Quotes of the Day:

"To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness." 

– Mohandas K. Gandhi

" Allow primacy in unconventional conflicts to rest with the Special Operations Forces, combined with traditional aid and assistance."

– Sam C. Sarkesian, Unconventional Conflicts in a New Security Era, Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

"Rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms. ... They cherish the illusion that they can combine the prerogatives of absolute power with the moral authority that comes from popular assent"

– Alexis de Tocqueville

1. China and Russia Are Breaking the World Into Pieces

2. Biden's withdrawal injects uncertainty into wars, trade disputes and other foreign policy challenges

3. China and the Philippines reach deal in effort to stop clashes at fiercely disputed shoal

4. Years of miscalculations by U.S., NATO led to dire shell shortage in Ukraine

5. ‘A Rubik’s Cube in the Sky’: Israel Struggles to Defend Against Drones

6. Russia Crushes Dissent as Putin’s System Ramps Up Repression

7. Afghanistan War Commission opens inquiry of America’s longest conflict

8. A USS Eisenhower pilot became the first American woman to score air-to-air kill

9. Troops Will Start Getting Economic Hardship Bonuses This Month, Though Only $20 on Average

10. Taiwan remodels war games in the face of China's threats

11.  Philippines 'to assert our rights' after China sea deal

12. Drone warfare in Ukraine prompts fresh thinking in helicopter tactics

13. The Mission and the Bureaucracy: How Administrative Requirements Hinder Warfighting

14. The Triumph of the Houthis (and Iran)

15. Trump and Zelenskyy hold phone call — and Ukraine says it liked what it heard

16. Myanmar's civil war has seen a devastating increase in attacks on schools, researchers say

17. The U.S. Department of Deterrence

18. Embrace the Infinite Variety of Circumstances: Fixing the US Military’s Multinational Exercises

19. What Biden’s Exit Means for American Foreign Policy

20. China’s Dangerous Nuclear Push

21. The End of South Asia

22. Securing Submarine Cables: A Critical Imperative for Indo-Pacific Stability

23. China’s Long March through the Global South

24. Trump realizes Ukraine future needs to be addressed with Ukraine

1. China and Russia Are Breaking the World Into Pieces

Map and graphics at the link.

Excerpts:

This relates to a final precept: Find the upside of adversity. Yes, the world is getting nastier. But an age of fracture creates chances for the US to build deeper connections with like-minded nations in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, to catalyze a historic burst of innovation in critical technologies, and to demonstrate that liberal societies can still outperform illiberal ones.

It creates chances, as well, for firms to craft more resilient supply chains; to reap the benefits of the new industrial policy; and to forge stronger partnerships with a US government that desperately needs private-sector creativity and innovation to master a new set of economic, intelligence and military challenges.

We’re in the opening phase of a brutally contentious era. The task is to make the most of it.

Opinion

Hal Brands, Columnist

China and Russia Are Breaking the World Into Pieces

Geopolitical blocs, rival ideologies, a tech race: Are we back in the 1960s?

July 21, 2024 at 12:00 AM EDT

By Hal Brands

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2024-07-21/china-and-russia-are-breaking-america-s-world-into-pieces?sref=hhjZtX76

From Ukraine to Gaza to the South China Sea, the world is littered with crises. International cooperation is paralyzed by diplomatic rivalry; techno-optimism has given way to a pervasive techno-anxiety . The sole superpower is limping toward an election with fateful consequences, as its rivals feverishly arm themselves for wars present and, perhaps, future. Each of these challenges, in turn, is symptomatic of a deeper historic shift underway.

“The current international environment is in turmoil, because its essential elements are all in flux simultaneously.” Henry Kissinger wrote that in 1968, as a whirlwind of change — decolonization, domestic protest, a changing balance of power — was roiling the arrangements that had emerged after World War II. But Kissinger’s assessment is also a good starting point for understanding a disordered globe today.

For a generation after the Cold War, the world was structured by a set of verities : the triumph of democracy over autocracy, the virtues of globalization and innovation, the prospects for great-power peace, and the stabilizing role of American power. Those verities underpinned a world that was remarkably favorable for the US and its allies. They were also historically propitious for global finance and trade. The reason today’s world seems so chaotic is that those old verities are crumbling, as the contours of a new era take shape.

The emerging order is one in which geopolitical blocs are back, and strategic rivals wage vicious ideological and technological fights. The international economy is a battleground, as interdependence and insecurity go hand in hand. Global governance and problem-solving increasingly look like artifacts of a happier age. International violence is intensifying, as the risk of major war — even global war — ticks higher. US power still looms large, but America’s behavior grows more erratic as its politics become less stable.

All this turmoil could still produce a decent future. But first, policymakers and dealmakers must understand the age of fragmentation underway.

Globalization’s Golden Age

The post-Cold War world had its insecurities, its injustices, its outrages. But the world that emerged after the opening of the Berlin Wall still felt like a time of unique progress and promise.

Democracy was trouncing autocracy: The number of democracies increased from around 40 in the early 1970s to 120 by the year 2000. Globalization was running riot: World trade increased roughly fourfold between 1989 and 2019, while flows of foreign direct investment grew eightfold between 1992 and 2000. Economic openness was raising living standards around the world. It was also, the thinking went, deflating international tensions by creating a common prosperity that only the most vicious rogues would disrupt.

Globalization was propelled, in turn, by the digital revolution, which facilitated trade and boosted productivity. Information technology also seemed to favor freedom: Social media fueled protests that toppled repressive governments in Egypt and Ukraine in the early 2010s.

Progress had its dark side, of course. Catastrophic terrorism, of the sort the US suffered on 9/11, showed how weak actors could exploit the ease of international travel, communications and finance to strike with global reach.

In general, however, a world that was supposedly being pacified by economic integration seemed ever-more conducive to great-power peace. And as the threat of major war receded, the leading powers would channel their energies into initiatives and institutions — from countering violent extremism to building the World Trade Organization — meant to tame transnational threats and strengthen global rules of the road.

All this progress was underpinned by the US. American alliances locked in peace and stability in Eastern Europe and the Western Pacific. Washington championed democracy and globalization; it catalyzed collective action against nuclear proliferation and other problems. American tech firms fostered innovations that powered the digital age. The post-Cold War order, as one Pentagon strategy document put it, was “ultimately backed by the US.”

It was also a wonderland for firms and investors that rode globalization’s wave. Multinationals could reap new efficiencies in an open, integrated world economy. They could trade and invest in a climate of security provided by Uncle Sam.

Globalization helped keep inflation low, in part by allowing developed economies to tap bargain-basement labor. Not least, the dilemmas of doing business with repressive regimes, or even potential rivals, seemed negligible given the expectation that trade itself would make problematic actors become responsible stakeholders.

In this sense, the post-Cold War era was a golden age. But now, its key elements have come undone.

War of Ideas

In hindsight, post-Cold War progress was more fragile than it appeared: Many new democracies were weakly consolidated, which left them vulnerable to autocratic reverses. Other features of the era were double-edged swords. Globalization brought prosperity but also inequality and cultural insecurity — effects that fueled a neo-populist moment that has yet to end. Information technology gave dissidents new tools for critiquing repressive rulers, but also gave those rulers better ways of tracking and stifling their critics.

Most fundamentally, a post-Cold War order that rested on US and Western dominance encountered trouble once that dominance began to wan.

Russia revived, and China grew explosively, in the flourishing global economy. Washington and many allies neglected their military budgets because they had grown too comfortable in the protective cocoon of American hegemony.

US vs. China GDP

Source: Bloomberg

Over time, countries that disliked a system rooted in liberal values and US leadership grew more aggressive in their challenges: Russia invaded its neighbors Georgia and Ukraine, China claimed and incrementally conquered much of the South China Sea; Iran sowed chaos in the Middle East. This onslaught occurred just as America’s commitment to that system was, itself, coming under strain.

Failed efforts to transform Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of America’s post-Cold War influence led to demoralization and retrenchment. The global financial crisis of 2008-09 scrambled America’s politics and sapped its strategic energies. The presidency of Donald Trump, when Washington declared competition against China — but also seemed to be at war with many of its allies — epitomized how uncertain America’s trajectory had become.

By 2022, when Vladimir Putin tried to destroy an independent Ukraine after sealing a remarkable “no limits” alliance with Xi Jinping’s China, the post-Cold War era was unmistakably over. Several features define the era that has begun.

China Rises in Tech

First, blocs are back. Not so long ago, geopolitical dividing lines were fading. Now, rival coalitions are squaring off across the globe.

In Ukraine, a cohort of Eurasian autocracies — North Korea, Iran and China — is aiding Russia’s effort to shatter the norm of non-aggression. They confront a group of advanced democracies — from North America, Europe and the Indo-Pacific — who support Kyiv to sustain a larger system that has served them well.

These alignments are not all-encompassing — many countries in the Global South seek to play both sides — but they are unmistakably hardening as international tensions rise.

A Russia alienated from the West is tripling down on ties to fellow revisionists: Witness Putin’s recent treaty alliance with Pyongyang. The US, for its part, is strengthening, expanding and interlinking its alliances to contain the Eurasian autocracies.

The resulting confrontations spill across regional boundaries. Since 2022, the US has pushed allies in Europe and Asia to choke off the supply of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, an illustration of how geopolitical divisions are reshaping economic and technological ties.

Second, the battle of ideas is on again. Russia and China didn’t get the memo about the irresistible triumph of democracy. They are rewiring international norms and organizations to make autocracies more secure. They believe their illiberal systems can produce greater discipline, effort and strength than decadent democracies. To prove the point, they are coercing and destabilizing states that stand in their way.

Russia has used disinformation, cyberattacks and sabotage against democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. Beijing employs an array of weapons — friendly media outlets, bribes, cyberattacks, economic sanctions — to stifle criticism and sow discord in Taiwan and other liberal societies. Technological innovation is fueling political warfare: Moscow and Beijing can now wield AI-enabled disinformation against their democratic foes.

Third, the fight for techno-primacy is raging. A generation ago, America’s technological lead was simply commanding. Things aren’t so lopsided anymore.

China has made huge strides in cyberweapons and hypersonic missiles. It is investing massively in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other technologies of what’s being called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Throughout history, geopolitical competitions have been technological competitions. If China dominates key emerging technologies, it may dominate this era.

This means industrial policy is here to stay, as geopolitical rivals invest in, and put up protective barriers around, strategic sectors from semiconductors to clean energy. It also means that economic warfare will become commonplace, as both countries wield subsidies, export controls, investment curbs, tariffs and other tools to accelerate their innovation and hold the rivals back.

Fourth, cutthroat competition is killing global problem-solving. Transnational challenges are getting more severe, but geopolitical tensions have impeded US-China cooperation on issues from Covid to climate change. The great powers can’t even collaborate on keeping vital trade routes open.

The US and China once worked together to suppress Somali pirates. But Beijing is now cutting deals with the Houthi militants shooting up the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, while Iran equips them and Russia urges them on. In the years ahead, expect seemingly fundamental norms, like freedom of navigation on the seas, to become more contested. And expect cooperation to tackle transnational problems, whether climate change or management of advanced technologies, to occur primarily within groups of likeminded countries — for instance, the Group of 7 — than across them.

Fifth, amid cold wars, tech wars, and trade wars, the shadow of real war has become inescapable. Ukraine is being ravaged in Europe’s largest conflict since 1945. The Middle East is being roiled by multiple, interrelated clashes. The overall number of state-versus-state wars is higher than at any time in decades. Don’t expect that trend to turn around anytime soon.

However the war in Ukraine ends, Russia will emerge from it with an experienced military, a mobilized economy and an epic grudge against the West. Iran is inching closer to a nuclear capability that would underwrite its sponsorship of violent instability across the Middle East.

China is stockpiling food and energy; mass-producing ships, aircraft and ammunition; and intensifying its push for supremacy in the Pacific. Hotspots from the Senkaku Islands to Second Thomas Shoal could serve as the trigger for a Sino-American clash.

Territorial Claims Overlap in South China Sea

Sources: Mainland China’s Ministry of Natural Resources (10-dash line); Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (11-dash line); CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines)

The stability of the international system has long been closely related to the stability of the key regions of Eurasia: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. War or the threat of war pervades all three areas at once.

This makes a final feature of our era more sobering: a still powerful, but less reliable, America. US advantages, economic and military, remain substantial, and American commitment remains indispensable to a decent world. Unfortunately, at a time when many Western countries face political paralysis, instability, or some mixture of the two, America’s own internal dramas could be uniquely damaging.

Yes, the near-term danger is a second Trump presidency that could weaken US alliances and spur frontline states like Poland or South Korea to build their own nuclear weapons — or, alternatively, a second Biden presidency in which America is led by a visibly declining commander-in-chief. But the problems run deeper.

Lurking behind Trump is a larger America First movement that would just as soon leave the world to itself. Lurking behind Biden is a potentially potent form of progressive neo-isolationism. The political foundations of American internationalism are thus unstable. Rising polarization and domestic tensions could leave the US distracted, even consumed by its inner demons — just as surging global volatility makes the price of that distraction higher.

World War III?

Eras of turmoil can bring happy endings. The Cold War birthed the liberal international order, which eventually delivered more freedom, peace and prosperity than humanity had ever enjoyed before. Today, realism need not be synonymous with despondency, because the US and its democratic allies still have long-term advantages over their foes, including their free governmental institutions. But for political leaders and business leaders, navigating this age of fragmentation will require keeping some core principles in mind.

First, there is no return to “normal.” Today’s crises in Ukraine, the Middle East and other hotspots aren’t freak occurrences. They are symptoms of deep, ongoing shifts that are changing the basic rhythms of global affairs.

Particular crises may come and go; particular tensions may rise or fall. But leaders in government and business must prepare for an era of persistent vitality, competition and conflict. Levels of risk, both strategic and economic, will be elevated for years to come.

Second, you can’t have it all. After the Cold War, the US and its allies could enjoy a world that was phenomenally congenial to their interests and values at a very low price. Multinationals could exploit the efficiencies globalization offered without worrying too much about the vicissitudes of global politics. Neither approach is sustainable today.

As the leaders who attended this month’s NATO summit can attest, the cost of national security, and of safeguarding democratic values, is rising as autocratic powers make their moves. Meanwhile, Western companies that had to choose whether to stay in Russia after it invaded Ukraine — or are wondering how to protect their assets, operations and reputations if China invades Taiwan — are discovering that the dilemmas of operating in a hothouse environment can be severe.

Third, take worst-case scenarios seriously. Responsible American officials need to consider not just the possibility of a US-Russia clash or a US-China conflict — as cataclysmic as either would be — but also a global war, in which conflicts in multiple theaters erupt at once. International corporations also need to grapple with scenarios that would have seemed outlandish not so long ago.

No limits.Photographer: Sergei Bobylyov/AFP/Getty Images

What if the security of vital sea lanes suffers because the Houthis have set a precedent that others follow? How might their operations be affected by a Sino-American war that causes a decoupling more violent, precipitous and far-reaching than nearly anyone envisions today? We can hope these situations won’t come to pass. But grappling with them is how one builds the resilience, whether military or intellectual, needed to thrive in a tumultuous world.

Fourth, as geopolitics and geoeconomics become inseparable, the West needs to invest in new knowledge. In government, national security is no longer so thoroughly dominated by diplomats and defense nerds. Understanding investment patterns, financial and technological choke points, and private sector decision-making has become crucial to prevailing in modern rivalry. The private sector, for its part, is entering a moment in which geopolitical illiteracy is simply negligent , given that few firms are wholly insulated from the disruption — or opportunity — national rivalries can cause.

This relates to a final precept: Find the upside of adversity. Yes, the world is getting nastier. But an age of fracture creates chances for the US to build deeper connections with like-minded nations in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, to catalyze a historic burst of innovation in critical technologies, and to demonstrate that liberal societies can still outperform illiberal ones.

It creates chances, as well, for firms to craft more resilient supply chains; to reap the benefits of the new industrial policy; and to forge stronger partnerships with a US government that desperately needs private-sector creativity and innovation to master a new set of economic, intelligence and military challenges.

We’re in the opening phase of a brutally contentious era. The task is to make the most of it.

Brands is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the co-author of “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China” and a member of the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He is a senior adviser to Macro Advisory Partners.

2. Biden's withdrawal injects uncertainty into wars, trade disputes and other foreign policy challenges

This is an important statement and is foreign policy and national security the criteria for judging the candidates for president. But of course domestic priorities will remain the dominant consideration.

Of course like for most in the national security community, north Korea does not even rate a mention (my bias is showing).

Excerpt:

The scope of foreign policy challenges facing the next U.S. president makes clear how consequential what happens in Washington is for the rest of the planet. Here’s a look at some of them.

Biden's withdrawal injects uncertainty into wars, trade disputes and other foreign policy challenges

BY  ISABEL DEBRE

Updated 4:55 AM EDT, July 22, 2024

AP · July 22, 2024

1 of 6 |FILE - Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, left, looks on as U.S. President Joe Biden speaks, where he introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during an event on the Ukraine Compact at the NATO Summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, Thursday, July 11, 2024. Biden’s withdrawal from the U.S. presidential race injects greater uncertainty into the world. (Stefan Rousseau/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the U.S. presidential race injects greater uncertainty into the world at a time when Western leaders are grappling with wars in Ukraine and Gaza, a more assertive China in Asia and the rise of the far-right in Europe.

During a five-decade career in politics, Biden developed extensive personal relationships with multiple foreign leaders that none of the potential replacements on the Democratic ticket can match. After his announcement, messages of support and gratitude for his years of service poured in from near and far.

The scope of foreign policy challenges facing the next U.S. president makes clear how consequential what happens in Washington is for the rest of the planet. Here’s a look at some of them.

ISRAEL

With Vice President Kamala Harris being eyed as a potential replacement for Biden, Israelis on Sunday scrambled to understand what her candidacy would mean for their country as it confronts increasing global isolation over its military campaign against Hamas.

Israel’s left-wing Haaretz daily newspaper ran a story scrutinizing Harris’ record of support for Israel, pointing to her reputation as Biden’s “bad cop” who has vocally admonished Israel for its offensive in Gaza. In recent months, she has gone further than Biden in calling for a cease-fire, denouncing Israel’s invasion of Rafah and expressing horror over the civilian death toll in Gaza.

“With Biden leaving, Israel has lost perhaps the last Zionist president,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. “A new Democratic candidate will upend the dynamic.”

Biden’s staunch defense of Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack has its roots in his half-century of support for the country as a senator, vice president, then president. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant thanked Biden for his “unwavering support of Israel over the years.”

“Your steadfast backing, especially during the war, has been invaluable,” Gallant wrote on X.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog praised Biden as a “symbol of the unbreakable bond between our two peoples” and a “true ally of the Jewish people.” There was no immediate reaction from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of former President Donald Trump whose history of cordial relations with Biden has come under strain during the Israel-Hamas war.

UKRAINE

Any Democratic candidate would likely continue Biden’s legacy of staunch military support for Ukraine. But frustration with the Biden administration has grown in Ukraine and Europe over the slow pace of U.S. aid and restrictions on the use of Western weapons.

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“Most Europeans realize that Ukraine is increasingly going to be their burden,” said Sudha David-Wilp, director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund, a research institute. “Everyone is trying to get ready for all the possible outcomes.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on X that he respected the “tough but strong decision” by Biden to drop out of the campaign, and he thanked Biden for his help “in preventing (Russian President Vladimir) Putin from occupying our country.”

Trump has promised to end Russia’s war on Ukraine in one day if he is elected — a prospect that has raised fears in Ukraine that Russia might be allowed to keep the territory it occupies.

Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is among Congress’ most vocal opponents of U.S. aid for Ukraine and has further raised the stakes for Kyiv.

Russia, meanwhile, dismissed the importance of the race, insisting that no matter what happened, Moscow would press on in Ukraine.

“We need to pay attention,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by a pro-Russian tabloid. “We need to watch what will happen and do our own thing.”

CHINA

In recent months, both Biden and Trump have tried to show voters who can best stand up to Beijing’s growing military strength and belligerence and protect U.S. businesses and workers from low-priced Chinese imports. Biden has hiked tariffs on electric vehicles from China, and Trump has promised to implement tariffs of 60% on all Chinese products.

Trump’s “America First” doctrine exacerbated tensions with Beijing. But disputes with the geopolitical rival and economic colossus over wars, trade, technology and security continued into Biden’s term.

China’s official reaction to the U.S. presidential race has been careful. The official Xinhua news agency treated the story of Biden’s decision as relatively minor. The editor of the party-run Global Times newspaper, Hu Xijin, downplayed the impact of Biden’s withdrawal.

“Whoever becomes the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party may be the same,” he wrote on X. “Voters are divided into two groups, Trump voters and Trump haters.”

IRAN

With Iran’s proxies across the Middle East increasingly entangled in the Israel-Hamas war, the U.S. confronts a region in disarray.

Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis struck Tel Aviv for the first time last week, prompting retaliatory Israeli strikes inside war-torn Yemen. Simmering tensions and cross-border attacks between Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group and the Israeli military have raised fears of an all-out regional conflagration.

Hamas, which also receives support from Iran, continues to fight Israel even nine months into a war that has killed 38,000 Palestinians and displaced over 80% of Gaza’s population.

The U.S. and its allies have accused Iran of expanding its nuclear program and enriching uranium to an unprecedented 60% level, near-weapons-grade levels.

After then-President Trump in 2018 withdrew from Tehran’s landmark nuclear deal with world powers, Biden said he wanted to reverse his predecessor’s hawkish anti-Iran stance. But the Biden administration has maintained severe economic sanctions against Iran and overseen failed attempts to renegotiate the agreement.

The sudden death of Ebrahim Raisi — the supreme leader’s hard-line protege — in a helicopter crash vaulted a new reformist to the presidency in Iran, generating new opportunities and risks. Masoud Pezeshkian has said he wants to help Iran open up to the world but has maintained a defiant tone against the U.S.

EUROPE AND NATO

Many Europeans were happy to see Trump go after his years of disparaging the European Union and undermining NATO. Trump’s seemingly dismissive attitude toward European allies in last month’s presidential debate did nothing to assuage those concerns.

Biden, on the other hand, has supported close American relations with bloc leaders.

That closeness was on stark display after Biden’s decision to bow out of the race. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called his choice “probably the most difficult one in your life.” The newly installed British prime minister, Keir Starmer, said he respected Biden’s “decision based on what he believes is in the best interests of the American people.”

There was also an outpouring of affection from Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris, who called Biden a “proud American with an Irish soul.”

The question of whether NATO can maintain its momentum in supporting Ukraine and checking the ambitions of other authoritarian states hangs in the balance of this presidential election, analysts say.

“They don’t want to see Donald Trump as president. So there’s quite a bit of relief but also quite a bit of nervousness” about Biden’s decision to drop out, said Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Like many in the United States, but perhaps more so, they are really quite confused.”

MEXICO

The close relationship between Mexico and the U.S. has been marked in recent years by disagreements over trade, energy and climate change. Since President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in 2018, both countries have found common ground on issue of migration – with Mexico making it more difficult for migrants to cross its country to the U.S. border and the U.S. not pressing on other issues.

The López Obrador administration kept that policy while Trump was president and continued it into Biden’s term.

On Friday, Mexico’s president called Trump “a friend” and said he would write to him to warn him against pledging to close the border or blaming migrants for bringing drugs into the United States.

“I am going to prove to him that migrants don’t carry drugs to the United States,” he said, adding that “closing the border won’t solve anything, and anyway, it can’t be done.”

___

Associated Press writers Jill Lawless in London, Daria Litvinova in Talinn, Estonia, and Josh Goodman in Miami contributed to this report.

AP · July 22, 2024

3. China and the Philippines reach deal in effort to stop clashes at fiercely disputed shoal

Excerpts:

During final meetings in the last four days, two Chinese demands that had been key sticking points were removed from the draft deal.

China had previously said it would allow food, water and other basic supplies to be transported by the Philippines to its forces in the shoal if Manila agreed not to bring construction materials to fortify the crumbling ship, and to give China advance notice and the right to inspect the ships for those materials, the officials said.

The Philippines rejected those conditions, and the final deal did not include them.

China and the Philippines reach deal in effort to stop clashes at fiercely disputed shoal

AP · by JIM GOMEZ · July 21, 2024

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — China and the Philippines reached a deal they hope will end confrontations at the most fiercely disputed shoal in the South China Sea, two Philippine officials said Sunday.

The Philippines occupies Second Thomas Shoal but China also claims it, and increasingly hostile clashes at sea have sparked fears of larger conflicts that could involve the United States.

The crucial deal was reached on Sunday, after a series of meetings between Philippine and Chinese diplomats in Manila and exchanges of diplomatic notes that aimed to establish a mutually acceptable arrangement at the shoal without conceding either side’s territorial claims. The Philippine officials, who have knowledge of the negotiations, confirmed the deal to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity ahead of a public announcement.

China has disputes with several governments over land and sea borders, many of them in the South China Sea, and the rare deal with the Philippines could spark hope that similar arrangements could be forged by Beijing with other rival countries to avoid clashes while thorny territorial issues remain unresolved. It remains to be seen, however, if the deal could be implemented successfully and how long it will last.

Chinese coast guard and other forces have used powerful water cannons and dangerous blocking maneuvers to prevent food and other supplies from reaching Filipino navy personnel at Manila’s outpost at the shoal.

The yearslong territorial standoff at the shoal has flared repeatedly since last year between Chinese coast guard, navy and suspected militia ships and Philippine coast guard-escorted navy boats transporting food, water and fresh navy and marine personnel to an outpost on a long-grounded and rusting warship, the BRP Sierra Madre.

In the worst confrontation, Chinese forces on motorboats repeatedly rammed and then boarded two Philippine navy boats on June 17 to prevent Filipino personnel from transferring food and other supplies including firearms to the ship outpost in the shallows of the shoal, according to the Philippine government.

After repeated ramming, the Chinese seized the Philippine navy boats and damaged them with machetes and improvised spears. They also seized seven M4 rifles, which were packed in cases, and other supplies. The violent faceoff wounded several Filipino navy personnel, including one who lost his thumb, in a chaotic skirmish that was captured in video and photos that were later made public by Philippine officials.

China and the Philippines blamed each other for the confrontation and each asserted their own sovereign rights over the shoal, which Filipinos call Ayungin and the Chinese call Ren’ai Jiao.

The United States and its key Asian and Western allies, including Japan and Australia, condemned the Chinese acts at the shoal and called for the rule of law and freedom of navigation to be upheld in the South China Sea, a key global trade route with rich fishing areas and undersea gas deposits.

In addition to China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have been locked in separate but increasingly tense territorial disputes in the waterway, which is regarded as a potential flashpoint and a delicate fault line in the U.S.-China regional rivalry. The U.S. military has deployed navy ships and fighter jets for decades in what it calls freedom of navigation and overflight patrols, which China has opposed and regards as a threat to regional stability.

Washington has no territorial claims in the disputed waters but has repeatedly warned that it is obligated to defend the Philippines, its oldest treaty ally in Asia, if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.

One of the two Philippine officials said the June 17 confrontation prompted Beijing and Manila to hasten on-and-off talks on an arrangement that would prevent confrontations at Second Thomas Shoal.

During final meetings in the last four days, two Chinese demands that had been key sticking points were removed from the draft deal.

China had previously said it would allow food, water and other basic supplies to be transported by the Philippines to its forces in the shoal if Manila agreed not to bring construction materials to fortify the crumbling ship, and to give China advance notice and the right to inspect the ships for those materials, the officials said.

The Philippines rejected those conditions, and the final deal did not include them.

JIM GOMEZ

Gomez is The AP Chief Correspondent in the Philippines.

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AP · by JIM GOMEZ · July 21, 2024

4. Years of miscalculations by U.S., NATO led to dire shell shortage in Ukraine

A long read. Please go to the link for proper formatting.  https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-artillery/

A REUTERS INVESTIGATION

Years of miscalculations by U.S., NATO led to dire shell shortage in Ukraine

Since Russia seized Crimea in 2014, policymakers in America and Europe repeatedly failed to address warnings about the sorry condition of the West’s munitions industry. The result: an inability to adequately supply Ukraine with a key weapon, and a shift of the war in Russia’s favor.

By STEPHEN GREY, JOHN SHIFFMAN and ALLISON MARTELL

Filed July 19, 2024, 8 a.m. GMT

KRAMATORSK, UKRAINE

On the frontlines near this old industrial city, soldiers in the trenches say a shortage of an all-important munition – the 155 millimeter artillery shell – has turned the war in Russia’s favor.

Many of them blamed the supply crunch on the U.S. Congress for failing to quickly approve a $60 billion military aid package, which passed after months of delay in April. The U.S. and European nations have pledged that assistance is on its way. But while fresh supplies have been delivered, Ukraine is still massively outgunned.

155mm shell

The causes of the shell crisis began years ago. They are rooted in decisions and miscalculations made by the U.S. military and its NATO allies that occurred well before Russia’s 2022 invasion, a Reuters investigation found.

A decade of strategic, funding and production mistakes played a far greater role in the shell shortage than did the recent U.S. congressional delays of aid, Reuters found.

In the years between Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and its 2022 invasion, for example, repeated warnings from top NATO commanders and from officials who operated or supervised U.S. munitions plants went largely unheeded. They advised their governments, both publicly and privately, that the alliance’s munitions industry was ill-equipped to surge production should war demand it. Because of the failure to respond to those warnings, many artillery production lines at already-ancient factories in the United States and Europe slowed to a crawl or closed altogether.

“This is a problem that’s been long in the making,” said Bruce Jette, who served as the assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for acquisition, logistics and technology from 2018 to January 2021.

Reuters interviewed dozens of current and former U.S., Ukrainian and North Atlantic Treaty Organization military officials, and reviewed thousands of pages of confidential U.S. Army briefings, public documents and other internal records. The reporting found that:

Production of the 155mm shell dropped so dramatically that, from summer 2014 to fall 2015, the U.S. added no new shells to its stockpile.

Manufacturing defects and safety violations triggered repeated production-line shutdowns. The 2021 discovery of cracks in shells cut production capacity in half for months.

A U.S. decision to change the type of explosive used in those shells hasn’t helped the war effort and, to date, has been an expensive flop: The Army spent $147 million on a facility it doesn’t use.

And a plan to replace an antiquated plant in Virginia that produced propellant to launch the shells has fallen a decade behind its scheduled completion and has almost doubled in price. That delay has created a greater U.S. reliance on raw materials from overseas than is publicly known. One internal U.S. Army document from 2021 details “foreign dependencies” on at least a dozen chemicals made in China and India, countries with close trade ties to Russia.

Particularly ironic: The U.S. pre-war plan for sourcing the explosive TNT from overseas included contracts with a factory in eastern Ukraine. The plant was seized by Russia early in the war.

U.S. shell production

Average monthly production of 155mm artillery shells

Big guns and the shells they fire are pivotal to Kyiv’s ability to hold the 1,000-kilometer front. The artillery functions day or night and regardless of weather. The 155mm shell and its Russian equivalent are considered crucial because they combine the explosive power and extended range needed to destroy armor and inflict casualties.

Since the war began, artillery has proved so lethal that it has caused more than 80% of casualties on both sides, according to estimates by Ukrainian military commanders.

Major Anton Bayev, who helped coordinate artillery support for frontline troops in the Kreminna Forest about 60 kilometers from Kramatorsk, says the shell shortage left him feeling “naked.” Starting in the fall, he said, supplies of old Soviet shells were all but gone, and 155mm shells were running low. By spring, there were times when his whole brigade had just four shells a day to cover at least a dozen kilometers of territory, he told Reuters.

“We were talking about it all the time: ‘What are we going to do if we get into a war here? We can’t just ramp this stuff up in one day. We’re in a bad situation.’”

Joe Amadee, former U.S. Army senior adviser

A Ukrainian serviceman prepares 155mm artillery shells at a position near the frontlines of the Zaporizhzhia region in January. Shortages of 155mm rounds have made thwarting Russian advances difficult and deadly. REUTERS/File photo

“It’s very hard for me to witness my infantrymen being destroyed when I cannot do anything,” said the 30-year-old commander.

In May, shortly after Congress approved the fresh aid, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said there were no reports of artillery shortages– an assessment disputed by those at the frontlines. Regardless, in a recent interview, Zelenskiy urged Western allies to provide more help, more quickly.

Some defense analysts say second-guessing decisions that led to the supply crunch is overly simplistic. “It’s easy to criticize leaders of the past for not consistently funding munitions. Clearly, the industrial base would be in a better place today if they had done so,” said Cynthia Cook, who directs the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. The key, she said, is to understand that there are always trade offs, and there would have been weapons or tools the military would have been unable to fund had it upgraded its ammunition production facilities.

But Lord David Richards, a former British chief of the defense staff and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said that since the end of the Cold War, politicians in Western nations have frequently overruled the advice of “the more capable NATO commanders.” Those commanders, he said, had warned of the dangers of not keeping artillery ammunition stocks higher.

Instead, Richards said, policymakers took what he called a “production gamble” by assuming militaries could restart production in time for when the munitions were needed.

A worker at the at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania operates a furnace on the assembly line where 155mm shell casings are made. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Recent congressional delays did slow U.S. military aid to Ukraine, said Doug Bush, the assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for acquisitions, logistics and technology. “The effect was real on the battlefield,” he said.

Bush saw a silver lining in the repeated warnings outlining munitions-production woes: They provided a roadmap for action after Russia’s invasion.

“We were really lucky we had done that work because then as soon as the war started, Congress said, ‘Your ammo plants need more help to meet the surge,’ and we’re like, ‘We have a plan, the one we already gave you.’”

A deadly gamble

Early in the war, the U.S. and its allies pledged to help Ukraine replace its legacy Soviet-era guns, which use a different caliber of ammunition. By the end of last year, Ukraine’s supplies of Soviet artillery shells – its standard long-range caliber measuring 152mm in diameter – had been nearly exhausted. The dramatic production shortfalls of the comparable Western 155mm shell, coupled with the insatiable need of Ukrainian forces for ordnance, has meant the U.S. has sought the munition from other nations and has needed to draw substantially from its own stockpile.

How many 155mm shells the U.S. has in reserve is classified. But the Army, which made fewer than 3,000 shells per month in the mid-2010s, says it is now producing about 36,000 shells a month. To help the Army reach its goal of making 100,000 shells per month by late 2025, Congress recently approved $6 billion to produce new shells, upgrade old factories and build new ammunition plants.

Whether those efforts will prove too little and too late to halt Russian offensives remains in question. What’s clear is that, while Moscow was able to quickly pivot to a war economy and source shells from allies, the shortages have already left Ukraine painfully outgunned.

“It’s very important for our infantry to hear the sound of our artillery every hour just to understand that they are not alone in the field.”

Volodymyr Havrylov, Ukraine’s former deputy defense minister

Ukrainian servicemen prepare 155mm shells last December near the town of Marinka in the Donetsk region. Artillery has enabled Ukraine to destroy Russian armored vehicles and stop enemy troop advances. Without it, Ukrainian forces fear their positions may be overrun. REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi

Last October, a Ukrainian offensive ended abruptly, and troops went from shelling to shoveling. Soldiers remember the order: Stop attacking and start digging trenches. With limited artillery, the Ukrainian attack had ended.

In all, six different frontline units told Reuters similar stories: a sudden dearth of artillery that, they believe, changed the course of the war.

Absent ammunition, however, commanders fear Russia may overrun their positions and decimate Ukrainian forces.

A senior officer on Ukraine’s general staff provided Reuters previously undisclosed figures that demonstrate the deadly difference artillery makes. When Ukraine was firing 10,000 shells per day, between 35 and 45 Ukrainian soldiers were killed daily and about 250 to 300 were wounded. But when the daily fire fell to half that, more than 100 Ukrainian soldiers were killed per day and at least a thousand were wounded.

“These projectiles build a wall for our soldiers,” the officer said.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian commanders say that for every shell their forces fire, Russia fires at least five. Compounding the problem: Ukraine faces a critical and growing shortage of troops compared to Russia.

Even before funding from the U.S. Congress was delayed, the Ukrainians had been told by U.S. officials that shells could not be produced quickly enough to meet their military needs, said Volodymyr Havrylov, who served as Ukraine’s deputy defense minister for the first 18 months of the war.

“It’s very important for our infantry to hear the sound of our artillery every hour just to understand that they are not alone in the field and there are guys behind them who are ready to support them,” Havrylov said.

By summer 2023, however, U.S. officials told Ukraine that its forces should be ready for a reduced supply of shells in 2024 – barely half of the 2 million rounds of 155mm they ended up receiving in 2023.

Havrylov said U.S. officials told him that “we should adjust our warfare approach” and “live with” a reduced supply of shells.

Along the assembly line, Mike Reed works to produce metal shell casings for 155mm artillery rounds at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The 155mm shell was little used in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s two big wars this century, which led many military planners to believe the weapon was growing obsolete. But these so-called asymmetric wars, which pitted a superpower’s regular military against insurgent irregulars, differ greatly from the conventional fighting here. In Ukraine, where two mass armies are shooting it out, the value of artillery is borne out by the casualty counts.

In meetings in September, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians that “we have to move from the old era of military warfare to more technological things,” Havrylov recalled.

Drones, for example, have played a significant role in the war, both on land and in the Black Sea. Many planners agree the conflict has demonstrated how this rising technology has ushered in important changes to battle tactics and strategy.

Still, that advice was also necessitated by what some U.S. and NATO officials say was poor planning – a misguided belief that industry in the U.S. and Europe could quickly reverse more than three decades of funding cutbacks and plant closures, swing into action and mass-produce the needed ordnance.

“People understood the risk and we took the risk because it was assumed industry could surge,” said a former senior U.S. military official who participated in a 2023 Army review that documented failures to prepare for war. “I don’t think we understood collectively how challenged the industry would be to turn on a dime.”

The review was conducted by retired generals and military leaders for the Army Science Board, an advisory group that offers technical guidance to senior officials. It cited other problems that made a surge for war difficult: costly environmental requirements, bureaucratic contracting processes, decades of erratic funding from a divided Congress, and an Army habit of diverting funds budgeted for ammunition to other programs.

“This state of affairs has been obscured for years,” the report said.

Yet it was well known among the top echelons of the U.S. military and NATO commanders. Three Science Board study members told Reuters the failure to prepare for war can be attributed to almost everyone involved for the last 15 years: military leaders, Pentagon officials, defense contractors and politicians of both parties.

The issue: “It didn’t seem like anyone had a holistic view of the entire defense production industry,” one of those members said.

At the NATO summit last week, U.S. President Joe Biden acknowledged the depth of the munitions production problem confronting the alliance. “We need a new industrial policy in the West,” Biden said during a news conference. “It came as a surprise to some of us how we had fallen behind.”

The warnings

In 2020, two years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, U.S. Army assistant secretary Jette sent a civilian adviser on a mission. Jette ordered adviser Joseph Amadee to visit America’s ammunition plants to answer two fundamental questions: Does the U.S. have enough ammunition on hand for war? And if not, can America’s industrial base move quickly if war breaks out and more ammunition is urgently needed?

Amadee, a former PepsiCo and Pillsbury factory executive, had served in the Army and later as an adviser in Iraq. He said he was appalled by what he found.

Among the locations he toured were three U.S. munition plants critical to producing the 155mm rounds. The shells contain a high explosive that shatters their metal casing into lethal shrapnel. They are fired from cannons with bags of gunpowder, the propellant.

Those three elements – the carefully forged shell casings, the high explosives, and the supplies of the powder to launch the projectiles – have proved crucial since World War I. Also essential: efficient production lines to assemble those components.

As he made his tours, Amadee told Reuters, he came across problems he found absurd. In Tennessee, he walked the floor of a new but idled $147 million factory built for use in the explosives process. Parts of the plant were literally gathering cobwebs, he recalled.

In Pennsylvania, he toured a dilapidated shell-casing factory first used for the Korean War. It had been lightly used by the military for years in the mid-2010s and was now limping along with no significant upgrades funded. In Iowa, he was briefed on manufacturing flaws, including cracked 155mm shells, that shut down one production line for months. And in Virginia, he visited a $399 million construction project running a decade behind schedule, significantly over budget and still struggling to produce the propellant needed to launch the 155mm shell.

Amadee, whose tenure from 2018 to early 2022 spanned Republican and Democrat administrations, said troops on Ukraine’s front lines are now paying the price for a failure to keep 155mm production lines prepared for war.

It is a scenario supervisors at the factories, contractors and Army officials openly dreaded in the years before the war, Amadee said.

“We were talking about it all the time: ‘What are we going to do if we get into a war here? We can’t just ramp this stuff up in one day. We’re in a bad situation,’” he recalled.

Clockwise from top left: Casings for the pivotal 155mm shell are made at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania. The steel bars used to make the casings, stacked here in the railyard, are cut from 20 feet into 14-inch billets weighing 115 pounds, the Army says; A worker tends to a steel billet along the assembly line at the Scranton facility, which began producing shell casings during the Korean War; During a process called “nosing,” the metal shell casing is heated to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, placed in a press and shaped, the Army says; Workers inspect the shell casings at the Scranton plant. The Army says this site and another one nearby produce about 36,000 shell casings a month; After the 155mm shell casings are produced and inspected at Scranton, they are sent to a different facility where the explosive is loaded inside. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Reuters reviewed internal Army briefings to generals and top Pentagon officials. Those briefings also reflect such warnings. Operators of the 155mm shell-casing factory in Pennsylvania told Army leaders in 2020 that, without upgrades, they would be incapable of meeting “emerging requirements or wartime surge.” A similar “strategic update” in 2021 cited core “critical” or “immediate” modernization needs at plants where pieces of the 155mm shell are manufactured. The briefing document called for “transformational change across the industrial base.”

Without funding and upgrades, contractors told the Army that years-long backlogs and breakdowns at shell factories would only worsen. A confidential June 2021 briefing from contractor General Dynamics-OTS to an Army general noted that absent improvements, production of 155mm shells would fall by half by 2023. A bar chart in the same document showed that, at a key metal-making facility, 83 pieces of equipment used to make the 155mm were more than 50 years old. General Dynamics, which makes shell casings, declined to comment.

In the U.S., most plants making 155mm ammunition are owned by the U.S. Army but operated by private contractors. Investment decisions lie with the Pentagon and Congress.

Jette, the Army official who dispatched Amadee to survey America’s munitions apparatus, said he pushed hard from inside the system to tackle an obvious problem. In September 2020, Jette went public, warning U.S. lawmakers at a public hearing that upgrading ammunition factories might be expensive, but that “there is greater risk in not doing so.”

Representative Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat who then chaired the House Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, echoed Jette’s concerns, especially about plant safety. At the hearing, he noted the age of the facilities. “Why are fundamentally essential functions of defense manufacturing done in museum-like conditions?” he asked.

In a statement to Reuters, Norcross said he began tighter oversight of Army plants in 2019, and he noted that Congress increased by 15% the Pentagon's budget request for munitions facilities to $684 million in fiscal year 2021.

“Make no mistake, there was still much to be done heading into 2022,” Norcross said, “but the challenge of ammunition facilities improvement had numerous champions.”

In search of supplies

Money wasn’t the only problem suppressing the West’s ability to prepare for war. In the decade before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. military made a key decision about the kind of explosive to use for the 155mm shell and which suppliers to rely on, Reuters found. The choice proved unwise: It not only slowed the production rate but also has left the West struggling to quickly find enough high explosive to ramp up output.

That decision involved moving away from using trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT. The explosive is valued for its high stability, according to Thomas Klapotke, a professor of energetics at the University of Munich. That is, it can be melted and poured into shell casings without exploding.

Since before World War II, TNT has been mixed with other less-stable “explosive fillers” more familiar to chemists than to laymen – principally more-powerful octogen, called HMX, or hexogen, called RDX. The standard mix used in artillery shells has hardly changed since then, Klapotke said. But with the war in Ukraine, each of these explosives is in short supply.

In a forest in western Poland, a complex on the same site where a factory was built by Nazi German occupiers to support an invasion of the Soviet Union now makes thousands of tons of TNT every year. The problem for Ukraine is that the factory, located near the city of Bydgoszcz, is the last surviving TNT plant in Europe or North America.

Workers there now work around the clock. It’s run by a state-owned company, Nitro-Chem, and makes about 10,000 tons of TNT per year. The company declined to say exactly how much. A single 155mm round typically requires about 10 kg of TNT. That means that the 10,000 tons of TNT would be enough to provide for about 1 million rounds, if every bit were used for 155mm shells.

Much of the TNT made in Poland is shipped to the U.S., according to staff at the plant. It is then packed into shells with other ingredients and added to the shrinking U.S. Army stockpile. The oldest shells are shipped back to Poland and then on to Ukraine.

Few countries today produce TNT, primarily because of environmental concerns about contamination from the highly toxic chemicals produced in the manufacturing process.

Germany closed its last TNT plant, Schönebeck on the Elbe, in 1990. And in Britain, a TNT plant at Bridgewater in Somerset was closed in 2008, the last of at least four TNT factories in the country dating to World War II.

When the Somerset plant was slated for closure, a report by trade unions warned that Britain would lose “all national capability for the production of military explosives.” The report cited the dangers of relying on other suppliers, even allies. After all, the report noted, during the first Gulf War in 1991, Britain had been denied supplies of 155mm ammunition by one of its close allies, Belgium, where the UK had outsourced its shell production to save money.

The demand is so high for trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT, that staff work around the clock here at Nitro-Chem plant in Bydgoszcz, Poland. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

Besides the plant in Poland, production of TNT is now concentrated in China and India. Customs records examined by Reuters show at least 1,200 tons of TNT were exported from India in 2023 and 2024 to arms makers that supply Western forces. India also shipped large volumes of the explosive fillers RDX and HMX to Poland’s Nitro-Chem.

But both India and China also have tried to maintain good relations with Russia. And neither likely would be able to fill NATO’s needs, even if willing. “You cannot imagine just how overheated the market is at the moment,” said a European defense industry executive. “The worst thing at the moment is the global shortage of TNT and RDX. The shortage of these raw materials is the basic reason why production cannot be ramped up much more at this point.”

One factor behind America’s TNT shortage dates back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. No facility in the U.S. has made TNT since 1986. The Army relied on imports instead.

Decades later, in 2014, the Army began trying to transition away from TNT to a different explosive compound called IMX-101. At the time, the Army said IMX-101 was more environmentally friendly and less vulnerable to detonation by accident or terrorist attack.

But Reuters learned that last summer, about 17 months into the war in Ukraine, the Army quietly switched back to TNT for cost and efficiency reasons. IMX, while less toxic, also proved to have some environmental downsides of its own.

In a statement to Reuters, the Army confirmed for the first time publicly that “the plan changed” and it stopped producing IMX-101 for the 155mm shell last July.

“Unexpected world events and the cost of IMX led the Army to abandon IMX-101 and use TNT, which is cheaper.” The years-long use of IMX slowed the production rate such that artillery output is now 25% “higher with TNT than with IMX,” the Army said.

Earthen walls protect the production, packing and filling of TNT at the Nitro-Chem plant in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The thick barrier is meant to absorb and deflect energy to prevent an explosion in one building from triggering an explosion in another. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

A safety barrier at TNT-maker Nitro-Chem’s plant in Bydgoszcz, Poland is designed at an angle to deflect an accidental explosion upward. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

Even before the war, the IMX endeavor was struggling, Reuters found. After building the $147 million Tennessee plant to handle waste for the program, the Army hasn’t used the facility. The reason: Rather than manufacture precursor IMX chemicals domestically, as planned, the Army imported the chemicals, negating the need for the waste plant, according to contracting records and current and former officials.

Army procurement official Bush said the unused IMX facility is an “insurance policy,” adding, “We’re going to use it at some point.”

As a result of all these decisions, the Army largely came to depend on the plant in Poland for its TNT supply. And the Army’s contingency plans included relying on another facility: a TNT factory in eastern Ukraine.

In 2021, the U.S. began importing TNT from that plant, in Rubizhne in Luhansk province, as part of a long-term $188 million deal. A person familiar with the matter said the U.S. imported about 500 tons of TNT before the war started. In 2022, however, the facility was quickly captured by the Russians. Ukrainian forces destroyed it before retreating.

The U.S. has announced plans to build its own $650 million TNT factory. It will take at least two years to complete.

Finding a war footing

In late May, inside a Ukrainian bunker not far from the front, tensions ran high among brigade commanders. Russia was on the offensive. A bank of screens showed drone-surveillance video of a stretch of frontline north of Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv.

On May 10, Russia had launched a surprise attack, smashing through flimsy border defenses to take more than 700 square kilometers in the nine days after. The brigade was holding the line along a 20-kilometer sector north of the town of Lyptsi.

Sitting to one side, the commander for artillery watched another feed – radar showing the loopy path of two Russian Orlan drones. The drones were monitoring Ukrainian positions and calling in salvos of deadly Russian artillery fire.

Colonel Ihor Obolenskyy, who’s in charge of the brigade, said the “duel of artillery between the enemy and us” was constant. After new supplies were rushed to the front to help repel the advance, Obolenskyy said he had, at the moment, sufficient 155mm rounds.

“Why are fundamentally essential functions of defense manufacturing done in museum-like conditions?”

Representative Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat and former chair of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces

Ukrainian servicemen fire an American 155mm turreted self-propelled howitzer M109 toward Russian troops in the Kharkiv region last year. Until Ukrainian forces ran short of 155mm shells, commanders there say the exchange of artillery with Russian forces was constant. REUTERS/Sofiia Gatilova

But there was a different problem. Firing an artillery shell requires gunpowder, the propellant that is loaded separately and launches the shell when detonated. And to hit enemy positions, the Ukrainian guns need to fire their 155mm cannons at full range – about 25 kilometers.

The gunpowder, supplied in what he called “big tubes,” was in short supply. “We have a lot of projectiles but not a lot of big tubes,” he said. That meant the range of his guns was restricted.

The shortage of gunpowder presents yet another dire issue for Ukrainian forces – and for the West. It is made from nitrocellulose, a compound created by treating natural cellulose fibers such as cotton with nitric acid. The process is difficult and dangerous.

As with the TNT plants, Western countries have spent the years since the end of the Cold War closing powder plants. The last in the United Kingdom were shuttered in 1998, and plants closed in Romania in 2004 and in Bergerac, France, in 2007, all due to insufficient orders. Germany’s Rheinmetall has retained powder production in Aschau, Bavaria and in Wimmis, Switzerland, but those plants are unable to meet current demands.

The U.S. Army’s sole nitrocellulose plant is located in rural Virginia. It opened in 1941 and though it is still operating, recent Army budget documents say the plant has “exceeded its useful life” and breakdowns are routine. A recent equipment failure there caused one production line to close for six weeks, said a person familiar with the matter. “The place is very fragile,” he said of the plant.

In 2012, the Army signed a deal to replace it with a modern plant that would be far more efficient, safe, and environmentally sound. The new facility would also reduce reliance on foreign suppliers. It was to open around 2015 and cost about $245 million.

The nitrocellulose project, however, is a decade behind schedule, and costs have soared to $399 million. Internal Army records and federal court records blame delays and cost overruns on contractor and subcontractor incompetence. Subcontractor Fluor Federal Solutions paid $14.5 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges related to the project. Fluor and contractor BAE Systems OSI have declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation over the matter.

The Army said the new nitrocellulose factory is “in the final stages of commissioning and qualification.” But it is not yet producing large quantities of nitrocellulose for military use. The “prove out” process – getting the chemical mix just right – could take years, people briefed on the matter said. The Army said it hopes to have the process honed by December. It said the delay has had “no impact” on the Ukrainian war effort because the legacy plant still functions.

In May, the U.S. Army opened a new 155mm production facility in Mesquite, Texas. Near Dallas, the $500 million facility is expected to begin making war-ready shells in the fall, officials said. It is operated by General Dynamics-OTS. REUTERS/Shelby Tauber

Russia, meanwhile, has been expanding several gunpowder plants, all that date back to at least World War II. Its plant at the city of Kazan once made gunpowder for Catherine the Great. Even after demand fell following the collapse of the USSR, Russia managed to keep open its plants there and in Perm and Tambov, in part by diversifying into the supply of liquid nitrocellulose for civilian use as paints or lacquer.

In an interview with Reuters, Lieutenant-Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO military committee, said Russia had shown it could rapidly adopt a war economy and “order their industry to give priority to the war in Ukraine.” The challenge facing Western democracies, he said, is to show they too can marshal their huge industrial resources.

In Europe, an effort to increase the 155mm supply is beginning to pay off. Total shell production there now surpasses U.S. output, and according to a NATO official, the alliance is on track to make 2 million shells this year. “We are making progress but we are not complacent about the scale of the challenge,” the official said.

In the U.S., the Army took reporters on a tour in April of the recently updated shell plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There, officials showed off new modern lathe machine tools from South Korea. Some were still in shrink wrap.

And in May, the secretary of the Army showcased the grand opening of a state-of-the-art facility near Dallas, which will rely heavily on robots to make 155mm shells.

Still, those new machines aren’t expected to begin producing war-ready shells until the fall. Although total U.S. monthly shell production might jump from 36,000 to 60,000 by year’s end, officials say it isn’t expected to reach the goal of 100,000 for another 18 months.

Back on the frontline, Ukraine’s soldiers hope the efforts work – fast.

One lieutenant who commanded a gun in the southern Donetsk region told Reuters that for months, he had fired so infrequently that the Russians didn’t even bother to shell his position. New supplies have arrived, he said, but he feared they were too late and too little to stop the Russians.

“What we have is still a pittance,” Oleksander said. “We are retreating village by village until we reach our homes.”

Outgunned

By Stephen Grey, John Shiffman and Allison Martell

Additional reporting: Mike Stone in Washington, Karol Badohal in Poland, Krishn Kaushik in New Delhi, Sabine Siebold in Berlin, Andrew Gray in Brussels, and Tom Balmforth and Kamila Hrabchuk in Ukraine.

Design and graphics: Maryanne Murray

Visual editing: Feilding Cage

Photo editing: Simon Neuman and Edgar Su

Edited by Blake Morrison

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5. ‘A Rubik’s Cube in the Sky’: Israel Struggles to Defend Against Drones

A Middle East laboratory that hopefully will provide us with lessons.

‘A Rubik’s Cube in the Sky’: Israel Struggles to Defend Against Drones

An attack on Tel Aviv attributed to Yemen’s Houthis exposes a hole in Israel’s high-tech air defenses

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/a-rubiks-cube-in-the-sky-israel-struggles-to-defend-against-drones-14062f76?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Anat Peled

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 and Dov Lieber

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Updated July 22, 2024 12:48 am ET

Friday’s drone attack damaged buildings in central Tel Aviv. PHOTO: MATTEO PLACUCCI/ZUMA PRESS

KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel—On Friday, Israel’s vaunted aerial-defense system tracked 65 rockets fired across its northern border by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, intercepting some and letting the rest fall harmlessly into open areas. 

That same day, Israel missed a single drone it believes flew more than 1,000 miles from Yemen to explode in the commercial capital Tel Aviv. 

Israel has a problem with drones. They can be small and hard to detect, and they don’t move on predictable trajectories or emit the intense heat of rocket engines that make missiles easier to track and destroy. They are also cheap and plentiful, and are being deployed by the country’s adversaries in increasing numbers and sophistication. 

Hezbollah has demonstrated the ability to strike Israel with drones in the near daily exchanges of fire since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in which Israeli authorities say 1,200 people were killed and some 250 were taken hostage, prompting Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip.

The group often sends several at once—at least one for reconnaissance and another rigged with explosives—and has hit border towns and military bases, killing and injuring civilians and soldiers. It also has hit sensitive military equipment—including a radar surveillance balloon called Sky Dew in May and a multimillion-dollar antidrone system called Drone Dome in June. 

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A drone strike hit Tel Aviv in the first such attack on Israel’s commercial capital since the war in Gaza began more than nine months ago. The Yemen-based Houthis claimed responsibility for the attack. Photo: Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg PHOTO: KOBI WOLF/BLOOMBERG

Goading the Israeli military, Hezbollah flew surveillance drones across northern Israel in recent months, collecting aerial images of sensitive sites and publishing them in an unsubtle reminder of Israel’s vulnerability. 

The Iron Dome, Israel’s famed air-defense system, has struggled to cope with the challenge. The alternative has been to scramble jet fighters, a costly and potentially dangerous solution that forces pilots to fly low in mountainous areas and exposes them to Hezbollah’s antiaircraft systems.  

When all else fails, Israeli soldiers are told to use their rifles, some of which have been rigged with technology that can make their shots more accurate, according to Israeli military and defense officials.

“UAVs have turned into the main threat in terms of our ability to deal with it, because the army right now has no means of prevention except using F-16s,” said Ariel Frisch, deputy security officer of Kiryat Shmona, an Israeli city near the border with Lebanon that has been hit by at least six explosive drones since Oct. 7. “We are very, very worried about it.”

Israel’s vulnerability to uncrewed aerial vehicles is a sign of the challenges it would face in any full-scale war with Hezbollah and the difficulty it will have ever feeling confident it has eliminated threats from the adversaries around its borders. It is a threat all modern armies are struggling with as their opponents make use of the fast advances in civilian technology to develop cheap and highly accurate weapons.

The drone that hit Tel Aviv early Friday morning was a large model that air-defense experts say should be easier to knock down. The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it used a new drone that can evade air-defense systems.

Oil tanks burning at the port in Hodeidah, Yemen. The Israeli army said it struck Houthi targets in Yemen on Saturday. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

The drone approached from the Mediterranean Sea to the west and was identified by Israeli radar minutes before it struck, a senior Israeli air-force officer said Sunday. Those on duty needed to decide whether it was an Israeli drone, an allied aircraft, a civilian aircraft or even a flock of birds. 

During the war, Israel has been focused on aerial attacks from the north, south and east—in fact, an enemy drone was coming in from the east at about the same time, and Israel shot it down. Complicating matters, the drone from Yemen was flying in on routes generally used by civilian aircraft, though at a much lower altitude, the officer said. 

“All of this, on top of the humans in the process, unfortunately caused them to classify it not as a threat,” the officer said. 

Just over a mile from the border with Lebanon, Kiryat Shmona today is a ghost town with dusty cars, abandoned homes and unraked leaves covering its streets. Most of its some 20,000 residents have been evacuated from their homes since the start of the fighting. Hezbollah has hit targets across northern Israel with rockets, antitank missiles and drones.

Israeli security forces stood guard after the drone strike in Tel Aviv. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS

Hezbollah has launched about 1,000 drones at Israel since the beginning of the war, mainly targeting towns and military bases within 3 miles of the border, including Kiryat Shmona. Their use has increased sharply this year, and the militant group has exhibited an ability to learn and take advantage of blind spots in Israeli defenses by mapping northern Israel with its surveillance drones, said Sarit Zehavi, founder and president of Alma Research and Education Center, a think tank in Israel.

The group has an arsenal of at least 2,500 drones and the ability to assemble more from parts supplied by Iran, according to estimates by Alma. 

Drones force militants’ stronger adversaries to allocate scarce and costly resources to defend against them. While the Iranian Ababil drones used by Hezbollah can cost $5,000 apiece, an hour of flight time for an F-16 shooting two missiles is roughly $45,000, said Yehoshua Kalinsky, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. An interception by the Iron Dome is even more expensive and can cost $100,000 or more. 

Shooting down drones with a jet requires pilots to locate hard-to-detect devices and distinguish them from friendly drones, other warplanes and civilian aircraft. The drones have low heat signatures, so the jets need to get behind them and as close as possible for the heat-seeking missiles to engage, an Israeli air-force pilot said. 

The combination of friendly or enemy drones and jets, civilian aircraft and birds is like “a Rubik’s Cube in the sky,” said an air-force officer involved in aerial threat detection.

Samuel Bendett, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who studies drone warfare, said Israel could learn from Ukraine’s experience. After 2½ years of drone-intensive war with Russia, the country has developed more cost-effective solutions for detecting and intercepting them. 

They include spreading acoustic sensors throughout the country to pick up the sound of drone motors. Ukraine also has established specialized truck-mounted mobile defense units armed with large-caliber machine guns, projector lights and electronic warfare systems that are then dispatched to intercept approaching drones. 

Israel’s defense system has known about the drone threat for years, but hasn’t developed effective solutions in time, said Liran Antebi, a senior researcher also at the Institute for National Security Studies, who has been warning about the threat since 2013.

“Israel underestimated the size of the threat, the amounts of the systems in the hands of the other side and its willingness to operate them,” she said.

llan Bitton, the former head of Israel’s air defenses in the air force and a former senior official at Israel Aerospace Industries, said drones for years were seen as a “side issue”—not a big enough threat to divert resources from efforts to counter rockets and missiles. 

Solutions have been late in coming, but Bitton was optimistic that Israel will create a multilayered defense against drones within one to three years. Israel’s Ministry of Defense has now allocated larger sums to the task and is working with big defense companies and new technology outfits. A new accelerator program for Israeli startups lists sensors to detect small aircrafts as one of the ministry’s areas of interest. 

One highly expected response is the “Iron Beam,” which will fire a concentrated laser to take down aerial threats. A defense official said it would be rolled out sometime in 2025. The energy used for each interception is expected to cost a dollar or two per target, significantly cheaper than using interceptor missiles. 

Still, the system has its weaknesses. Its effectiveness goes down in bad weather, and it can only shoot down one threat at a time, when adversaries are expected to attack with swarms. Israeli defense officials said it would need to be integrated into a multitiered defense system similar to what Israel now uses against rockets and missiles. 

Moshik Cohen, an Israeli tech entrepreneur who previously worked on defense-missiles development at the Israel Aerospace Industries and autonomous vehicles at Samsung, is now working on building a platform to detect and classify threats, such as drones and UAVs, so they can be shot down. But he is aware that the drones are improving quickly as well. Israel is in a technology race, he said, not a typical arms race, and doesn’t have the advantage of time.

“This is an agile, software-defined conflict,” Cohen said. “If something is evolving, you need to evolve and move faster to win. Otherwise, you have no chance. You don’t have three years for development.” 

Write to Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com and Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 22, 2024, print edition as 'Israel Struggles to Defend Against Drones'.

6. Russia Crushes Dissent as Putin’s System Ramps Up Repression

The worst of the axis of totalitarian dictators?

Russia Crushes Dissent as Putin’s System Ramps Up Repression

Wrongful conviction of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is latest blow against freedom of expression in Russia

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-crushes-dissent-as-putins-system-ramps-up-repression-785c90f8?mod=hp_lead_pos8

By Georgi Kantchev

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July 21, 2024 11:09 am ET

Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter falsely accused by Russian authorities of spying, was sentenced Friday to 16 years in a penal colony. PHOTO: ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Already shrinking before the Ukraine war, the space for dissent and freedom of expression has all but vanished in Russia. 

The latest sign came on Friday with the wrongful conviction of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich of spying following a hurried closed-door trial that the U.S. government has condemned as a sham. Gershkovich, who was afforded few of the protections normally accorded to defendants in Western countries, was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony, adding to the number of imprisoned Americans that Russian President Vladimir Putin could exchange in return for high-value Russians held in the West.

Russian authorities have produced no public evidence to support their allegations, which Gershkovich, the Journal and the U.S. government have vehemently and repeatedly denied. The 32-year-old journalist was accredited as a foreign correspondent by Russia’s foreign ministry.

The death and imprisonment of Kremlin critics, the adoption of new repressive legislation, the muzzling of journalists and a tightening noose on the internet has fostered a climate of fear and self-censorship in Russia. Authorities have targeted ordinary citizens, with many facing fines and lengthy imprisonment for merely voicing opposition to the war or challenging the official narrative.

Yulia Navalnaya, shown in June, has promised to carry on her husband’s struggle for a free Russia. PHOTO: SEBASTIAN CHRISTOPH GOLLNOW/DPA/ZUMA PRESS

Taken together, the measures have effectively stifled dissent and eliminated the last vestiges of opposition to the regime, human rights watchers and political analysts say. That has helped Putin further tighten his grip over the country’s political, economic and social system. 

“Russia now is not even the Russia of the early invasion,” said Sergey Sanovich, a fellow at Stanford University who focuses on Russian politics. “Repression now is different and new.”

This shift represents a fundamental rewriting of Russia’s social contract, which, before the war, amounted to a transactional agreement where citizens tolerated limits on personal freedoms in exchange for economic stability and upward mobility. This has been replaced by an environment intolerant of any dissent and demanding absolute loyalty to the regime.

Arshak Makichyan, a Russian-Armenian climate and antiwar protester who left the country shortly after the war with Ukraine began, said there were “no freedoms left in Russia.” After the still-murky death of Putin opponent Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp in February, Makichyan said he doesn’t feel safe, even in his new homeland of Germany. 

READ EVAN GERSHKOVICH’S WORK

On the Ground in Putin's Russia: Coverage of a Country at War

“Russia is not North Korea yet, but it’s on its way in that direction. The climate has changed drastically,” he said. “They broke the social contract, whatever it was.”

The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.

After Russia’s post-Soviet experiment with Western-style democracy in the 1990s, Putin’s leadership brought restrictions on personal liberties, the independent media and political participation.

But the Kremlin still allowed some forms of protest, often as a relief valve for dissent, and Russians often gathered in mass demonstrations despite the threat of police detentions. Opposition leaders such as Navalny could participate in some elections, even if those were heavily skewed in favor of the regime. Independent media outlets exposed corruption cases or promoted critical views.

All that changed with the Ukraine invasion. 

In quick succession, the government implemented a series of restrictive laws that significantly curtail basic human rights, including freedom of expression and assembly. The crackdown targeted anyone who disseminates information critical of the Kremlin or the war. The LGBT movement was added to a list of extremist and terrorist organizations. Authorities declared hundreds of activists “foreign agents,” including scores who had fled abroad, meaning they face possible prosecution if they return home.

In total, Russia’s parliament has adopted 43 repressive laws since the start of the country’s Ukraine invasion in February 2022, according to human-rights group OVD-Info, which itself has been declared a foreign agent. A law adopted this year allowed the confiscation of property from those convicted of crimes, including dissemination of “fake” information about the army.

Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison for criticizing the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine. PHOTO: MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

For many in Russia, the death of Navalny—blamed by his followers on the Kremlin, which denies it—served as the final blow for political opposition inside the country. 

Even before that, however, authorities had turned the screws by jailing opposition figures and forcing closure of nongovernmental organizations. They have escalated persecution of political opposition figures, sentencing Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison for criticizing the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine. Prominent opposition politician Ilya Yashin was sentenced to 8½ years in prison after he was charged with spreading false information about Russia’s military campaign, which he denied.

Most opposition leaders are now scattered abroad, including Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who promised to continue her husband’s crusade. Earlier this month, a Russian court issued an arrest warrant for Navalnaya for participating in an “extremist” group.

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The Wall Street Journal reporter was falsely accused by Russian authorities of spying. The decision came after a secret trial that the U.S. has condemned as a sham. Photo: Donat Sorokin/TASS/ZUMA PRESS PHOTO: DONAT SOROKIN/TASS/ZUMA PRESS

The list of legitimate opposition candidates in last March’s presidential election was slimmer than usual, while establishment figures whom Putin once tolerated as a useful way to keep potential rivals in check have also been sidelined. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group who launched a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military command last year, was killed when a bomb destroyed the private jet he was flying in.

The crackdown has extended to ordinary Russians as well, sometimes in bizarre circumstances. A man was fined last year for wearing blue and yellow sneakers, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. A pastry chef was fined for writing antiwar slogans on cakes.

Only a few people, meanwhile, have access to independent information on the war. 

Russia has blocked social-media platforms such as X, Instagram and Facebook, as well as foreign media, such as the U.K.’s BBC. Television journalism has been neutered, with news broadcasts mostly peddling government propaganda.

Most Russian opposition leaders are now scattered abroad, including Yulia Navalnaya, for whom a Russian court has issued an arrest warrant. PHOTO: LUKAS BARTH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

In 2023, authorities say they blocked or deleted 670,000 websites and pages with information prohibited by law. That is up from 247,000 links the year before.

The government has also blocked various VPN services that would allow people to access international websites. Some tech-savvy users with friends abroad have tried to set up a private VPN server, though these are rare exceptions.

“Restrictions online are much more effective than they used to be. It is genuinely technically difficult to access blocked content,” Sanovich of Stanford University said. “The difference from two years ago could not be more stark.”

Write to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 22, 2024, print edition as 'Putin’s Moscow Crushes Dissent, Freedom of Expression'.

7. Afghanistan War Commission opens inquiry of America’s longest conflict

This has been lost among all the other news.

Before they begin I recommend the members (re-?) read Sam Sarkesian's work: Unconventional Conflicts in a New Security Era, Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (1993)

On the nature of future conflicts, Sarkesian emphasized the need for adaptability: "The American mindset and way of war must include serious consideration of different cultures"

Regarding strategy in unconventional conflicts, he stressed the importance of supporting local systems: "Strategies must be implemented so as to avoid damage to the innate character of the indigenous government"

Sarkesian highlighted the interconnected nature of modern conflicts: "He recognizes the interdependence of the world's nations and the inability of the United States to go it alone in all conflicts"

On the comprehensive approach needed for unconventional conflicts, he noted: "He acknowledges the requirement for our strategy to support indigenous systems, with all that suggests regarding civilian administration, police, political, and socioeconomic issues"

Sam Sarkesian offered several key insights on unconventional conflicts:

1. Future conflicts require adaptability and cultural understanding. Sarkesian emphasized that "The American mindset and way of war must include serious consideration of different cultures".
2. Strategies in unconventional conflicts should support indigenous systems. He stressed that "Strategies must be implemented so as to avoid damage to the innate character of the indigenous government".
3. Unconventional conflicts demand an integrated approach. Sarkesian advocated for integrating "the civilian and military components into a truly effective sixth service".
4. Special Operations Forces should play a primary role in unconventional conflicts. He suggested allowing "primacy for unconventional conflicts to rest with the Special Operations Forces, combined with traditional aid and assistance".
5. The United States cannot act alone in all conflicts. Sarkesian recognized "the interdependence of the world's nations and the inability of the United States to go it alone in all conflicts".
6. Unconventional conflicts require a comprehensive strategy. He acknowledged the need for addressing "civilian administration, police, political, and socioeconomic issues" in these conflicts.
7. There's a need for clear distinction within special operations. Sarkesian called for establishing "a clear distinction in the US special operations command between the two major components of unconventional conflict, special operations and special forces.

These insights demonstrate Sarkesian's emphasis on cultural sensitivity, supporting local systems, integrating military and civilian components, and adapting strategies to the unique challenges posed by unconventional conflicts.

Afghanistan War Commission opens inquiry of America’s longest conflict

The bipartisan panel will study the conflict’s myriad failures with a mandate to recommend how the United States can avoid a repeat performance.

The Washington Post · by Abigail Hauslohner · July 19, 2024

Against the backdrop of America’s roiling political landscape and two raging foreign wars, a coterie of former U.S. government officials and academics on Friday opened what will be an extensive examination of the United States’ 20-year foray in Afghanistan — the nation’s longest conflict.

“Today we make history,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, co-chair of the Afghanistan War Commission. “Never before has the United States commissioned such a wide-ranging independent legislative assessment of its own decision-making in the aftermath of a conflict.”

The mission is daunting. The 16-member bipartisan panel has been tasked by Congress with determining what went wrong and what U.S. leaders could do differently the next time the United States goes to war. Their mandate encompasses policies and actions taken by four presidential administrations, the U.S. military, the State Department, U.S. allies, and many other agencies, organizations and people.

The commission has 18 months to carry out its research and until August 2026 to deliver a final public report.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 ended the war, but delivered the country back into the hands of the Taliban, an enemy Washington spent trillions of dollars trying to vanquish beginning in the aftermath of 9/11. The bloody and chaotic exit resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and scores of Afghans; left thousands of American allies behind to an uncertain fate; triggered broad, bipartisan outrage; and gave rise to bitterly politicized congressional inquiries and hearings.

The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee is expected next month to deliver a final report detailing the findings of its investigation of the withdrawal. That inquiry has featured hours of heated and sometimes emotional testimony from Biden administration officials, military commanders, veterans and their families. The committee next week intends to interview Jen Psaki, President Biden’s White House press secretary at the time of the withdrawal.

The war commission’s 4½-hour discussion Friday, held in the Washington headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, featured former ambassadors, military officers and CIA personnel as witnesses. It drew a small crowd of observers, many of whom were also connected to the war.

Chaudhary and her co-chair, Colin F. Jackson, a former Defense Department official, are cognizant of the charged atmosphere that surrounds their undertaking. The commission itself was borne of the collective outrage that followed the withdrawal three years ago.

But they stressed that they seek a dialogue that is thoughtful and apolitical, even if commission members were handpicked by Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the heat of national anguish. “We are bipartisan in our composition, but our work is nonpartisan,” Chaudhary said.

It’s hard to ignore the issue of blame, they concede. It “keeps coming up in our conversations,” Chaudhary told the panelists. People want to know if the commission will name and shame; if it will deliver some measure of justice by calling out the leaders who made the worst critical decisions in the war.

The commission will try not to do that, while at the same time endeavoring to produce “a full, objective, rigorous, unvarnished and unflinching account of our performance as a government and a military,” Jackson said. “We owe it to the generation that served in Afghanistan, and the generation that will serve somewhere else.”

It isn’t just an assessment of the war’s failures. The commission’s report will include guidance, they said: practical advice that could be applied to other wars the United States is involved in, such as those ongoing in the Middle East and Ukraine, or to wars that have yet to happen, but someday will.

If the first hearing can serve as a guide for what commissioners are likely to conclude, it’s that so many different things went wrong.

Consecutive administrations failed to address the critical role that Pakistan — an ostensible U.S. ally — played in sustaining and shielding the Taliban, said Nader Nadery, a witness who served as a senior Afghan government official. U.S. leaders also often prioritized short-term military goals over longer-term values, and sometimes employed rhetoric that undermined the Afghan government’s credibility, he said.

There were convoluted chains of command throughout the war; disruptive personality clashes between American decision-makers and agencies; and commanding officers served tours of duty that were so short as to represent “the institutional equivalent of a frontal lobotomy,” said another witness, Ronald Neumann, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and the author of “The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan” — published 11 years before the U.S. withdrawal.

There was a terribly devised system for parliamentary elections that invited fraud, said Noah Coburn, a political anthropologist who provided testimony Friday. There was too much public meddling in Afghan politics by U.S. leaders, and too little policy input solicited from the Afghans. Poor U.S. decisions when it came to security partners, development and investments fueled corruption, which spread mistrust of the government and support for the anti-government Taliban, said Coburn. Civilian casualties, abusive warlords and poor security did that too.

It’s not that no one was saying this during the war. Much has been written. Experts and documentation of on-the-ground events were ample as they were happening, commissioners and panelists acknowledged. But often, U.S. officials failed to absorb the information, and consecutive administrations failed to use that knowledge to change course.

“A fair question,” Jackson, the co-chair, said, “is, but what decisions are you going to look at?”

“The easy answer is we’re going to consider a much larger set of decisions than we can possibly cover in detail, and there will be a very difficult winnowing process,” he said.

Among the obvious points of interest, Jackson said, will be the decision to invade Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The commission will examine the decision to surge U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2009. They will look at the decision-making that went into negotiations with the Taliban. And of course, they will look at decisions related to the withdrawal.

The commissioners acknowledged that their mandate has become vast — to cynics, perhaps, so ambitious as to be almost impossible. What started as a mission to understand and to educate is also partly an exercise in collective therapy, the commissioners said, an opportunity not just for government officials, but for the larger population, and particularly veterans, to come to terms with what happened.

“For so many of us, the war still lingers in our minds. We carry the moral, physical and emotional injuries in our daily lives,” Chaudhary said. “Closure may not be possible for everyone.” But a space is needed for “civic discourse,” she added.

The Washington Post · by Abigail Hauslohner · July 19, 2024

8. A USS Eisenhower pilot became the first American woman to score air-to-air kill

A USS Eisenhower pilot became the first American woman to score air-to-air kill

The aviator, part of Strike Fighter Squadron 32, took out a Houthi drone in the Red Sea as part of the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group’s intercept mission.

NICHOLAS SLAYTON

POSTED ON JUL 21, 2024 7:21 PM EDT

3 MINUTE READ

taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton

A female Naval aviator with Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 32 became the first woman in the U.S. military to score an air-to-air victory in combat. The aviator, who the Navy has not named, shot down a one-way attack drone fired by Houthi forces against commercial ships passing through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, using an F/A-18F Super Hornet.

Strike Fighter Squadron 32 deployed on the aircraft carrier the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower when the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group was sent to the Middle East in October 2023. The group, consisting of the carrier, its support ships and a carrier wing, spent the winter intercepting missiles and one-way attack drones fired at merchant ships.

It’s not clear when specifically the fighter pilot scored that aerial victory. The military considers downing aerial drones as an aerial victory. It’s not a new distinction — the Royal Air Force credited shot down Nazi V-1 rockets as kills during World War II.

“The success of the entire squadron over the past nine months is a testament to all the members of the command and their friends and family at home that support them,” Cmdr. Jason Hoch, leader of the squadron, said in a Navy release. “I couldn’t be prouder of the Swordsmen’s performance day-in and day-out in incredibly demanding conditions. We proved over and over again that the flexibility a carrier strike group brings to the fight is unmatched, and that is solely due to the highly trained and motivated Sailors who go above and beyond the call of duty each and every day.”

https://x.com/ChowdahHill/status/1813615688919183747/photo/1

According to the Navy, Strike Fighter Squadron 32 (known as the “Fighting Swordsmen”) fired more than 20 air-to-air missiles against drones. The fighter squadron also used nearly 120 air-to-surface weapons in airstrikes on Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen. Earlier this month, the Navy released a breakdown of just how many strikes the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group carried out during its nine months deployed to the Middle East. Aircraft assigned to the group fired 60 air-to-air missiles and 420 air-to-surface missiles and bombs.

In the same release, the Navy said at least one F/A-18G Growler had a confirmed kill. Growlers are essentially the same airframe as the air-superiority-focused F/A-18 Super Hornet, but have avionics and weapons systems focused on electronic warfare and air defense supression.

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The Navy has released relatively little information about the air missions during the Eisenhower deployments. Anti-drone and missile intercept operations in April, when Iran attacked Israel with more than 300 munitions, likely led to Air Force pilots with the 494th Fighter Squadron and 335th Fighter Squadron achieving ace status — five or more aerial kills. The Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group and its air wing did not participate in that mission.

The unnamed female aviator is the first American military pilot to score an air-to-air kill, but not the first woman overall to do that in history. During World War II, a Soviet pilot took that distinction. Sources dispute whether Lt. Lydia Litvyak or Lt. Valeriya Khomyakova was the first to get an aerial victory, but both got confirmed kills. Litvyak would become one of two Soviet women to reach “ace” status during the war, getting at least five aerial kills before her death in 1943, although the total number is also disputed.

On a wider level, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group expended 770 munitions during its operations around Yemen, including the 480 shot by the air wing. The rest were missiles fired by the ships. That included interceptions of Houthi missiles and drones, targeted strikes on launch and radar sites and multinational bombing campaigns on cities and ports controlled by the Houthi movement.

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Nicholas Slayton

Contributing Editor

Nicholas Slayton is a Contributing Editor for Task & Purpose. In addition to covering breaking news, he writes about history, shipwrecks, and the military’s hunt for unidentified anomalous phenomenon (formerly known as UFOs). He currently runs the Task & Purpose West Coast Bureau from Los Angeles.

9. Troops Will Start Getting Economic Hardship Bonuses This Month, Though Only $20 on Average

​???

And it probably costs 10 times that per servicementeber to adminster.  

Troops Will Start Getting Economic Hardship Bonuses This Month, Though Only $20 on Average

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin,Rebecca Kheel · July 19, 2024

The Pentagon says that it's finally ready to pay troops the "economic hardship bonuses" that Congress authorized last year to help offset rising prices and higher costs of living across the country.

But the sums troops will get seem unlikely to make a major impact, putting renewed attention on lawmakers to do more. A senior defense official told Military.com in an interview Friday that troops in the most junior ranks -- E-1 to E-3 -- will automatically see the bonus in their paychecks starting this month and going through December but, on average, they will be getting only $20 a month.

"The monthly bonus amounts, on average, will total approximately $120 [over the six months] ... and they're based on the funding Congress has made available," explained the official, who spoke with Military.com on the condition they remain anonymous.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, concerned that service member pay was not keeping pace with the private sector or inflation, included $43 million in the latest defense spending bill to provide the bonuses for anyone up to E-6 in rank.

Though Congress authorized the bonuses in December in the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, it didn't provide funding for the benefit until late March, when lawmakers finally passed a bill to fund the Pentagon through the remainder of fiscal 2024, leading to the Pentagon's slow implementation.

The defense official explained that, broadly, the Pentagon took that appropriated $43 million and decided how many service members it could pay before the money ran out.

The result is that the bonus will go only to those up to the grade of E-3, not E-6 as allowed by law, and will benefit around 266,000 people.

"We chose the paygrades because of the amount of money that Congress appropriated and what we could pay and what would fit within that appropriation," the defense official said.

The official also noted that, even though service members receive two paychecks a month, the bonus will be paid at the end of each month.

"While it's welcome news that the department will provide some junior enlisted service members with temporary bonus pay, as authorized by [last year's] NDAA, more must be done," Justine Tripathi, a spokesperson for the House Armed Services Committee, told Military.com in an emailed statement, noting that this "is why the [upcoming] NDAA provides junior enlisted service members with a 19.5% pay raise."

In June, the House moved forward with a version of the annual defense policy bill that would give a huge 15% pay raise for E-1s to E-4s on top of a 4.5% increase for all troops. That proposal would mean junior enlisted troops would get a 19.5% pay raise next year.

Conversely, in June, the Senate unveiled a proposal to hike E-1 to E-3 pay by 5.5%, while service members of all ranks would get a 4.5% pay raise next year.

A bipartisan panel of lawmakers recently found after months of studying military quality-of-life issues that military pay has not kept pace with inflation or civilian paychecks.

The House and Senate will have to negotiate a compromise version of their respective bills before this year's NDAA can pass into law, and the prospect for the larger hike is murky.

The White House has raised strong objections to any targeted boost to junior enlisted pay before an administration study on military compensation is finished, which leads to questions whether the House's plan, along with its ambitious pay raise to junior troops, can survive.

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin,Rebecca Kheel · July 19, 2024

10. Taiwan remodels war games in the face of China's threats

Excerpts:

Officials have said such drills will now be held on Taiwan's outlying islands, where Chinese vessels and warplanes have edged closer in recent months, and that troops would now take part in "impromptu" exercises.

The changes come as Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory, has increased its military presence in the skies and waters around the island.

"Nowadays the situation is more threatened than before, so this type of public relations exercise is useless," Ou Sifu of Taiwan's Institute of National Defense and Security Research said of previous drills.

He said Koo "is putting pressure on our conservative military, forcing them to conduct exercises that are more realistic to actual war".

Taiwan remodels war games in the face of China's threats

22 Jul 2024 06:01PM

channelnewsasia.com

TAIPEI: Taiwan launched its annual war games on Monday (Jul 22) aiming to more realistically simulate an attack from China, dropping drills deemed to be out-of-touch with the growing threat of conflict.

Self-ruled Taiwan's military has discarded exercises "that were more for demonstration purposes", such as live-fire drills laid on for the media on the main island, said new Defence Minister Wellington Koo.

Officials have said such drills will now be held on Taiwan's outlying islands, where Chinese vessels and warplanes have edged closer in recent months, and that troops would now take part in "impromptu" exercises.

The changes come as Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory, has increased its military presence in the skies and waters around the island.

"Nowadays the situation is more threatened than before, so this type of public relations exercise is useless," Ou Sifu of Taiwan's Institute of National Defense and Security Research said of previous drills.

He said Koo "is putting pressure on our conservative military, forcing them to conduct exercises that are more realistic to actual war".

Koo has eliminated goose-step marching and bayonet training for the military in the two months since he was appointed, saying they were ineffective in modern situations.

A Brave Eagle trainer jet lands at a military base as the first day of the annual Han Kuang exercise kicks off in Taitung, Taiwan on Jul 22, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Angie Teo)

Another major change for the drills is the new focus on decentralising the command structure, which the defence ministry said would familiarise troops with "the increasing complexity and uncertainty of the battlefield".

Participants were previously briefed on every scenario they would face but "this year the troops are not told in advance and they have to respond spontaneously", said military expert Su Tzu-yun.

"This is more in line with the real situation," he said, calling it "the most crucial point for the reform of Taiwan's military".

"It can improve the morale and self-confidence of the participating troops," Su told AFP.

The navy conducted an "emergency departure" off the coast of Taiwan's northern Yilan county on Monday morning as part of a rapid response exercise, the defence ministry said.

Koo, wearing military fatigues, oversaw a drill registering reservists for emergency mobilisation in northern Taoyuan.

Major drills were also expected this week in eastern Hualien county, home to an airbase for fighter jets, and on the island of Penghu in the narrow waterway separating Taiwan from China.

"CATASTROPHIC CONSEQUENCES"

China has said it would never renounce the use of force to bring Taiwan under Beijing's control.

Beijing launched war games three days after President Lai Ching-te was sworn in in May as "punishment" for an inauguration speech it called a "confession of Taiwan independence".

Chinese coast guard ships have also ramped up their presence around Taiwan's outlying islands and Chinese aircraft are more frequently sighted near the main island, according to daily reports from Taipei.

The military could become "less sensitive" with such actions being "normalised", said retired Major General Richard Hu.

"This 'boiling frog syndrome' could really trigger catastrophic consequences when (China) decides to launch its full-scale invasion of Taiwan someday in the future," Hu told AFP.

Japan has reportedly concluded that a ground landing in Taiwan by Chinese troops would now be "possible in less than a week" instead of the previous estimate of a month.

The International Crisis Group's Amanda Hsiao said it was "critically important" for Taiwan to accelerate its defence reforms, which would require dividing the attention of its troops between "the everyday challenges of Chinese military pressures" and a potential invasion.

"Without clarity of vision, there is the risk that Taiwan is ill-prepared to deal with both types of threats," she said.

Asked about the war games, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said "any attempts to exaggerate tensions, seek independence by force, or resist unification by force are bound to fail".

channelnewsasia.com

11. Philippines 'to assert our rights' after China sea deal

Philippines 'to assert our rights' after China sea deal

22 Jul 2024 03:41PM

(Updated: 22 Jul 2024 03:51PM)

channelnewsasia.com

MANILA: Manila insisted on Monday (Jul 22) it will continue to "assert our rights" over a hotspot South China Sea reef, after reaching a deal with Beijing for resupplying Filipino troops stationed on a grounded warship.

The Philippine foreign ministry also rejected suggestions by China that the "provisional arrangement" announced on Sunday required Manila to give Beijing "prior notification" and verification of deliveries to the BRP Sierra Madre on Second Thomas Shoal.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, including Second Thomas Shoal, which lies about 200km from the western Philippine island of Palawan and more than 1,000km from China's nearest major landmass, Hainan island.

"The principles and approaches laid out in the agreement were reached through a series of careful and meticulous consultations between both sides that paved the way for a convergence of ideas without compromising national positions," foreign ministry spokeswoman Teresita Daza said in a statement.

"The (Chinese foreign ministry) spokesperson's statement regarding prior notification and on-site confirmation is inaccurate," Daza said.

Daza said the Philippines "will continue to assert our rights and jurisdiction in our maritime zones", which included Second Thomas Shoal.

The fish-rich shoal has been a focus of violent clashes between Chinese and Philippine ships in recent months as Beijing steps up efforts to push its claims to almost the entire South China Sea.

An aerial view shows the BRP Sierra Madre on the contested Second Thomas Shoal, locally known as Ayungin, in the South China Sea, on Mar 9, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS)

A Filipino sailor lost a thumb in the latest Jun 17 confrontation when Chinese coast guard members wielding knives, sticks and an axe foiled a Philippine Navy attempt to resupply its troops.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday that Beijing had agreed to an arrangement with the Philippines over Filipino resupply missions "based on our principled position" that the shoal was part of Chinese territory.

"Should the Philippines need to send living necessities to the personnel living on the warship, China is willing to allow it in a humanitarian spirit if the Philippines informs China in advance and after on-site verification is conducted," the spokesperson said.

But it would "absolutely not accept" the delivery of large amounts of construction materials to the ship and attempts to "build fixed facilities or permanent outpost".

The resupply arrangement followed talks with Beijing this month when the countries agreed to "de-escalate tensions" and increase the number of communication channels to resolve maritime disagreements between them.

A handful of Filipino troops are stationed on the decrepit BRP Sierra Madre that was deliberately grounded on Second Thomas Shoal in 1999 to assert Manila's claims to the area.

They require frequent resupplies for food, water and other necessities as well as transport for personnel rotations.

12. Drone warfare in Ukraine prompts fresh thinking in helicopter tactics

Drone warfare in Ukraine prompts fresh thinking in helicopter tactics

militarytimes.com · by Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo · July 19, 2024

MILAN — Air defense and drone warfare observed in Ukraine are changing the nature of military helicopter tactics, moving the platforms’ center of gravity away from the tip of the spear to an emphasis on combat-support missions along the front lines, according to officials and issue experts.

The shift is animated in large part by proliferating ground-based air defenses that make manned flight over the battlefield almost impossible.

“In 2024, helicopters at the front, due to the threat and saturation of anti-aircraft means, primarily perform fire support along the line of combat engagement, using the toss bombing tactics [unaimed strikes by unguided missiles] and have also been a means of countering unmanned systems,” said Serhii Kuzan, a former adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

He recalled the Russian emphasis on helicopters during the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Moscow’s troops had planned a large-scale landing operation, which eventually failed, at the Antonov airport near Hostomel, only 25 kilometers from Kyiv.

The vulnerability of combat helicopters has translated into a high number of losses on the Russian side. In February, a report published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies found that the Russian Aerospace Forces had lost 40% of their pre-war Ka-52 Hokum-B attack helicopter fleet.

“Russian rotary losses have continued, but changes in tactics and the introduction of new weapons, in particular the LMUR (also known as the Kh-39) air-to-surface missile, which provides a greater stand-off range, have had an effect,” Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at IISS told Defense News.

Maj. Gen. Pierre Meyer, commander of the French Army Light Aviation (ALAT), said Russia’s helicopter-based landing attempt should be a cautionary tale for military planners.

“At Hostomel, we saw Russian helicopters intervening almost on parade for two days, at a certain height and arriving en masse, tightly packed – in the end, it’s not a question of whether helicopters still have their place, it’s how we use them,” Meyer told the audience at the Paris Air Forum last month.

“Had we acted like the Russian helicopters, with the mode of action I’m talking about, we would’ve had exactly the same losses,” he said.

Meyer said there is utility in teaming helicopters with drones, as many Western armed forces are already doing, with unmanned aerial vehicles providing additional “aero-combat action and maneuver” to military choppers.

According to Kuzan, the former Ukrainian defense adviser, helicopters could soon become integrated with unmanned forces, “using their command control points, powerful communication relays or as a mobile means of radio-electronic warfare and intelligence.”

Bruno Even, the CEO of Airbus Helicopters, said rotary aviation can still play its trump card of all-around utility.

“Depending on the conflict, the attack helicopter has its rightful place and role to play – their use may have to evolve towards stand-off weapons that allow the aircraft to intervene from a greater distance,” he said at the Paris Air Forum.

Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris contributed to this report.

Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. She covers a wide range of topics related to military procurement and international security, and specializes in reporting on the aviation sector. She is based in Milan, Italy.

13. The Mission and the Bureaucracy: How Administrative Requirements Hinder Warfighting

Written by every (and any) company grade officer in the military :-) 

When I was a battalion commander one of our warrant officers conducted an analysis of all training requirements imposed on the battalion from every level above and informed me that there was no time for anyone to implement any battalion level training guidance and that we did not have time to execute all the externally imposed "mandatory" requirements much less anything that we thought was important.

Excerpts:

Time is a limited resource, and warfighting has been placed on the backburner behind the deluge of required company administrative actions, trainings, and programs. The Army as a whole would benefit if senior leaders recognized the breadth of company functions and scope of required tasks being demanded of company leaders and decided when, where, and how to reduce them. The Army is right to place warfighting back at the forefront of its priorities. But this can only be achieved by meaningfully cutting back on current administrative priorities from all Army entities.

The Mission and the Bureaucracy: How Administrative Requirements Hinder Warfighting - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Brent Stout · July 19, 2024

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There are about seventy-five “additional” duties required of all US Army companies. Company commanders must assign two or more junior leaders to each duty, requiring each assigned individual to attend schools, conduct online training, receive regular inspections, and create and maintain continuity binders and knowledge management systems. Each additional duty pulls squad leaders away from their squads and platoon leaders away from their platoons. Key leaders at the company level are stuck behind computers for most of their workdays and on many of their off days just trying to keep up. Unsurprisingly, companies struggle to find the time and personnel resources to shoulder this administrative and clerical burden while also accomplishing their top priority: warfighting.

Unit armorer, master driver, equal opportunity leader, and sexual harassment and assault victim advocate—these are a few of the commonly known duties required of all companies across the Army. On top of these, there is an array of others— like communications security custodian, government purchase card holder, unit movement officer, and hazardous material endorsement officer—that require extended specialized training, often held at the corps or installation levels. It is not uncommon for the process to train and certify a government purchase card holder or communications security custodian to last anywhere from six to twelve months, which can put companies and even battalions in an operational bind, forcing them to rely on adjacent units or find ways to make do until they have their own personnel trained and certified in these critical roles.

But additional duties are just one piece of a broader problem that Army companies face. From frequent reporting requirements to maintaining policies to managing a range of certification programs, leaders at this level are challenged to devote the time and resources necessary to training and preparing their units for the challenges of the modern battlefield.

Reporting Requirements

Apart from additional duties, companies across the Army are commonly required to submit anywhere from three dozen to four dozen monthly reports, each requiring information gathering, preparation, review, validation, processing, storage, and submission. The process of completing and submitting reports can tie up the equivalent of one week every month for company command teams. The burden is amplified by redundancies across reports—there is scope for consolidation, for example, among the unit commander’s financial report, the BAH (basic allowance for housing) validation report, and the basic needs analysis report. Other reports that could be consolidated include the unit manning report with the rating scheme, alert roster, readiness roster, and soldier and family readiness group roster. Burdensome reports like the troops-to-task report rarely feed actual decisions, processes, or systems, but instead pull platoon sergeants and operations sergeants away from warfighting operations and missions, on top of requiring many hours to complete every week. If leaders, and specifically commanders at echelon, do not understand all that is being asked of their reporting subordinates, it is easy to double down and require yet another report, PowerPoint slide, or meeting.

Policies and Operating Procedures

A quick scan of the Army Publishing Directorate’s website shows that there are roughly fifteen thousand active Army regulations, Army directives, general orders, ALARACT (all Army activities) messages, technical manuals and bulletins, Army doctrine publications, field manuals, and training circulars, many of which individual Army leaders are expected to reference, understand, and enforce. At the unit level, commanders are expected to publish and display their own policy letters and the policy letters of higher echelons. Regardless of how easy it might be to copy and modify one or two dozen policy letters from the higher echelon, it requires a lot of time to find, reference, update, understand, disseminate, display, and apply the abundance of policy letters and the periodic updates from the company, battalion, brigade, division, corps, command, and Department of the Army.

Like unit commander policy letters, standard operating procedures (SOPs) specify how the unit will operate in its current structure under the current command. SOPs are meant to increase unit effectiveness by standardizing and streamlining operations. US Army companies normally have anywhere from twelve to twenty of these, with the tactical SOP, plans SOP, command post SOP, and maintenance SOP at the forefront. Others might include the arms rooms, safety, supply, communications, medical, barracks, and motor pool SOPs. Unit SOPs are inspected at least annually, with some, like a maintenance SOP, reaching hundreds of pages in length. The unrealistic volume of documents to update, inspect, and reference quickly inundates and overwhelms company leaders and simply dilutes the effectiveness that SOPs are supposed to provide.

Annual Training and Leader Certification Programs

The current suite of annual training requirements fosters an ethically ambiguous environment where people are tempted to forge certificates of completion or skip through online training on mute. The value of various required trainings is debatable, but few directly contribute to more ready formations or better warfighting. That does not mean there is no place for them; but it does mean that they are in competition for time with activities that do directly improve warfighting. Recurrent training and certification programs include the Threat Awareness and Reporting Program; antiterrorism courses; survival, evasion resistance, and escape education; ISOPREP (isolated personnel report) training; courses on cyber awareness and network acceptable use policy; training on how to safeguard personally identifiable information; leaders safety courses; classes on the Family Advocacy Program; the Azimuth Check (formerly the Global Assessment Tool); Digital Training Management System leader certification; personnel readiness training; installation People First programs; MEDPROS (Medical Protection System) courses for leaders; equal opportunity training; and courses on SHARP (sexual harassment/assault response and prevention programs. That is not an exhaustive list.

In-house leader academy and certification programs are prevalent across the Army at the battalion and brigade echelons, usually in the form of squad leader, platoon sergeant, platoon leader, executive officer, and command team certifications. Army installations host consolidated courses for company and battalion executive officers with an even bigger emphasis placed on the pre-command course for incoming company commanders and first sergeants. There is laudable intent behind internal leader certification programs to prepare incoming leaders for their positions through information dissemination and program familiarization. The return on in-house leader academies and certification programs can be high, especially when there are high levels of chain of command engagement and group reviews of current events and Army initiatives. Regardless, these events still fill slots on training calendars, pull company leaders away from their companies, and may not always lead to better warfighting.

Other Required Administrative Actions

On top of these additional duties, reports, policies, procedures, training requirements, and certification programs, there are the many daily company administrative functions and responsibilities. These range from adjudicating personnel actions like awards to completing evaluations, and from counseling and leave processing to conducting professional development events, physical fitness testing, and height and weight measurement. Company leaders must initiate bars to reenlistment, manage UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) actions, update signature cards, and ensure medical readiness compliance. They must help soldiers access and navigate career skills and transition assistance programs, Substance Use Disorder Clinical Care programs, and family care plans. They are responsible for personnel flags, high-risk reviews, and health and welfare inspections. They play a role in awarding Army good conduct medals as well as promotions and reenlistments, and they facilitate motorcycle counseling and privately owned weapon validation and approvals. Additional commander responsibilities include reviewing training plans, creating and briefing operations orders, conducting commander’s inquiries, adjudicating legal action, attending higher-echelon events like professional development sessions and hail and farewell gatherings, maintaining property accountability through cyclic inventories and reconciliation, and making slide updates for company, battalion, and brigade meetings. Little wonder, then, that company commanders might end up primarily concerned with garrison administrative operations over warfighting.

The Source of So Many Administrative Requirements

The sheer number of additional duties, reporting requirements, policies, and administrative procedures comes as the result of fragmenting and bureaucratizing company functions in an effort to reduce risk and institutionalize consistency and redundancy at echelon. Individual staff sections and Army-wide installation and program managers likely have little awareness of the other company priorities, lines of effort, and training requirements, and may be quick to add more requirements and inspections. Many required additional duties—like master fitness trainer, master driver, master resiliency trainer, master marksmanship trainer, retention officer, dispatching delegate, fuel handler, and unit movement officer—are, in reality, components of organic duties already held by company junior leaders. Other duties seek to assign personnel to absorb the administrative burden of Army-wide systems of record, like Digital Training Management System operator, Defense Travel System operator, Global Combat Support System–Army operator, Army Records Information Management System manager, and publications officer. By formally institutionalizing these lines of effort, it builds consistency across the Army’s vast formation, but at the expense of adding inspections, creating continuity binders, and sometimes even hiring and maintaining installation civilian program managers. Of course, we need to understand the potential repercussions of cutting additional duties—what happen, for instance, if each company did not have a voting assistance officer, a repair and utilities representative, a motorcycle mentor, a morale, welfare, and recreation coordinator, a fire marshal, a container control officer, or a credentialing assistance officer. But the reality is that if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

Who Cares

During a recent leader professional development event for company commanders in my brigade, we reviewed an executive summary of the April 2024 Joint General Officer Forum. During the event, General Randy George, the Army chief of staff, reiterated the Army’s number one priority of warfighting, stating that retaining this focus would require a shift away from a culture of bureaucracy and toward a culture of continuous innovation. He stated that there is interplay between leadership and risk-taking. Each additional duty, policy, report, and SOP is a response to a previously identified issue, so it is going to require strong leaders who are willing to take risk to reduce the redundant and unnecessary requirements currently distracting companies from warfighting. As General George stated at the forum, “We won’t change things without being very knowledgeable about them.” Leaders at echelon will need to understand the full volume of what is being asked of companies before they can direct change, and not just what is listed in a battalion weekly tasking order, but everything demanded from the Army, installation programs, and other external entities.

Current Efforts

Lieutenant General Sean Bernabe, the commanding general of III Armored Corps, has taken note of the expectations being placed on company leaders and has looked at ways to revamp the Fort Cavazos company commander and first sergeant course to realign company priorities and reduce administrative requirements. Reducing required duties and requirements is difficult, as it increases risk. You cannot simply stop performing certain tasks, especially if they are tied to other unit lines of effort, if they are bureaucratically convoluted, or if they are connected to unit or leader metrics of success and performance. The chief of staff of the Army could tell a company commander to stop inputting data into the Army’s Digital Training Management System if it doesn’t help the company improve warfighting, but if that commander’s battalion and brigade uses it to track training completion and assess training schedule compliance, it’s going to stay.

In September 2023, inspectors from the US Army Forces Command Inspector General conducted a follow-up inspection of companies and battalions within the command. Their investigation spanned nine installations, including more than one hundred companies from forty-six battalions across twenty-six brigades. The objective of the inspection was to identify primary sources of schedule disruption and inefficiency and to assess leader engagement at echelon to implement directives and initiatives from their higher headquarters. Among its top findings, the inspection concluded that poor staff work and lacking communication between echelons caused commanders to fail to provide the predictable training environments outlined in Army Regulation 350-1, Army Training and Leader Development and Field Manual 7.0, Training. They found that company leaders stayed at work hours after releasing soldiers to complete administrative tasks, and that the unpredictability at battalion and below echelons was regularly the result of taskings being published well inside the doctrinal timelines. Even small tasks can tie up key leaders and equipment. The inspection found that companies sometimes receive taskings within an hour of execution, and even after directed suspense timelines. It recommended additional inspections, but what it did not do was identify programs and lines of effort that distract units from their priority warfighting missions and pull them away from complying with their training plans and calendars, nor did it identify redundant Army programs to cut or offer recommendations to reduce or eliminate any Army directives or initiatives.

Bottom Line

If the Army wants to modernize and focus on improving our warfighting capabilities, the bureaucracy must be reduced in the form of cutbacks on administrative and clerical requirements and responsibilities at the company level. The service must also seek to reduce Army-wide directives, initiatives, and programs. We cannot ignore the time and material resources that excessive administrative requirements impose, but we can reduce their impact through changing requirements at higher echelons and through selective focus and leader and manager competencies at lower echelons. Ultimately, since information requirements are directed from the higher headquarters, any course corrections or systemic changes realistically can only occur from the top down.

Time is a limited resource, and warfighting has been placed on the backburner behind the deluge of required company administrative actions, trainings, and programs. The Army as a whole would benefit if senior leaders recognized the breadth of company functions and scope of required tasks being demanded of company leaders and decided when, where, and how to reduce them. The Army is right to place warfighting back at the forefront of its priorities. But this can only be achieved by meaningfully cutting back on current administrative priorities from all Army entities.

Captain Brent Stout recently completed his assignment as the commander of the 104th Engineer Construction Company at Fort Cavazos, Texas. He earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the US Military Academy at West Point and a master’s degree in engineering management from Missouri University of Science and Technology. Captain Stout is currently enrolled in advanced civil studies at Texas A&M for nuclear engineering followed by an assignment teaching in the Department of Physics and Nuclear Engineering at West Point beginning in the fall of 2026.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Capt. Tobias Cukale, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Brent Stout · July 19, 2024

14. The Triumph of the Houthis (and Iran)

The Triumph of the Houthis (and Iran)

The U.S. told Israel it would deter the terrorists in Yemen. It has failed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-triumph-of-the-houthis-and-iran-biden-tel-aviv-drones-red-sea-94f5e14a?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=1&mc_cid=675277f0d6&mc_eid=70bf478f36

By The Editorial Board

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July 21, 2024 5:51 pm ET

Fire and smoke rising following Israeli airstrikes in the port city of Hodeidah, Yemen on Saturday. PHOTO: HOUTHIS MEDIA CENTER/HANDOUT/SHUTTERSTOCK

The bombing exchange between the Houthis of Yemen and Israel over the weekend isn’t merely another military escalation in the Middle East. It represents the failure of the Biden Administration’s policy of appeasement to contain the Iran-backed Houthis as they terrorize commercial shipping in the Red Sea, Israel and the U.S. Navy.

Israel bombed the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, including oil and gas depots, a power station, and cranes used in Houthi military operations. This was retaliation after a Houthi drone evaded Israeli air defenses Friday and landed in Tel Aviv near the U.S. Consulate, which may have been the target. One Israeli civilian died and 10 were wounded. What if the drone had killed Americans?

The Houthis have attacked Israel from Yemen more than 200 times since Oct. 7, though Israel’s defenses have managed to intercept most drones and missiles. The terror group is boasting that its drones, supplied by Iran, are becoming sophisticated enough to make it past Israeli radar and interceptors.

The Biden Administration told Israel nine months ago that the U.S. would handle the Houthi threat and it should stick to playing defense. But the attack on Tel Aviv shows that the U.S. effort is a bust.

The Houthis have all but shut down Western shipping in the Red Sea, at enormous cost to global businesses and consumers. They continue to attack U.S. naval vessels, which have been forced to play a high-stakes game of catch the drones and missiles. That one or more haven’t killed sailors and damaged ships is a tribute to U.S. naval training and technology. But sooner or later one might get through and result in American casualties.

Why won’t Mr. Biden and the Administration’s Commander-in-Chief-by-committee do more? For the same reason they’ve responded so tepidly to other attacks by Iranian-backed proxies in Iraq and Syria.

They know Iran is the Houthis’ supplier and terror master, and that the U.S. would have to hurt Iran militarily to make enough of a deterrent impression. That would probably mean sinking much of Iran’s navy. Mr. Biden and his political advisers are afraid such a U.S. response would lead to Iranian escalation and more fighting before the U.S. election.

If history is a guide, it’s more likely that Iran would talk tough but back off—as it did after Donald Trump ordered the killing of Iranian terror chief Qassem Soleimani in 2020, and after Israel bombed an air-defense radar inside Iran following Tehran’s April attack on Israel.

The White House is hoping a cease-fire in Gaza will cause the Houthis to cease and desist. But the Houthis and Iran have learned they can terrorize and kill Israelis and Americans at little cost. Even if they stop for a time, they can resume the shooting any time they wish. The Houthis and their Iranian sponsors are winning their showdown with the West, and the result is likely to be more American and Israeli casualties in the future.

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Appeared in the July 22, 2024, print edition as 'The Triumph of the Houthis (and Iran)'.

​15. Trump and Zelenskyy hold phone call — and Ukraine says it liked what it heard

Trump and Zelenskyy hold phone call — and Ukraine says it liked what it heard

By MILES J. HERSZENHORN and PAUL MCLEARY

07/19/2024 07:40 PM EDT

Politico

A Ukrainian official says Trump pledged to “achieve a just peace in Ukraine” if he gets a second term.

According to both sides, Friday’s call was diplomatic, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy congratulating former President Donald Trump on officially becoming the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. | Evan Vucci, File/AP Photo

07/19/2024 07:40 PM EDT

Former President Donald Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and unlike their last controversial phone call, both sides claimed to be satisfied with how the conversation went.

Trump said that it was a “very good call” and that he will work to negotiate a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv. A person close to Zelenskyy who requested anonymity to discuss the private conversation said it went “exceedingly well” and that Trump pledged to “achieve a just peace in Ukraine” if he wins back the White House.

Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X that he and Trump agreed to schedule a “personal meeting” to discuss “what steps can make peace fair and truly lasting.”

Trump has pledged to swiftly end the war in Ukraine if reelected in November, going so far as to state he would negotiate peace before he assumes office in January, and has disparagingly called Zelenskyy “the greatest salesman of all time” for his efforts to secure billions of dollars in military, economic and humanitarian aid from Washington.

The war in Ukraine was not a major topic of discussion at the Republican National Convention this week in Milwaukee, though as Trump accepted the Republican nomination on Thursday night, he boasted that “I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created, including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine, which would have never happened if I was president.”

The conversation came just a few days shy of the five-year anniversary of the phone call between the two leaders that led to Trump’s first impeachment, after he asked Zelenskyy to consider investigating Joe Biden on discredited allegations.

According to both sides, Friday’s call was more traditionally diplomatic, with Zelenskyy congratulating Trump on officially becoming the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

Zelenskyy initiated the call nearly a week ago after the assassination attempt against Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the person close to Zelenskyy said. Zelenskyy himself was the subject of an assassination attempt by Russia in the early days of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

The prospect of Trump’s reelection has alarmed officials in Europe and Ukraine who are concerned that his administration will halt U.S. military and economic support for Kyiv.

Those anxieties only increased in recent weeks as Trump met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the final day of the NATO summit in Washington and picked Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate.

Vance once described Zelenskyy’s efforts to restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders as “fantastical” and has stated that he “doesn’t care” what happens in Ukraine.

A Trump spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.

Though Trump’s recent foreign policy comments have been cause for concern in Kyiv and other EU capitals, Zelenskyy’s aides and advisers were thrilled by how well the call went, according to the person close to Zelenskyy.

“I, as your next President of the United States, will bring peace to the world and end the war that has cost so many lives and devastated countless innocent families,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after he got off the phone with Zelenskyy.

“Both sides will be able to come together and negotiate a deal that ends the violence and paves a path forward to prosperity,” Trump added.

Politico

16. Myanmar's civil war has seen a devastating increase in attacks on schools, researchers say

Another forgotten war.

Excerpts;

Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, which leads the pro-democracy struggle against military rule, estimated in January that more than 570 children under age 18 had been killed in various circumstances by security forces. Upwards of 8,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict, according to the multinational Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Myanmar Witness put most of the responsibility for the destruction of schools on airstrikes conducted by the Myanmar military. Air attacks have become more frequent as pro-democracy forces and ethnic minority armed groups allied with them have made gains on the battlefield.

The military “has had to resort to more and more airstrikes, often with less and less appropriate aircraft, as they lose effective access to the ground” as a result of offensives by the resistance, Lawrence told The Associated Press.

The military government has consistently denied targeting civilians or using disproportionate force.

Myanmar's civil war has seen a devastating increase in attacks on schools, researchers say

BY  SAM HARSHBARGER

Updated 3:47 AM EDT, July 20, 2024

AP · July 20, 2024

1 of 3 |FILE - Smoke rises from debris and corrugated roofing of a school structure that was burned to the ground in Taung Myint village in the Magway region of Myanmar on Sunday, Oct. 16, 2022. An intensification of fighting in Myanmar’s civil war has brought a sharp increase in destructive attacks on schools, a group that monitors armed conflict in the Southeast Asian nation said in a report Saturday, July 20, 2024. (AP Photo, File)

BANGKOK (AP) — An intensification of fighting in Myanmar’s civil war has brought a sharp increase in destructive attacks on schools, a group that monitors armed conflict in the Southeast Asian nation said in a report Saturday.

Myanmar Witness said the attacks have further strained Myanmar’s already fractured school system, taking away education for millions of children who have also been forced to flee their homes, miss vaccinations and suffer from inadequate nutrition.

The group, a project of the United Kingdom-based Center for Information Resilience, identified a total of 174 attacks on Myanmar schools and universities since the military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi three years ago. It said the count came from evidence in social media and news reports.

Other groups have suggested higher numbers of attacks. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, an advocacy group based in New York, counted over 245 reports of attacks on schools and 190 reports of military use of educational facilities in 2022-23.

The 2021 military takeover was met with widespread nonviolent demonstrations for democracy, but those were crushed with lethal force. Many opponents of military rule then took up arms, and large parts of the country are now embroiled in conflict. The military government is estimated to control less than half the country.

“Education underpinned the democratic movement in Myanmar, but today Myanmar’s youth are witnessing their schools — and life opportunities — reduced to rubble,“ said Matt Lawrence, project director at Myanmar Witness. “If education is not protected throughout Myanmar, the next generation’s view of the world risks being driven by factionalism and war, rather than hope and reason.”

Student enrollment in Myanmar dropped 80% from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 through 2022, a year after the army’s takeover, according to the humanitarian group Save the Children. By mid-2022, about half the country’s children, or 7.8 million, were not attending schools, it said.

Myanmar Witness said it documented reports of 64 fatalities and 106 injuries associated with the 176 attacks on schools, though most could not be verified.

Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, which leads the pro-democracy struggle against military rule, estimated in January that more than 570 children under age 18 had been killed in various circumstances by security forces. Upwards of 8,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict, according to the multinational Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Myanmar Witness put most of the responsibility for the destruction of schools on airstrikes conducted by the Myanmar military. Air attacks have become more frequent as pro-democracy forces and ethnic minority armed groups allied with them have made gains on the battlefield.

The military “has had to resort to more and more airstrikes, often with less and less appropriate aircraft, as they lose effective access to the ground” as a result of offensives by the resistance, Lawrence told The Associated Press.

The military government has consistently denied targeting civilians or using disproportionate force.

The report said resistance forces also have attacked schools, but much less frequently and less destructively, often using drones with small explosive loads.

Education is also being disrupted by other factors. Many young people, including older students, have taken a greater role in the resistance. Thousands of teachers left their jobs after the army seized power and joined a civil disobedience movement aimed at disabling military control over government institutions. And the conflict’s shifting front lines make it difficult for teachers to provide lessons on a reliable basis.

Some teachers have established or joined schools outside the reach of the military’s control.

“What we see is almost a dual system that’s developing in Myanmar, where there are state-sponsored schools and then schools sponsored by other parties and retribution for participating in either system,” said Lisa Chung Bender, executive director of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.

“It puts children and educators in an impossible position where they have to go through checkpoints and say where they’re going, and if it’s determined that they’re going to an enemy school, whichever enemy that is, they can be harassed, detained, or physically punished,” she said.

The lack of proper access to education is only part of a deepening humanitarian crisis in Myanmar. More than 3 million people have been displaced from their homes by fighting, most since the military’s seizure of power in 2021, and the country suffers from a deepening economic crisis.

A report in June by the United Nations Children’s Fund on global child food poverty said 35% of Myanmar’s children live in food poverty, defined as having access to half or fewer of the eight food groups children need daily for healthy growth and development.

According to the U.N. Development Program, over half of Myanmar’s children now live in poverty as the country’s nascent middle class has disappeared.

AP · July 20, 2024

17. The U.S. Department of Deterrence

Conclusion:

Deterrence is vital and essential for U.S. grand strategy. It is also inevitably complex and frustrating. In the best of all worlds, one should not have to choose between winning and warning, between defense and deterrence. But few would advocate designing national security on this “best case” basis. Integrated deterrence has yet to grapple with these tradeoffs, assuming them to be limited or non-existent. When one relaxes such assumptions to consider tradeoffs such as those between deterring and defending (or deceiving and disarming), we again face dilemmas in the implementation of this grand strategic vision. This requires a clear sense of our own national priorities and of the limitations of available tools.

The U.S. Department of Deterrence - War on the Rocks

ERIK GARTZKE AND JON LINDSAY

warontherocks.com · by Erik Gartzke · July 22, 2024

Madeleine Albright once asked Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Nobody ever asked that question about nuclear weapons. Not using them is the whole point.

Deterrence thinking, far from being in decline, is now more fashionable than ever. Deterring China in particular calls for all hands on deck. The notion of “integrated deterrence” is thus a key pilar of the current U.S. National Security Strategy. While buzzwords may change, the basic idea is sure to feature in future strategies as well.

Integrating all forces, in all domains, in all regions, with all allies, for all kinds of conflict is obviously a daunting task. The fact that it may also be impossible has not stopped the U.S. military from trying. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Defense is struggling to become, in effect, the Department of Deterrence.

“Defense” is already a euphemism. The U.S. military is specialized for war. Its services and combatant commands are specialized for fighting in the land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains. But deterrence is a political function. National leaders ought to make difficult choices about what they really want, how much they are willing to pay for it, and where they are willing to compromise. Yet “deterrence” has become a euphemism as well, covering up hard tradeoffs about national interests.

We question whether the same forces that are specialized for winning modern wars can also be used to prevent them, or vice versa. As we argue in a new book on deterrence, forces that excel at “winning” are not always ideal for “warning.” Other policy tools are even better for “watching” in secrecy or even “working” with others. These are very different political activities, enabled by different specialized organizations.

In the first part of this essay, we discuss the enduring aspiration to integrate strategy. The second part likens integrated deterrence to combined arms warfare at the grand strategic level and highlights some important disanalogies. In the third we focus on the tension between military forces specialized for “winning” modern wars and nuclear forces specialized for “warning” about them. Finally, we discuss the importance of managing the strategic tradeoffs of deterrence in practice.

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Aspiration vs. Implementation

Integrated deterrence is not new. Emerging threats are often accompanied by calls for reinvigorating deterrence with a new adjective. The George W. Bush administration sought “tailored deterrence” to mobilize nuanced capabilities for regional problems of counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation. The Obama administration worried about “cross-domain deterrence” in response to challenges in space and cyberspace, dramatized by the test of a Chinese anti-satellite weapon and a barrage of Russian cyber-attacks against Estonia in 2007. Turning cross-domain deterrence on its head, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review aimed to deter “an unprecedented range and mix of threats, including major conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear, space, and cyber threats, and violent non-state actors.” The special operations community even floated the notion of “comprehensive deterrence” to counter low-intensity threats as well in today’s complex strategic environment.

Not to be outdone, China developed a concept of “integrated strategic deterrence” to combine conventional, nuclear, and informational tools to offset American strengths. And to counter the looming threat of China, the Biden administration responded with “integrated deterrence.” The phrase first appeared in a speech by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at a change of command ceremony at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command on April 30, 2021. Austin called for U.S. personnel to “rise above the old stovepipes” because “deterrence now demands far more coordination, innovation, and cooperation from us all.” The 2022 National Security Strategy later defined integrated deterrence as “the seamless combination of capabilities to convince potential adversaries that the costs of their hostile activities outweigh their benefits” and “working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our network of Alliances and partnerships.”

The enduring aspiration for a seamless strategy belies the fact that there are many seams in practice. The notion of “integrated deterrence” takes longstanding efforts to integrate “joint operations” and “whole of government” policies to an unprecedented extreme. The Department of Defense was established in 1949 to combine the old Departments of War and the Navy, along with a new Department of the Air Force. Each service had different ideas about strategy. While the Army prepared to fight and win in wartime, the Navy patrolled the waves in peacetime, and the Air Force championed a new doctrine of strategic bombing, in which the transition from peace to war might occur without warning. Strategic Air Command, the forerunner to U.S. Strategic Command, grappled with the novel strategic problems of nuclear weapons. Subsequent technological innovation in space and cyberspace has culminated in new functional organizations like U.S. Space Force and Cyber Command.

Every new warfighting domain increases the integration challenge, no matter what buzzword is used to describe it. Getting the Department of Defense’s many services and combatant commands to sing from the same sheet of music has always been a hard problem. Wrangling the fractious components of the department has defied several ambitious secretaries such as Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld. The post-9/11 challenges of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency piled on additional challenges of integrating with the intelligence community, Department of State, and law enforcement agencies as well. Chinese military modernization, combined with more aggressive foreign policy under Xi Jinping, now puts a premium on both preparing for and avoiding war with China. Integrated deterrence, from this perspective, is mainly a bureaucratic problem of getting parochial organizations to work together for the common good.

Operations vs. Strategy

It is tempting to think about integrated deterrence, accordingly, as a straightforward application of proven operational concepts, but at the strategic level instead. In combined arms warfare, for instance, infantry provide flexibility and reconnaissance, tanks provide mobile fires and protection, artillery and aircraft deliver massed fires, and helicopters provide battlefield mobility. In “joint” or “multidomain” operations, likewise, navies project power on land, air forces shape the battlefield, everyone relies on satellite communications and intelligence, and mutual cooperation across all domains creates warfighting synergies. The intelligent orchestration of diverse specialties makes the whole team much stronger than the sum of its parts.

Implementing the modern system of force employment requires extensive training, refined doctrine, and high-quality troops. These luxuries are not available to every nation. Even for the U.S. military, achieving joint command and control was (and remains) a long, difficult institutional saga. But at the end of the day, integrated joint operations have enabled U.S. forces to prevail against less integrated foes, at least in battles if not in wars. Surely integrated deterrence might deliver similar benefits?

Operational integration across domains is challenging in practice. No doubt, integration at the strategic or grand strategic level is even more challenging. Yet integrated deterrence aspires to coordinate not only the entire Department of Defense but also agencies across the rest of the U.S. government with different administrative cultures and political constituencies — as well as U.S. coalition partners, sovereign nations with their own peculiar interests and defense politics.

The bureaucratic hurdles of implementation are formidable, perhaps insurmountable. Yet the strategic assumptions of integrated deterrence may be even more problematic. Operational integration, after all, serves the common ends of war, but deterrence serves many different political ends besides. Deterrence aims to produce strategic stability, of course, but appeasement might accomplish that, too. Deterrence thus also aims to protect or improve the status quo, and to do so without breaking the bank or compromising military effectiveness. What leader would not want to get their way, at low cost, without war, yet still win a war if deterrence fails? The problem is that these desirable goals cannot be accomplished at the same time, or to the same degree.

Winning vs. Warning

The 2022 National Security Strategy assumes that “Integrated deterrence is enabled by combat-credible forces prepared to fight and win, as needed, and backstopped by a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.” The same forces that are capable of “winning” in combat are also supposed to improve the “warning” needed for deterrence. This is often true. Military effectiveness is the foundation of deterrence by denial, which some consider to be more effective than punishment, especially in conventional deterrence.

But what happens when the means of winning are at odds with the means of warning? What happens when combat-capable forces are not combat-credible? Many of the hallmarks of modern military power — multidomain maneuver forces, automated weaponry, secret cyber and space operations — entail distinct liabilities for deterrence. It is possible for the U.S. military to be combat-capable without being combat-credible.

Naval forces, for instance, are very useful for projecting power across the world’s oceans. But their very mobility makes it hard for states to credibly commit to sending the fleet to any one location, or keeping it there, at any given point in time. Reliance on offshore balancing to deter China, for instance, raises questions about whether the United States will be willing to bet the U.S. Navy on a crisis over Taiwan. Flexible options — highly desirable for global power projection and maneuver — weaken deterrence commitments.

Automation produces a related problem. Drones help to lower the cost of intervention abroad and improve force protection. But it becomes difficult for adversaries to judge the resolve of an attacker that, quite literally, has no skin in the game. Unmanned options — highly desirable for limiting cost and risk in war — undermine costly signaling.

Many special technical operations in space and cyberspace are highly classified. But deterrence signals must be revealed to their target, and the revelation must be specific enough to be credible. It is not possible to reveal unique capabilities that can be easily countered, since the act of communicating a threat disarms it. Worse, secret weapons and sensitive methods create private information, which raises the risk of war. Secret options — highly desirable for seizing the advantage in war—undermine strategic stability.

It is telling that U.S. Cyber Command spent most of its first decade arguing that deterrence is not appropriate for cyberspace. Instead it adopted a doctrine of “persistent engagement” and “defending forward” to actively contest threat actors. This contrasts starkly with U.S. Strategic Command, where deterrence is the raison d’être for nuclear weapons. Strategic Command is successful when its capabilities are never used, but Cyber Command is successful when it is capabilities are used “persistently.” But now cyber warriors find themselves in the awkward position of explaining how cyber contributes to “integrated deterrence.” An underappreciated feature of nuclear forces is their relative transparency. Because there is no perfect defense against concerted nuclear attack, and even one nuclear bomb can incinerate a city, states are paradoxically free to share information about their nuclear capabilities with one another. This in turn leads nuclear weapons to be unusually effective in achieving deterrence. The ability to brandish nuclear capabilities without diminishing their power to hurt is one of the most consequential but misunderstood attributes of nuclear security.

Secrecy is the opposite of transparency. As Gen. John Hyten said, “You can’t deter people if everything you have is in the black.” Worse, secret advantages can undermine the deterrent benefits of transparency. Consider the use of offensive cyber operations to target nuclear command-and-control systems. This provides an invaluable “left of launch” counterforce option in case deterrence fails. But cyber exploits must be carefully concealed to be viable. Private information about cyber advantages in turn increases the chance that deterrence will fail, as wargames have demonstrated. Sometimes integration creates synergy, as in combined arms warfare, but integration can also produce painful tradeoffs.

As much as integration sounds appealing in abstract, and policy coordination is mandatory, the heterogeneity of intent and action between “winning” and “warning” — to say nothing of other objectives — requires specialization, rather than integration. Indeed, deterrence began here. The advent of the nuclear era dramatized the difference between “winning” a war and “warning” about one. As Bernard Brodie famously observed shortly after atomic bombs were used by the United States against Japan, nuclear weapons are more useful for deterrence than warfighting. Avoiding nuclear war while retaining political influence became the essential dilemma of the Cold War, and remains so today, even or especially when conventional force is being used or contemplated.

Managing Deterrence in Practice

The vast literature on deterrence emerged in response to a very specific military specialization — nuclear weapons. Scholarship on deterrence continues to burgeon in the 21st century. Ironically, technological specialization itself never found an explicit articulation in nuclear deterrence theory. Strategists should not assume that other forms of military specialization will improve deterrence as well. The problem is not only that deterrence depends on perceptions and beliefs, but also that deterrence is a relationship between many means and many ends.

Specialized services and combatant commands are not just repositories of operational expertise or management nodes. They are also specialized instruments for different strategic goals. Some military instruments — for example, ground forces and nuclear weapons — have specific advantages for the classical deterrence goals of improving credibility and preventing war. Other military capabilities — such as stealthy and maneuverable air and maritime forces — sacrifice credibility in return for enhanced warfighting. Emerging technologies in space and cyberspace are particularly well suited to intelligence collection and deception, which differ in subtle ways from traditional strategies of deterrence and defense. Non-military tools like cultural soft power or economic inducements, in turn, may be better suited for stabilizing strategies that eschew conflict altogether (i.e., accommodation or disarmament).

If we conceive of deterrence as containing various “ingredients,” then competent practitioners are faced with difficult decisions about how to combine these ingredients in order to produce “recipes” designed to conform with their respective national tolerances for cost, performance, risk, and reward. The trade-offs involved help to explain patterns of conflict and restraint that seem otherwise surprising. Given the multiple political ends of deterrence, the recipes used may often be incompatible or inconsistent.

Of course, strategic deterrence, or U.S. acumen in multidomain warfare, are hardly a waste of time. Quite the opposite. They ensure that the United States does not have to fight wars in places and in ways that are most costly, risky, or where defeat is least acceptable, such as on America’s own shores. Obvious military superiority is an excellent deterrent: Countries tend to avoid contests they don’t think they can win, or where the costs or risks of fighting appear excessive. But deterrence does not render potential adversaries impotent — the enemy still gets a vote.

A basic misconception about deterrence is that it somehow prevents an enemy from taking any action. A more accurate way to think about deterrence is that it is the process of steering the behavior of others, much as defensive obstacles channelize an enemy in war. Deterrence is a mobile buffet — doing well is an invitation for an adversary to innovate or otherwise disrupt the status quo. Indeed, the more effectively and extensively that a nation practices deterrence, the more likely it is that the contests it experiences are those for which it is least prepared.

The rock, paper, scissors logic of strategic interaction requires considering the adversary’s response to your actions, and your response to their response, as well as accepting tradeoffs between alternatives. This implies that we should think about integrated deterrence more dynamically. In practice this means decomposing deterrence into digestible components, at least initially. If one cannot win all the time everywhere, then picking where to win — and by extension when and what to lose — is the consummate art of grand strategy. Getting deterrence right may ultimately be less about distilling an abstract ideal recipe of military threats and assurances and more about discerning what a society really values.

To sum up, integrating deterrence is not simply an organizational problem, but also a political process. Decisions about force posture and structure tend to shape how and what a nation can and cannot deter. These political choices tend to become “baked into” a nation’s capabilities for considerable periods of time. Geopolitical competitors, in turn, are motivated to offset strategic investments by posing new challenges in different areas. Put simply, any strategy of integrated deterrence is destined for disintegration.

Deterrence is vital and essential for U.S. grand strategy. It is also inevitably complex and frustrating. In the best of all worlds, one should not have to choose between winning and warning, between defense and deterrence. But few would advocate designing national security on this “best case” basis. Integrated deterrence has yet to grapple with these tradeoffs, assuming them to be limited or non-existent. When one relaxes such assumptions to consider tradeoffs such as those between deterring and defending (or deceiving and disarming), we again face dilemmas in the implementation of this grand strategic vision. This requires a clear sense of our own national priorities and of the limitations of available tools.

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Erik Gartzke is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies (cPASS) at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author, with Jon R. Lindsay, of Elements of Deterrence: Strategy, Technology, and Complexity in Global Politics. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Iowa.

Jon R. Lindsay is an Associate Professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). He is the author of Information Technology and Military Power and other books. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Erik Gartzke · July 22, 2024

18. Embrace the Infinite Variety of Circumstances: Fixing the US Military’s Multinational Exercises

Excerpt:

While works like Kill Chain by Chris Brose and Ghost Fleet by August Cole and P. W. Singer have alerted the United States to the importance of implementing future technologies, our ability to do so is another matter. For instance, the US Marine Corps emphasizes small, scalable drone capabilities, but a sluggish procurement process hinders execution. A possible solution could be contracting out training aids and scenario support to companies that aim to create scalable red-force training models with drone capabilities. These unmanned aerial and surface vessels can simulate payloads and swarming tactics in training scenarios, allowing us to test our responses to future challenges. For example, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a part of Rear Admiral Stone’s Expeditionary Strike Force, conducted a collection of events such as an amphibious assault and noncombatant evacuation exercises. However, these exercises are scripted mainly. A noncombatant evacuation operation exercise is primarily meant to demonstrate how a force would evacuate noncombatants or civilians from a hostile situation in extremis. Now imagine such an exercise was unscripted, and rescue forces encountered a swarm of two hundred drones as an opposition force. The point is that such exercises are meant to project capability yet are absent of the most critical element for genuinely testing new tactics and developing future capability: the fundamental reality that the enemy gets a vote.

Embrace the Infinite Variety of Circumstances: Fixing the US Military’s Multinational Exercises - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Brutus W. Castle, Stewart A. Guinness · July 22, 2024

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The incessant hum of the generator outside the Alaska tent was like a lullaby to the exhausted staff within, the seemingly endless shift in a twenty-four-hour JOC—the joint operations center—blurring the lines between day and night. The air conditioner’s groan reminded us of the battle against the Thai heat, a losing war against the humidity of the sweltering jungle. The scent of stale coffee and the ubiquitous corkboards and whiteboards, littered with half-hearted scribbles and outdated CONOPs, added to the sense of weary boredom. It was a scene familiar to any JOC veteran of the post-9/11 wars. Yet, the irony of replicating it here, amid the tropical foliage of Cobra Gold, wasn’t lost on anyone. The two of us were there as observers. But as we observed the activities taking place in the JOC, we wondered: Were we, the US military, preparing for the future where being stationary is death, or simply reliving the past in a different locale? The question echoed in the silence between yawns as the exhausted staff trudged through another monotonous hour. A look around the JOC evoked a famous ancient Roman adage, “Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum” (“If you want peace, prepare for war”)—cliché or profound? We both looked at each other and shook our heads in frustration—soon to be another exercise in the books.

One way that the United States and its allies prepare for war is through multinational exercises—like Cobra Gold in Thailand. Due to their size and expense, these exercises represent a significant investment in an increasingly constrained fiscal environment. They have immense value—but how might they be improved? If the lights go out in the next crisis or the first shot is fired in a future conflict, the question we present is: Will the United States and its allies enact the focused operations iterated during these multinational joint and combined exercises? If not, where are there opportunities to focus these exercises on preparation to enable the United States and our allies to project such deterrence?

We argue that an overemphasis on exercises as merely relationship–building activities is an increasingly inefficient legacy of the bygone era of US hegemony. The unquestioned American power in the Pacific and participation in military exercises sacrificed the practice of realistic warfighting activities to maintain favorable relations through the repetitive display of comfortably easy, slam-dunk activities. In a 2022 article, Shannon Houck and Douglas Borer emphasized what the United States should be focused on in the Indo-Pacific; but how we go about US military activities in the region also warrants greater attention. These exercises should be reoriented toward more challenging activities that build confidence in relevant and real-world tasks, experiment around new technology, and display actual capabilities to adversaries. This reorientation is intended to evolve these major exercises into the emerging strategic competition landscape and, in doing so, provide a significantly more substantial return on investment given their significant cost.

Cobra Gold: Yesterday’s History and Tomorrow’s Opportunity

The United States’ integrated deterrent strategy in the Indo-Pacific region has recently emphasized Operation Pathways, featuring over forty army-to-army and Joint Chiefs of Staff exercises. This multinational collaboration showcases preparedness through exercises such as Talisman Sabre, Super Garuda Shield, and Cobra Gold. The Department of Defense boasts of an effective deterrence initiative by displaying a credible combat force through these exercises. The significance of partner relations in integrated deterrence is undeniable. However, merely repeating US-centered relationship-building activities in the event of a future crisis would be futile. We can now use the multinational joint and combined exercises to stress-test the hard stuff. US fighting forces overlook a valuable opportunity by not concentrating multinational joint exercises on large-scale campaigns and twenty-first-century threats, aggregating joint efforts and iterating future capabilities with one goal in mind: to learn by failure.

Cobra Gold, an annual, multiservice, multinational event, has been held in Thailand since 1982 and has a rich history focused on relationships. As part of a Pacific exchange program cohort of Naval Postgraduate School students, sponsored by the US Army’s I Corps and its commanding general, Lieutenant General Xavier Brunson, our team aimed to pinpoint strategic and tactical recommendations. As observers, during Exercise Cobra Gold 2024, we were intentionally removed from the organizational rigidity or bias sometimes inherent when operating as part of units preparing for or conducting the exercise.

The complexity and multinational involvement aim toward relationship development, yet therefore, training is often notional, theoretical, or scripted due to varying participants, countries, and capabilities. This results in a lack of cohesion in achieving the exercise’s goals. For instance, I Corps leads many exercises in the Indo-Pacific region, yet they do not have a common theme or interconnected scenario. Additionally, there is a risk that these exercises do not focus enough on crucial iterative training opportunities associated with future regional crises and conflicts. Warfighters have echoed this concern. After taking part in the 2015 iteration of Cobra Gold as a Marine Corps rifle platoon leader, Travis Onischuk voiced his concern for the exercise’s logistic support, which he described as “quite literally, prioritizing WiFi over water.” Regrettably, some exercises are based on outdated capabilities and need a realistic scenario, such as those we may face against a peer adversary in the Indo-Pacific region. This is often referred to as antiaccess / area-denial (A2AD). In short, our future battles will differ significantly from those of the past two decades, in which we enjoyed air, munition, and technological superiority. The concept of A2AD suggests that we may be the inferior force in specific environments, and the survivability of our most critical infrastructure is in question against a highly sophisticated and capable enemy. If we do not incorporate this complexity into our exercises, we do ourselves a significant disservice.

The crux of these exercises lies in fostering partner relationships while avoiding pushing training to take a back seat. Given the current focus on integrated deterrence, this approach is vital. US Rear Admiral Christopher Stone, leading the Expeditionary Strike Force in Cobra Gold 2024, highlights the significance of these exercises in nurturing bonds. And this is undoubtedly important. But when establishing proficiency in training becomes a clear second in the order of priorities, it is worth revisiting our objectives. In a perfect scenario, we strive to achieve the best of both worlds by maximizing the return on investment in both relationships and training value.

The Enemy Gets a Vote: How Do We Adjust?

Drone and counterdrone capabilities provide one example of many surrounding the relevance of implementing current technology in an exercise for one goal: determining if these technologies and the tactics used to employ them are effective. Drones, include those that employ a growing degree of autonomous functionality, are significantly impacting modern warfare, as seen in the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Both nations recognize the tactical advantages offered by these technologies in offensive and defensive strategies. If Ukrainian leaders could turn back time, they would likely invest more heavily in developing such technologies and tactics. Given this relevance, pacific adversaries, such as China’s People’s Liberation Army, aim to leverage drones to enhance their military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. Ukraine’s use of kamikaze drones exemplifies how these technologies are transforming battlefields. Acknowledging that these threats could play a significant role in future conflicts, particularly in this region, is crucial. Therefore, it is essential to utilize military exercises for US and joint forces to challenge and deter potential threats posed by these evolving technologies.

While works like Kill Chain by Chris Brose and Ghost Fleet by August Cole and P. W. Singer have alerted the United States to the importance of implementing future technologies, our ability to do so is another matter. For instance, the US Marine Corps emphasizes small, scalable drone capabilities, but a sluggish procurement process hinders execution. A possible solution could be contracting out training aids and scenario support to companies that aim to create scalable red-force training models with drone capabilities. These unmanned aerial and surface vessels can simulate payloads and swarming tactics in training scenarios, allowing us to test our responses to future challenges. For example, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a part of Rear Admiral Stone’s Expeditionary Strike Force, conducted a collection of events such as an amphibious assault and noncombatant evacuation exercises. However, these exercises are scripted mainly. A noncombatant evacuation operation exercise is primarily meant to demonstrate how a force would evacuate noncombatants or civilians from a hostile situation in extremis. Now imagine such an exercise was unscripted, and rescue forces encountered a swarm of two hundred drones as an opposition force. The point is that such exercises are meant to project capability yet are absent of the most critical element for genuinely testing new tactics and developing future capability: the fundamental reality that the enemy gets a vote.

Assurance, Not Secrecy

A possible counterargument to our perspective is that US military leaders may hesitate to include realistic scenarios in large-scale exercises due to concerns about secrecy. However, we argue that integrated deterrence is best achieved by demonstrating capability to potential adversaries rather than hiding it. This capability is not based on secret technology but on an integrated and synergized joint effort developed through complex exercises. The goal is to deter through assurance—or as Lieutenant General Brunson would say, “integrated assurance,” which is grounded in convincing future competitors and allies of our genuine capabilities and the line we intend to defend. Moreover, we believe prioritizing secrecy could also shield a realistic understanding and assessment of our capability from the most vital recipient: ourselves.

Undoubtedly, additional criticism may be suggested while building or continuing partnered relationships; adding complex scenarios that promote short-term failure to achieve long-term success may have a deleterious impact on the relationships with allies, many of whom have grown accustomed to exercises’ emphasis on those relationships. However, we suggest there is something significantly worse: being unprepared for a fight you didn’t expect.

“Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances,” admonished Sun Tzu in The Art of War. Our tactics, which we have established over more than two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and global counterterrorism operations, undeniably influence our training. Continuing to foster key allied relationships through Joint Chiefs of Staff exercises is undoubtedly critical to our readiness for any future conflict or crisis, and exercises like Cobra Gold further strengthen this bedrock. But the US joint force must also develop tactics, techniques, and procedures interconnected with future technology to leverage advantage in increasingly denied or multidomain environments. Furthermore, we must test these concepts, integrate them to gain efficiency, and continue to assess their effectiveness—in realistic scenarios and against a capable opposition force. As the future battlefield evolves, one thing is clear: what we expect to happen and what will happen are different. Our goal, in the end, is to bridge the gap.

The authors are graduate students in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. They are also active members of the special operations community, with a combined twenty-nine years of experience exclusively within special operations and participation in several multinational exercises.

Editor’s note: Due to operational security and the sensitivity of the authors’ work in the special operations community, MWI has elected to publish this article under pseudonyms rather than their true names.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Spc. Elizabeth MacPherson, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Brutus W. Castle, Stewart A. Guinness · July 22, 2024

19. What Biden’s Exit Means for American Foreign Policy

Excerpts:

Presidents should be allowed to rise to greatness in our history simply by serving one term. The moment and the individual can coalesce and that moment may last only four years. George H. W. Bush is a good example. He was supremely qualified and had the right tools to manage the end of the Cold War and the first years of what followed. Yet he didn’t want to be just a one-term president. As a result, when he was defeated in 1992, he left office feeling depressed as if he had somehow failed as president, despite his one term having been so consequential and important. Gerald Ford was another excellent one-term president.

Biden’s one-term presidency is destined to be viewed very positively. How positively will ultimately depend on whether a Democratic successor, whether it’s Kamala Harris or not, is elected in November. But not all of his legacy depends on a Democratic victory in November. He brought us out of Trumpian chaos. He restored America’s role in the world, restored the trust of allies. He pushed adversaries away from goals they were hoping to achieve. Without anything like the majorities of FDR or LBJ, his deft touch with Congress led to a deepening of the social safety net, brought technology to bear in the problem of climate change without sacrificing American jobs, and made a generational commitment to American infrastructure.

In sum, the president has had a successfully consequential term. Unfortunately, he felt that he alone could prevent Trump from returning to the White House and so sought reelection. But sadly, he didn’t have enough in the tank. It was his own body that defined that his moment had passed. I hope that with time he comes to view his term differently, just as I believe George H. W. Bush did, as one that was extraordinarily successful and a blessing for our country.

What Biden’s Exit Means for American Foreign Policy

A Conversation With Timothy Naftali

July 22, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by July 22, 2024 · July 22, 2024

On July 21, following weeks of intense speculation, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that he would not run in the November 2024 presidential election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. Coming at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, the decision could have large implications for U.S. foreign policy for the remainder of Biden’s term.

To make sense of what Biden’s decision means for the presidency and U.S. world leadership in the weeks to come, Foreign Affairs’ senior editor Hugh Eakin spoke to the presidential historian Timothy Naftali, a faculty scholar at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University, the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, the author of George H. W. Bush (a volume in the Times Books “American Presidents” series), and the editor of The Presidential Recordings: Lyndon B. Johnson.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

In his momentous announcement, Biden said that it’s in the best interest of his party in the country for him to focus solely on “fulfilling [his] duties as president for the remainder of [his] term.” I wonder how easy that will be. Will the world, including not only antagonists but also partners and allies, see him as a lame duck?

Timothy Naftali

I actually think that President Biden’s very difficult decision today has restored some of the luster to the American commitment to Ukraine and to stabilizing other parts of the world.

Leaders see power as always in flux. And in the three weeks since the debate, the Biden administration likely found the world more skeptical about U.S. power, in the sense that it seemed more and more likely that former President Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden in the election this fall. And as a result, countries were already gaming what kind of international political environment they would be contending with starting at the end of January, with Biden no longer in the White House.

But there is now a better chance that a Democrat will win in November. And so I’d argue that, for the moment at least, foreign leaders have to take seriously the possibility that a member of Biden's team or someone else from the Democratic Party will be leading the United States, meaning that they may be able to count on support for Ukraine, for example. Some of that luster may disappear after the beginning of November. But the fact that the Democrats are no longer likely losers, I think will influence the way foreign leaders, particularly American adversaries view the Biden administration.

So to the extent that a likely Trump victory was already baked into the international calculus about the United States, Biden’s announcement forces a very different assessment.

And something else needs to be underscored here. Not since the early 1950s, when the internationalist General Dwight Eisenhower won the contest for the soul of the Republican Party over the isolationist Senator Robert Taft, have the two parties presented such fundamentally different worldviews with regard to America’s place in international affairs. Since 1952, both parties have been internationalist in their outlook. President Trump in his first term was an exception, but the Republican Party that he led was divided on this issue.

As the recent Republican convention demonstrated, Trump has now refashioned the party completely in his own image. His choice of Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate, for example, didn’t represent an attempt to bridge different points of view, but a doubling down of Trumpism. And so were he to return to power—were he to regain the White House, and Republicans to hold the House and regain the Senate—foreign leaders, friends and foes alike, could anticipate a much more isolationist America. So the fact that now the internationalist party has an improved chance to win, will necessarily alter the calculations of foreign leaders. [Russian President] Vladimir Putin can no longer be certain that he can outlast the American commitment to European stability and to the sovereignty of Ukraine.

On the matter of antagonists, however, the United States is closely involved in two major wars, in Europe and the Middle East, and dealing with complicated issues in Asia and elsewhere. Does this announcement come at a perilous moment?

Oh, yes. It’s a perilous moment when the national strategy of a great power is so in question that an election could alter the country’s, or at least its leadership class’s, definition of the national interest. And it’s especially perilous for the international system when the country in question is a superpower. This situation introduces an uncertainty into the political calculations of every leader. It is very rare for an election to decide how the power elite of a nation defines its national interest. And it’s almost unheard of that this should happen for a great power.

During the Cold War, the two parties in the United States disagreed on the means by which to fight the Cold War, particularly in the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era. But they didn’t disagree on the fact that the United States faced a determined adversary and that national security entailed playing a role in defending, protecting, and encouraging regional and international stability. That consensus doesn’t exist anymore across the two parties.

Comparisons are naturally being made with President Lyndon Johnson’s March 1968 announcement that he would not run again. And many have noted that Biden’s decision is coming much later, in late July. But from a foreign policy point of view, it seems that actually, it’s early: we still have six months of the presidency left. What are the real possibilities in terms of what Biden can do during this time?

President Biden can ensure the continuation of the systems that are below the surface that are helping American allies around the world. If Trump is elected, we don’t know what will happen to intelligence cooperation, for example, not only with Ukraine but also with NATO allies and allies in East Asia. We don’t know what will happen to the training that our military is doing to assist allies of freedom around the world.

All these processes, though they don’t get a lot of attention, matter for the stability of the world. And they don’t usually need special acts of Congress to be sustained; they just need a stable center in the Oval Office, and [under Biden] that’s been guaranteed. Adversaries are very sensitive to the continuation of those activities. It’s these day-to-day activities of the United States that are often the most alarming to them and most reassuring to our allies. International problems are rarely easy to solve, but they can be managed, and it’s that gardening, if you will, that American foreign national security policy makers need to do every day to be effective.

And so the gardening can continue.

With the president in office focused on American internationalism, that’s a good thing for American allies. It gives them some predictive capacity about what they can expect from the United States between now and the 20th of January. And it’s a terrible thing for American adversaries, who know they are going to have to put up with a lot of American activities in support of aims that they don’t share.

What about the larger Biden record? Inevitably, one thinks of what happened at the end of the Obama administration and Trump coming to office setting out to undo so many of the major Obama policy initiatives. Are there specific ways that Biden can Trump-proof some of his own accomplishments?

By stepping aside, Biden is doing the most important thing that he can do at this point to Trump-proof the United States, in terms of our national security. As the Supreme Court just reminded us, the U.S. president has enormous authority to direct our foreign policy. And so the choice of the next president is so important. Even if Trump were to beat the ultimate Democratic nominee, Biden’s accomplishments in foreign policy might not all completely dissolve. Were Trump not to score a trifecta, and retain the House as well as win the Senate, one might see some pushback from Congress if a future President Trump and Vice President [J. D.] Vance were to try to dramatically rescind American activities abroad and sacrifice Ukraine to the wolf in the Kremlin.

So how to Trump-proof our international stature will depend on which party the American people choose to lead the two houses of Congress. If Democrats control the House, they would complicate Trump’s efforts, for example, to shut down support for Ukraine. Trump could still veto a bill, but there may be the votes to overturn that veto. There will still be Republican senators and Republican members of the House who will want to vote for aid for Ukraine. So, if the Democrats control the House, Congress might be able to pass assistance packages for Ukraine and Israel, despite Trump’s being in the White House.

As a result of this decision, does Biden in fact have a chance to try to shape his legacy, given the timing and that there is a definite endpoint ahead? Are there useful historical analogies for what presidents have done in these final months?

Well, this will be an unusual late presidency because of how this new period we’ve just entered started. In 1968, Johnson attempted to combine two very difficult decisions as a way of strengthening his legacy and improving the well-being of the United States. At the same time that he said in March 1968 he would not be a candidate for reelection in November, he announced a serious commitment to negotiating a way out of the Vietnam War. In that way, he made clear that he was devoting his late presidency to an issue of foreign policy.

Biden might view his remaining months in office as an opportunity to do something similar in the Middle East. But the current crisis in the Middle East is hardly a parallel to the US policy failure in Vietnam. The United States is not a direct combatant in Israel’s war with Hamas. It has to work through an ally, Israel. So there isn’t a direct parallel to Johnson, who said to the world, and particularly to Hanoi and Moscow and Beijing, “Take me seriously” in seeking a diplomatic off-ramp from the war in Vietnam. “I’m no longer playing politics. I’m out of politics.” I don’t see there being a direct parallel for Biden, and that’s OK.

History provides us with echoes, but rarely does it repeat itself; the circumstances of each case are almost always very different though the dilemmas they raise can seem similar. The people, the political culture—those can be similar, the individuals can be similar. But history isn’t a crystal ball. There are unique elements to Biden’s decision that should be appreciated—and should be a source of some humility in trying to figure out what’s going to happen next.

From a historical perspective, is there something you see as particularly striking about the decision and how it happened?

In trying to follow from afar the discussions going on in Wilmington [Delaware, where the president was at his family home, isolated with COVID and struggling to decide what to do], it seemed that Biden was in part a prisoner to an unfortunate American tradition. This is the idea that only by winning a second term is the president of the United States validated. In the 1840s, James K. Polk made clear that he was seeking only one, very consequential term. Modern presidents, however, have treated their re-election as a referendum on their first terms, when the campaign would be better suited as a test of what they have to offer in a second term.

Presidents should be allowed to rise to greatness in our history simply by serving one term. The moment and the individual can coalesce and that moment may last only four years. George H. W. Bush is a good example. He was supremely qualified and had the right tools to manage the end of the Cold War and the first years of what followed. Yet he didn’t want to be just a one-term president. As a result, when he was defeated in 1992, he left office feeling depressed as if he had somehow failed as president, despite his one term having been so consequential and important. Gerald Ford was another excellent one-term president.

Biden’s one-term presidency is destined to be viewed very positively. How positively will ultimately depend on whether a Democratic successor, whether it’s Kamala Harris or not, is elected in November. But not all of his legacy depends on a Democratic victory in November. He brought us out of Trumpian chaos. He restored America’s role in the world, restored the trust of allies. He pushed adversaries away from goals they were hoping to achieve. Without anything like the majorities of FDR or LBJ, his deft touch with Congress led to a deepening of the social safety net, brought technology to bear in the problem of climate change without sacrificing American jobs, and made a generational commitment to American infrastructure.

In sum, the president has had a successfully consequential term. Unfortunately, he felt that he alone could prevent Trump from returning to the White House and so sought reelection. But sadly, he didn’t have enough in the tank. It was his own body that defined that his moment had passed. I hope that with time he comes to view his term differently, just as I believe George H. W. Bush did, as one that was extraordinarily successful and a blessing for our country.

Foreign Affairs · by July 22, 2024 · July 22, 2024

20. China’s Dangerous Nuclear Push

Quite an attention getting subtitle from Andrew Yeo and Brookings.

Excerpts:

By emphasizing the consequences that await China should it continue to develop its arsenal, Washington could convince Chinese leaders to come to the negotiating table for broader talks. If Beijing does agree to serious negotiations, it must demonstrate good faith by allowing for greater transparency into China’s nuclear arsenal, posture, and plans. Eventually, such an arrangement could include Russia, once conditions are conducive, as well as France and the United Kingdom.

In return, Washington might offer Beijing a commitment to help constrain proliferation in East Asia—for example, by working to persuade U.S. allies to abstain from developing their own nuclear capabilities. But for that to work, Washington must continue to demonstrate a firm commitment to extending deterrence through mechanisms such as the Nuclear Consultative Group, a forum for discussing nuclear issues with South Korea.

Ultimately, the United States’ goal should be to reframe the competition with China as a potentially positive-sum endeavor, with the two countries working together to support nonproliferation. Although there is no guarantee of success, starting a new U.S.-Chinese nuclear dialogue may ultimately protect East Asia from greater nuclearization. But first, Washington may have to play hardball.

China’s Dangerous Nuclear Push

To Temper Beijing’s Ambitions, Washington Should Threaten to Share Weapons With Japan and South Korea

By Amy J. Nelson and Andrew Yeo

July 22, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Amy J. Nelson and Andrew Yeo · July 22, 2024

Since the 1990s, Beijing has spurned Washington’s invitations to participate in nuclear arms control negotiations. Instead, it has expanded and modernized its arsenal: the country’s estimated 500 nuclear warheads are on track to double by 2030. China’s advances, along with North Korea’s, has had knock-on effects in the region. Despite U.S. security assurances, a majority of South Koreans now want their country to have its own nuclear weapons, and Japan’s long-standing aversion to the bomb is also eroding. Asia is now on track to see a destabilizing arms race in the years ahead.

If it acts quickly, however, Washington can stem these worrying developments. In February, Beijing invited the world’s nuclear states to negotiate a “no first use” treaty. (The United States, which has more than ten times as many nuclear weapons as China, maintains a first-use option.) After so many rejected advances, the United States should welcome China’s overture to talk. If Beijing is prepared to negotiate in good faith, Washington should respond in kind—and press for a broader arms control agreement.

Washington must engage in tough, even coercive diplomacy, making it clear that Beijing faces a stark choice: participate meaningfully in substantive negotiations or brave a massive U.S.-backed nuclear buildup in its own backyard. And if Chinese leaders decline to do so, Washington could begin discussions with Seoul and Tokyo about nuclear-sharing arrangements, as well as move faster to update and enlarge its own arsenal, channeling investments to its nuclear weapons defense industrial base.

Some observers might object to this tough approach, arguing that it will contribute to nuclear proliferation. But there is an instructive precedent for Washington’s use of coercion to bring states to the arms control negotiating table. In 1983, Washington deployed nuclear-tipped Pershing II missiles in West Germany and ground-launched cruise missiles in Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands. Rather than prompting escalation, this aggressive move compelled Moscow to engage in diplomacy that led to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated all intermediate-range forces from Europe.

Today, Washington should strengthen its missile defenses, and those of its allies, ramp up U.S. deployments of nuclear-armed submarines and nuclear-capable bombers, and pursue nuclear-sharing arrangements with Seoul and Tokyo. Just as such moves drove the Soviet Union to the bargaining table in the past, they could convince China to negotiate in the future.

UNTHINKABLE NO MORE

A coercive approach toward China would require the backing of South Korea and Japan. The South Korean public in particular wishes to move beyond U.S. reassurances of nuclear deterrence. Two national polls conducted this year found that more than 70 percent of South Koreans believe that their country needs its own nuclear arsenal. Although South Korean elites tend to disagree, a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that 61 percent of academics, experts, businesspeople, politicians, and officials surveyed would support a nuclear-sharing option with the United States “if necessary.” Such a middle-ground approach would see Washington redeploying tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea, which has not been nuclear since 1991, when the George H. W. Bush administration withdrew all U.S. nuclear weapons as part of a broader worldwide drawdown.

In Japan, the idea of developing nuclear weapons was once unthinkable, given its status as the only country in history to have been on the receiving end of a nuclear attack. But as early as 2002, Shinzo Abe, then a member of Japan’s House of Representatives and not yet prime minister, stated that “the possession of nuclear bombs is constitutional, so long as they are small.” Although a 2020 poll found that 75 percent of the Japanese public still supports a global ban on nuclear weapons, some Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leaders have adopted a more permissive stance. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Abe argued that Japan should consider a NATO-style nuclear-sharing agreement with the United States. A March 2022 survey found that 63 percent of Japanese were open to discussions of a nuclear-sharing option. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was even less circumspect about Japan’s nuclear ambitions, stating in 2023 that Japan was “heading towards becoming a nuclear power in five years.”

For now, Tokyo continues to champion nonproliferation, especially under the leadership of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who is a member of the LDP but whose family roots are tied to Hiroshima. But Kishida’s political future is tenuous, and other LDP members who might replace him are more accepting of nuclear weapons. Soon, Chinese nuclear expansion and North Korean nuclear threats may nudge Japanese leaders to adopt nuclear views more akin to those of South Korean leaders. In recent years, some Japanese officials have even questioned whether the U.S. nuclear umbrella is enough, suggesting instead that the country should consider developing its own arsenal. “We respect the ideals of nonproliferation, provided that the U.S. nuclear guarantee is perfect,” Nobukatsu Kanehara, who had served as assistant chief of cabinet secretary under Abe, said in 2021. But he added an important caveat: “Is it? That is the great, great concern for us.”

ESCALATE TO DE-ESCALATE

The history of arms control demonstrates the value of coercive policies in getting states to agree to negotiations. During SALT I, the first round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, from late 1969 through the summer of 1972, the United States toyed with the idea of adding extra warheads to missiles, which convinced the Soviets to stay at the negotiating table. And U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, a project to build a missile-defense system in space, drove his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, to entreat the Americans to engage in a series of summits. In the face of such provocations, Moscow had to choose between accelerating the arms race and pursuing arms control. On these occasions, Washington’s gambles paid off, compelling Moscow to back down.

How would coercion work today? Although current U.S. policy discourages increased nuclearization, Washington could leverage the threat of arming South Korea and Japan to bring China to the negotiating table. If Beijing declined dialogue, it would risk a much greater nuclear threat in its own backyard. A nuclear Japan and South Korea would dial up the likelihood of misperception, miscalculation, and accidents, raising the stakes of nuclear catastrophe. Facing such a perilous reality, Beijing may well cave to U.S. pressure and enter into serious arms control talks. Of course, this strategy is not without risk. But low-risk efforts have failed to temper Beijing’s ambitions, requiring a new approach to arms control.

Even visions of dystopian nuclear futures have played a role in motivating leaders to engage in arms control in the past. (Reagan had shown little interest in arms control until viewing The Day After, a film depicting a nuclear holocaust in the American Midwest.) Laying out a nuclear future with severe security costs for Beijing may finally get the attention of Chinese elites, something that has eluded U.S. officials for decades, and draw Beijing to the negotiating table for serious discussions.

Washington could leverage the threat of arming South Korea and Japan to bring China to the negotiating table.

If such an approach is to work, Washington must clearly communicate to Beijing that China’s nuclear modernization, along with North Korea’s expanded nuclear program, will necessarily hasten U.S.-led regional proliferation. To that end, Washington must make clear to Seoul and Tokyo that it is open to discussing nuclear-sharing options should Beijing continue to expand its nuclear forces. And it should signal to Beijing that in absence of substantive nuclear talks, calls from the right wing of the U.S. foreign policy establishment to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal will win out.

Dystopian nuclear futures may already be at play: Beijing’s February invitation arrived four months after the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, which advises Congress on nuclear policy, issued its annual report, which envisioned a worst-case scenario of China and Russia colluding in a nuclear conflict in 2035. The commission’s recommendations for a nuclear buildup in response to the imagined scenario were undoubtedly viewed by Chinese leaders as a threat.

Of course, the current U.S. administration would prefer to uphold the United States’ commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which prohibits nonnuclear weapons states from developing an arsenal, and maintain its deterrence posture with fewer nuclear weapons. But if Beijing continues to develop its arsenal, Washington will have no option but to abandon those commitments. Paradoxically, its best chance of sustaining the treaty may be to first adopt a position of dramatically enhanced nuclear strength.

HARDBALL

By emphasizing the consequences that await China should it continue to develop its arsenal, Washington could convince Chinese leaders to come to the negotiating table for broader talks. If Beijing does agree to serious negotiations, it must demonstrate good faith by allowing for greater transparency into China’s nuclear arsenal, posture, and plans. Eventually, such an arrangement could include Russia, once conditions are conducive, as well as France and the United Kingdom.

In return, Washington might offer Beijing a commitment to help constrain proliferation in East Asia—for example, by working to persuade U.S. allies to abstain from developing their own nuclear capabilities. But for that to work, Washington must continue to demonstrate a firm commitment to extending deterrence through mechanisms such as the Nuclear Consultative Group, a forum for discussing nuclear issues with South Korea.

Ultimately, the United States’ goal should be to reframe the competition with China as a potentially positive-sum endeavor, with the two countries working together to support nonproliferation. Although there is no guarantee of success, starting a new U.S.-Chinese nuclear dialogue may ultimately protect East Asia from greater nuclearization. But first, Washington may have to play hardball.

• AMY J. NELSON is a Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy program and Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.
• 
  
• ANDREW YEO is a Senior Fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation Chair at the Brookings Institution and Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America.

Foreign Affairs · by Amy J. Nelson and Andrew Yeo · July 22, 2024

21. The End of South Asia

The author has one of the coolest names I have seen.

If we never have grandchildren I am going to recommend that name to our daughter,

Excerpt:

The end of South Asia is a key marker in the history of the region and offers geopolitical opportunities and choices for India and its partners. For India, finally relinquishing the region and not worrying about primacy there allows it to forge a dynamic geopolitical relationship between South Asia and regions and countries farther afield. It is not that India should stop engaging with its neighbors but that it should see them in a wider geopolitical context, not merely as denizens of the subcontinent they happen to share.

The same is true for the United States and its allies. Although they may have viewed smaller South Asian countries as irrelevant or at best marginal to their wider interests, they should understand that the likes of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are enmeshed in the broad geopolitical competition. Encouraging the participation of these smaller countries in larger frameworks and coalitions, such as the Quad, will help rein in Chinese influence and give these countries alternatives to the political and economic support offered by China. The countries of South Asia may not comprise a coherent region, but they will play integral roles in shaping the wider Asian balance of power in the years to come.

The End of South Asia

A Region in Name Only

By Happymon Jacob

July 22, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Happymon Jacob · July 22, 2024

For decades, policymakers and scholars have been trained in the West and elsewhere to think of the countries of the Indian subcontinent as part of a coherent region: South Asia. Home to around a quarter of the world’s population, the region consists of eight countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Its diverse peoples speak hundreds of different languages and follow numerous different religious traditions, but they have shared histories, including the experience of British colonialism, and shared cultural connections, including a love of the sport of cricket and Bollywood films, ethnic ties, and musical and culinary practices, for instance. In the late twentieth century, South Asian leaders sought to deepen links within the region, with the greater goal of integration in line with that pursued in nearby Southeast Asia under the auspices of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or in Europe under the European Union. South Asia, too, they imagined, could become a consequential regional bloc in global geopolitics.

But that never happened. In the last four decades, South Asia has managed to build little security, economic, or policy cohesion. Mistrust and enmity, notably that between India and Pakistan, have made integration a pipe dream. Worse, at the most fundamental level, the notion of belonging to South Asia has lost any of the traction it ever had. South Asians no longer look to one another for connection and solidarity but rather gaze farther afield, to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or the West. Not many South Asians (outside those tens of millions living in diaspora around the world) would even think to consider themselves South Asians in the first place. The term today does not denote a coherent regional identity but is merely a mundane geographical demarcation used mostly by those outside the region. The dream of a united South Asia is over, with important implications for geopolitics on the subcontinent that policymakers and analysts of the region have yet to fully grasp.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

As a term, “South Asia” has its origins far from the subcontinent. Academic analysts and policymakers in the West began using the term in the late 1950s after the emergence of independent postcolonial states from British India in 1947. During the Cold War, when the United States maintained closer ties to Pakistan than it did to ostensibly nonaligned India, the term allowed Washington to speak about the region without underlining India’s local predominance. Universities in the West followed suit, with academics using South Asia as a neutral term to describe India and its neighbors. Over time, Indians themselves started using the term in certain rarefied circles, but few people in the region conceived of themselves as South Asian.

In the late 1970s, General Ziaur Rahman, who had come to power in Bangladesh through a military coup in 1975, started floating the idea of a regional organization. Although the smaller states immediately warmed to the idea, India and Pakistan were initially more skeptical but decided to entertain the Bangladeshi proposal. The proposal found formal expression in 1985 with the creation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, a group that included Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. SAARC sought to create a “better climate of understanding” and foster cooperation among member states.

As a term, “South Asia” has its origins far from the subcontinent.

For around three decades, SAARC enjoyed considerable support in the region, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Indian leaders became more receptive toward SAARC beginning in the late 1990s, particularly Prime Ministers Inder Kumar Gujral (1997 to 1998), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998 to 2004), and Manmohan Singh (2004 to 2010). They pushed ahead even as many in New Delhi warned that India’s rivalry and disputes with Pakistan would severely curb SAARC’s ability to function, never mind its ability to integrate the region. For their part, Pakistani leaders have long been wary of SAARC, fearing it could become a vehicle for the exercise of India’s influence, but Islamabad still participated in the summits and other platforms associated with the group. Smaller states in the region, such as Bhutan, the Maldives, and Nepal, were the keenest advocates of SAARC, convinced that their membership in such a multilateral platform granted them greater geopolitical agency.

But after an initial period of activity, SAARC has crept perilously close to obsolescence. Of the 18 SAARC summits held so far, six were staged during the first six years of its existence. The group has held only six summits between 2005 and 2014 and none at all in the last decade. During the group’s heyday from the 1990s into the first decade of the twenty-first century, member countries set up and explored several ambitious ventures, including the South Asia Free Trade Area (a free-trade agreement signed in 2004), a customs union, a common regional market, and a common economic and monetary union. But over time, these grand ambitions have fallen by the wayside. The partial progress achieved in implementing the free-trade area has been stalled since 2014, when Pakistan blocked the signing of an agreement about motor vehicles. Other closer forms of regional integration remain pipe dreams.

The South Asian University, set up by the SAARC countries in New Delhi in 2010, is today a ghost of what it was originally meant to be. Visa restrictions and financial constraints have hampered its growth, and the institution has not helped foster a sense of regional identity through higher education as its founders imagined it would. Attempts by the region’s elites and civil society to encourage regionalism in South Asia through nongovernmental organizations, such as the South Asia Free Media Association and South Asians for Human Rights, or think tanks, such as the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, have not gained much traction either. SAARC and these organizations express an elite-level desire for greater connection within South Asia, but that desire has failed to produce meaningful integration in the region.

THE CENTER DOES NOT HOLD

Part of South Asia’s problem is its lopsidedness. India is the region’s biggest and most powerful country. Its dominance has had a paradoxical impact on the development of regional structures. At its core, South Asia consists of India and six countries that share a border with India but not with one another. (The exception is Afghanistan, which shares a border with Pakistan but not with India.) In that sense, South Asia is primarily the sum of interactions among India’s neighbors with India and India with its neighbors.

The fact of Indian centrality has meant that New Delhi does not always see the value of building regional structures, as such structures cannot add to the predominance India already enjoys in the region. Even though a number of Indian prime ministers saw merit in SAARC, the Indian bureaucracy and strategic establishment have never been convinced of its value. They have long feared that the creation of regional structures could potentially check India’s dominance in its own backyard. Since SAARC functions based on consensus, India’s vote on affairs on the subcontinent would count as much as that of Bhutan and the Maldives, the smallest countries in the region. As a result, it makes little sense for Indian decision-makers to support the creation of structures that could undermine their country’s influence in the region. That sentiment has a corollary among Indian strategists and foreign policy analysts; they, too, look beyond the region and think of South Asia’s inherent conflicts as a millstone around India’s neck.

That South Asia is increasingly becoming an arena of geopolitical competition not only makes further regional integration less likely; such competition also threatens to undo even the limited regional cohesion that exists today. In recent decades, China has built up its influence among India’s neighbors. Take Sri Lanka, for instance, whose largest bilateral creditor is China and to whom China has provided loans to build highways, an airport, and a port. In Bangladesh, China has been using loans and infrastructure development assistance to gain influence. And China is jostling there not just with India but with the United States. In 2021, the United States placed sanctions on an elite paramilitary unit in Bangladesh for its alleged human rights violations and extrajudicial killings. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin rebuked this policy when he reiterated in 2023 that the Chinese “firmly support Bangladesh in safeguarding its sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, upholding independent domestic and foreign policies, and pursuing a development path that suits its national realities.” In sum, China’s growing profile in South Asia marks a clear change from Beijing’s initial decision, dating back to the inception of the People’s Republic of China, of leaving the region to India. Today, China no longer sees India as a peer, nor is it willing to accept India’s primacy in the subcontinent.

Intraregional trade in South Asia is meager: it contributes to only five percent of the region’s overall trade totals—by contrast, intraregional trade among the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations accounts for 25 percent of the region’s overall trade. Moreover, China’s fast-growing trade with South Asia is eclipsing India’s own trade with its neighbors.

In recent decades, China has built up its influence among India’s neighbors.

The inhabitants of the region themselves are not clamoring for stronger ties. Indeed, a shared history and cultural heritage doesn’t necessarily produce strong connections, let alone thriving bonds. India’s growing, prosperous middle class has little interest in South Asia, nor does it feel that it has much in common with people in neighboring countries. In the minds of this aspirational class of around 430 million people, many of whom have connections to diasporic communities in the West, the Middle East, and elsewhere in Asia, India is meant for bigger things than its immediate neighborhood.

Cultural exchange within the region is also on the wane. In 2019, Pakistan banned Indian content on local television and FM radio channels. Turkish TV shows increasingly fill the vacuum in Pakistan left in the absence of content from India. In India, there are hardly any Pakistani artists in the Bollywood film industry, and Pakistani cricketers no longer play in India’s money-spinning Indian Premier League, the sport’s most lucrative league.

South Asians are not working or studying in one another’s countries as much as they used to. Since 1990, there has been a consistent decline in intraregional migration. For instance, India has long been a favored destination for Nepali workers, but they now are venturing to the Gulf countries and Malaysia, with India often serving just as a transit point. People across the region are going to places where they can secure higher wages than they can in South Asia, namely Australia, Malaysia, the Middle East, western Europe, and North America.

Few South Asians study in one another’s countries, except in India. South Asian students still make up half the total foreign student population in India, but these numbers have stagnated in the past decade. A 2020 Brookings India report showed that the annual growth rate of foreign South Asian students in India decreased from 30 percent in the 2011–12 academic year to just nine percent in 2018–19. India’s loss has been China’s gain. The number of students from India’s neighboring countries studying in China increased by 176 percent between 2011 and 2016, the Brookings report stated. In 2016, for example, there were three times as many Bangladeshis studying in China as in India.

South Asians face a very clear impediment to travel within the region: hard borders. Only the tourist-friendly Maldives offers visas on arrival for all SAARC member countries. Bhutan and Nepal have a visa-free travel agreement with India. But apart from these deals, regional travel is difficult. Given that India is the only geographical connection among many of the countries of the region, New Delhi’s decision to open or close borders determines the fate of intraregional connectivity in South Asia. The decrease in intra-South Asian connectivity in trade, tourism, and education is, unsurprisingly, being made up for by China: consider the growing amount of connectivity in trade, tourism, and education between China and Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The more India neglects South Asia, the more China embraces it. It’s not a zero-sum game; it’s a walkover for China. And it may well be too late for India to reassert itself as a regional hub.

A REGION UNBOUND

Thanks to the decision of many South Asian states to leverage China to balance India’s primacy, South Asia is no longer the India-centric region it used to be. Paradoxically, however, India’s loss of regional primacy also means that South Asia is losing its salience as a geopolitical entity, with smaller countries strengthening economic, political, diplomatic, and cultural ties with China and drifting away from India. In other words, the smaller South Asian states that once hoped to benefit from greater regional integration have made such integration more unlikely; by using China to balance India, they have undermined the coherence and potential unity of South Asia.

The end of South Asia as both a geopolitical entity and an epistemological category has implications that go beyond university departments or nongovernmental organizations that might have to reimagine how they frame their agendas. Despite India’s primacy in the region, Indian thinkers have come to believe that entanglement in South Asia limits the country’s ambitions. In the last decade, India has reoriented its strategic focus from Pakistan to China and from the continental theater to the maritime one. It has embarked on a wider economic journey by signing and negotiating several important free-trade agreements with countries farther afield, such as Switzerland. New Delhi seeks a larger geopolitical space for itself. In contemporary Indian strategic thinking, South Asia is at best a small place and at worst a limitation.

There is little value for India in pouring in resources to either regain exclusive primacy or balance China in a space in which it is geopolitically weaker and somewhat contained. Although New Delhi’s concerns about Beijing’s growing power are understandable, frantic attempts to win back South Asia or compete with China for regional dominance are unlikely to work. Another option available to India is to work with China in the region, as many of India’s neighbors would prefer, but it won’t be too long before an ambitious and aggressive China seeks to relegate India to the rank of a second-rate power in South Asia. Already, India has struggled to set and enforce redlines among its neighbors, for example, with Chinese spy ships docking in Sri Lanka in recent years.

Indian thinkers believe that entanglement in South Asia limits their country’s ambitions.

A wiser option for New Delhi would be to think more broadly and see South Asia as only a part of its neighborhood rather than the entirety of it. This doesn’t mean that India should give China a free hand in South Asia. To the contrary, it should encourage countries and groupings outside South Asia to take a more active role in the region. It could, for instance, invite friendly and wealthy Gulf states to work with India in South Asia to help address climate change or provide disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. It could take a more active role in the security partnership known as the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), that brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, encouraging forms of cooperation between the Quad and smaller South Asian island states, such as the Maldives and Sri Lanka, as well as landlocked ones, such as Bhutan and Nepal. India could proactively engage partners such as Japan, the United States, the EU, and other like-minded powers to help curb China’s growing influence in the region by countering Chinese economic and political narratives and providing alternative transparent development models. In so doing, India would widen its sense of its own backyard and check the Chinese quest for hegemony.

The end of South Asia is a key marker in the history of the region and offers geopolitical opportunities and choices for India and its partners. For India, finally relinquishing the region and not worrying about primacy there allows it to forge a dynamic geopolitical relationship between South Asia and regions and countries farther afield. It is not that India should stop engaging with its neighbors but that it should see them in a wider geopolitical context, not merely as denizens of the subcontinent they happen to share.

The same is true for the United States and its allies. Although they may have viewed smaller South Asian countries as irrelevant or at best marginal to their wider interests, they should understand that the likes of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are enmeshed in the broad geopolitical competition. Encouraging the participation of these smaller countries in larger frameworks and coalitions, such as the Quad, will help rein in Chinese influence and give these countries alternatives to the political and economic support offered by China. The countries of South Asia may not comprise a coherent region, but they will play integral roles in shaping the wider Asian balance of power in the years to come.

• HAPPYMON JACOB is Associate Professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, a New Delhi–based think tank.

Foreign Affairs · by Happymon Jacob · July 22, 2024

22. Securing Submarine Cables: A Critical Imperative for Indo-Pacific Stability

Excerpt:

Submarine cables are the unsung heroes of the digital age, enabling the connectivity that drives economic growth and societal development. In the Indo-Pacific, their importance cannot be overstated. However, the security of these critical infrastructures is increasingly threatened by natural disasters, geopolitical tensions, and malicious activities. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive and cooperative approach, integrating national strategies, regional cooperation, technological innovation, and strengthened legal frameworks. As the Indo-Pacific continues to rise in global prominence, ensuring the security of submarine cables will be paramount to maintaining regional stability and global connectivity.

Securing Submarine Cables: A Critical Imperative for Indo-Pacific Stability

thediplomat.com

Submarine cables are the unsung heroes of the digital age, enabling the connectivity that drives economic growth and societal development.

By Jihoon Yu

July 20, 2024

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In the vast and strategically critical Indo-Pacific region, submarine cables have emerged as a vital yet vulnerable component of global infrastructure. These underwater cables, which span thousands of miles across ocean floors, carry nearly 95 percent of international data, supporting everything from internet traffic to financial transactions. Despite their significance, the security of submarine cables remains a relatively underappreciated aspect of maritime security.

Submarine cables are the lifeblood of global communication. They facilitate the seamless flow of information that underpins modern economies and societies. The Indo-Pacific region, with its dynamic economic growth and strategic importance, relies heavily on these cables for connectivity. Countries like Japan, Australia, and Singapore are major hubs in the global network of submarine cables, making the security of these cables a matter of national interest as well as regional and global concern.

The vulnerability of submarine cables to both natural and man-made threats is a growing issue. Natural threats include seismic activities such as earthquakes and tsunamis, which are frequent in the Indo-Pacific’s “Ring of Fire.” These natural disasters can cause significant damage to underwater infrastructure, leading to disruptions in communication and economic losses.

Man-made threats pose an even more complex challenge. Sabotage, espionage, and accidental damage from shipping activities are significant risks. The intentional cutting or tampering of cables could cripple communication networks, disrupt financial markets, and impede military operations. In the context of rising geopolitical tensions, particularly with China’s increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea and beyond, the risk of state-sponsored sabotage or espionage cannot be ignored.

The Indo-Pacific region’s geopolitical landscape exacerbates the security challenges of submarine cables. China’s maritime expansion and militarization of disputed territories in the South China Sea add layers of complexity to the already fragile security environment. The potential for conflicts over cable routes and landing points is high, as these are strategically significant assets. Control over submarine cables could provide a strategic advantage in terms of intelligence and communication superiority, making them prime targets in any geopolitical conflict.

Despite their critical importance, submarine cables have not received adequate attention in national and regional security frameworks. There is a lack of comprehensive policies and regulations specifically addressing the protection of submarine cables. International law, primarily the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), provides some provisions for the protection of submarine cables, but these are often insufficient and lack enforcement mechanisms.

Enhancing the security of submarine cables in the Indo-Pacific requires a multifaceted approach. First, there needs to be greater awareness and recognition of the importance of these cables among policymakers and stakeholders. This involves integrating submarine cable security into national security strategies and maritime policies. Countries in the Indo-Pacific should prioritize the protection of submarine cables as critical infrastructure and allocate resources accordingly.

Second, regional cooperation is essential. The Indo-Pacific region is characterized by diverse political systems and varying levels of technological capability, making unilateral efforts insufficient. Collaborative initiatives such as joint patrols, shared surveillance systems, and coordinated response strategies can enhance the overall security of submarine cables. Regional organizations and forums, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the Quad (comprising the United States, Japan, India, and Australia), can play pivotal roles in fostering cooperation and developing collective security measures.

Third, technological innovation and investment are crucial. Advancements in monitoring and surveillance technologies can significantly improve the ability to detect and respond to threats to submarine cables. Investing in resilient infrastructure, such as redundant cable systems and secure landing points, can mitigate the impact of potential disruptions. Public-private partnerships can also play a significant role, as the private sector owns and operates a substantial portion of the global submarine cable network.

Legal and normative frameworks must be strengthened to protect submarine cables. This includes updating and enforcing international laws to address the specific challenges related to submarine cable security. Establishing clear guidelines for the protection and repair of cables, as well as punitive measures for intentional damage, can provide a deterrent against malicious activities.

Finally, it is essential to foster a culture of information sharing and transparency. Governments, private sector entities, and international organizations should collaborate to share information on threats, vulnerabilities, and best practices. This collective knowledge can enhance the resilience of the global submarine cable network and ensure its continued operation in the face of emerging threats.

Submarine cables are the unsung heroes of the digital age, enabling the connectivity that drives economic growth and societal development. In the Indo-Pacific, their importance cannot be overstated. However, the security of these critical infrastructures is increasingly threatened by natural disasters, geopolitical tensions, and malicious activities. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive and cooperative approach, integrating national strategies, regional cooperation, technological innovation, and strengthened legal frameworks. As the Indo-Pacific continues to rise in global prominence, ensuring the security of submarine cables will be paramount to maintaining regional stability and global connectivity.

Authors

Guest Author

Jihoon Yu

Jihoon Yu is a research fellow at Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. Jihoon was a member of Task Force for South Korea’s Light Aircraft Carrier project and Jangbogo-III submarine project. He is the main author of the South Korean Navy’s "Navy Vision 2045." His areas of expertise include the ROK-U.S. alliance, the ROK-Europe security cooperation, maritime security, naval strategy, and hybrid-threats. He earned BA in International Relations from the ROK Naval Academy, MA in National Security Affairs from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and Ph.D. in Political Science from Syracuse University.

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thediplomat.com

23. China’s Long March through the Global South

Graphics at the link: https://asiatimes.com/2024/07/chinas-long-march-through-the-global-south/

Excerpts:

Two simple proposals:

We should combine with Japan, South Korea, and Germany to compete with China’s Long March through the Global South. Together we have more resources and more capital.

We should invite our NATO partners to join us in creating the technologies that will determine the outcome of the 21st century. We won’t persuade them to rebuild conventional armies. But joining us at the cutting edge of technology is an offer they can’t refuse.

As a young researcher for Reagan’s National Security Council, I produced a study saying that SDI would pay for itself through civilian spinoffs. I was wrong: It paid for itself ten times over. This isn’t our first rodeo. We can do it again. We are more in need of reminder than of instruction.

China’s Long March through the Global South - Asia Times

US should combine with Japan, South Korea and Germany to compete; together they have more resources, more capital

asiatimes.com · by David P. Goldman · July 21, 2024

Asia Times Business Editor David P Goldman delivered these remarks on July 8 at the National Conservatism 4 Conference in Washington, D.C.

The “Long March” analogy isn’t my idea. Chinese policymakers talk of Mao’s civil war strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside.

Why is this important? The working-age population of high-income countries will fall by a quarter this century due to low birth rates. In the case of Taiwan and South Korea, it’s more like three-quarters.

That’s why I doubt China will invade Taiwan; the Chinese don’t fight for what will fall into their laps sooner or later like ripe fruit. But the working-age population of so-called Middle-Income countries will rise by half.

The world’s scarcest resource is young people who can work in a modern economy. Empires of the past fought over territory. China’s goal is to control people.

In 1979 China took a nation of farmers and turned them into industrial workers, and multiplied GDP per capita 30 times. Now it plans to turn a nation of factory workers into a nation of engineers — think of South Korea. That’s a messy and costly transition. But China is doing it.

In 2020 I wrote of China’s plan to Sino-form the Global South. It knows a lot about getting people who make $3 a day to make $10 or $20 a day.

China’s population has been in decline, but its highly educated population is growing:

Ten and a half million university graduates, up 60% in 10 years, 2X our total – and a third are engineers. That’s more engineering graduates than the rest of the world combined.

South Korea quintupled industrial production between 1990 and 2010 while its factory workforce fell by a fifth.

Will China collapse? Compare the US and China aggregate debt burden: the US is 262% of GDP, and China is 278% of GDP –

But China lends the world a trillion dollars a year and we borrow a trillion dollars a year. Countries with positive growth and big current account surpluses don’t have financial crises.

China has gotten many things wrong, but it got two big things right.

The first is AI applications to manufacturing. It can produce a $9,000 electric vehicle at a profit, or 2,400 5G base stations a day in a plant with 50 workers – I saw this. It also claims to have a factory that can make 1,000 cruise missile motors a day.

We can’t produce enough artillery shells to supply Ukraine. China can make as many ship-killer missiles as it wants. That’s the biggest change in relative firepower since muskets replaced crossbows. A US destroyer can carry 100 missile interceptors. There’s no limit to how many missiles China can launch from the mainland. We talk about prioritizing China: With what?

We’re just rearranging the deck guns on the Titanic.

China has 3 million 5G base stations. We have 100,000. China dominates key industries—telecom infrastructure, EVs, solar power, drones, steel and shipbuilding — and it’s aiming at semiconductors. Biden’s Treasury Secretary goes to China and says, “Please, you’ve got too much industrial capacity, don’t export so much!” What about OUR capacity?

The other big thing China got right is the transformation of the Global South. It doubled exports to the Global South since Covid – now exports more to the Global South than to all developed markets. Assimilates billions of people into its economic sphere. It did this with 200 soldiers deployed outside China versus our 230,000.

We spent $7 trillion on forever wars. China spent $1 trillion on Belt and Road Initiative investments. Who got more influence?

Forty countries have applied to join the BRICS group.

This isn’t about authoritarianism versus democracy. China’s exports to democracies like India grew as fast as exports to Russia. The Chinese are incurious about how barbarians govern themselves. They want to make the world dependent on Chinese technology and supply chains.

This is a gigantic undertaking: Four out of five workers in the Global South are immured in the so-called informal sector. They pay no taxes, receive few services, have no access to capital and world markets.

China is assimilating them with digital and transportation infrastructure. That connects people to world markets. Huawei and ZTE now deliver more than half the world’s telecom infrastructure and more than two thirds of the market in the Global South.

BYD is building EV plants in Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Turkey and Hungary. The $9,000 EV is today’s equivalent of the Model T for the Global South – a car the average family can afford. That’s as big as the Model T was for the United States.

Meanwhile our position deteriorates.

When Donald Trump left office, our trade deficit in goods was $800 billion a year. Now it’s half again as big, at $1.2 trillion a year.

Most of the new imports come from the Global South. We put tariffs on goods from China, so China instead shipped components to Mexico, Vietnam, India and a dozen other countries, which sold the finished goods to us. We import less from China but we’re more dependent on Chinese supply chains.

Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we smashed the enchanted broom that was flooding us, and now we have a dozen.

The Fed’s Industrial Production Index is lower than it was before COVID. Capital goods orders are down more than 10% after inflation.

Worst of all: We now import more capital goods — the goods that make other goods — than we produce at home. To produce more and import less, we need more capital goods, but we’ll need to import more capital goods today in order to import less in the future. That’s why across-the-board tariffs may do more harm than good.

We cut off China’s access to advanced chip technologies, but China has worked around most of these barriers. It can produce the chips it needs for industrial automation, 5G telecom, and other real economy applications. Again and again, we overestimated the impact of our sanctions and underestimated China’s ability to adapt.

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Taking potshots at the elephant hasn’t done much good. We have to get our own elephant.

We need a national effort on the scale of the Kennedy Moonshot or the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative. In 1965 12% of all federal outlays went to R&D. Today it’s 2.4%.

We get industrial policy right when we have a national emergency.

Trump’s missile defense is the way to go. Reduce our forward deployment and concentrate resources on high-tech defense.

We have faster chips. But it’s not just about processing speed: It’s know-how, education, an industrial culture and industrial communities, and we’ve let these slip. Trump is right to impose high tariffs on Chinese EVs – we have to protect our manufacturing base. He’s also right to invite Chinese auto companies to build plants in the US. China is ahead of us in industrial automation. Let’s appropriate some of China’s IP.

Two simple proposals:

We should combine with Japan, South Korea, and Germany to compete with China’s Long March through the Global South. Together we have more resources and more capital.

We should invite our NATO partners to join us in creating the technologies that will determine the outcome of the 21st century. We won’t persuade them to rebuild conventional armies. But joining us at the cutting edge of technology is an offer they can’t refuse.

As a young researcher for Reagan’s National Security Council, I produced a study saying that SDI would pay for itself through civilian spinoffs. I was wrong: It paid for itself ten times over. This isn’t our first rodeo. We can do it again. We are more in need of reminder than of instruction.

asiatimes.com · by David P. Goldman · July 21, 2024

24. Trump realizes Ukraine future needs to be addressed with Ukraine

The author is a member of the Ukrainian parliament.

Trump realizes Ukraine future needs to be addressed with Ukraine

22 july, 2024 monday

12:01

global.espreso.tv

I carefully re-read Boris Johnson's article and came to conclusions that differ from the initial emotional reaction.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy's phone conversation with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson's July 19 article in the Daily Mail outlining his plan to end the war and the conditions for peace in Ukraine complete a certain stage in the formation of the Republican administration's foreign policy. Of course, if Trump wins the November 5 election, which is questionable because the outcome of the election remains unknown. Regardless, Joe Biden has withdrawn his candidacy.

The fact that Zelenskyy-Trump spoke positively is a positive sign that the American politician is increasingly aware that the Russian-Ukrainian war is a very complex matter. One may want to "end the war in one day" on Putin's terms, but this approach is more than risky, because instead of being a "strong man," Trump may become known as an extreme loser. And this is at the start of his second presidential term, which is a completely unacceptable prospect for him.

Some points in the former British prime minister's article are disturbing (the reference to the "denazification" of Ukraine as a concession to Putin), but a careful reading of it convinces us that Johnson remains a friend of Ukraine. He wants the best for our people, and for this purpose he works hard, intelligently, and with those who need it most.

Moreover, it can be assumed that it was Boris (as everyone calls him) who facilitated the communication between Zelenskyy and Trump, as he met with the Republican presidential candidate on July 16. The main subject of their conversation was the war in Ukraine, which is natural, since Viktor Orban had met with Trump five days earlier. He presented his "peace plan," which is actually a plan to surrender and dismember Ukraine in the interests of Russia and China.

Johnson set himself the task of convincing his "American friend" that there is an alternative and that it is better for Trump personally and for the United States as a whole.

What’s on Trump’s Mind?

Analyzing the content of Zelenskyy's conversation with Trump alongside the theses in Johnson's article will offer a "snapshot" of the discussions around Trump's foreign policy strategy and his entourage during its formulation. This will also provide insights into the backstage of world politics at a critical moment for the future of Ukraine and the global community.

The conversation with Trump was initiated by the president of Ukraine, who, according to his spokesman, "urged Trump not to believe representatives of those countries who try to explain or justify Putin's actions. Of course, there are no excuses. He is an ordinary murderer." He added that Trump called for "not believing in fake news that his victory could be beneficial to Russia. He called this thesis fake news and urged us not to believe it.”

Zelenskyy himself said that he "agreed with President Trump to discuss in person what steps can make peace just and truly lasting." The American emphasized a different message: "I am grateful to President Zelenskyy for his appeal because I, as the next president of the United States, will bring peace to the world and end the war that has taken so many lives and destroyed countless innocent families.”

At first glance, both politicians seem to be talking about the same thing: ending the Russian-Ukrainian war and peace for Ukrainians. In fact, there are big differences between Zelenskyy's and Trump's positions, which Johnson directly and indirectly described.

When considering Johnson's article in the context of the Zelenskyy-Trump conversation, three things should be kept in mind. First, the Briton knows the former American president very well and knows how to talk to him, pressing on sensitive points in his self-esteem. Secondly, Boris's article should be read in the context of Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) ideology and the content of his campaign slogans. Third, Trump has an "overwhelming weakness" for Putin personally and other dictators.

The question "How to appease Putin?" is present in Trump's thinking and can be seen through his actions. It is hardly possible to change this situation. Perhaps, instead, it can be shown that for Trump himself, this model is not working, and even threatening.

What Johnson wrote about...

Here is a brief summary of Johnson's main points. He is convinced that the way Trump reacted to the terrorist attack against him - by calling on his supporters to fight - demonstrated the qualities necessary for the next owner of the White House: courage, invincibility, and leadership. And that is why only Trump can cope with the three main challenges of our time: the threat of Israel's war with Iran's "proxies," the situation around Taiwan, and the Russian-Ukrainian war.

In his opinion, Trump understands - unlike some Republicans - that Ukraine's defeat will be America's defeat. Putin is not going to be satisfied with the conquest of the country; he wants to conquer Georgia, the Baltic states, and Poland. And as he destroys Reagan's "gains" in Eastern Europe, his allies in China will want to take over Taiwan, while Hezbollah will attack Israel. In such a situation, America will have two choices: to abandon the illusion of world leadership or to spend trillions of dollars and send thousands of American soldiers to foreign countries to die there.

According to Johnson, the way to avoid this choice is simple: strong support for Ukraine, because "Ukrainians have shown that they can and will win. But the war in Ukraine has been going on for too long, its cost is enormous, and only Trump can end it on terms that are favorable to Ukraine and the West. Two steps are needed to achieve these goals. The first is to increase arms supplies to Ukraine and lift bans on the use of Western weapons to strike deep into Russian territory. This will enable Ukrainians to repel the Russian army.

The second step is to hold negotiations with Moscow, a prerequisite for which should be Russia's withdrawal "at least to the pre-invasion boundaries of 2022." And in order to "avoid future conflict and uncertainty the rest of Ukraine would have to be recognised as a free country" and become a member of the EU and NATO as soon as possible.

To the political arguments, Johnson added business arguments, especially those that Trump understands. Ukraine's Defense Forces number more than a million soldiers and are "the most effective anti-Russian force in the world." That's why, after the war, Ukrainian troops could replace some of the US forces in Europe. "That would enable Trump to save money, and to bring U.S. forces home, and get the Europeans to do more in their own defence: one of his key objectives," Johnson summarized this part of his plan.

He offered Russia a number of "compensators." The first is the possibility of recognizing the "special military operation" as successful due to the "denazification of Ukraine." In his opinion, "there could be special protections for Russian language speakers." In addition, Trump is the only occupant of the White House who is able to offer a new rapprochement between Russia and the United States and a return to the days when Russia was "a respected partner of the G8 and even NATO.”

Boris for the territorial integrity of Ukraine

In conclusion, Johnson emphasized that the only way to achieve the desired result is through force. Thus, Washington under Trump's leadership will have to show that "international borders must be respected" and that "the Soviet empire cannot be rebuilt by force.”

Now my comments. Regarding the first step proposed by Johnson. There is no one among Ukrainians who would deny the need to obtain as many weapons as possible and to lift all restrictions on their use to destroy military targets on enemy territory. We are grateful to those Republican and Democratic politicians (for example, House Speaker Mike Johnson) who are pressing President Joe Biden to lift the ban. We hope for a positive conclusion of the negotiations on this issue, which have been conducted by the Ukrainian and American military for several weeks.

The limited permission to use Western weapons in the Kharkiv sector demonstrated the powerful impact of this decision on the situation in the combat zone and in the Russian rear. And after successful mobilization, training of recruits at home and abroad, supplies of Western weapons and cooperation with our intelligence partners, the Ukrainian Defense Forces are able to seize the strategic initiative and end the war with Ukraine's victory. And that's when Moscow will ask for a truce and peace on Ukraine's terms.

This is a good scenario that we want and that our people are ready to realize any day. Similarly, Ukrainians support Ukraine's membership in the EU and NATO as soon as possible - at least today and within the current borders of a free territory. With the fact that the borders of the Ukrainian state were defined in 1991 with the restoration of our independence and recognized by the international community.

It's time for everyone to realize that there will be no peace in the world when someone tries to end the Russian-Ukrainian war differently and introduce peace "in their own way" on our suffering land. The former British Prime Minister understands this well, which is why he said so many words about the courage and strength of our soldiers.

Johnson has been harshly criticized for two proposals: Russia's withdrawal "at least" on the border from February 24, 2022 (which is allegedly tantamount to giving up part of our territory) and his agreement to "denazify" Ukraine. These proposals should be scrutinized, and there is no reason to look for "betrayal" and denial of the author's pro-Ukrainian position in them. Because Johnson did not write that the "February 23rd line" should be the new state border of Ukraine. Instead, he firmly stated that "international borders must be respected," including those of Russia.

Orban is not a negotiator even with Trump

Participants in the recent Republican Party convention were given two signs, among others: one with the inscription "End the war in Ukraine" and the slogan "Peace through strength." This is a telling illustration of the existence of two factions among Republicans: the Trump faction (which blocked aid to Ukraine for six months) and the Reagan faction, which, together with the Democrats, supported the provision of aid. Johnson's article shows the "golden mean" he offered Trump.

We are not completely satisfied with it, because we would not want to allow any ambiguity about Russia's withdrawal "at least to the February 23 line" as a precondition for the start of ceasefire negotiations and, subsequently, a peace agreement. But we have what we have - Trump has never been a friend of Ukraine and is unlikely to become one. Only the tectonic shifts caused by Ukraine's resistance to Russian aggression and the support provided by our allies and partners made even him adjust his position somewhat.

In April, he supported Speaker Johnson when he decided to bring the Ukraine aid bill to a vote, even though Russia did everything possible and impossible to prevent this from happening. Today, he is forced to take a call from Zelenskyy and listen to Johnson's position, thus undermining Orban's status as a "negotiator" mandated by Putin and Xi Jinping. Thus, Trump has begun to signal that he understands what is self-evident and unanimously accepted by Ukrainians: that peace in Ukraine should be discussed with us first and foremost, not with the aggressor.

Now for the "denazification" of Ukraine. Johnson has previously said that this genocidal ideologeme is an acceptable "compromise" with Putin to end the war as soon as possible. He is not to blame, as even a sophisticated expert on Ukrainian history, Professor Timothy Snyder, has suggested that Russian be made the second official language in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government is at fault for convincing Western partners behind the scenes that issues of language, faith, and history should be viewed as matters for "compromise" with Russia and "denazification" is inconsequential. And even in the third year of the "great war," the parliament cannot gather enough votes to ban the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Although there is more than enough evidence of its criminal activities and subordination to Russian state structures and its special services.

A nation that does not care about its own dignity, the foundations of national security and the prerequisites for a secure and successful future should not demand such care from others.

Source

About the author. Mykola Kniazhytskyi, journalist, member of the Ukrainian parliament.

The editors don't always share the opinions expressed by the authors of blogs or columns.

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