implications as China forges on with amassing its resource cache.

Mr Wischer of Dei Gratia Minerals said while China’s stockpiling is primarily done by purchasing minerals from domestic producers, the country has sometimes stockpiled minerals through imports.

“In the latter case, China may import, for example, nickel produced by Chinese companies in Indonesia,” he noted.

China would expectedly try to draw Southeast Asia closer to its stockpiling orbit given the region’s rich natural resources, said Mr Han from The Asia Group.

“We see this intention with China’s BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) efforts to bolster its regional influence via trade partnerships,” he added.

Leaders of ASEAN and China are seen on a monitor in Hanoi during a virtual summit on Nov 22, 2021. (Photo: Malaysia Prime Minister office via AP)

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) became China’s top trading partner in 2020, overtaking the European Union. Meanwhile, China has been ASEAN’s largest trading partner for 15 years, with trade volume reaching a new record of US$702 billion in 2023.

Both ASEAN and China are also strong supporters of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and there’s the ongoing negotiations on the upgrade of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement.

Mr Mok said China’s resource accumulation efforts could lead to higher resource prices and increased economic dependency within Southeast Asia.

At the same time, he highlighted how it also brings opportunities through Chinese investments and infrastructure projects.

“This dual impact illustrates the region's complex relationship with Beijing’s strategic manoeuvres,” he said.

channelnewsasia.com · by Bong Xin Ying



7. China’s Leaders Point to Economic Threats but Show No Sign of Changing Tack


China’s Leaders Point to Economic Threats but Show No Sign of Changing Tack

Xi Jinping and top officials offer rare nod to risks, without pointing to major overhauls

By Rebecca FengFollow

 in Hong Kong and Chun Han WongFollow

 in Singapore

Updated July 18, 2024 10:40 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-leaders-point-to-economic-threats-but-show-no-sign-of-changing-tack-27790d88?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and several hundred other top Communist Party officials huddled in Beijing this week to plot a path forward for their country’s sagging economy. The outline they released after four days of meetings suggests a future that looks more or less like the present.

That fidelity to China’s current course signals that Xi remains committed to his vision of state-led development, even as unease festers—among ordinary Chinese and foreign investors—over his stewardship of the world’s second-largest economy.  

Economic growth has slowed sharply as China continues to struggle with an unbalanced recovery from the Covid pandemic. In a communiqué issued Thursday at the end of the meeting, known as the Third Plenum, the party’s governing Central Committee showed unusual candor in acknowledging the problems the economy faces. 

The document highlighted risks in key areas such as the property sector, local-government debt, and small and midsize financial institutions. It also promised to tackle lackluster demand, a problem that has dogged the economy. 

The discussion of specific threats to growth is unusual in Third Plenum communiqués, which in the past have typically referred to risks only in vague terms. 

Yet officials didn’t signal any major overhauls. Instead they reaffirmed Xi’s vision for a state-driven model of development focused on economic security and technological dominance—one that many analysts say is exacerbating the economy’s imbalances.


The venue of the four-day meeting in Beijing was heavily guarded. PHOTO: GREG BAKER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES


Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said he wants the country to lead the world in technological innovation. PHOTO: ANDY WONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The communiqué “essentially reaffirms the approach and direction of travel Xi Jinping has set for China, despite the serious challenges, particularly in the economic arena, that China faces today,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London. 

“The technocrats within the party must be as disappointed as investors,” Tsang said, adding that Xi’s emphasis on Communist Party control “will ensure political and social stability in China in the foreseeable future, but it will not do much to restore economic vitality.”

Officials stood by the government’s 5% growth target for this year, which some economists have said would be hard to achieve. They also vowed to nurture “new productive forces,” a buzzy party phrase that refers to tech-led industries that Xi believes will power China’s growth for the next generation, while highlighting security as the bedrock of national development.

The communiqué is meant to convey a broad outline of the Central Committee’s decision, reached at the plenum, on how to promote “Chinese-style modernization,” the term Xi uses to distinguish China’s authoritarian approach to development from Western models. A more detailed plan is due to be released in the coming days. 

Though vague, the document nevertheless made clear that Xi intends to strengthen the state’s position at the center of the country’s economic development, rather than giving more play to the market and consumers as some economists have proposed. It cited the need to jianchi, or persist, 17 times—an echo of state-media messaging that casts resistance to Xi’s vision as proof that his changes are necessary. 

Chinese Imports Are Rising Again. Here’s What It Means for U.S. Jobs


Chinese Imports Are Rising Again. Here’s What It Means for U.S. Jobs

Play video: Chinese Imports Are Rising Again. Here’s What It Means for U.S. Jobs


Cheap Chinese goods helped keep inflation low in the early 2000s, but at the cost of U.S. manufacturing. As those imports surge again, here’s what’s changed and what it means for American jobs. Photo: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg News PHOTO: WALDO SWIEGERS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Some past iterations of the Third Plenum delivered major economic overhauls, such as in 1978, when the party embraced then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s program of “reform and opening-up” and paved the way for decades of economic growth. In 2013, officials affirmed the market would play a “decisive” role in the economy and loosened the country’s one-child policy. There was no mention of the market’s “decisive” role in allocating resources in Thursday’s readout.

China’s economy slowed sharply in the second quarter, growing 4.7% year over year, down from 5.3% in the first. Growth momentum is disappearing owing to a series of interlinked challenges. The housing market is in a prolonged crisis, local governments are swimming in debt, consumers at home are cutting back spending and trade tensions overseas are mounting—all when the country’s population is rapidly aging.

There isn’t an easy solution to any of these problems. Despite many measures to revive the property sector, new home sales and prices are still dropping fast. Local governments’ hidden debt is now at a wobbly level of $7 trillion to $11 trillion, according to estimates by economists and academics. Addressing that would require a deep overhaul of how Chinese cities fund themselves. Beijing controls the purse strings and limits how much local governments can borrow. Yet cities are responsible for kick-starting economic growth. 

Some economists had hoped that the government would overhaul the country’s consumption tax, which would generate new revenues for local governments. 

Contradictory messages in state media illustrated the dilemma Xi faces as he promotes his state-dominated approach to development while simultaneously trying to reassure foreign companies and investors that the country is still a good place to do business. 

On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper People’s Daily published a front-page commentary defending Xi’s reform agenda and attacking foreign attempts to measure China’s progress according to Western “universal values” and political systems.

“General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized that our continuous efforts to promote reform ‘aren’t meant to pander to the applause of certain people, and we shouldn’t forcibly apply Western theories and perspectives onto ourselves,” it said. 

The tone of that commentary jarred with a lengthy profile published earlier in the week by the official Xinhua News Agency that described Xi as “another outstanding reformer” comparable to Deng, who is revered in China and the West as the architect of the market-opening overhauls that enriched the nation and boosted the global economy. Among Xi’s accomplishments in retooling the Chinese economy, the profile said, was “unleashing the power of the market.”

Issued in various languages, including Chinese, English, French and Spanish, the profile appeared to be intended for foreign audiences. The Chinese-language version appeared in Hong Kong media, but couldn’t be found on Xinhua’s website or other major state-media outlets. 


People in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, earlier in July. China’s economy has been hit by several challenges. PHOTO: NA BIAN/BLOOMBERG NEWS


Consumers in the world’s second-largest economy have been cutting back their spending. PHOTO: NA BIEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS

This week’s plenum took place months later than expected, missing the anticipated date in the fall of last year. The roughly 17-month gap between the latest conclave and the previous one in February 2023 is one of the longest intervals between plenums since the Mao Zedong era.

The delay has renewed questions about Xi’s penchant for bucking longstanding procedural norms and raised concerns about policy unpredictability in the world’s second-largest economy.

At the plenum, the Central Committee also approved some changes to its membership, accepting the resignation of former Foreign Minister Qin Gang and affirming the senior leadership’s earlier decisions to expel three People’s Liberation Army generals from the party.

The communiqué didn’t say why Qin resigned from the Central Committee, which he joined as a full member in October 2022. It referred to Qin as “comrade,” indicating that he remains a party member.

Beijing had replaced Qin as foreign minister in July 2023 without explanation, seven months after he took the job. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that an internal party investigation found that Qin had engaged in an extramarital affair that lasted throughout his tenure as China’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2021 through 2022. 

China politics watchers say Thursday’s announcement suggests that the reasons for Qin’s removal as foreign minister may not have been serious enough to warrant other disciplinary action.

The three PLA officials removed from the Central Committee included former Defense Minister Li Shangfu, as well as a former commander and an ex-chief of staff of the PLA’s strategic-missile force. All three have been accused of committing severe violations of party discipline and the law.

Li became China’s shortest-serving defense minister in October, when he was ousted after seven months in that role. Last month, the party expelled Li over alleged corruption, including giving and receiving bribes, and his case has been handed over to prosecutors.

Jason Douglas contributed to this article.

Write to Rebecca Feng at rebecca.feng@wsj.com and Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 19, 2024, print edition as 'China Leaders Cite Risks, but Stay Course'.



8. Israelis Are Preparing for Another War


Israelis Are Preparing for Another War

Israel expects a daily barrage of 4,000 rockets and thousands of casualties in a conflict that could dwarf the war in Gaza


By Carrie Keller-Lynn | Photographs by Amit Elkayam for WSJ

July 18, 2024 9:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/quietly-and-deep-underground-israelis-are-preparing-for-another-war-712afbfa?mod=latest_headlines

HAIFA, Israel—Above ground, Rambam Health Care Campus treats the wounded from the fight in Gaza. Below ground, northern Israel’s leading hospital is preparing for what could be the country’s next war—an all-out conflict with Hezbollah. 

Four operating rooms, a maternity ward and a dialysis center are among the facilities the hospital has set up three levels down in its underground parking garage, part of its plan to keep functioning if the daily tit for tat exchange of fire between Israel and the U.S.-designated terror group across the border with Lebanon escalates. 

Hospital beds are set up next to oxygen and suction lines embedded within the parking lot’s walls, medication is piled on rollable shelves, and ventilation ducts have been strung from the ceiling. Doctors practice evacuating their wards to the parking garage, primed to transfer operations underground within eight hours and get ready for new patients.




Rambam Health Care Campus in northern Israel has turned its underground parking lot into a hospital; Dr. Michael Halberthal, director of the hospital, said it expected thousands of casualties from a new war.

“We expect to have thousands of casualties over here,” said Dr. Michael Halberthal, the hospital’s director. “This is what we’re ready for.”

Healthcare centers, emergency services and residents across Israel are preparing for a war that could far outstrip the damage of the conflict with Hamas. Hezbollah is better trained and more heavily armed, with a missile stockpile experts estimate at 150,000 projectiles capable of pinning down the entire country. 

The group began attacking Israel the day after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks that left 1,200 dead, and says it won’t stop until a cease-fire is reached in Gaza. The fighting has displaced tens of thousands of civilians on each side. Israel is threatening a full-scale war if necessary to secure its northern border and return people to their homes. 

Hostage Rescue: Inside Israel's Covert Units


Hostage Rescue: Inside Israel's Covert Units

Play video: Hostage Rescue: Inside Israel's Covert Units


A dramatic hostage rescue in Gaza on June 8 opened a window to a world of espionage. Former Israeli counterterrorism officer Shir Peled explains the work of the undercover fighters. Photo Illustration: Palestinian Health Ministry/DROR LEBENDIGER PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PALESTINIAN HEALTH MINISTRY/DROR LEBENDIGER

Should that happen, Israeli emergency and municipal authorities briefed by the military expect 4,000 missiles and rockets to rain down each day, likely saturating air defenses. Daily casualties could run into the thousands. There would likely be hundreds of fires and widespread destruction of public infrastructure and private homes, all stretching the resources of response teams.

The destruction in Lebanon could also be extensive. Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip has destroyed more than half of the enclave’s buildings, according to a recent estimate based on satellite data, and has left more than 38,000 people dead, Gaza health authorities say. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told The Wall Street Journal in an interview in January that the military could “copy-paste” what happened in Gaza to Beirut if pushed by Hezbollah.

Homs

Hezbollah strikes

Israeli strikes

Tripoli

Beirut

Mediterranean Sea

LEBANON

SYRIA

Douma

Damascus

GOLAN

HEIGHTS

Haifa

ISRAEL

Note: Strikes from Oct. 8, 2023-July 18.

Source: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Homeowners associations across Israel are clearing out dusty shelters in apartment buildings, fixing plumbing and stockpiling water and supplies to be ready for long stays underground. Some in Tel Aviv keep go-bags of essentials packed by the door. Emergency crews are being beefed up, and supplies of necessities such as blood are being secured.

Halberthal led Rambam’s triage during Israel’s last war with Hezbollah, a 34-day conflict in 2006, when the hospital shook as roughly 70 missiles landed nearby. That experience pushed the hospital to build the underground facility, which it claims is the most fortified medical facility in the world.

Israel’s Health Ministry has asked Rambam to be prepared to surge its capacity by 40% if fighting broadens, Halberthal said. 

“Our reference scenario,” Halberthal said, “is a war of at least 60 days with very powerful missiles landing around us every four minutes.”

Eli Bin, the director general of Magen David Adom, the nonprofit organization that manages Israel’s emergency medical response, has been stockpiling supplies for the past few months in an underground facility south of Tel Aviv. 


Eli Bin, director general of Magen David Adom, in the chilled vault that holds Israel’s strategic reserve of blood units, south of Tel Aviv, Israel.

Forklifts move pallets of field dressings, syringes and medications into rows of multistory shelving at the warehouse. The parking bay is packed with some of the 200 ambulances Bin says Magen David Adom has added to its fleet since the war in Gaza began. One truck outfitted with a satellite dish is meant to serve as a mobile medical station if a facility is knocked offline. It is parked next to a large yellow tent that would serve as a makeshift field hospital.

“We know and expect that what happened in the south isn’t even a promo clip for what will happen in the north,” Bin said. 

Magen David Adom also manages Israel’s national blood bank, which it centralized and moved underground in October, to protect it from attack. The facility was processing 1,500 units of blood a day at the height of the current war. Some of those units are cycled through Israel’s strategic blood reserve, which Magen David Adom guards in a closely watched chilled vault, three floors underground.




Pallets of field dressings, syringes and medications line rows of multistory shelving at a facility run by Magen David Adom.

Magen David Adom, which had staff members killed during the Oct. 7 attacks, is now outfitting local first responders to be ready in Israel’s smaller towns, beginning with those closest to Lebanon.

Israel’s Fire and Rescue Services is training more than 150 civilian response teams in communities within 18 miles of Israel’s border with Lebanon, said senior officer Kfir Bibitko, who is in charge of national firefighting operations.

The squads are outfitted with small all-terrain firefighting vehicles that let them move quickly across the area’s farmland. Hezbollah’s aerial barrages have already triggered more than 100 fires in northern Israel, including one in June that raged for several days

“We have difficulty in getting to areas close to the border, because they’re firing upon them,” Bibitko said. 


Kfir Bibitko, who oversees national firefighting operations, said Israel’s Fire and Rescue Services is training civilian response teams.

On a clear day in Haifa, around 20 miles from the Lebanese border, Yair Zilberman sees the pummeled Israeli border town of Rosh HaNikra from his office window. The fighting could reach Haifa in an instant, said Zilberman, who oversees the city’s emergency preparedness. 

The city is girding for a more intense bombardment than it experienced in 2006, despite the introduction of Israel’s Iron Dome aerial-defense system since that war ended. In that monthlong conflict, Haifa was targeted with about 100 missiles in total, Zilberman said.

“Three missiles a day,” he said. “Nothing compared to what they’re talking about now.”

Since October, Zilberman’s team has created more than 100 new public shelters, outfitting them with generators and internet access, all in preparation for escalation with Hezbollah. That still leaves thousands of Haifa’s 300,000 residents without access to adequate shelter.

Haifa is also home to significant refinery infrastructure—holding tanks of gasoline, oil, chemicals and hazardous materials. The city has asked Israel’s government to move the facilities and is weighing going to court, though it is unlikely to help in this conflict. 



A controlled fire at a training facility for firefighters in Rishon LeZion, Israel.

After the 2006 war, Haifa successfully waged a battle to relocate about 12,000 tons of highly toxic ammonia, said Yona Yahav, Haifa’s mayor. A leak caused by a strike or debris could have killed thousands of civilians, he said. 

Towns closer to Israel’s border with Lebanon have been evacuated, some reduced to rubble from the constant bombardment. 

Israel’s government is under pressure to resolve the situation. Displaced families see the school year that starts on Sept. 1 as an important marker. Meanwhile, authorities worry that Israel and Hezbollah stand one miscalculation away from escalation.

“What worries us and what makes us lose sleep is a scenario in which there’s a mistake by one side,” said Bin, of Magen David Adom. “Whoever tosses a match in and ignites the field, it’s likely to set fire to the whole Middle East.”



Yair Zilberman, who oversees emergency preparedness in the city of Haifa, says fighting could spread to the city in an instant.

 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the July 19, 2024, print edition as 'Israelis Are Quietly Preparing for War With Hezbollah'.



9. Trump-Vance US presidency could mean tougher anti-China stance, say analysts


A view from Asia. (Singapore)


Trump-Vance US presidency could mean tougher anti-China stance, say analysts

Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance holds conservative views on China, calling the East Asian giant the “biggest threat” to the US.


Louisa Tang

19 Jul 2024 06:00AM

channelnewsasia.com

Donald Trump’s pick of JD Vance as his Republican vice-presidential running mate could mean an increasingly hawkish stance on China if the former United States president is re-elected, analysts told CNA.

“There's a bipartisan consensus about muscling up to a rising power in China, and Vance wants to counter China's growing technological and economic prowess,” said Tom Switzer, executive director of Australian think tank Centre for Independent Studies.

Vance, a junior senator from Ohio, called China the “biggest threat” to America in an interview shortly after his selection on Monday (Jul 15).

This falls in line with Trump’s – and even many Democrats’ – belief that China’s rise as the world’s factory has ruined the US’ manufacturing sector.

Switzer noted that many Republicans have gradually shifted their focus from Europe to Asia, and are intent on coordinating the efforts of those opposed to China’s ambitions to stand up collectively to Beijing.

“That supports tougher anti-China measures, including a trade and high-tech war, the development of closer relations with Taiwan, and the repudiation of Beijing's claim that most of the South China Sea is in its maritime territory,” Switzer told CNA’s Asia First programme.

Beijing has responded to Vance’s comments that it is “always opposed to the US making China an issue in elections”.

VANCE MORE CONSERVATIVE ON CHINA THAN TRUMP

Vance has views on China that are “probably a little more conservative” than Trump’s, said Gordon Flake, CEO of Perth USAsia Centre at the University of Western Australia.

Flake added: “Vance has a clear record in the year-and-a-half-plus that he's been in office of being what he calls an ‘economic nationalist’, calling on the US to revoke the ‘most favoured nation’ trade status with China and seeking to have a much more aggressive approach in terms of security. He's very focused on Taiwan.”

All members of the World Trade Organization are granted the ‘most favoured nation’ status, receiving preferential trade treatment such as lower tariffs and fewer barriers.


James Crabtree, distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out that Trump had become increasingly concerned about China over the course of his first presidency from 2017 to 2021.

While in the White House, Trump launched a trade war against China that is still ongoing.

On the campaign trail this year, he suggested he would impose tariffs of 60 per cent or higher on all Chinese goods, as well as a 10 per cent universal tariff on all US imports.

Crabtree told CNA’s East Asia Tonight: “His policy platforms now have a lot of things that will be very unpleasant for China.

“It's more likely that under Trump, the US will seek to defend Taiwan and help Taiwan to defend itself because that is what the US perceives to be in its own interest.”

VICE PRESIDENTS HAVE ‘LIMITED ROLE’ IN FOREIGN POLICY

Nevertheless, the experts stressed that US vice presidents typically have a limited direct impact on US foreign policy.

Observers previously said Trump chose the 39-year-old as his running mate due to their similar ideologies.

“Ultimately, (they are elected) it will be the views of president Trump that matter, and vice president Vance would only support him,” Flake told CNA’s East Asia Tonight.

Trump was officially chosen as the Republican’s 2024 presidential nominee at the party’s convention on Monday (Jul 15) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

He is due to formally accept the nomination in a prime-time speech on Thursday. The presidential election will be held on Nov 5.

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump raises his fist next to Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, Representative Steve Scalise (LA), Eric Trump, and Michael Boulos on Day 2 of the Republican National Convention (RNC), at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 16, 2024. REUTERS/Marco Bello

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

Meanwhile, Vance has opposed US funding for Ukraine's defence against Russia's invasion.

In his Jul 15 interview, he said Trump would prioritise a negotiated end to the crisis so the US could focus on the "real issue" of China. "That's the biggest threat to our country and we are completely distracted from it," he added.

Switzer noted that Vance’s outlook “nicely complements” Trump’s view.

“It’s not isolationist. It’s about being selective and where America throws its weight and priorities around the world,” Switzer added.

“He’s made it clear in his time in the Senate – he wants American foreign policy to re-define resources, order strategic priorities away from Europe, away from the Middle East and focus on Asia to deal with a rising China.”

Crabtree said that if Trump is re-elected, the US will likely seek to reduce its commitments in the Ukraine war and to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), posing a major problem to Europe.


VANCE REPRESENTS ‘FRESHNESS’

In terms of core policy issues, Switzer noted that Vance has tapped into widespread anxieties that have risen in the US in recent years amid global financial uncertainties, technological change, and cultural disruption.

“Vance, in some respects, represents freshness. He’s new; he’s highly intelligent,” Switzer said.

“He resonates with a lot of Americans who feel like they're the losers in the new America and they want to win again, and I think Vance complements Trump.”

Crabtree stressed that it will be risky to underestimate how radical and disruptive a second Trump presidency could be for both domestic and international politics.

He said American allies in Asia seem less wary of Trump – judging from his first term – compared with their European counterparts. This is because many in the region are apprehensive of Beijing’s ambitions, which means Trump’s stance on China “suited them just fine”.

He added: “Perhaps while the Europeans are panicking too much about Trump, in Asian capitals, leaders may be showing too little concern for the effects that he might have.”

channelnewsasia.com



10. Former Trump defense secretary urges Biden to do more to stop Iran's threats on officials



Former Trump defense secretary urges Biden to do more to stop Iran's threats on officials

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · July 18, 2024



1 of 2 |FILE - Secretary of Defense Mark Esper speaks before a meeting with Romanian Defense Minister Nicolae Ciuca, Oct. 8, 2020, at the Pentagon, in Washington. Esper said Wednesday, July 17, 2024, that it was time for the Biden administration “to do better than just playing defense” to Iranian threats on Trump administration officials.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)




ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, one of the Trump administration officials under constant security because of Iranian threats, said Wednesday that it was time for the Biden administration “to do better than just playing defense.”

His remarks were some of the first from one of the targeted Trump administration officials since reports this week that the latest threat to former President Donald Trump’s life from Iran led to beefed-up security in the days ahead of an unrelated assassination attempt on the Republican presidential nominee at a campaign rally Saturday.

U.S. intelligence and security officials say Iran is intent on revenge for the 2020 killing of Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani, which Trump ordered as president.

“To me, it’s personal as well,” Esper said at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual conference in Colorado that draws U.S. policymakers, journalists and others. “Because I’m in that group that’s on their hit list, and so like a few of my colleagues, I carry around a very robust 24/7 security protection detail that watches over me and several of us.”

“It’s going on for years now … and we got to do better than just playing defense,” Esper said, citing an earlier, foiled plot against John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser. Esper said additional plots have been uncovered but did not elaborate.

“So this administration needs to do a far better job in terms of how we deal with this problem,” he said, adding that officials need to figure out how to go after those behind the plots.


National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said Tuesday that the Biden administration considers “this a national and homeland security matter of the highest priority.”

Besides Esper, other high-level Trump administration officials who also receive protection following Soleimani’s assassination include retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, who headed U.S. Central Command and was in charge of the Soleimani operation.

The Biden administration also has repeatedly extended 24/7 protection to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his top Iran aide, Brian Hook, due to credible threats on their lives from Iran.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations called the accusations “unsubstantiated and malicious.”

In a statement Tuesday, the mission said that while it sees Trump as a “criminal” who should be punished in court for ordering Soleimani’s assassination, “Iran has chosen the legal path to bring him to justice.”


ELLEN KNICKMEYER

Foreign policy, national security, foreign policy & climate

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AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · July 18, 2024



11. Taiwan responds to Trump comments, says defense spending has reached historic levels




Taiwan responds to Trump comments, says defense spending has reached historic levels

BY BRAD DRESS - 07/18/24 12:05 PM ET

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4779699-taiwan-defense-spending-trump/?utm


A top Taiwanese official said defense spending has reached historic levels as he responded to former President Trump’s comments earlier this week that the island nation should pay more for its defense amid threats from China.

Kuoyu Chiao, the deputy head of the North America department in Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters at a press briefing on Thursday that defense spending was at 2.5 percent of gross domestic product, and that Taipei was modernizing its military.

“In the future, Taiwan will continue to work with the United States and like-minded countries to strengthen Taiwan’s defense capability and jointly maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” he said, according to a translation of the remarks provided by Reuters.

Trump, who is set to accept the GOP presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, told Bloomberg Businessweek that Taiwan should pay the U.S. for its defense.

“We’re no different than an insurance company,” Trump said, suggesting the island nation could afford to pay for its defense because of its dominance in manufacturing semiconductor chips. “They’re immensely wealthy.”

Taiwan Premier Cho Jung-tai said on Wednesday that Taipei was “willing to take on more responsibility” for its defense, but noted they were increasing defense spending and reinstating a one-year mandatory service in the military.

Trump has also threatened to not defend European allies who don’t pay enough in defense spending, a point of contention in the western security alliance NATO.

He has also pledged to end the war in Ukraine before he takes office, sparking fear about how that could be accomplished without ceding territory to Russia.

While some Republicans have soured on supporting Ukraine, taking on China retains bipartisan support in Washington, as does defending Taiwan against any potential Chinese aggression.

Beijing considers Taiwan, which split from the mainland in 1949 following a civil war and a communist takeover, as historically part of its country and has vowed to unify with the island by force if necessary.

The U.S. has unofficial relations with Taiwan but has committed to supporting the country, including with arms sales. Last month, the Biden administration approved a $360 million weapons sale to Taiwan, which prompted China to cancel talks on arms control and nonproliferation.

China has stepped up its military drills and patrols around Taiwan in recent years and conducted one of its largest exercises earlier this year following the inauguration of pro-U.S. Taiwanese President William Lai Ching-te.




12. Chinese PLAN and Russian Navy Finish South China Sea Exercise



Chinese PLAN and Russian Navy Finish South China Sea Exercise - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · July 18, 2024

Guided-missile destroyer CNS Dalian (105) attached to the PLA Southern Theater Command sails during a far-sea joint training drill in early April, 2023. Chinese MoD Photo

China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy and the Russian Navy wrapped up a joint exercise in the South China Sea and a separate joint naval patrol this week.

The two navies finished what the PLAN calls Joint Sea 2024, which is known as Maritime Interaction 2024 to the Russians. The drills began on Monday in the South China Sea, near the southern China city of Zhanjiang. The city is also the headquarters of the PLAN South Sea Fleet, from where the PLAN and Russian ships taking part in the exercise departed.

The drills included Russian Navy corvettes RFS Gromkiy (335) and RFS Rezkiy (343) and fleet oiler Irkut, which are all part of the Russian Pacific Fleet, and PLAN destroyer CNS Nanning (162), frigates CNS Xianning (500) and CNS Dali (553) and fleet oiler CNS Weishanhu (887).

During the exercise the combined force carried out various tactical drills, including joint live-fire air and missile defense drills. With the completion of the drills, Gromkiy and Rezkiy are now moving on to Southeast Asia to continue their Asia Pacific deployment.

The two navies also completed a joint naval patrol on Monday, which included Russian Navy corvette RFS Sovershenny (333), PLAN destroyer CNS Yinchuan (175), frigate CNS Hengshui (572) and fleet oiler Weishanhu. The joint patrol started south of South Korea’s Jeju Island, with the patrol transiting through the Osumi Strait to enter the Western Pacific Ocean and subsequently through the Philippine Sea before finishing in the South China Sea.

The joint patrol lasted 15 days, with the ships traveling 4,800 nautical miles in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a Russian Ministry of Defense news release. During the final stages, the patrol’s ships practiced escorting a ship and then carried out replenishment at-sea drills with Weishanhu.


“The objectives of the joint patrols are to strengthen naval cooperation between Russia and China, maintain peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region, monitor the sea area and protect the objects of maritime economic activity of Russia and China,” reads the release.

Meanwhile, in Hawaii on Monday, the humanitarian aid and disaster relief portion of the Rim of the Pacific 2024 exercise concluded, according to a U.S. Navy news release. The HADR phase featured nine countries: the U.S., Chile, Singapore, Germany, Japan, Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Peru. Two ships – Royal Canadian Navy offshore patrol vessel HMCS Max Bernays (AOPV432) and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force tank landing ship JS Kunisaki (LST-4003) – took part in the drills.


“Participants trained in a wide range of dynamic scenarios, including Urban Search and Rescue (USAR), Hawaii Healthcare Emergency Management (HHEM) mass casualty response, mass movement of evacuees, aerial survey, port restoration, and logistical support for humanitarian assistance,” reads the release from U.S. 3rd Fleet.

Meanwhile, U.S. Marine Rotational Force – Darwin sailors and Marines kicked off Exercise Predator’s Run 24 with the Australian Army, Philippines Army and the U.K. Commando Force in northern Australia on Monday, according to a Marine Corps news release issued Wednesday.

“MRF-D 24.3’s participation includes units from 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (Reinforced), Combat Logistics Battalion 5 (Reinforced), and Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 268 (Reinforced),” the release reads.The MRF-D 24.3 MAGTF is also reinforced by 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, based out of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California.”

“During the exercise, MRF-D 24.3 will integrate into the ADF’s Combat Training Centre 1st Division as a supporting effort to the Australian Army 1st Brigade’s order of battle, conducting warfighting and live-fire field evolutions. These operations aim to enhance the MRF-D 24.3’s Ground Combat Element, 2nd Bn., 5th Marines (Rein.), interoperability and sustain mission-essential task list training readiness,” the release continues.

The U.K. Littoral Response Group (South) features 400 Royal Marine commandos of No. 40 Commandos, with amphibious dock landing ship RFA Lyme Bay (L3007) and hospital/aviation support ship RFA Argus (A135). The Philippines Army contingent is a composite group of 125 Philippine Army personnel.


news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · July 18, 2024




13. Rewind and Reconnoiter: The Accelerating Threat of the Political Assassination with Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware



Excerpts:


Until we have a motive behind the attempted assassination of former President Trump, it is difficult to predict how the shooting will affect the remainder of the campaign. That and the tone struck by Trump at this week’s Republican presidential nominating convention will likely determine how people will react, against whom, and when.
A motive, however, is not necessary to be able to confidently say that, from a counter-terrorism and personal security protection standpoint for elected officials, we are now at an extremely elevated threat level. To borrow a cliché commonly deployed by terrorism scholars, the alarms are flashing red, with multiple political factions actively promising retribution or threatening violence against a variety of targets. This assassination attempt was not the beginning of political violence during this election cycle, but it will likely also not be the end.


Rewind and Reconnoiter: The Accelerating Threat of the Political Assassination with Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware


BRUCE HOFFMAN AND JACOB WARE

JULY 18, 2024



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https://warontherocks.com/2024/07/rewind-and-reconnoiter-the-accelerating-threat-of-the-political-assassination-with-bruce-hoffman-and-jacob-ware/

In 2022, Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware wrote “The Accelerating Threat of Political Assassination,” where they explored the increased frequency of political violence and assassination in Western democracies. Following last week’s assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, we invited them back to revisit the topic and discuss the evolution of political violence in the last two years.

Read more below.


Image: Flickr user Geoffrey Fairchild

In your 2022 article “The Accelerating Threat of the Political Assassination,” you discuss the growing trend of political violence and assassination, particularly in democracies such as the United States. In what ways could the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump affect the upcoming presidential election from a political and security standpoint?

Until we have a motive behind the attempted assassination of former President Trump, it is difficult to predict how the shooting will affect the remainder of the campaign. That and the tone struck by Trump at this week’s Republican presidential nominating convention will likely determine how people will react, against whom, and when.

A motive, however, is not necessary to be able to confidently say that, from a counter-terrorism and personal security protection standpoint for elected officials, we are now at an extremely elevated threat level. To borrow a cliché commonly deployed by terrorism scholars, the alarms are flashing red, with multiple political factions actively promising retribution or threatening violence against a variety of targets. This assassination attempt was not the beginning of political violence during this election cycle, but it will likely also not be the end.

Since your original article where you posit “accelerationism” as a strategy for violent extremists, how do you see the current political climate, particularly surrounding the upcoming election, exacerbating the trend of political violence and assassination attempts? Are there specific factors or events in the past two years that have significantly contributed to this dangerous escalation?

In the past two years, we have witnessed a further erosion of norms against political violence in the United States. From persistent rhetoric lionizing violent extremists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 as “heroes,” “political prisoners,” and “warriors,” to conspiracy theories being trafficked following the assassination attempt on then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in October 2022 that her gravely wounded husband had been involved in a homosexual tryst gone wrong, to a generally apathetic Democratic response to an armed threat to Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh outside his home, politicians have failed to defend the norm against Americans using violence to pursue political means. Deterrence against acts of violence like assassinations has, accordingly, eroded — especially when a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll revealed that one in five persons polled agreed with the statement,” Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.”

A range of other factors, such as the easing of COVID restrictions and the return of in-person campaigning, the erosion of content moderation standards on social media platforms like X, and simply the pioneering effect of successful assassinations abroad, are all likely contributing to the rising threat.

In the context of the U.S. role as a champion of democracy and a model for free societies, how does the assassination attempt impact global perceptions of democratic values? What message does this convey to other nations striving for democratic institutions? Are there ramifications for international political stability?

The day after the attack on Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron posted on X something that summed up the general response in democratic states to Saturday’s shooting: “It is a tragedy for our democracies.” From London to Tokyo, leaders of U.S. allies issued swift condemnations, seemingly mourning the continued breakdown of democratic tradition and norms in the world’s shining city on a hill.

Of course, both London and Tokyo unfortunately have recent experience with lethal political assassinations, with the United Kingdom having lost two members of Parliament in the past decade, and the former Japanese prime minister having been assassinated in 2022 (which in fact prompted us to write the initial War on the Rocks article). The United States is far from alone in confronting this dangerous and escalating trend.

How might the current political instability within the United States affect its ability to effectively counter threats posed by other superpowers like China or Russia? What strategic vulnerability will emerge if domestic polarization continues to overshadow cohesion in U.S. foreign policy and national security efforts?

As we wrote in Foreign Affairs in September 2023, the United States has emerged as an exporter of domestic terrorism — particularly violent far-right extremism — to allied states, seriously undermining its soft power and foreign policy at a critical juncture in the domestic security of many Western democratic states. The mocking tone emerging from adversaries following this latest flash of violence, then, should not be surprising. A Kremlin spokesman, for instance, blamed “the atmosphere that this administration created during the political struggle, the atmosphere around candidate Trump provoked what America is faced with today” (an assertion all the richer given the Department of Justice recently revealed a Russian AI-enabled election interference campaign). Hamas, meanwhile, claimed to condemn “any violence.”

The United States is rightly regarded across the globe as a citadel of democracy and beacon of hope in terms of representative government that is changed by the ballot and not the bullet. The attempt on Trump’s life and serial vilification and targeting of elected officials in recent years in the United States undermine our standing and credibility in the world and open the country to doubt, skepticism, and charges of hypocrisy.

Looking ahead, what place does political violence have in the United States, and what does the future hold for assassination overall?

Despite the bipartisan condemnation of the attack on the former president and his supporters, the finger-pointing and blaming have not stopped. There continues to be a failure to understand that words matter and vituperative rhetoric can lead — however inadvertently or unintentionally — to acts of wanton violence. It thus seems as if politicians on the right and left have silently accepted that violence is part of the fabric of American politics in the 21st century and perhaps is even necessary to advance one’s political aims.

And finally, with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would change about your argument or piece?

The article still holds up quite well, not least because it identified assailants across the political spectrum as presenting a threat. In fact, we would later double down on this analysis in our book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, where we credited the COVID pandemic as having reignited this form of violence through plotting it inspired against then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Although extremists had long discussed their assassination ambitions, we write in the book, “Until the fall of 2020, that plea to like-minded extremists to mount more ambitious and even more directly consequential attacks against elected leaders and prominent national figures had fortunately gone mostly unheeded.”

Less than four years later, that is clearly no longer true.

***

Bruce Hoffman is senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council of Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University.

Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and DeSales University.

Together, they are the authors of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America (Columbia Univ. Press).


14. Strategic Outpost’s 2024 Summer Vacation Reading List


Strategic Outpost’s 2024 Summer Vacation Reading List - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by David Barno · July 19, 2024

Summertime is in full swing, which means it’s time for our annual reading list! Every year since 2016, we have shared our favorite picks for our fellow natsec nerds to read while at the beach — or wherever you go to get away from email, texts, and depressing world events! Last year we broke with tradition and listed our favorite (and least favorite) war movies, but now we’ve happily returned to our long-running standard — and hope you will enjoy our 2024 selections!

Become a Member

On Modern War

New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, by David Sanger. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sanger draws on his decades of reporting for the New York Times to chart the dangerous rise of China and Russia as powerful threats to the international order. He contrasts the 20-year U.S. focus on two wars in the Middle East with the ways in which Russia and especially China vastly expanded their global influence during the same time. Sanger’s analysis draws on many personal anecdotes to help explain how we got to where we are today and, more importantly, to identify many of the difficult choices facing the United States and its partners in the coming years.

Next War: Reimagining How We Fight, by John Antal. Antal has been featured on this list before, with 7 Seconds to Die in 2022. His most recent book extends the early insights he brought from the wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020 to grapple with the staggering changes in warfare playing out in real time today in Gaza and Ukraine. Antal lists nine disrupters of modern warfare that challenge the U.S. way of war, which relies on limited numbers of very expensive and exquisite weapons systems. Even though the U.S. military continues to see itself as “the most lethal fighting force in human history,” Antal’s compelling catalogue of disrupters suggests that its future dominance is by no means assured.

War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, edited by Hal Brands. Although the war in Ukraine continues to rage on, this volume features essays from an impressive range of scholars analyzing the first two years of the conflict and the consequences it has already had. Standout chapters include those by former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and Robert Person on why the invasion occurred; Lawrence Freedman on Vladimir Putin’s strategy; Kori Schake on the U.S. strategy; Michael Kofman on battlefield dynamics; and Frank Gavin on nuclear lessons.

On Modern War – In Fiction

White Sun War, by Mick Ryan. Two years ago, retired Australian Army major general Ryan published War Transformed, a sober analysis of the changing character of modern warfare coupled with recommendations for adapting military institutions and preparing individuals for future conflicts. To our delight, he then followed it up with a terrific work of speculative fiction about a U.S. war with China over Taiwan in 2028. His engrossing narrative seamlessly blends developments at the tactical, operational, strategic, and geopolitical levels of warfare, across all five domains — including an incredibly clever use of outer space power that helps end the war. Sadly, the least plausible part of the book is how thoroughly the U.S. military has incorporated advanced technologies in a conflict that happens four short years from now. Instead of having equipment by then that can be maneuvered through eye blinks, or soldiers wearing arm screens that provide instantaneous AI translation, the Air Force will still be dominated by manned aircraft, the Navy will still be wedded to its carriers, and innovative technological breakthroughs still won’t be able to compete with deeply entrenched, multi-billion-dollar legacy programs of record.

The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin. One of your loyal columnists fell in love with one of Helprin’s books as a teenager, and she has read virtually everything he has published since. His latest novel is a beautiful, lyrical tale about modern naval warfare, terrorism, the challenges of command, and the timeless virtues of courage, integrity, and sacrifice. We meet Captain Stephen Rensselaer in the prologue as he awaits the verdict of his court-martial for mutiny. His story then unfolds as he runs afoul of Pentagon and presidential politics, falls in love, and leads his crew through seven unexpected battles. Naval nerds will be delighted at the level of technical detail, while others may be happy that Helprin expressly identifies which pages to skip for “those interested primarily in the story.”

Working with Industry

Unit X, by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. This book is a fascinating account of the origins and ongoing efforts of one of the Pentagon’s most unique organizations, the Defense Innovation Unit, penned by two of its founding members. The Defense Innovation Unit was created in 2015 to build bridges between Silicon Valley’s culture of rapid innovation and failing fast and the infamously risk-averse and stultifyingly slow Pentagon acquisition ecosystem. The unit was conceived as a bold workaround modeled on a venture capital firm, with a mission to get cutting-edge technology into the hands of warfighters in months or years rather than decades. The book chronicles its successes but leaves the reader equally sobered by the staggering bureaucracy that slows every new acquisition, no matter how vital to those on the front lines. As the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea highlight how warfare is rapidly changing, the authors offer a stark warning that “our military’s might has been largely eclipsed by the commercial systems our adversaries are bringing to battle.”

Freedom’s Forge, by Arthur Herman. As we watch the wars in Ukraine and Gaza consume huge amounts of materiel and the Department of Defense prepares for a potential future conflict with China, Herman reminds us of the astonishing U.S. industrial transformation that made America the literal arsenal of democracy in World War II. The United States might not have been able to deliver the goods that ultimately helped win the war if not for the civilian titans of industry who joined the war effort — one of whom even donned three stars to head U.S. Army industrial production — and, as Herman shows, ended up producing more than 286,000 warplanes and 85,000 tanks in just four years. It’s hard to imagine a similar degree of cooperation between industry and the Pentagon in the future — even though the war of attrition raging in Ukraine clearly demonstrates that the U.S. industrial base is completely unprepared to support a prolonged, high-intensity war.

New Perspectives on World War II

When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, by Garrett M. Graff. Author Graff went through more than 5,000 memoirs, stories, and oral histories to compile this remarkable volume of what Operation Overlord was like for those who fought in it. He deftly weaves together

testimonies from more than 700 individuals into a story that reads like a novel, adding only a small amount of supplemental text to provide context. You’ve never read a book about D-Day that’s quite like this one before. For as Graff powerfully notes, “It’s here — at the human level — where we find the greatest and most true story of D-Day.”

Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, by Craig L. Symonds. Admiral Chester Nimitz is arguably the single most important figure responsible for America’s decisive victory over Imperial Japan in World War II. Yet he is also among the least well-known and recognized, largely because of his self-effacing personality and quiet, collaborative leadership style. Nimitz led the U.S. military in the Pacific back from its stunning defeat and demoralization after Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay less than four year later. In an age too often marked by shameless self-promotion and the shirking of responsibility by CEOs and social media influencers alike, this new account sheds a fresh light on one of the military’s most effective organizers and motivators — and provides a unique leadership example of how to come back from devastating failures.

The Wonders of Air and Space

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. This short and stunning novel propels the reader into the tiny compartments of an orbiting space station to accompany its six space travelers through 24 hours — 16 sunrises and sunsets — above the stunning blue and green planet Earth below. Harvey’s elegantly breathtaking language borders on poetry, describing the otherworldly experience of astronauts encountering one sunrise and sunset after another, broken by stunning vistas of a fragile Earth slowly unfolding below — a glimpse of eternity. You will never think about space travel — or our delicate planet — in the same way again.

Wind, Sand, and Stars, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. First published by the famed French pioneering pilot and adventurer in 1939, this little-known work evokes awe and astonishment as Saint-Exupéry brilliantly describes his journeys through the unforgiving sky in peace and war. The breadth and reach of his astonishing adventures continue to amaze, but his most important message comes from the insights he provides about “the land of men” below. Reflective, thought-provoking, and deeply human, this work takes us back to a time when aviation was still novel — and the marvels of flight have arguably never been more poetically captured.

Just for Fun

Everyone Knows But You, by Thomas E. Ricks. Many of our loyal readers will recognize Ricks for his Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism and his many important books about the military and the recent wars. This time, Ricks turns to fiction, with a captivating thriller set on a fictitious island in Maine — near the area where Ricks has lived for many years. FBI agent Ryan Tapia has been exiled to a remote corner of a remote state, investigating the mysterious death of a fisherman. Ricks takes us deep into the world of Maine lobstermen and the local indigenous tribe to figure out whodunnit and why.

Swan Song, by Elin Hilderbrand. Hilderbrand — who is often described as “queen of the beach read” — brings an uncanny knack for brilliant plots, engaging characters, and cracking suspense to her series of novels set on Nantucket Island off the New England coast. This 27th and final book in her Nantucket series weaves a compelling mystery around the sudden comeuppance of wealthy outsiders who disrupt the island’s quiet life but soon leave a body and torched mansion behind. Pure fun, and a delightful end to a much-loved series.

Well, that’s a wrap for the summer of 2024! Strategic Outpost is now officially on our summer break! As we hurtle toward the dog days of August, we hope that all of you hard-working readers have some well-deserved plans for a long vacation, far away from emails, texts, SCIFs, and Zoom meetings. We hope that you come back rested, refreshed, and ready to return to the real world in September! Enjoy!

Become a Member

Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, U.S. Army (ret.), and Dr. Nora Bensahel are Professors of Practice at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and are also contributing editors at War on the Rocks, where their column appears periodically. Sign up for Barno and Bensahel’s Strategic Outpost newsletter to track their articles as well as their public events.

Image: Syd Wachs via Unsplash

Special Series, Strategic Outpost

warontherocks.com · by David Barno · July 19, 2024



15. The Rising Tide of Political Violence


Excerpts:

Allowing different flavors of a party to emerge is important now for the right. But it could become equally useful for the left. The Democratic Party remains mostly intolerant of violent actors, but leftist support for political violence has also been increasing. Some supporters of independent Senator Bernie Sanders threatened Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, for example. In 2017, a leftist traveled to Washington, D.C., with a plan to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And although only a small number of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 devolved into violence, that violence was serious in cities such as Seattle.
This uptick shouldn’t come as a surprise. In a polarized society, violence rarely sticks to one side for long. The last bout of political violence in the United States started with the right, as segregationists in the South lynched Black Americans and murdered civil rights activists in the 1950s and early 1960s. But these killings galvanized backlash from those who felt that the time for the pacifism that Martin Luther King, Jr., espoused had passed. Violence spread to the left throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with riots, militant groups, and murders by extremists such as the Symbionese Liberation Army.
On Saturday, the United States avoided the assassination of its leading presidential candidate. But it was through sheer luck: the 20-year-old shooter missed Trump’s skull by less than an inch. The country may not be as lucky the next time around, and the results could be catastrophic. When a 19-year-old in Sarajevo killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a deeply divided world descended into war. The tinder is laid in the United States, and it is bone dry. Americans need to take lessons from other countries to stop it from igniting.


The Rising Tide of Political Violence

Trump’s Attempted Assassination Is Part of a Global Trend

By Rachel Kleinfeld

July 19, 2024


Foreign Affairs · by A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security · July 19, 2024

It is commonplace for Americans to assume that their country’s problems are sui generis. Since the July 13 assassination attempt against former U.S. President Donald Trump, many commentators have portrayed the event and the tensions around it as unprecedented. Others have reached for comparisons, but they have almost always been domestic—focusing, for instance, on the astounding number of assault weapons in private hands in the United States compared to the number in every other country on earth.

It is certainly true that the shooting was a uniquely horrifying American moment, albeit one that was part of a rising tide of threats. There has been a drumbeat of major violent events (or near-events) in recent years: the mob attack on the Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential vote; the shooting of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball game in 2017; the kidnapping plot against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. Under the radar, this dangerous environment had intensified for all other kinds of public servants, as well. Between 2016 and 2021, threats against members of Congress rose tenfold, dropping only somewhat following Trump’s presidency. Threats to federal judges have doubled since 2021. And in recent quarterly polls, a fifth of local elected officials—such as school board members and county commissioners—report that they have received violent threats.

But Americans should realize that such problems are not theirs alone: political violence is growing in many democracies. Trump’s near-death experience at the hands of a young man with no clear partisan agenda has echoes in the attempted assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida last year. The year before, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was killed—the first assassination of a Japanese leader since the 1930s. In August 2023, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate was assassinated after leaving a campaign rally. And in May, a shooter attempted to murder Slovakia’s prime minister.

Current and former heads of state are not the only victims. From 2022 to 2023, France saw a 12-fold increase in violence against elected officials, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. A total of 51 candidates were physically attacked in the three weeks leading to July’s elections. Germany has had over 10,000 attacks on politicians in the last five years, and thousands more on party buildings. Mexico’s 2024 election was the deadliest yet, with 37 candidates murdered and over 800 injured. In Colombia, India, and Nigeria, violence against officials is also on the upswing.

Although each country’s violence has differing local causes, there are clear patterns that echo across countries. American political violence has much in common with that taking place in Germany and India, as well as in France’s most recent election. In all these states, a significant portion of the attacks are largely the product of radicalized partisans, often egged on by parties. Containing it requires containing these parties’ politicians.

But doing so is much easier said than done, especially in the United States. There, voters only have two real parties to choose between—and one of them is captured by a radical wing. Trump may be the most recent victim of American political violence, and attacks can come from both sides of the divide. But the reality is that his followers include the country’s biggest perpetrators, and they will be hard to cordon.

DANGER ZONE

Not every country experiences political violence for the same reasons. France’s violence, for example, involved a mix of riots around police brutality and pension reform in 2022 and 2023 before morphing into partisan attacks on parliamentary candidates in the lead-up to the July 2024 election. Colombian candidates are often targeted by armed groups to frighten political actors into serving criminal interests. In Nigeria, many local officials are kidnapped by bandits simply to fetch a healthy ransom.

But often there are similarities among states. Mexican candidates, as with Colombian ones, are frequently killed by criminal organizations. In France and Germany, political violence is spurred by radicalized political groups who have created an atmosphere in which violence is more acceptable as political behavior—though it often boomerangs back against them. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, for example, traces a significant portion of the political violence in Germany to supporters of the radical Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose extreme anti-immigrant positions have involved planning meetings on forced deportations with neo-Nazi groups. AfD’s violent youth supporters, for instance, have attacked centrist and Green politicians. But having created such a fraught atmosphere, AfD politicians themselves now face the greatest number of attacks. In the Indian state of West Bengal, parties have militant wings that intimidate both opposition politicians and wayward co-partisans, using riots, bombings, and murder to keep people in line.

This all may sound quite different from what happens in the streets of the United States. But a survey of the past eight years reveals many similarities. In addition to the riot of January 6, would-be terrorists threatened state legislatures in the fall of 2020. Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc mailed pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and CNN employees. In 2022, a man in Ohio shot and killed his neighbor because he believed that the neighbor was a Democrat.

The Republican Party has been overtaken by an extremist fringe willing to normalize violence.

Violent actors also target people from similar ideological camps. The January 6 mob, for example, brought a noose and chanted “Hang Mike Pence”—targeting Trump’s own vice president—because he refused to help steal the election. The co-partisan attacks mean that although the vast majority of political violence emanates from the right, the victims are almost equally distributed across the left-right divide.

January 6 was the first time rioters attempted to overturn an American presidential contest. But partisan attacks are not new to U.S. history. In the 1830s, the Know-Nothing Party organized around an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic platform, leading to mob violence from supporters during its campaigns. In 1860, the country’s South—led by pro-slavery politicians—seceded, sparking the Civil War. And after that war was done, former Confederates regained seats in Congress by waging bloody battles in which Southern Democrats openly murdered Republicans, many of whom were Black, to scare them away from voting. And Dixiecrats used violence during the mid-twentieth century to try to crush the civil rights movement.

Today, there are Americans on both the left and right who support political violence. Left-leaning violence tripled from 2015 to 2020 according to the Global Terrorism Database (the last year for which there are statistics broken down by ideology). But violence from left-leaning perpetrators started from a very small number, so they remain infrequent. Violence from the right, meanwhile, started from a higher baseline and then grew significantly; in 2020, the right was responsible for almost four times as many planned violent incidents as the left. That is because the Republican Party has been overtaken by an extremist fringe willing to normalize violence. Former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, for instance, ran a campaign ad showing him breaking into a house with a gun and encouraging supporters to “Get a RINO [Republican in Name Only] hunting permit.” Former New York City Mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani declared, “Let’s have trial by combat,” before sending the right-wing mob toward the Capitol on January 6. Representatives Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Steve King have spoken at the white nationalist America First Political Action Committee Conference in recent years. It is no surprise, then, that a 2020 study by the political scientist Pippa Norris found that—when measured by ideology and tactics—Republicans had much more in common with Turkey’s autocratic Justice and Development Party than with the mainstream center-right parties of Europe.

COALITION OF THE SANE

So how can the United States curtail attacks? There is no easy answer. But some of the other countries struggling with partisan violence have done a better job than others, and they provide a possible template.

Consider, again, France and Germany. In both states, mainstream parties have limited the reach of extremists by forming a cordon sanitaire, or buffer, around their most dangerous actors. In Germany, the primary center-right party has ruled out governing with, and therefore legitimizing, the AfD. The French center-right party has been eclipsed in size by the far-right National Rally; the RN is already the country’s dominant conservative entity. But in France’s recent parliamentary elections, the center-right teamed up with straight centrists, the center-left, and even the regular left to block the far right from gaining a plurality. Doing so was a massive logistical challenge: candidates from across these factions had to drop out of races between the first round (where the National Rally won) and the runoffs so as not to split the vote. But it was a clear success. Thanks to their work, the “Republican front” deprived the far right of a megaphone with which to spread the illiberal and dehumanizing ideas that prompt social violence.

Adapting these lessons to the United States’ two-party system is hard, but not impossible. It would first require admitting that what is most important is keeping purveyors of violent discourse out of top political office. Doing so necessitates setting aside disagreements and forming a big tent with the greatest possibility of winning. For Democrats, that would require openly acting on the reality that a change of presidential candidate is needed. For non-Trump Republicans, it would mean taking on a clearly nonviolent and classically liberal identity around which they could rally, as the French Republicans have done, and as groups such as Principles First and Republicans for the Rule of Law are attempting. Although such changes seem daunting, a short timeline can be empowering in forcing the urgency of the moment.

Leftist support for political violence has also been increasing.

To bring this program to fruition without forcing its purveyors to undermine (or destroy) their electoral chances, reformers may have to change the structure of the American electoral system. Many Republican voters are Trump true believers, but a solid plurality (many of whom voted for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in primary contests, even after she had ended her campaign) are not. They may not be willing to change political stripes to vote for a Democrat, but they have already shown their preference to vote for a different type of Republican. Alaska and Maine, for example, use ranked-choice voting that allows multiple Democrats and Republicans to run in the general election without splitting their base, and in these contests, many Republican voters cast ballots for non-extreme GOP candidates. Ranked-choice voting also incentivizes politicians to moderate, because less partisan candidates are more likely to end up ranked second on ballots. It is no coincidence that Alaska and Maine have produced Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins—the two Republican senators most willing to speak out against violence and antidemocratic action (aside from Utah’s Mitt Romney, who is retiring from office).

Allowing different flavors of a party to emerge is important now for the right. But it could become equally useful for the left. The Democratic Party remains mostly intolerant of violent actors, but leftist support for political violence has also been increasing. Some supporters of independent Senator Bernie Sanders threatened Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, for example. In 2017, a leftist traveled to Washington, D.C., with a plan to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And although only a small number of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 devolved into violence, that violence was serious in cities such as Seattle.

This uptick shouldn’t come as a surprise. In a polarized society, violence rarely sticks to one side for long. The last bout of political violence in the United States started with the right, as segregationists in the South lynched Black Americans and murdered civil rights activists in the 1950s and early 1960s. But these killings galvanized backlash from those who felt that the time for the pacifism that Martin Luther King, Jr., espoused had passed. Violence spread to the left throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with riots, militant groups, and murders by extremists such as the Symbionese Liberation Army.

On Saturday, the United States avoided the assassination of its leading presidential candidate. But it was through sheer luck: the 20-year-old shooter missed Trump’s skull by less than an inch. The country may not be as lucky the next time around, and the results could be catastrophic. When a 19-year-old in Sarajevo killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a deeply divided world descended into war. The tinder is laid in the United States, and it is bone dry. Americans need to take lessons from other countries to stop it from igniting.

Foreign Affairs · by A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security · July 19, 2024


16. The Red Sea Crisis Goes Beyond the Houthis


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A diplomatic initiative of this nature succeeds only with a demonstrable and sustained engagement by U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as key defense and intelligence officials that carry weight across the region. The visible role of senior-most U.S. leaders can strengthen the hand of U.S. envoys on the ground in the region, who must be better staffed and resourced to match the complexity of the crisis. Unless the crisis receives this level of attention, U.S. credibility in this strategic zone will continue to be undercut by the impression, widespread across the Horn, that top U.S. policymakers are too preoccupied by the problems of Gaza and Ukraine (not to mention the American presidential election) to consistently engage and try to solve an African crisis. And, as a corollary, the United States is willing to defer to Gulf countries, which do not necessarily share core American interests in the region.
The United States should not go it alone. Instability in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa is a direct economic and security threat to European business and commercial interests. Migration has come to dominate European political debates, and an intensification of instability in the Horn risks exacerbating this problem, further skewing European politics in ways that complicate the transatlantic alliance. The United States must leverage Europe’s direct interests in the region by partnering with the European Union, its member states, and the United Kingdom in active efforts to secure regional peace, with a specific focus on supporting mediation to end the twin wars in Sudan and Ethiopia. Similarly, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, working in close partnership with the African Union and its member states, can play a high-level role in averting a deeper crisis by facilitating better coordination between the array of international envoys attempting to manage the Horn’s multiple hot spots.
It is not too late to stabilize the Red Sea, but the window is closing as violence and state fragmentation spread and the influence of U.S. competitors expands. The United States and its partners must act to stop widening crises on land or risk chasing a current of further instability into one of the world’s most vital waterways.


The Red Sea Crisis Goes Beyond the Houthis

To Avoid a Spiral of Violence, America Must Help Stabilize the Greater Horn of Africa

By Johnnie Carson, Alex Rondos, Susan Stigant, and Michael Woldemariam

July 19, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Johnnie Carson, Alex Rondos, Susan Stigant, and Michael Woldemariam · July 19, 2024

The Red Sea is in crisis. At the center of the storm are Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have unleashed a wave of attacks on ships traversing one of the world’s most pivotal maritime straits, putatively in support of Hamas’s war against Israel. The Houthi gambit in the Red Sea is imposing serious costs on global trade, as did the problem of Somali piracy, which reached its peak in 2010. The United States and some of its allies have stepped in to militarily suppress the threat, bombing Houthi positions inside Yemen. But although this episode is illustrative of the difficulties of Red Sea security, the crisis extends far beyond the trouble emanating from Yemen.

The political violence and state fragmentation that fueled the Houthis’ rise in Yemen is now wreaking havoc across the broader Horn of Africa. A metastasizing web of intrastate and interstate conflicts stretching from Sudan to Somalia could bring unprecedented chaos across the Horn, creating space for extremist militant networks and countries hostile to Western interests and a free and open Red Sea. Preventing the situation from growing even worse will require a broad-based diplomatic coalition to deescalate the Horn’s multiple conflicts. But such an effort cannot succeed without aggressive U.S. diplomatic support. An American-led push would have to deter destabilizing interventions on the part of outside parties such as the United Arab Emirates and Iran, which have extended military support to warring actors in places like Sudan. It would also need to avert a regionwide famine, the threat of which is most acute in Sudan and Ethiopia. Taking on these daunting tasks will require a boost of diplomatic outreach by senior U.S. officials, including U.S. President Joe Biden. If the region’s interconnected crises worsen, parties hostile to U.S. interests and a free and open Red Sea may gain strategic advantage in this important maritime corridor.

A REGION AT WAR

Multiple wars are causing deep instability in the Horn of Africa and contributing to the crisis in the Red Sea. From 2018 to 2019, popular revolts toppled long-standing authoritarian regimes in Ethiopia and Sudan, but both states have since descended into astonishing levels of violence. A two-year war between Ethiopia’s federal authorities and forces from the Tigray region killed over 500,000 people and displaced millions more. The November 2022 agreement that ended that conflict is under increasing strain as many of its most contentious provisions await implementation. Ethiopia’s two biggest regions—Oromia and Amhara—are suffering from intractable insurgencies, and talks to peacefully resolve the conflict in Oromia ended in failure in November. Although the country’s capital, Addis Ababa, remains stable, insecurity is a constant across much of the rural hinterland.

Internal tensions in Ethiopia are the backdrop to its deteriorating ties with Eritrea, which faces its own looming questions about an aging leader and a potentially volatile political transition. Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki, 78, has been in power for three decades, presiding over a highly personalized autocracy with few viable mechanisms for managing succession. In January, landlocked Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding on port access with Somaliland, which seceded from Somalia in 1991 but whose sovereignty is not recognized by any country. At the time of the signing, Somaliland President Muse Bihi Abdi said the agreement would involve Ethiopia’s recognition of Somaliland as an independent state, which could lead to a serious dispute between Addis Ababa and Mogadishu and derail fragile efforts to stabilize Somalia. Djibouti, the traditional port outlet for Ethiopian goods and services, could also face political and economic repercussions from deepening Ethiopia-Somaliland ties, at the same time it also faces uncertainties about political succession.

As this has been playing out in Ethiopia, the Sudanese state has effectively collapsed. Sudan’s fractious security apparatus toppled the transitional administration of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok in October 2021 and then descended into devastating internal strife in April 2023. By early 2024, the country was the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis, with violence driving an estimated 10 million people to flee their homes. For much of the war, the capital and the country have effectively been partitioned in two, with the main belligerents—the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)—locked in a costly stalemate that both believe they can break. Alarmingly, this already brutal war is set to become even more deadly, as the RSF launches offensives into eastern Sudan, both sides exhibit signs of internal fragmentation, and each seeks to mobilize constituencies along sectarian lines.

The war in Sudan has also disrupted the transit of South Sudanese oil to the Red Sea and cut more than 75 percent of revenue flowing to authorities in Juba, South Sudan’s capital. The loss of this money is collapsing the patronage-based deals that anchor the war-torn country’s politics. Civil servants, as well as the military and security services, have already gone months without pay, and this worrying development comes ahead of an ill-defined and potentially volatile electoral process expected later this year. To the east and north, Sudan’s disarray is adding to three-way tensions between Ethiopia’s federal government, Tigrayan authorities, and Eritrea, which are all intimately invested in the balance of power in eastern Sudan. It has also paralyzed the negotiations over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, an enormous infrastructure project that affects the water supply of Egypt and Sudan. The last round of talks collapsed in December amid charges of bad faith between Egypt and Ethiopia.

Kenya is facing its own political inflection point with leaders under pressure to balance their budget while responding to citizen priorities, as evidenced from recent tax-related protests and subsequent dissolution of the cabinet. The storm gathering along Kenya’s frontiers also increasingly requires its leaders’ time, attention, and diplomatic leadership.

SOURCES OF DISORDER

This region is no stranger to instability. But the current crisis is unprecedented in scale and scope. It is also exacerbated by three emerging problems of the twenty-first century’s changing global order. The first and most relevant to the Horn and Red Sea is the growing strength of middle powers keen to assert themselves in their backyard and on the international stage. The explosion of civil war in Yemen in 2014 and the crisis among Gulf countries three years later (which saw Qatar placed under a blockade by its neighbors) precipitated a flurry of financial and military interventions across the Horn by Middle Eastern powers intent on cultivating local clients and denying strategic advantage to their regional competitors. Even as the rivalries that animated this scramble have waned, the pattern of aggressive intervention and its debilitating effects have not. Flush with money and military hardware, local actors across the Horn are doubling down on coercion at the expense of negotiation. The United Arab Emirates is at the center of this problematic activity, as its recent interventions in Sudan (where it backs the RSF) and Ethiopia (where it backs Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed) demonstrate. But many others have also been culpable, including Egypt, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Converging demographic, climate, and macroeconomic pressures serve as additional catalysts for disorder. A regionwide youth bulge and rapid urbanization are creating new demands for economic mobility that many governments cannot meet. Between 2020 and 2023, the Horn of Africa suffered five failed rainy seasons, causing the worst drought since the 1980s; meanwhile, South Sudan and Kenya have suffered from debilitating floods. These environmental shocks, combined with conflict, are producing acute hunger crises in Sudan, South Sudan, and Tigray, with nearly 30 million at risk of starvation. And nearly all countries in the region are suffering from a toxic combination of debt, high inflation, and severe hard currency shortages brought on by global economic forces beyond their control, from supply chain disruptions to increased borrowing costs.

Meanwhile, the crumbling of global multilateralism has undermined international responses to the Horn’s multiple crises. For four years, geopolitical competition between China, Russia, and the United States has thwarted any serious UN Security Council action on the wars in Sudan and Ethiopia. Power brokers at the African Union have largely scrapped the organization’s founding principle of “non-indifference,” doing little of substance to address these conflicts even as they demand prominent roles in any peace processes. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the Horn’s regional trade organization, is paralyzed by internal rivalries and is uninterested in rocking the boat by pursuing peace initiatives that alienate some member states. And even if African multilateral organizations were willing to act, success would require collaboration with powerful players from the Middle East at a moment when there is no forum for the Red Sea that brings together African and Middle Eastern states and makes transregional solutions possible.

The Sudanese state has effectively collapsed.

This growing instability has been disastrous for the region’s people. It will also be exploited by a constellation of actors hostile to Western interests and a free and open Red Sea. The jihadist group al Shabaab, for example, is poised for a breakout in Somalia. President Hassan Sheikh is struggling to suppress the group and reduce its ability to shape the national narrative. He is distracted by the growing closeness between Ethiopia and Somaliland and the rivalry between his administration and Somalia’s member states. He is also facing a drawdown of military support from international partners. Some observers openly contemplate Al Shabaab’s return to Mogadishu, where it had a strong presence between 2009 and 2012—an outcome that would be comparable to the Taliban’s 2021 return to Kabul in Afghanistan. This reality would immediately imperil neighboring Kenya and even Ethiopia, which has historically been immune to attacks from the group but witnessed a major incursion in July 2022. In Sudan, Western intelligence officials openly worry that the prevailing chaos will create new openings for homegrown terror networks or affiliates of al Qaeda and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) from the Sahel and Libya.

Revisionist states are also making tangible bids for power in and around the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary outfit, has provided support to the RSF, but the Kremlin is now cultivating both sides of the Sudanese war in a bid to retain its stakes in the country’s gold economy and realize a 2020 agreement that would grant Moscow a Red Sea naval base on Sudan’s coast. Russia’s influence in Sudan is now significant. Russia is also exploiting Eritrea’s insecurities regarding Ethiopia to deepen ties with this strategic Red Sea state. Meanwhile, Iran is also on the march. In 2015, Saudi pressure led states across the region to downgrade their bilateral relations with Tehran, but it is now an active player in the Sudan war, providing armaments to the SAF in recent months in a bid to reconstitute historical ties with the country’s security apparatus. This comes on the back of evidence that Iran supplied drones to the Ethiopian military at the height of the Tigray war.

LEAN ON FRIENDS

The Horn’s multiple crises can be sustainably resolved only by actors within the region. Yet most of them recognize that the United States must be the critical catalyst for peace. The Biden administration, to its credit, appreciates this reality. It is at the center of diplomatic efforts to resolve the wars in Sudan and Ethiopia and deescalate tensions around the Ethiopia-Somaliland agreement. It continues to be a leading source of humanitarian assistance to the region, and it remains a key supporter of regional counterterrorism efforts.

But it is also evident that these efforts have not arrested the region’s slide. To avert the looming strategic catastrophe, which would involve U.S. adversaries leveraging the Horn’s instability to expand their political and military influence along the Red Sea, the United States must enhance its efforts to deescalate regional tensions and address the Red Sea arena—the maritime route and the surrounding countries (littoral and beyond) in the Horn and Gulf—as a connected geopolitical space. For too long, the activity of Middle Eastern states in the Horn has been a concern of Africa-focused diplomats within the U.S. government but deprioritized by their counterparts in Near East‒focused bureaucracies and the broader foreign policy apparatus. A first step would be a strong U.S. effort to discourage the destabilizing Middle Eastern interventions that are at the heart of much of the chaos. Since many of the key transgressors are U.S. partners, such as the UAE, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, Washington’s concerns about their conduct must be significantly elevated in bilateral dialogues. The United States should make the case to these friends that their interventions harm their long-term economic interests, damage their reputations in ways that make it harder for the United States to deepen bilateral cooperation, and expand the influence of malign actors across the region. The U.S. Congress, which has demonstrated some awareness of the problematic activity of Middle Eastern states in Sudan and across the Horn, must reinforce this message of disapproval and press the administration when it is not being delivered. Hearings and legislation requiring the administration to publicly report on the nature and consequences of Middle Eastern interference in the Horn, as well as U.S. responses, should be put in play.

The United States should also mobilize to prevent famine across the Horn, which is a direct symptom of the depth of the crisis and violence in the region. To do so, the appointment of a coordinator for humanitarian relief in the Horn is needed, tasked with reaching deals with armed actors, international relief organizations, and local humanitarians and business interests to secure safe passage of food and basic goods. The most urgent challenge is currently in Sudan, where warring parties have obstructed the movement of aid across the country’s international borders and lines of control.

The United States should mobilize to prevent famine across the Horn.

A diplomatic initiative of this nature succeeds only with a demonstrable and sustained engagement by U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as key defense and intelligence officials that carry weight across the region. The visible role of senior-most U.S. leaders can strengthen the hand of U.S. envoys on the ground in the region, who must be better staffed and resourced to match the complexity of the crisis. Unless the crisis receives this level of attention, U.S. credibility in this strategic zone will continue to be undercut by the impression, widespread across the Horn, that top U.S. policymakers are too preoccupied by the problems of Gaza and Ukraine (not to mention the American presidential election) to consistently engage and try to solve an African crisis. And, as a corollary, the United States is willing to defer to Gulf countries, which do not necessarily share core American interests in the region.

The United States should not go it alone. Instability in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa is a direct economic and security threat to European business and commercial interests. Migration has come to dominate European political debates, and an intensification of instability in the Horn risks exacerbating this problem, further skewing European politics in ways that complicate the transatlantic alliance. The United States must leverage Europe’s direct interests in the region by partnering with the European Union, its member states, and the United Kingdom in active efforts to secure regional peace, with a specific focus on supporting mediation to end the twin wars in Sudan and Ethiopia. Similarly, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, working in close partnership with the African Union and its member states, can play a high-level role in averting a deeper crisis by facilitating better coordination between the array of international envoys attempting to manage the Horn’s multiple hot spots.

It is not too late to stabilize the Red Sea, but the window is closing as violence and state fragmentation spread and the influence of U.S. competitors expands. The United States and its partners must act to stop widening crises on land or risk chasing a current of further instability into one of the world’s most vital waterways.

  • JOHNNIE CARSON is Senior Adviser to the President of the U.S. Institute of Peace. From 2009 to 2013, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.
  • ALEX RONDOS is a Senior Adviser with the Africa Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He formerly served as the European Union’s Special Representative for the Horn of Africa.
  • SUSAN STIGANT is Director of Africa Programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
  • MICHAEL WOLDEMARIAM is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

Foreign Affairs · by Johnnie Carson, Alex Rondos, Susan Stigant, and Michael Woldemariam · July 19, 2024



17. The Senile Superpower?



Excerpts;

Allies and partners may also recalibrate their diplomatic efforts in response to an age-weakened American president. For example, if allied leaders in European capitals doubt Biden’s competence in a second term, NATO’s unity may suffer. In Trump’s case, doubts among allies about his dedication to the United States’ traditional security commitments will only grow if they see him exhibiting stereotypical traits of senility, such as curmudgeonly stubbornness and an unwillingness to learn. In the extreme, just as U.S. leaders bypassed a seemingly senile Rhee in favor of his advisers, foreign capitals may look to bypass the president in favor of lower-ranking departmental heads and bureaucratic counterparts.
But the historical record also suggests that over time an aging leader can repair his international image. Mao changed U.S. perceptions of his age-related decline through face-to-face meetings. So could Trump or Biden.
There is some precedent for this. There were many doubts about President Ronald Reagan’s mental acuity in his second term, which he began at the age of 73. Yet Reagan was able to engage in intense one-on-one diplomacy with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which helped set the stage for the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. In one encounter during the 1985 Geneva Summit, Reagan actively sought to demonstrate youthfulness. When Gorbachev emerged from his limousine, wearing an overcoat to protect him from the cold, Reagan left off his overcoat and bounded down a set of stairs to greet the Soviet leader. The result was that, in the words of Jack Matlock, a White House aide at the time, “even though Reagan was much older, Gorbachev came across as the spiritually older person.”
Before the Biden-Trump debate, many foreign leaders and governments had surely drawn conclusions about Biden’s acuity from in-person meetings, just as they surely had about Trump’s acuity from encounters with him when he was president. But such optics are not only an electoral liability. The United States’ own treatment of aging foreign leaders in the past makes clear that when presidents are seen as suffering from the ravages of time, their standing abroad will also take a hit.

The Senile Superpower?

America Has Long Treated Aging Leaders Differently—and So Might Other Countries Treat Biden or Trump

By Joshua Byun and Austin Carson

July 18, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Joshua Byun and Austin Carson · July 18, 2024

At age 81, U.S. President Joe Biden is objectively old, but what was striking about his June 27 debate with former U.S. President Donald Trump was just how old he looked and sounded. In the weeks since, Biden’s unsettling performance has triggered a political crisis within the Democratic Party. His campaign has claimed that the president merely had “a bad night” and has cited, among other things, the clean bill of health from his yearly physical exams and the exhaustion induced by recent foreign travel. But that has not stopped a growing number of Democrats from calling for Biden to bow out of the race, driven by fears that he has little chance of defeating Trump.

Yet there is more at stake than electoral odds. History suggests that old leaders who betray visible signs of senility, whether or not these encapsulate actual cognitive decline, will be treated differently by their foreign counterparts. And the problem of an aging president does not apply to Biden alone. His debating partner is hardly a model of youthful sharp-mindedness. In his appearances this year, Trump, 78 years old, has shown moments of confusion, unrelenting digressions, striking ignorance, and egregious (but perhaps partly intentional) misrepresentations—although the apparent vigor he showed right after the assassination attempt against him cuts in the other direction. Still, for both Biden and Trump, a second term carries the risk that doubts about the president’s competence will permeate international diplomacy and burden U.S. foreign relations.

In a study published last year, we looked at historical cases to answer the question of how aging leaders are seen in international politics. We focused on top-level U.S. appraisals of two aging titans of Cold War Asia, Syngman Rhee of South Korea and Mao Zedong of China—views that featured abrupt changes over time that could not simply be attributed to the men’s chronological aging. We found that foreign observers use physical, emotional, and cognitive indicators as vital clues to assess elderly leaders and that leaders who repeatedly show telltale signs of age-related decline are treated differently—not just compared with younger leaders but also compared with old leaders who show fewer signs of decline.

When a leader exudes agedness, adversaries may drive a harder bargain or adopt more aggressive foreign policies, expecting a weaker response. Allies and partners may question the promises that an old leader makes or bypass what they see as an aging figurehead by working with other officials. They may even postpone substantive diplomacy altogether. But policymakers may also update their assessments of leaders through continued contact, giving old leaders a chance to recover their reputations for competence and relevance. When it comes to assessments of vigor in international politics, seeing is believing.

AN OLD STORY

Aging leaders have been a fixture on the world stage for centuries. In earlier eras, elderly monarchs were the norm. Today, aging dictators and democratically elected heads of state are common. But a leader’s age alone tells us little. Old age can be a source of wisdom or a driver of mental decline. How does one tell the difference? In everyday life and in diplomacy, people use tells of senility—that is, signs of confusion, physical weakness, or loss of focus that correspond to widely held stereotypes about age-related decline.

This should not be news to the White House. U.S. officials themselves have routinely scrutinized their elderly foreign counterparts for telltale signs of senility, basing harsh judgments on many of the same indicators that observers focused on after Biden’s debate performance—his raspy voice, halting speech, frail movements, meandering answers, and apparent forgetfulness.

When a leader exudes agedness, adversaries may expect a weaker response.

In 1964, for example, a CIA summary of a meeting between Chester Bowles, then the U.S. ambassador to India, and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s 74-year-old prime minister, described Nehru as “weak” and speaking “with painful slowness.” (He ended up dying of a heart attack just weeks after the meeting.) In 1979, likewise, the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia reported after a meeting with King Khalid bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, then 66 years old, that “the king appeared feeble; especially noticeable were his somewhat disoriented remarks along with an extremely short attention span.” And throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. policymakers tried to determine whether and how the aging of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev might be shaping his competence and power within the Politburo. After a 1977 meeting, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance remarked that the 71-year-old Soviet leader appeared “in a daze,” “out of touch with his surroundings,” and “heavily dependent on those around him in getting through his audiences.” To Vance, this was “strongly suggestive of an aging individual whose reserve strength is essentially depleted.”

U.S. officials viewed some elderly leaders in a more favorable light. In 1959, the CIA station in Bonn, West Germany, made sure to warn Washington that the 83-year-old West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s behavior in the ongoing Berlin crisis “should not be ascribed to senility,” given that he had shown himself “physically firm and mentally alert” in “close quarters.” The elderly Zhou Enlai, China’s prime minister for much of the Cold War, held numerous meetings with foreign partners that showcased his vigor and intellectual sharpness. After meeting with a 73-year-old Zhou in 1971, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wrote in a memo that he “ranks with Charles De Gaulle as the most impressive foreign statesman I have met.”

To better understand how assessments of old leaders have shaped international diplomacy, we used declassified archival records to dig deeper into U.S. appraisals of Rhee and Mao. Evolving views of their agedness evident in top decision-making circles highlight the importance of verbal and physical cues. These two cases also underscore how foreign suspicions of senility can have significant ramifications for foreign policy.

RESPECT YOUR ELDERS?

Rhee became the focal point of U.S. policy in South Korea after becoming the country’s first president at the age of 73. U.S. officials were often unhappy with how Rhee, whose country they were defending in the Korean War, conducted his foreign and domestic affairs. But most also admitted that he was—in the opinion of one U.S. general summarized in a 1952 memo—“a shrewd, astute, hard-bargaining, old patriot, who knows how to get what he wants and usually does.” As that description shows, old age can be seen as positive rather than negative. For U.S. policymakers, it followed that the best way for the United States to deal with South Korea was to, in the words of a State Department official in 1953, “convince him that working with us is the best way of achieving the objective to which he has dedicated his life”—namely, securing his country’s independence against external aggression.

The mood changed in the late 1950s, however, when U.S. officials in South Korea increasingly took note of Rhee’s apparent senility. On a 1956 visit, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles remarked that “Rhee showed evidence of having greatly aged,” adding, “I tried to give him some of the impressions of my trip, but he showed little interest, and he did not follow what I was saying.” Walter Dowling, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, repeatedly reported on how the president was “beginning to look and act like a very old man,” as he put it in 1957. One among many signs of “marked deterioration,” the ambassador wrote two years later, was that “he is increasingly forgetful, and that it is necessary to explain and re-explain ideas and suggestions before [he] grasps meaning or significance.” Peer De Silva, the CIA station chief in Seoul, recounted in his memoir that by 1959, it was “common knowledge that Syngman Rhee … was rapidly sliding into senility.”

Declassified American records make clear that such prevailing assessments informed a broader loss of faith in Rhee as a strategic partner, prompting Washington to quietly back his domestic political opponents, who removed him from power in 1960. “It is clear that he is superannuated and has lost the capacity to distinguish between the political forces of the past and those of the present and the future,” the CIA observed five days prior to Rhee’s ouster; the proper role of the United States was to help “ease him out of power altogether with his party lieutenants.” During his final meeting with Rhee, Walter McConaughy, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, delivered a harsh message: although the United States viewed him as the “George Washington” of South Korea, it was time for this “elder statesman” to turn the burdens of government “over to younger men.”

FROM SENILE TO SHARP

During the 1960s, Mao rarely appeared in public, and U.S. policymakers had no firsthand access to him in diplomatic meetings. Deriving what they could from third-hand accounts and hearsay, many in Washington assumed that the reclusive leader was suffering from senility. One example of such indirect evidence, according to a 1964 CIA report, was that “Mao was once a forceful speechmaker and prolific and effective writer, but no important production has been claimed for him since 1957.”

This assumption narrowed the range of policies that the United States was willing to consider in its relations with China. Years before Nixon’s famous opening to China, some in the U.S. government advocated rapprochement with Beijing to turn it into a strategic partner against the larger Soviet adversary. One reason that such proposals failed to gain traction was perceptions about Mao’s age-induced decline. The old dictator, the argument ran, would be too rigid and incompetent to make an overture worthwhile.

It was not until Kissinger saw Mao’s performance in person during his visits to China in the early 1970s that American views began to change. Kissinger’s analysis from face-to-face meetings with Mao contain numerous references to clues about aging. “Mentally he was extremely impressive,” Kissinger wrote to Nixon in 1973, adding that the elderly chairman “led the conversation” and “covered all major international issues with subtlety and incisiveness.” He went on: “And all of this was done without a single note of his own.” Explaining why previous encounters had fueled concerns about Mao’s age, including those Nixon had after meeting Mao on his famous visit the previous year, Kissinger noted, “It is now clear in retrospect that he was quite ill when you saw him.”

More optimistic assessments of Mao’s competence that resulted from the face-to-face encounters of the early 1970s helped expand U.S. ambitions for diplomatic engagement with China. After all, American leaders had believed from the initial stages of rapprochement that Mao’s personal condition and domestic status in China was one of the most important wildcards that, as Kissinger put it in 1973, carried “substantial potential for trouble in our relationship.” With these concerns largely allayed, U.S. policymakers could reach for deeper levels of cooperation, opening the door to compromises and understandings throughout the rest of the decade on a wide range of issues involving Southeast Asian politics, the Korean Peninsula, and arms control.

ACTING THEIR AGE

When he took office, Trump set the record for the oldest president at the start of his term—a record Biden then broke at the start of his. Should either candidate serve out a second term, he would be 82 or 86, respectively, by the end. Indeed, despite the attention paid to Biden now, the problem of an aging U.S. president on the international stage will not be his alone. Even if one believes that Trump’s verbal and physical signs of aging are milder, foreign counterparts will be rendering senility-related judgments about Trump, too. Either candidate’s victory would invite questions about the age-related decline of the U.S. president—and its foreign policy ramifications. And continued aging will only sharpen those concerns.

History suggests that the foreign policy risks of such concerns are substantial. Adversaries may conclude that the aging president is a compromised figure within U.S. domestic politics. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, may then feel emboldened to take more risks in Ukraine. Personal connections among heads of state may also suffer. Biden, for his part, has often highlighted his extensive personal meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. If the president is seen as suffering from age-related decline, however, Xi may place less value in such a dialogue. That may make it harder for the United States and China to, say, defuse a future crisis over Taiwan.

When it comes to vigor in international politics, seeing is believing.

Allies and partners may also recalibrate their diplomatic efforts in response to an age-weakened American president. For example, if allied leaders in European capitals doubt Biden’s competence in a second term, NATO’s unity may suffer. In Trump’s case, doubts among allies about his dedication to the United States’ traditional security commitments will only grow if they see him exhibiting stereotypical traits of senility, such as curmudgeonly stubbornness and an unwillingness to learn. In the extreme, just as U.S. leaders bypassed a seemingly senile Rhee in favor of his advisers, foreign capitals may look to bypass the president in favor of lower-ranking departmental heads and bureaucratic counterparts.

But the historical record also suggests that over time an aging leader can repair his international image. Mao changed U.S. perceptions of his age-related decline through face-to-face meetings. So could Trump or Biden.

There is some precedent for this. There were many doubts about President Ronald Reagan’s mental acuity in his second term, which he began at the age of 73. Yet Reagan was able to engage in intense one-on-one diplomacy with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which helped set the stage for the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. In one encounter during the 1985 Geneva Summit, Reagan actively sought to demonstrate youthfulness. When Gorbachev emerged from his limousine, wearing an overcoat to protect him from the cold, Reagan left off his overcoat and bounded down a set of stairs to greet the Soviet leader. The result was that, in the words of Jack Matlock, a White House aide at the time, “even though Reagan was much older, Gorbachev came across as the spiritually older person.”

Before the Biden-Trump debate, many foreign leaders and governments had surely drawn conclusions about Biden’s acuity from in-person meetings, just as they surely had about Trump’s acuity from encounters with him when he was president. But such optics are not only an electoral liability. The United States’ own treatment of aging foreign leaders in the past makes clear that when presidents are seen as suffering from the ravages of time, their standing abroad will also take a hit.

  • JOSHUA BYUN is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College.
  • AUSTIN CARSON is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Foreign Affairs · by Joshua Byun and Austin Carson · July 18, 2024


18. What the Microsoft Outage Reveals


What the Microsoft Outage Reveals

We discover the fragility of our technological infrastructure only when it’s too late.

By Samuel Arbesman

The Atlantic · by Samuel Arbesman · July 19, 2024

It happened again: yet another cascading failure of technology. In recent years we’ve had internet blackoutsaviation-system debacles, and now a widespread outage due to an issue affecting Microsoft systems, which has grounded flights and disrupted a range of other businesses, including health-care providers, banks, and broadcasters.

Why are we so bad at preventing these? Fundamentally, because our technological systems are too complicated for anyone to fully understand. These are not computer programs built by a single individual; they are the work of many hands over the span of many years. They are the interaction of countless components that might have been designed in a specific way for reasons that no one remembers. Many of our systems involve massive numbers of computers, any one of which might malfunction and bring down all the rest. And many have millions of lines of computer code that no one entirely grasps.

We don’t appreciate any of this until things go wrong. We discover the fragility of our technological infrastructure only when it’s too late.

So how can we make our systems fail less often?

We need to get to know them better. The best way to do this, ironically, is to break them. Much as biologists irradiate bacteria to cause mutations that show us how the bacteria function, we can introduce errors into technologies to understand how they’re liable to fail.

Samuel Arbesman: Everything is overcomplicated

This work often falls to software-quality-assurance engineers, who test systems by throwing lots of different inputs at them. A popular programming joke illustrates the basic idea.

A software engineer walks into a bar. He orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 99,999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd. (So far, so good. The bartender may not have been able to procure a lizard, but the bar is still standing.) A real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames.

Engineers can induce only so many errors. When something happens that they didn’t anticipate, the network breaks down. So how can we expand the range of failures that systems are exposed to? As someone who studies complex systems, I have a few approaches.

One is called “fuzzing.” Fuzzing is sort of like that engineer at the bar, but on steroids. It involves feeding huge amounts of randomly generated input into a software program to see how the program responds. If it doesn’t fail, then we can be more confident that it will survive the real and unpredictable world. The first Apple Macintosh was bolstered by a similar approach.

Fuzzing works at the level of individual programs, but we also need to inject failure at the system level. This has become known as “chaos engineering.” As a manifesto on the practice points out, “Even when all of the individual services in a distributed system are functioning properly, the interactions between those services can cause unpredictable outcomes.” Combine unpredictable outcomes with disruptive real-world events and you get systems that are “inherently chaotic.” Manufacturing that chaos in the engineering phase is crucial for reducing it in the wild.

Netflix was an early practitioner of this. In 2012, it publicly released a software suite it had been using internally called Chaos Monkey that randomly took down different subsystems to test how the company’s overall infrastructure would respond. This helped Netflix anticipate and guard against systemic failures that fuzzing couldn’t have caught.

Read: The coming software apocalypse

That being said, fuzzing and chaos engineering aren’t perfect. As our technological systems grow more complex, testing every input or condition becomes impossible. Randomness can help us find additional errors, but we will only ever be sampling a tiny subset of potential situations. And those don’t include the kinds of failures that distort systems without fully breaking them. Those are disturbingly difficult to root out.

Contending with these realities requires some epistemological humility: There are limits to what we can know about how and when our technologies will fail. It also requires us to curb our impulse to blame system-wide failures on a specific person or group. Modern systems are in many cases simply too large to allow us to point to a single actor when something goes wrong.

In their book, Chaos Engineering, Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones offer a few examples of system failures with no single culprit. One involves a large online retailer who, in an effort to avoid introducing bugs during the holiday season, temporarily stopped making changes to its software code. This meant the company also paused its frequent system resets, which those changes required. Their caution backfired. A minor bug in an external library that the retailer used began to cause memory issues—problems that frequent resetting would have rendered harmless—and outages ensued.

In cases like this one, the fault is less likely to belong to any one engineer than to the inevitable complexity of modern software. Therefore, as Rosenthal and Jones argue—and as I explore in my book Overcomplicated—we must cope with that complexity by using techniques such as chaos engineering instead of trying to engineer it away.

As our world becomes more interconnected by massive systems, we need to be the ones breaking them—over and over again—before the world gets a chance.

The Atlantic · by Samuel Arbesman · July 19, 2024


19. Intelligence: The god that failed



Excerpts:

The 70-year span between Korea and Ukraine is replete with strategic intelligence failures.
In April 1961 The United states engineered an invasion of Cuba by Cuban dissidents that was to lead to the collapse of the Castro regime. Predicated on the faulty assumption that Castro had no popular support, the invasion proved a dismal failure.
In October 1962 it was the turn of the Soviets to misjudge America’s resolve and try to position missiles in Cuba, a venture that brought the world close to a nuclear war.
The end of the Cold War did not substantially change the genetic makeup of intelligence. While tactical intelligence remains largely the realm of the technocrats, strategic intelligence is still very much hostage to the mindsets of governments. And as the issue of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq demonstrated, manufacturing or cherry picking evidence to ensure that it conforms to a specific vision of reality is a temptation difficult to resist.


Intelligence: The god that failed - Asia Times

Manufacturing or cherry-picking evidence to ensure conformity to a specific vision is a temptation hard to resist

asiatimes.com · by Alexander Casella · July 15, 2024

On October 22, 1963, US President John F. Kennedy invited the publisher of the New York Times for lunch. During the meal he suggested that the Times transfer its correspondent in South Vietnam, David Halberstam, to another posting.

Halberstam’s reporting indicated that the Saigon regime was losing the war against its communist Vietcong adversary. This contradicted the reports that Kennedy was getting from official American sources, which all claimed that the Saigon regime had the upper hand.

David Halberstam in Vietnsm

Halberstam was not removed from his position, and Kennedy would have done well to pay more attention to his reporting. But the president did not, preferring to depend on official channels that provided him, one must assume, with the news that he wished to hear, namely that Saigon, Washington’s ally, was winning the war.

It was obvious that Halberstam as a journalist and a civilian did not have anywhere near the volume of first-hand knowledge that was available to the government. However, he had numerous sources within the American counter-insurgency community, operating at the grass roots level, who shared with him, albeit confidentially, their misgivings about how the war was progressing.

Those misgivings were available to the government but they were systematically disregarded both by the American military and by the American Embassy in Saigon. In other words, the intelligence collecting system at the grass root level worked.

What did not work was the processing of the information at the level of Saigon, be it by the American military or by the diplomats. Thus the onward communication to Washington of the conclusions to be drawn from this locally generated information was flawed.

The flawed information was uncritically received by the system in Washington and further fed to the political establilshment , which was only too happy to receive information that conformed to its vision of events in Vietnam.

If the assimilation by the ruling establishment of information that comes from parallel or unofficial sources or does not conform to the prevailing opinion is an issue in open societies, the problem is compounded tenfold when a one-party system or a one-man rule prevails. The most glaring example is Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union.

‘Shoot him. He lies.’

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched operation Barbarossa, which was supposed to bring down the Soviet Union. The attack took Stalin by surprise but it did not have to be so. For weeks before the attack Stalin had been warned by a number of sources that Hitler was on the point of invading the Soviet Union. In the hours prior to the attack a German soldier crossed the lines to warn the Soviets of what was coming. His message was duly reported by radio to Moscow and the reply came immediately: “Shoot him. He lies.”

Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. Stalin believed he knew when it would come, and he didn’t want to hear otherwise. Photo: Spiked

The reason for this reaction was simple. Stalin had decided that Hitler would attack in 1943 and no amount of contrary evidence would change the dictator’s mind. It got to the point where Soviet officials who dared to present him with contrary evidence were putting their lives at risk – with the result that they soon refrained from providing him with data that did not confirm to his preconceived vision. The result was that, when Hitler attacked, Stalin proved so unprepared that he came close to losing the Soviet Union.

From China’s intervention in the Korean war to the Tet 1968 0ffensive to Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, post-World War II history is paved with intelligence failures – with two caveats.

Iraq’s aluminum tubes that ultimately were found not to be suitable for making nuclear weapons. Photo: Leading to War

The first is that at the grass roots level the collection and processing of raw intelligence is an ongoing process, undertaken by most nations in order to address both domestic and international security concerns. This process mostly, when not interfered with, can produce actionable results albeit not necessarily in the public domain.

The second is that the proclivity of political establishments either to force-fit intelligence to conform to their preconceived visions of reality or to ignore geopolitical imperatives is well established. The end result is that intelligence is disregarded in the decision-making process with dire consequences. As of today the two book ends of this deficiency are Korea and Ukraine.

In the fall of 1950 the forces led by General McArthur had not only repulsed the North Korean assault on South Korea but had crossed the 38th parallel and were moving toward the Yalu river, which marked the border with China. This created major concern in Beijing, amplified by the fact that McArthur had indicated that he might consider using Chinese nationalist Kuomintang troops, brought in from Taiwan, to strengthen his hold on North Korea.

The result was that a conflict that developed in the Korean peninsula had now the potential of spreading and represented a direct danger to the Chinese state. Indeed, while the new communist leadership in Beijing could put up with an American military presence in South Korea, the 38th Parallel was a red line that could not be crossed. However, given the total breakdown of communications between China and the United States, there was no channel by which Beijing could convey its concern to Washington.

Unaware of Washington’s intentions and increasingly wary that the Americans might be tempted to cross the border into China and seek to overthrow the regime, the Chinese Communists started massing troops on the Yalu border.

For Washington the questions that should have been raised were two: at the strategic level, would China intervene; and at the tactical level, where and how. There is no evidence that these questions were ever raised.

The original goal of the UN intervention in Korea had been to thwart aggression. However, once general McArthur had decided that his forces would proceed beyond the 38th Parallel, China’s intervention in the conflict was a strategic given and the only question was how and where it would unfold.

There is no evidence that this conundrum was ever considered by the policy makers in Washington. Thus a strategic intelligence failure was compounded by a tactical one when, on November 1, 1951 some 350 000 Chinese troops caught the American forces by surprise and sent them reeling from the border areas.

Ukraine stands out today as the other bookend of intelligence failures. The Russian attack that started on February 24, 2022, took the form of an armored column headed for Kiev. Had the attack occurred 20 years earlier, one can reasonably assume that the Russian force would have reached its target in a matter of hours and imposed on Ukraine a pro-Russian government. But in twenty years Ukrainian nationalism had assumed a new dimension and fueled a resistance to the invasion that neither the Russians nor the friends of Ukraine had expected.

This Maxar satellite image taken and released on February 28, 2022, shows a military convoy heading towards Kyiv. Image: Maxar Technologies


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Compounding the problem for Putin was the state of the Russian army. Over the previous decade the Russian armed forces had gone through a massive modernization program. However, the level of corruption in the country was such that most of the funds directed to the military were diverted. The combination of an unexpected resistance and a non-performing army ensured that what should have been a 48-hour operation morphed into the present quagmire. And there are no indications that these two developments were ever factored in when President Putin decided on the use of force as regards Ukraine.

The reasons for this deficiency in factoring in reality can only be presumed but had it been considered it would have run counter to two of President’s Putin basic assumptions, namely that Ukraine was in substance Russian and that the reform of the Russian armed forces had been successfully implemented. Thus President Putin either was not presented with the intelligence that the situation demanded or he implicitly disregarded it because it ran contrary to his ideological bent.

The 70-year span between Korea and Ukraine is replete with strategic intelligence failures.

In April 1961 The United states engineered an invasion of Cuba by Cuban dissidents that was to lead to the collapse of the Castro regime. Predicated on the faulty assumption that Castro had no popular support, the invasion proved a dismal failure.

In October 1962 it was the turn of the Soviets to misjudge America’s resolve and try to position missiless in Cuba, a venture that brought the world close to a nuclear war.

The end of the Cold War did not substantially change the genetic makeup of intelligence. While tactical intelligence remains largely the realm of the technocrats, strategic intelligence is still very much hostage to the mindsets of governments. And as the issue of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq demonstrated, manufacturing or cherry picking evidence to ensure that it conforms to a specific vision of reality is a temptation difficult to resist.

Alexander Casella PhD has taught and he has worked as a journalist for Le Monde, The Times, The New York Times, Die Zeit, The Guardian and Swiss radio and TV, writing primarily on China and Vietnam. In 1973 he joined the UNHCR, serving, among other postingss, as head of the East Asia Section and director for Asia and Oceania. He then served as representative in Geneva of the International Center for Migration Policy Development.

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asiatimes.com · by Alexander Casella · July 15, 2024



20. Want “Strategically Minded Warfighters?” Then Make “Intellectualism” a Military Value (SOF PME)


Focus on SOF PME.


Conclusion:

There has been some positive evolution in how the military perceives education. For example, the JCS acknowledges the “episodic” approach to education is insufficient to develop the type of practitioner the nation requires. Although this is a positive development, leaders must create climates that encourage individual education as part of professional development and institute collective educational opportunities as part of their unit’s development. Although the formal educational opportunities the military offers are necessary and more generous than those provided by other federal government organizations, these “episodic” education opportunities are not sufficient to nurture the “critical thinkers” leaders say the security environment requires. We believe the choice is straightforward, the military either prioritizes lifelong education for military practitioners and ensures commanders incorporate it into their unit schedules or the military becomes a “break in case of emergency” organization focused on achieving limited military objectives. If not, the U.S. military runs the risk of taking actions that make conditions worse because they do not understand the risk created by their actions. Making these changes will require adjustments to military culture and values, but failure to change will only perpetuate the current conditions that have leaders questioning the value of PME.



Want “Strategically Minded Warfighters?” Then Make “Intellectualism” a Military Value

A common refrain whenever military leaders and policymakers are dissatisfied with military performance is to argue that Professional Military Education (PME) needs to change. Although education should never be static, blaming PME institutions for the military not achieving policy outcomes ignores deeper fundamental issues with how the military perceives and approaches education. If policymakers and national security leaders are serious about educating practitioners to be more effective, they must move away from the current episodic approach that is more focused on credentialing than intellectually nurturing. This article offers a critique of how the military approaches education and offers recommendations for changing the way PME is viewed and practitioners are educated.

By

David P. Oakley & Mike Obadal

Published

3 days ago


interpopulum.org · by ByDavid P. Oakley & Mike Obadal

For over a decade, U.S. military leadership has acknowledged inadequacy in how it intellectually prepares practitioners to face a dynamic and uncertain environment. Despite this acknowledgment, the persistent claim of a broken Professional Military Education (PME) system is proof of either an unresponsive PME or that PME is serving as a useful scapegoat to shield addressing other fundamental issues. There is some truth in the former, but the latter is what has stifled change. Although it is convenient to solely blame PME institutions and their faculty, it is also unfair because it ignores organizational and cultural issues within the military that affect how education is perceived and incorporated into organizational and individual development, thus limiting its value. If the U.S. military wants to harness education to nurture the practitioner, they must appreciate the organizational and cultural issues that currently limit its utility.

CONTACT David P. Oakley, davidpoakley@usf.edu | Mike Obadal, mike.obadal@gmail.com

The views expressed in this publication are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy, or position of the University of South Florida, United States Government, Department of Defense, or United States Special Operations Command. © 2024 Arizona State University

First, military leadership must not only acknowledge the failure of an “episodic” approach but prioritize and resource recurring educational opportunities that complement the needed year-long educational experiences. Second, they must appreciate that, while practitioners require training and education, these are distinct and serve different yet complementary purposes. Finally, and most important, they must prioritize intellectual development to the same degree they prioritize physical fitness and incorporate “intellectualism” as a military value.

This article, co-written by an experienced Special Operations Forces (SOF) practitioner/leader (Obadal) and an academic/former practitioner (Oakley), first considers the necessity of educating the SOF practitioner in the current security environment. Recurring education is essential for SOF practitioners considering SOF’s mission and how leaders anticipate employing SOF in the current security environment. Although this section focuses on the SOF practitioner, the need for recurring education to nurture the practitioner is not limited to SOF and the failure to adequately educate occurs in SOF and the broader military. The article then considers some of the organizational and cultural reasons why the military has been unsuccessful in exploiting education for the benefit of the practitioner. It concludes with recommendations focused not on PME content, but on the need to adjust the way the military views education and how it integrates education in individual and collective development.

A SOF Leader’s Perspective on the Security Environment and the Ingredients for a Successful Practitioner

It is not a military secret that the attention of the Department of Defense shifted over the last few years to the strategic problems of Russian disruption and a rise in China’s global status. In fact, unclassified strategic documents from the current and previous administrations demand that the Pentagon shift its focus towards strategic competition. There is a departure from counterterrorism as the driving factor in almost every aspect of the military: force design, global posture, weapons development, and fiscal priority. We are trading V-shaped hulls for autonomous vehicles, close-quarters battle for cyber operations, and predator drones for satellite technology. Further, there is widespread recognition among military professionals that the United States will struggle to achieve domain dominance, which over the last twenty years was arguably secured with logistical but no significant adversarial challenges. The United States should be prepared to accept and overcome challenges such as the denial of air superiority through 5th generation fighters and advanced air defenses, disruptions in the maritime domain through unmanned subsurface vehicles and long-range missiles, sporadic space support due to jamming and counter-satellite capabilities, and challenges in the information domain driven by rapidly evolving policies and advanced programs. Further, Russia and China are working to move past unmanned systems by automating military platforms and actions, while the United States struggles to rectify its own ethics and morals regarding the lethal decision loop.

Beyond technology, another currency in this strategic competition is global presence, providing influence and access. SOF are more and more often the “front-line” in this effort, thanks to two decades of expansion. Since 2001, U.S. Special Operations Command’s numbers have doubled both in force structure and global deployments, with its members currently in about 80% of countries around the world. The partnerships, intelligence and influence they cultivate in these countries are essential to global competition, and critical if conflict breaks out. Leaders managing these relationships also navigate an environment rightfully controlled by diplomacy and intelligence professionals. Between their partnerships, their American counterparts, and Russian and Chinese presence, leaders must possess critical thinking and communications skills that surpass what standard military training or experience provides. They face situations not addressed in doctrine, partners not adherent to decision matrices, and adversaries utilizing highly unconventional means of competition.

For decades, the first “Special Operations Truth” remained intact: Humans are more important than hardware. In special operations, humans are far less reliant on the latest weapons and platforms for very practical reasons. Employment of major weapons systems is not the mission of most special operations units. Certainly, they use the most advanced equipment they can, but these center on situational awareness, transportation, and precise lethal engagement and tend to be personal kit, not pacing items. Most core activities center on “human terrain” instead of actual terrain. Counterinsurgency, unconventional warfare, civil affairs, security force assistance, and information operations all rely heavily on human contact and require exceptional interpersonal interaction. Advanced hardware for special operators is important, but the weapon system itself is the individual – required to navigate ambiguous environments with a broad mission statement. Preparation for SOF employment is about ensuring the individual makes the right decision. Effectiveness is gained by making good decisions in fluid human environments.

As a special operations commander from major to colonel (Obadal), I never had my entire formation in one geographic location. Globally dispersed, my subordinate leaders spent 99% of their time making their own decisions. I relied on them to make sound decisions without direct or daily command oversight. Lack of effective communications and speed of decision requirements had much to do with this, a common issue (not problem) that special operations professionals encounter.

In the short periods of time that I could speak directly with my leaders, effectiveness was weighed by how well and quickly they could encapsulate numerous dynamic elements into a single coherent message that included: 1) the decision they made or the direction they were taking; 2) how they incorporated the views of other U.S. and multinational stakeholders in crafting a plan; 3) the risks associated with every option, including the risk of inaction; 4) how their decision fit into the larger operational and strategic goals of the task force, combatant command, and U.S. policy. These men and women were special operations non-commissioned officers, warrant officers, and mid-grade officers who we thrust into environments that sometimes drew on their training, but always demanded their critical analysis.

One of my non-commissioned officers served as our sole representative to the U.S. Embassy in an important regional partner which had suffered numerous terror-related setbacks and was enduring political upheaval. During one of my visits, senior civilian and military officials on the country team lauded his performance and expressed the criticality of his input. This was unremarkable, as U.S. leaders in numerous countries commonly demonstrated appreciation for special operators working in embassies. What struck me was the soldier’s own assessment. He attributed his success to his recently completed Joint Special Operations Master of Arts (JSOMA) program at National Defense University: “Without the combination of education on the National Security process, and the focus on critical thinking, I’d be lost here.”

While he would not have been completely lost, his point drives home the criticality of three elements: training, experience, and education. In special operations, education likely takes a higher priority than other military disciplines due simply to the environment and the increased need for critical thinking. Balancing it with training is not taking away lethality or readiness; in fact, it increases the ability of leaders to operate more effectively.

If leadership pronouncements and strategic documents identify the importance of PME and experienced leaders highlight the value of education for operational effectiveness; why do PME problems persist? Is it that PME institutions are not listening? Although PME is not perfect and there is room for improvement, we believe the fundamental issue is not PME but military culture, what it values, and how it incorporates education into individual and organizational development.

The Importance of Differentiating Between Training and Education

Although military leaders identify the need for “strategically-minded warfighters or applied strategists,” the decade-long deafening echo signals military leadership’s assessment that they are not developing the practitioners required for success in the contemporary security environment. This failure is partly due to a misappreciation of the purpose of education and a conflation of education with training.

Training is focused on the individual or unit—by design pointed inward to elicit a specific behavior in specific situations. Training is critical to effective military formations: without training, units and individuals would rapidly break down. At the tactical level, it drives behavior to employ weapons, move supplies, and achieve tactical objectives. At the organizational level, training allows senior leaders to understand the complex systems that drive military momentum—training on force structure, fiscal practices, and joint planning. Training prepares leaders to employ military tools in combat situations.

Education is focused outward, to elicit changing behavior based on an understanding of changing situations (or an appreciation of initial misunderstanding). At the tactical levels, education largely occurs through exposure. Consider a deployed unit months into a counterinsurgency deployment. They understand the population’s behaviors, the enemy tendencies, and can better appreciate changes in the environment. Although this “learning by probing” or “learning by failure” will always occur, the lack of education prior to the deployment often makes overcoming ignorance disruptive and costly. At the higher levels, formal education provides senior leaders with the ability to critically break down problems that involve factors far beyond the military’s traditional optic. In other words, formal education prepares leaders to think critically in every situation.

The U.S. military’s training approach does an excellent job developing staff officers who can navigate the bureaucracy and technicians who can employ their weapon system and follow processes and procedures. Where it is found wanting is in nurturing critical thinkers who can assess the utility/limitations of force in specific socio-political environments, appreciate how those environments might respond to their actions, and assess the risk their actions potentially create.

Anyone who has served in the military appreciates that it values structure, processes/procedures, regulations, and doctrine. This is understandable for an organization that uses violence to achieve military conditions and asks people to unflinchingly put their lives at risk to orchestrate that violence. The military’s technician mentality might be sufficient when the strategic environment is viewed through the dichotomy of war/peace and what is asked of the military is limited to the use of force to achieve clear military outcomes (e.g., destroy the opponent’s army). The problem is, the U.S. military operates in complex and dynamic socio-political environments throughout the “spectrum of conflict” and its actions have effects beyond the opposition’s military. What is acceptable in the traditional war/peace dichotomy is irresponsible and dangerous in the “gray zone,” as part of “strategic competition,” when conducting “irregular warfare,” or when attempting to “shape the environment” within a combatant command’s area of responsibility.

The military’s training technicians culture often seeps into how the military views the role of education. For example, one of the authors has heard some refer to “just in time education” or experienced the calls for increasing “critical thinking” in PME curricula resulting in keyword searches to count the number of times “critical thinking” is present in syllabi. “Just in time education” is an adaptation of “just in time training” which focuses on providing the training at the moment the individual requires the skill. Although “just in time education” is a catchy phrase, it completely ignores that education is about intellectually nurturing an individual and not providing last-minute training. “Just in time education” thinking is dangerous because it creates the impression that education is merely information needed now and not about developing attributes such as critical thinking, curiosity, empathy, and humility throughout an individual’s career.

Although educators know “just in time education” is a platitude, sadly, it accurately describes the U.S. military’s “episodic” approach to education where it provides ten months of “strategic education” circa the eighteenth year of a career. Given this “just in time education” approach, senior leaders should not be shocked by the dearth of strategic thinkers. Is it surprising that individuals who achieved success focusing on technical acumen over nearly two decades of service cannot be rewired in a ten-month program? The astonishing thing is not that every war college/senior service college graduate is not transformed into a strategic thinker, but that some senior military leaders seem to expect such a transformation.

“Action is Achievement”

While training ensures the technician can perform their function, education is required for the professional to appreciate how the environment might respond to their action. One drawback of an overly technician mentality is a focus on the performance of the activity instead of adequately considering whether the activity might achieve the desired conditions, or the potential risks created in the environment by taking certain actions. This observation is not novel and was identified numerous times over the past two decades when the military failed to achieve its objectives in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Despite acknowledging, the military culture continues to focus more on “doing something” and rewarding action even if it is counterproductive to the ultimate goals.

The “action is achievement” culture somewhat highlights tension in the military where an attribute that is desirable in one situation is undesirable, counterproductive, and even dangerous in another situation. For example, “decisiveness” – which is essential when taking a hill or exploiting a tactical opportunity – can have disastrous consequences at the strategic level when actions are taken without sufficient thought to the secondary or tertiary effects. The problem is that military practitioners are inculcated with the belief that “decisiveness” is always good and anything not “decisive” is merely “indecisive” and is the result of poor leadership and performance. This leads to the practitioner embracing false certainty and penalizing anyone who admits ignorance or uncertainty even in an unfamiliar environment. This toxic mixture often results in rash decisions by ignorant practitioners when caution and thoughtfulness are required.

“Ivory tower nonsense” or “this academic stuff is too complicated”

A common refrain is that an academic subject is too complicated for practitioners to understand so we should avoid the topic and focus the curriculum on understanding our own organizations, processes, and procedures (i.e., building technicians). This view is condescending and underestimates the intellectual capabilities of practitioners. More importantly, it is ethically irresponsible because it sends unprepared practitioners into a dynamic and indeterminant world while asking them to “do something.” Practitioners have been trained on the technical capabilities of their weapon system and how to employ it, but they have not been adequately educated to appreciate how the environment might respond to their actions.

Can you imagine if the medical profession said, “the brain is too complex so instead of trying to increase our understanding, we will train neurosurgeons to make perfect incisions and sutures.” The “neurosurgeons” would still operate, but the focus on developing technicians who merely know how to use tools and not on neurosurgeons who understand the brain (or “environment”) would result in corpses with perfect incisions. Some might think this is an extreme analogy, but our point is that it is irresponsible to accept the description of a “dynamic threat landscape,” argue for a military role in competing on this “landscape,” and then complain that military practitioners are incapable of understanding these complicated “landscapes.” If it is too difficult to understand, then the military should remain “break in case of emergency” and not utilized to “shape the environment,” “operate in the gray zone,” or conduct ongoing irregular warfare campaigns.

Intellectualism is Not a Military Value

The U.S. military culture has long prided itself on physical “toughness” and rewards an individual who pushes through physical exhaustion to accomplish the mission. “Embracing the suck” is a figurative badge of honor that results in numerous war stories and alcohol-soaked tall-tales while the Army awards an actual badge to highlight the awardee’s physical prowess. Physical training is a morning ritual in many military units where individuals are praised for physical perseverance. How much time do these units set aside for educating the practitioner to understand the strategic environment? How often are practitioners awarded for dedicating themselves to intellectual development? If physical challenges and accomplishments are embraced and rewarded, why is it not also acceptable to intellectually challenge practitioners and expand their limits? Why is it culturally acceptable to physically exhaust practitioners, but challenging practitioners intellectually is frowned upon? We are not arguing that physical readiness is not important, but we are arguing that intellectual readiness is at least as important. If the world is complex, dynamic, and uncertain, military practitioners must be intellectually prepared to face this environment.

The glaring discrepancy of prioritizing the physical over the intellectual is merely a sign of a more significant issue regarding the military and PME—the military does not value intellectualism. The case of anti-intellectualism in the military has been made many times, and although we believe there is merit to this argument, we are speaking about something different. “Anti-intellectualism,” according to Hofstadter, “is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.” Even if there is no “resentment” towards intellectuals in the military, the fact that none of the services identify “intellectualism,” or something associated, as a value highlights “intellectual-apathy” at the least.

Recommendations: Individual Education and Collective Education

Individuals should be rewarded for seeking intellectual growth opportunities and prioritizing the intellectual as much as the physical. Practitioners should be encouraged to pursue educational opportunities, provided time to do so (it should not be considered “time off,” but an important part of their job), and rewarded for seeking intellectual nurturing. Leaders should incorporate collective education as part of their unit or staff development. One simple way is to devote as much time to collective intellectual activities such as guest speakers, book clubs, and classes as organizations do to physical fitness. Ideally, this should include collective unit educational activities where commanders bring their units together to discuss current events or hold discussions with outside experts. Beyond providing an educational opportunity, this will also highlight that leaders value continuous education and can also help establish a common understanding of the operational environment; something called for in doctrine, but seldom achieved in practice. It will also help correct what some perceive as “anti-intellectualism” in the military while saving all of us from having to hear leaders make light of education by quipping, “it is only a lot of reading if you do it.” I doubt those leaders would ever say, “it is only a lot of running if you do it” or “it is only a lot of training if you do it.”

Conclusion

There has been some positive evolution in how the military perceives education. For example, the JCS acknowledges the “episodic” approach to education is insufficient to develop the type of practitioner the nation requires. Although this is a positive development, leaders must create climates that encourage individual education as part of professional development and institute collective educational opportunities as part of their unit’s development. Although the formal educational opportunities the military offers are necessary and more generous than those provided by other federal government organizations, these “episodic” education opportunities are not sufficient to nurture the “critical thinkers” leaders say the security environment requires. We believe the choice is straightforward, the military either prioritizes lifelong education for military practitioners and ensures commanders incorporate it into their unit schedules or the military becomes a “break in case of emergency” organization focused on achieving limited military objectives. If not, the U.S. military runs the risk of taking actions that make conditions worse because they do not understand the risk created by their actions. Making these changes will require adjustments to military culture and values, but failure to change will only perpetuate the current conditions that have leaders questioning the value of PME.

Dave Oakley (academic) is the Academic Director for the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute. He served in the U.S. Army and the CIA during a twenty-two-year national security career. Mike Obadal (practitioner) spent his military career in special operations, commanding numerous overseas and stateside organizations.

Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and U.S. Special Operations Command, Special Operations Forces Vision & Strategy, https://www.socom.mil/Pages/SOF-Vision-and-Strategy.aspx.

The “I” and “My” in this section refers to Mike Obadal.

U.S. Department of Defense, Fact Sheet: 2022 National Defense Strategy, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Mar/28/2002964702/-1/-1/1/NDS-FACT-SHEET.PDF.

Miguel Alejandro Laborde, “The Future of ISR-Changing Time and Needs,” Warrior Maven: Center for Military Modernization, https://warriormaven.com/global-security/intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance-isr-satellites.

“Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy in Russia,” Center for Naval Analyses, https://www.cna.org/our-media/newsletters/ai-and-autonomy-in-russia (accessed November 10, 2022); Bohyyn Kim, “Ethics and Big Data,” in Big Data for Generals and Everyone Else Over 40, ed. David C. Ellis and Mark Grzegorzewski (Tampa: Joint Special Operations University, 2022), 119-127.

Nick Turse, “Will the Biden Administration Shine Light on Shadowy Special Ops Programs?” The Intercept, 20 March 2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/03/20/joe-biden-special-operations-forces/.

U.S. Special Operations Command, “SOF Truths,” https://www.socom.mil/about/sof-truths (accessed 10 November 2022).

Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Ways of War, 1.

Jim Garamone, “DOD Policy Chief Kahl Discusses Strategic Competition With Baltic Allies,” U.S. Department of Defense, 17 September 2021, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2780661/dod-policy-chief-kahl-discusses-strategic-competition-with-baltic-allies/.

Kyle J. Wolfey, “Military Power Reimagined: The Rise and Future of Shaping,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 3rd Quarter 2021: 20-28, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/2679810/military-power-reimagined-the-rise-and-future-of-shaping/.

Nikos Andriotis, “What is Just in Time Training (and the Best Practices to Adopt it for Your Business),” efront, https://www.efrontlearning.com/blog/2017/10/just-time-training-best-practices-adopt-business.html.

Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Ways of War, 2.

U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Secretary of Defense, “Message to the Force,” by Secretary Lloyd Austin, Memorandum, (Arlington, Virginia, 4 March 2021), https://media.defense.gov/2021/Mar/04/2002593656/-1/-1/0/SECRETARY-LLOYD-J-AUSTIN-III-MESSAGE-TO-THE-FORCE.PDF.

James Joyner, “Soldier-Scholar (Pick-one): Anti-Intellectualism in the American Military,” War on the Rocks, 25 August 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/08/soldier-scholar-pick-one-anti-intellectualism-in-the-american-military/.

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 7.

https://www.army.mil/values/; https://www.secnav.navy.mil/ethics/pages/corevaluescharter.aspx#:~:text=As%20in%20our%

20past%2C%20we,continue%20to%20guide%20us%20today; https://www.doctrine.af.mil/Portals/61/documents/Airman_Development/

BlueBook.pdf; https://www.marines.com/life-as-a-marine/standards/values.html#:~:text=Our%20Core%20Values%20are%20Honor,

and%20in%20our%20Nation%27s%20communities; https://wow.uscgaux.info/content.php?unit=114-06-02&category=core-values; https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article/3211936/ussf-establishes-polaris-awards-program-announces-field-command-recipients-ahea/#:~:text=The%20Polaris%20Awards%20consist%20of,that%20embodies%20all%20four%20values.

Department of Defense, JP 5-0: Joint Planning, (Washington D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, December 2020), https://irp.fas.org/doddir/dod/jp5_0.pdf (accessed November 10, 2022).

Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Ways of War, 2.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Education White Paper, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/

Doctrine/concepts/cjcs_wp_education.pdf?ver=2017-12-28-162044-527.

interpopulum.org · by ByDavid P. Oakley & Mike Obadal


21. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 18, 2024


Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 18, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-18-2024


Key Takeaways:


  • Ukrainian forces reportedly struck a Russian coast guard base in occupied Crimea on the night of July 17 to 18.


  • European countries continue to display their commitment to Ukraine and unity in the face of Russian aggression.


  • Rosgvardia made an unprecedented proposal on July 17 to grant Russian Central Bank leadership the right to carry automatic weapons and handguns.


  • Kremlin officials continue to expand the geographic scope of Russia's proposed alternative "Eurasian security architecture."


  • The US continues efforts to build out a partnership with Armenia, sparking critical reactions from Kremlin officials.


  • Russian forces recently marginally advanced along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line and near Kharkiv City, Toretsk, Avdiivka, and Hulyaipole.


  • Russian officials continue efforts to expand the Russian Armed Forces' training capacity and address force generation issues.



22. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 18, 2024


Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 18, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/israel%E2%80%93hamas-war-iran-updates


Key Takeaways:


  • Iran: Members of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s inner circle told Western Media that Khamenei sought to promote the candidacy of Masoud Pezeshkian due to Pezeshkian’s ability to “foster unity.” 


  • Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Air Force killed two Hamas commanders and one PIJ commander in the Gaza Strip on July 18. 


  • Lebanon: The IDF Air Force conducted airstrikes that killed one Hamas leader and one Hezbollah member in southern Lebanon on July 18.












De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com


V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
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FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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