"In any problem where an opposing force exists and cannot be regulated, one must foresee and provide for alternative courses. Adaptability is the law which governs survival in war as in life ... To be practical, any plan must take account of the enemy's power to frustrate it; the best chance of overcoming such obstruction is to have a plan that can be easily varied to fit the circumstances met."

-Sir Basil H. Liddel-Hart (Strategy, 1954)

"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him."

-Sun Tzu

A certain grasp of military affairs is vital for those in charge of general policy.

- Carl von Clausewitz

According to the citations, Sgt. Johnson and Sgt. 1st Class Johnson’s “courage and dedication” to their threatened teammates was “unmatched,” with both soldiers “engaging a numerically superior hostile force, disrupting the enemy’s freedom of movement, and killing several enemy fighters” before succumbing to their wounds. “[Their] actions were key to saving the lives of multiple soldiers.”

— James Gordon Meek (@meekwire) July 20, 2021

• Tucker Carlson keeps showing that he doesn’t understand the U.S. military
• The Navy SEAL who shot Bin Laden is hyping a new brewery. We tried their beer so you don’t have to
• U.S. Marines have to take official photos for no logical reason whatsoever
• A woman has qualified as the Navy’s first female special operator
• An Afghan interpreter who helped US troops may be condemned to die over a minor paperwork error
• Airmen and vets are divided over a new study showing the Air Force’s anti-beard policy damages careers

What most concerns Culver when it comes to military relations is that U.S. and Chinese forces are now in near "constant contact" in the South China Sea. In turn, alongside the possibility for miscommunication, the "ingredients for potential crisis" are abundant.

Culver adds that growing nationalist sentiments in China mean Beijing might feel "it could not back down" in an escalation spiral with the U.S.

Whether you agree or disagree with Culver's assessments, his experience and knowledge mean that they demand close attention.

President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces was a mistake.

Preventing catastrophe depends on what the United States does now.

Xi may well defy expectations and decide to hand over power at the 20th Party Congress in late 2022. But without a successor in place—someone who has already established credibility and been tested by the party—this outcome is highly unlikely. Instead, several candidates might be advanced via promotion to the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of political power in China. These individuals would then spend several years moving through increasingly senior roles in order to gain governing experience and build credibility within the system. Yet even if Xi were to designate one or more potential successors in 2022 with an eye toward formally retiring as early as the following Party Congress, it may not mean the end of his informal control. He could continue to exercise enormous power behind the scenes, as both Deng and Jiang Zemin did after their terms as leader ended. This trend in China aligns with a broader historical pattern: it is rare for all-powerful rulers to abdicate, and they often retain influence if they do. For now, Xi’s dominance denies foreign governments the chance to build relationships with potential successors. And if he does not make his preferences clear in 2022, the delay will likely ensure that anyone eligible to become the next leader of China is currently too junior to even be on the radar of external observers.

...

Xi has eviscerated the CCP’s fragile norms around the sharing and the transfer of power.

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• From the Desk of George Friedman
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Moreover, if things get to the point where the military has to be called upon to shoot on the people, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda explains that the regime’s days would be counted. Taking such action would undermine its revolutionary credentials while a refusal to do so would mean the fall of the regime. That’s not the situation now, and the military government surely retains the upper hand, but it’s a dilemma that protesters may eventually force on the dictatorship.

The dictatorship has also been taking in lessons in repression from Venezuela, whose government it controls, and from Nicaragua, over which it has much influence. Both of those dictatorships have ruthlessly put down mass protests and so far, remained in power.

It’s not possible to predict what happens next. Cuba is a different place today than it was before July 11. Cubans have lost their fear and the regime’s deteriorating ideological legitimacy matters for all of Latin America, especially at a time when the populist and the extreme left continue to pose a serious threat in countries throughout the region.

“The VFA is not being changed, the document will not be changed, but there will be some addendum, side agreement to implement the VFA,” the defense chief said during a pre-State of the Nation Address forum that was held virtually.

“Once it is signed by the President, it will be an official document attached to the VFA.”

While he was looking forward to his meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Lorenzana said, “There will be just a side agreement to implement the provisions of the VFA and Lorenzana said.

No agenda has been set yet for the meeting, although he said he hopes that they will tackle the VFA, the Mutual Defense Treaty, bilateral relations between the two countries and the West Philippine Sea.

This Friday will mark the anniversary of Cashe's son, Andrew Cashe, graduating from the U.S. Army's One Station Unit Training for Infantry at Fort Benning, also in Georgia.

• There have been 9 under secretaries from October 1999 through June 2021.
• These 9 served a median tenure of under 16 months.
• Excluding the Trump years and the one under secretary that served that administration, the median tenure of the eight under secretaries that served the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations is 17 months.
• Excluding the Trump years, the median gap between under secretaries is 7.5 months. Congressional calendars and reticence had only a marginal influence here with most of the blame on recruiting and, more importantly, a failure to prioritize the office.

• The turnover and lack of consistency in the backgrounds and skills of the under secretaries indicates a severe lack of understanding of what this office can do or should do.
• There was little indication the White House and the NSC had serious expectations of this office. This is evident by the sometimes mutually reinforcing lack of accountability of the office and the failure to support the office within the State Department bureaucracy and with other agencies.
• Within the State Department, the absence of this under secretary removes a senior advocate and defender (and oversight) of the public side of foreign affairs. This absence is felt by inter-agency partners.
• Some of the turnover and some of the lack of effectiveness could be expected by the incumbents’ backgrounds and cause for hire, which included successfully putting on a political convention, marketing consumer goods, running an international documentary and lifestyle media enterprise, and editing a magazine.
• When combined with the fluid definition of “public diplomacy,” a term adopted in the mid-1960s for a public relations campaign to defend an agency (USIA) rather than to purposefully label a set of activities based on methods or outcomes (which for the previous two decades was simply under the umbrella of “public affairs”), it became a kind of parlor game to see how the new under secretary was going to redefine “public diplomacy.” This does not happen with other under secretaries. (Sen. Fulbright deserves responsibility and blame here as he willfully caused USIA material to be considered propaganda and thus unfit for Americans, the byproduct of which contributed to contortions around what “public diplomacy” meant at any given time.)
• There is not another senior leadership position, at or below the under secretary level, in foreign policy, which includes national security, that suffers from the same benign neglect from the White House, reinforcing the point this is a marquee failure of leadership.
• The vacancy is not a failure of design that requires establishing a new bureaucracy but a marquee failure of leadership to appreciate the role of public opinion in foreign affairs, including but well beyond the realm of “national security,” and to hire and provide support (across the interagency) accordingly.

• The Biden administration responded to China’s aggressive cyber operations by “naming and shaming” Beijing in an attempt to confront the growing threat posed by criminal hackers.
• For China, cyberattacks are an asymmetric means of confronting the West while attempting to maintain a thinly veiled veneer of plausible deniability.
• The hacking operations are intended to pilfer sensitive information and intellectual property, including military technology and medical data, to bolster the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party and related government entities.
• Notably, no sanctions accompanied the condemnation; many governments are wary of China’s willingness to use economic coercion against countries and companies that criticize Beijing.

The new chief of the task force is a veteran of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center and, this official said, spent more than a decade on intelligence analysis and targeting, focused on bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

...

In preparation for designing the curriculum at the National War College, Kennan read a book of essays edited by Brodie entitled The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, and Edward Mead Earle’s Makers of Modern Strategy (which included essays on Clausewitz, Jomini, Mahan, and Mackinderesque geopolitics). After reading Earle's book, Kennan jotted down the following note: "Our task is to plan and execute our strategic dispositions in such a way as to compel Sov. Govt. either to accept combat under unfavorable conditions (which it will never do), or withdraw. In this way, we can contain Soviet power until Russians tire of the game.” Kennan’s best biographer John Lewis Gaddis noted that this was the first use by Kennan “of the verb that became associated with his name.”

• Tucker Carlson keeps showing that he doesn’t understand the U.S. military
• The Navy SEAL who shot Bin Laden is hyping a new brewery. We tried their beer so you don’t have to
• U.S. Marines have to take official photos for no logical reason whatsoever
• A woman has qualified as the Navy’s first female special operator
• An Afghan interpreter who helped US troops may be condemned to die over a minor paperwork error
• Airmen and vets are divided over a new study showing the Air Force’s anti-beard policy damages careers

Besides that, if the United States really sees its struggle against China as a fundamental contest between two warring systems, the best way to win that war would be by increasing U.S. competitiveness and ensuring the American model can deliver at home. As Sanders put it in his June essay, “if democracy is going to win out, it will do so not on a traditional battlefield but by demonstrating that democracy can actually deliver a better quality of life for people than authoritarianism can.”

All signs suggest that the administration—which has made remarkable efforts to reform American society and the economy since taking office—gets this. While it can and should continue to push back against China’s bad behavior abroad, however, it would be better served by doing so less loudly and by toning down its ideological rhetoric—as well as by abandoning its attempts to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies.

Making such changes might mean giving up on some of the short-term political gains Biden could earn through his current, red-toothed approach. But if, in the process, those changes also lower the risk of a disastrous armed conflict, avoid undermining U.S. economic influence over China, and reassure U.S. allies by allowing them to avoid having to openly choose sides—something countries from Germany to Japan are determined to evade—the trade-off will be worth it.

Of course, this more nuanced approach would also make life harder for pundits, as defining a clear Biden Doctrine would get a lot more challenging. But the world is a messy, complicated place—and so good policy should be too. Even if that makes it harder for analysts to neatly parse.

The logic is sound. Proxy attacks won’t stop until U.S. rivals start to fear that they will suffer more from the American response than they gain from the initial probe. Showing that the U.S. will respond asymmetrically — that it reserves the right to strike back across multiple domains — can inject greater uncertainty into these countries’ calculus. And as analyst Michael Knights argues, if Washington can resist publicly crowing about its operations, it can avoid making its enemies feel as though they have no choice but to continue the cycle.

Even so, retaliating against a sponsor doesn’t always do the trick. Trump may have shocked the Iranian government by killing Soleimani, but the militia attacks resumed not long thereafter. The root of the problem is that it is hard for a distracted superpower to win contests of coercion and resolve against committed rivals — and the U.S. is the very definition of a distracted superpower vis-a-vis Russia and Iran right now, because it is so visibly trying to focus on China.

The Biden administration, like the Trump administration, is trying to signal that it is losing patience with proxy attacks. Proving that point may require a degree of sustained reprisal — and sustained confrontation — that will take Biden considerably further than he wants to go.

So if the dream of rebuilding America around notions of liberal nationhood is likely a mirage; if postmodern multicultural nationalism has clearly failed; and if rebuilding a more hard-edged version of U.S. nationhood around Reagan and Trump-style nostalgia for the Anglo-American past remains repugnant—what, then?

The answer is separation: Red and blue America finally accept that for the past 60 years they’ve grown irreconcilably apart, and that they are in fact separate nations—each worthy and deserving of independence from the other. Dissolve the United States, I say, and start an American Union that works more like its European counterpart. The breakup, in fact, has already begun.