Quotes of the Day:
"I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime, yet for every criminal there are 10,000 honest decent kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries - but fit is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses...in the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land."
- Robert A. Heinlein - Excerpt from This is I Believe
“Think of the life you have lived until now as over and, as a dead man, see what’s left as a bonus and live it according to Nature. Love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own, for what could be more fitting?”
– Marcus Aurelius
"Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
- Physicist Richard Feynman
1. ‘How Does One Process Defeat?’
2. Will Beijing Invade Taiwan?
3. Air Force special operations’ next big battlefield: Facebook
4. Pentagon Grappling With New Vaccine Orders; Timing Uncertain
5. Who’s against the jab: Our statistical model throws light on America’s vaccine hesitancy
6. DoD really has no idea who it’s hired to do private security, report finds
7. U.S. scheme to hype South China Sea issue sanctimonious - Xinhua
8. Army Says Drowning Wasn't the Cause of Green Beret's Death, Retracting Prior Claim
9. Philippine, US Troop Pact In ‘Full Force Again’
10. China theme runs through Philippine weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz’s Olympic gold medal
11. Why a post-US Afghanistan poses a litmus test for China as a military power
12. DIA Medical Sleuth Busts China Biowarfare Plot Theory
13. How the U.S. Learned to Stop Worrying About the Pacific and Love the ‘Indo-Pacific’
14. ‘Complete disaster’: Inside the Biden team’s chaotic bid to evacuate Afghan interpreters
15. FBI probe shows amount of chemicals in Beirut blast was a fraction of original shipment
16. Russia-Japan Tensions Rise As Moscow Eyes Kuril Development
17. Re-Shaping the USMC as a Crisis Management Force: Working Naval Integration
18. 6 key takeaways about the state of the news media in 2020
19. The Return of Hypocrisy
20. DoD needs to get a handle on quality of life at remote, isolated U.S. bases, report finds
21. The Secret Source Who Helped Fuel Trump’s Big Lie
22. Lithuania leads in defying China
23. QAnon is not Dead: New Research into Telegram Shows the Movement is Alive and Well
1. ‘How Does One Process Defeat?’
An essay to ponder over the weekend.
To Dr. Cohen's reading recommendations I would add Professor Nancy Sherman's Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind and Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience.
‘How Does One Process Defeat?’
A letter to a civilian who deployed to Afghanistan
A few days ago I heard from a former student of mine, whom I will refer to as Scott. He began by assuring me that he, his wife, and their three children were all well, and filled me in on his career since a period of extended service in Afghanistan as a civilian. He wrote the following:
You might have seen the news earlier this week that Spin Boldak, the Afghan border town in Kandahar, is now under Taliban occupation. After spending a bit of time in the Arghandab River Valley (which still induces nightmares) I spent a year in Spin Boldak (which induces slightly fewer nightmares).
I got home from a thirteen month deployment almost a full decade ago … but ten years later the place I spent a year on patrol with the three different cav squadrons, and on the back of Afghan Border Police pickup trucks, now has the Taliban flag flying at the border crossing.
However I feel conflicted on how to feel. Part of me is sad, part of me is enraged, and part of me just doesn’t care any more—and it is a weird way to feel. How can I be mad while also shrugging it off? Or trying to shrug it off?
So I thought I would drop you a line because I always appreciate your perspective. Do you have any good books to recommend? I’m sure someone has written something intelligent (fiction or nonfiction) that would help one understand the injured psyche of individuals who spent a not insignificant amount of time supporting what ends up being a futile or losing side of a violent conflict … How does one process defeat in a healthy way? Is it possible?
Since Scott specifically asked me to write an article on this subject (for The Atlantic, in fact), I thought I would share my response, which would normally be private.
Dear Scott,
Thank you for writing, and for a confidence in my perspective that, like any teacher with a conscience, I fear may be misplaced. For much of my career, I have found myself counseling and attempting to console veterans of multiple wars. The first came to me more than 30 years ago, a tightly wound young Marine officer who had lost men to what is cruelly misnamed “friendly fire.” This is, I suppose, to say that the experience of war can torment even the winners, and veterans of a conflict that (by historical standards) entailed very few losses on our side.
Your questions call, it seems to me, for multiple answers, at different levels, and with different degrees of detachment. You asked for a good book to read. Carter Malkasian’s new work, The American War in Afghanistan, looks to be the best account of that war. He teaches, like I do, at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, but more to the point was a senior adviser to General Joe Dunford, and even more to the point learned Pashto and spent a year in an Afghan village. His view of the entire war, including from the vantage point of the other side, may help.
As for the psychological and emotional issues of veterans—and you may be a civilian, but a veteran you most definitely are—I can suggest to you only Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam and, even more so, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. A psychiatrist and a classicist, Shay captures like no one else what it means to come home from war—even a war that has been won, which, if you think about it, is the story of Odysseus.
The truth is, of course, that very few wars are ever clearly “won” or indeed “lost.” We talked about that in the first course you ever took with me, “Strategy and Policy.” Wars simply bring consequences, and these invariably include political and social transformations, lives lost, bodies and souls maimed, courage and nobility displayed, horrors perpetrated and witnessed, and comradeship transformed into a kind of love that those of us who are not veterans of war will never experience.
On a colder, more political level, one is always impelled to ask: Was it worth it? But surely that is an unanswerable question. Even in victory, many doubt the cause for which they fought. That is one of the themes of Michael Shaara’s great novel about Gettysburg, Killer Angels. From the individual point of view, it gets harder yet. Surely no American war was more just or more completely won than World War II. Yet in the 1960s, could any of us have dared look into the eyes of Alleta and Thomas Sullivan, who lost their five sons in the sinking of the USS Juneau in 1942, and said to them, “It was worth it”?
This is not to say that all wars are pointless and thereby make a case for a thorough-going pacifism. There are things that are worse than war. And there are achievements of which those like you who have borne the burden should be proud. The American effort in Afghanistan improved life immeasurably for many people whom we once cruelly abandoned. Girls and women, in particular, found freedoms unimaginable under the tyranny they had endured and, alas, will almost certainly endure once again.
Those achievements have their own value in their own time. If I could urge one thing upon you, it would be to take pride in what you did and what you and your comrades, civilian and military, achieved during your time on the line. That is all any of us can do, because it is not given to us to see very far ahead, and when we attempt to do so we are usually wrong. Afghanistan’s future looks dark. But it is not the same country that the United States entered two decades ago, and we do not know what it will be two decades hence.
Sgt. Oscar Cuellar and an Afghan boy consider each other for a moment in the outskirts of Qalat, the capital of Zabul Province. (Ben Brody)
As for our withdrawal from Afghanistan now, like you, I am torn. For the past 12 years, we had presidents who kept sending soldiers and civilians to a conflict in which they did not believe. One could argue that Joe Biden simply has a courage that they did not, to act on a conviction identical to their own. One could further argue that although Afghanistan has not seen American losses in some time, and although the actual troop footprint is small, it is a losing game that takes up disproportionate time and energy from the country’s senior leadership, when the United States has other, more important troubles on its hands.
And yet I would feel less disturbed if America’s leaders owned the decision. That, it seems to me, is a test of all leadership, in every domain and in any kind of organization—owning it, accepting responsibility, and looking truth in the eye. To suggest, as the administration has, that the catastrophe that impends in Afghanistan is not our responsibility is factually and morally false. We have made a brutal choice, an understandable choice, but not a morally neutral choice. All involved should lose some sleep over it, and I hope they will.
The last paragraph but one of your letter is the toughest to respond to:
For the first time, I brought my older daughter to Arlington on Memorial Day this year, and didn’t want her to see me cry and I kept my sunglasses on as we walked through section 60 and I tried not to bawl too much in front of her. Seeing markers of kids—and they were kids—who were closer in age to her than me now, are buried in the rows and rows, it tore me up.
For that, Scott, your former teacher has no perspective to offer, only tears, and a wish that I could put my arm around your shoulders.
2. Will Beijing Invade Taiwan?
A number of short essays from China Scholars.
Spoiler Alert: It depends and not even China knows the answer to that question.
Will Beijing Invade Taiwan?
A ChinaFile Conversation
The ChinaFile Conversation is a weekly, real-time discussion of China news, from a group of the world’s leading China experts.
Susan Thornton is a Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, which she joined following a 28-year diplomatic career. She most recently served as Acting Assistant Secretary of State...
Admiral Scott Swift served in the U.S. Navy for more than 40 years, rising from his commission through the Aviation Reserve Officer Candidate program to become a Navy light attack and strike fighter...
Bonnie S. Glaser is Director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was previously Senior Adviser for Asia and the Director of the China Power Project at the Center...
Yu-Jie Chen is an Assistant Research Professor at Institutum Iurisprudentiae of Academia Sinica and an Affiliated Scholar at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute of NYU School of Law. Her research focuses on...
Ryan Hass is a fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair at the Brookings Institution, where he holds a joint appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy...
Scott W. Harold is a Senior Political Scientist and Associate Director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Policy at The RAND Corporation. In addition to his work at RAND, Harold is an Adjunct Professor...
On July 1, Xi Jinping gave a speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. After walking Party members through China’s recent past and glorious future, Xi turned to Taiwan. “Resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China’s complete reunification is a historic mission and an unshakable commitment of the Communist Party of China,” he said. “We must take resolute action to utterly defeat any attempt toward “Taiwan independence,” and work together to create a bright future for national rejuvenation.”
What, precisely, are Beijing’s plans for Taiwan? In recent years, there has been no small amount of saber rattling, with aggressive naval drills, aerial incursions, and warnings that force would be used for reunification if necessary. But given the steep domestic and international costs of war, how likely is it that Beijing will attempt to force reunification militarily? Will the People’s Republic of China wage war on Taiwan? — Abby Seiff
Comments
The simplest answer to the question of whether China will “wage war” on Taiwan is, “It depends.” No particular scenario is inevitable.
The military balance across the Taiwan Strait is changing and increasingly lopsided. This imbalance is longstanding, however, and the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) development of capabilities shouldn’t be conflated with Beijing’s intentions. The PLA simply must be prepared. Some maintain that Xi Jinping has set a timetable for reunification in order to make it part of his legacy, but in turbulent times and facing many other daunting challenges, the weighing of costs and benefits is more likely to be determinative. Beijing is well aware that any scenario involving war on Taiwan will be dramatically costly, especially given the likelihood that global opinion will tag the mainland as the aggressor. Others point out that Beijing has increased its military and diplomatic pressure on Taiwan, but often mistake these moves as part of a well-honed plan, as opposed to responses to specific triggering events or trends.
Many claim that public sentiment in Taiwan has irrevocably shifted against the mainland, and clearly the pressure on Hong Kong’s civil liberties in the wake of anti-government protests there have soured many of Taiwan’s youth on Beijing. Nevertheless, cross-Strait business and trade continue apace, and Taiwan’s students still head to the mainland for school and work. Over time, opinions may change. Some believe that Taiwan voters are likely to drive their leaders to take increasingly pro-independence stands, and that this has set a collision course with Beijing. Tsai Ing-wen, however, was reelected by a healthy margin despite (or maybe, in part, because of?) her cautious first-term stance on independence-related issues. Taiwan democracy is raucous, but ultimately pragmatic.
If there is no inevitability to Beijing waging war on Taiwan, we need to look at the factors that might make such a move more likely. Some have mentioned domestic politics as a potential catalyst for action on Taiwan, in a “wag the dog” scenario. It is difficult at this point to discern the kind of infighting that might inspire such a dramatic nationalist distraction, but with uncertainty hanging over Beijing’s political transitions it cannot be ruled out. A sudden move by Taiwan authorities away from the Republic of China Constitution, away from historical understandings around a One China framework, or to directly declare independence would all certainly be cause for alarm and would likely generate a punishing response from Beijing.
Washington also figures largely here. The line between de facto and de jure independence in the international system is a thin one that has generally been controlled by the United States. Beijing, while uncomfortable with this reality, has wagered that it could keep the U.S. from recognizing Taiwan, leaving its ambiguous status to be addressed later. But the PRC continually perceives U.S. moves toward recognition and is prone to (over)react to them. U.S. disclaimers only add fuel to the paranoia. This dynamic could easily lead to the scenario envisioned by the question, especially in the current climate of mutual hostility and suspicion.
So, ultimately, whether “war is waged” over Taiwan depends on developments and leadership in Taipei, Beijing, and Washington.
Even the People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not definitively know the answer to this frequently posed question. The best answer is, “It depends.” The next compelling question is, “On what?”
In seeking a fuller appreciation of what is behind these questions, we need to better understand what the competition between the PRC and liberal democracies is all about. As a military practitioner it is easier for me than others to make the statement that we focus our analysis of the PRC too much on the military element. The core to the competition is about government and economic models. But this is not the discussion the PRC wants to have. They are much more comfortable with leveraging force and coercion that is core to a military competition. If we are not careful, it will be.
Among the fundamental core elements of the Chinese Communist Party that are most consequential to the question posed here are, first, its promise to the Chinese people to reverse the effects of the “100 years of humiliation.” The second element is its promise that it will never again allow the sovereignty of China to be violated. The third element is the promise to ensure the economic prosperity of the Chinese people, lifting them from the poverty forced on them by the first and second core elements.
These three elements will be key in the conditions that could trigger the PRC to move to forcibly reunite Taiwan with the PRC.
The possibility the PRC will turn to war depends on the reality that if any of these three elements are held at risk in the eyes of the CCP, their very existence is challenged. Beijing cannot afford for the Chinese people to worry that another period of “humiliation” might be at hand. In the minds of PRC leaders, this would be manifest should international recognition of Taiwan as an independent country become the norm. (This is the context of the PRC protest of recent NBC Olympics coverage that showed a map of China that didn’t include Taiwan.)
In the context of the second element—ensuring sovereignty—U.S. Freedom of Navigation Operations outside the PRC are viewed as actions aimed at underscoring free maritime passages as affirmed by the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea. To the CCP, such actions strike at the heart of their legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people.
Lastly, if the economic growth of the PRC is not sustained sufficiently to achieve promised prosperity, then there is a greater likelihood Beijing will “externalize” its internal economic challenges to include consideration of the forcible reunification of Taiwan.
To underscore a critical point, beyond the scope of Taiwan, the South China Sea, and all the other points of friction highlighted as uniquely consequential, the “competition” in its most critical context centers on the PRC’s understanding that its hybrid form of communism cannot compete against, or survive full contact with, the free and open international community of democracies.
If the PRC cannot reconcile its ability, or inability, to modify the rules-based international order to set the conditions necessary for something other than a free and open economic and governance system to compete on the global stage, it will continue to turn to force and corrosion.
It would be unwise to rule out the possibility of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) attack on Taiwan. PRC military modernization has focused on the mission of seizing and controlling Taiwan since the mid-1990s. The 2005 Anti-Secession Law set out conditions for use of force, including the exhaustion of all means to achieve peaceful reunification. Key questions, however, are whether Xi Jinping has put unification above other national priorities, decided that it must take place now, and concluded that the risks are acceptable. I believe the answer to these questions is no.
In the 14th Five-Year Plan that was approved in March, Beijing reaffirmed its commitment to the “peaceful development of cross-Straits relations.” The same month, Xi Jinping visited Fujian, where he passed up an opportunity to visit a front-line People’s Liberation Army unit and instead inspected a mobile corps of the People’s Armed Police Force. Moreover, Xi signaled that the PRC’s approach to Taiwan would continue to rely on both carrots and sticks. He exhorted provincial officials to “be bold in exploring new paths for integrated cross-Strait development,” including by offering economic policies that would benefit the people of Taiwan. In Xi’s July 1 speech marking the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) centenary, he reaffirmed a commitment to advancing “peaceful reunification.”
Xi is no doubt aware of the risks of waging war against Taiwan. A failed invasion or even one that ends in stalemate could pose a threat to the CCP’s legitimacy at home. An attack on Taiwan would likely result in a major war with the United States and require diverting resources from pressing domestic priorities that would set back Xi’s plan to achieve national rejuvenation by mid-century. Use of force would likely instill fear among China’s neighbors that Beijing could employ military means to solve other territorial disputes—potentially solidifying an anti-China coalition willing to push back against PRC aggression.
Deterring Taiwan independence, not unification, is Beijing’s top priority, and Xi has confidence that Taiwan’s “secession” can be prevented. Unification is a longer-term goal that Beijing prefers to achieve without bloodshed. The PRC has amassed a vast array of coercive tools that are being employed to undermine the confidence of the people of Taiwan in their government and weaken their will to resist integration with the mainland. As the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote 2,500 years ago, “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight” and “to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
Beijing has long resorted to carrots and sticks to incentivize the unification of Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as well as to deter Taiwan’s formal declaration of independence. In recent years, however, Xi Jinping has stepped up coercion, including by increasing military pressure on Taipei. The pressure ranges from what have now become regular “island patrols” (in which People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter and bomber aircraft circumnavigate the island) to the PLA’s frequent entries into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. These moves appear aimed at normalizing PRC military presence around Taiwan. Beijing has multiple goals: sending warning signs both to what it views as “independence forces” in Taiwan and perpetrators of “foreign interference” in the U.S.; training its armed forces and boosting combat capabilities; increasing the cost to Taipei of monitoring Beijing’s near-daily military activities; and pushing the envelope to alter the status quo across the Taiwan Strait.
Whether Beijing would actually wage war on Taiwan, however, depends mostly on Beijing’s perceptions of the cost of such an action, including its perception of Taiwan’s determination to defend itself and the potential for U.S. intervention. Thus, raising Beijing’s perception of the cost of invasion is the key to preventing it from making a devastating, tragic gambit.
Therefore, Taiwan must enhance its defensive capabilities, both military and societal. While the lure of acquiring bright, shiny objects for its arsenal may be almost irresistible, Taiwan ought to attend more to civilian preparation. There is a lot of room for improvement in the work of readying Taiwan’s citizenry for a possible PLA invasion in the hopes of prolonging and sustaining Taiwan’s resistance. For example, Enoch Wu, a rising Democratic Progressive Party politician, has proposed that Taiwan transform its existing military reserves in order to develop an effective civil defense force that would constitute a defiant holdout against an invasion. But this proposal has not gained much traction. Taiwanese society must not succumb to the temptations of complacency and indifference.
Regardless of whether Beijing plans to invade Taiwan soon, miscommunication worsens the risk of war. Since Xi has refused to engage with President Tsai Ing-wen, his unilateral, non-cooperative approach might lead to miscalculation, especially amid military tensions. At this point, the possibility of China’s current militant actions causing an accident that leads to an exchange of missiles is more worrying than the prospect of an intentional invasion.
The U.S. must continue to support Taiwan. Washington should send a clear message that it will not be a bystander when the PRC threatens to unify Taiwan by force or should Beijing launch an unprovoked attack. This strategic clarity from the U.S., together with Taiwan’s readiness, would help put restraints on Beijing’s calculations. Beijing would also be wise not to force itself into a situation in which everything that occurs looks like a nail to be hammered. Waging war against Taiwan would be disastrous not only for Taiwan but also for PRC society, the world, and possibly even Xi’s tenure.
With the People’s Republic of China (PRC) regularly rattling its saber towards Taiwan, many observers worry that the Taiwan Strait is becoming one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Yet, while the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been modernizing its forces with a Taiwan contingency in mind for the past two and a half decades, there remain good reasons to think that Xi Jinping is unlikely to launch a war of aggression against Taiwan in the near-term.
First, the PRC can live without Taiwan, and has for all but four out of the last 126 years. Only from 1945 to 1949 did a regime that controlled the mainland also occupy Taiwan. At no point in its history has Taiwan ever been part of the People’s Republic of China. And democratic Taiwan poses no military threat to the PRC today.
Second, part of the impression that the PRC may be on the verge of using force against Taiwan may stem from Chinese political warfare and psychological operations. While Xi has ordered his military to be prepared to fight and “win wars,” the reality is that the Communist Party’s goal remains to win without fighting. Any choice to ignite conflict, however, would be entirely a product of Beijing’s preferences; Taipei would never do so.
Third, the risks—for the PRC, Xi, CCP leadership, military, and Chinese people—of a war with Taiwan are enormous. Should Xi launch a war of choice and lose, his rivals could try to remove him from the leadership, whereas dangling the prospect of using force against Taiwan—without actually doing so—might help him maintain his grip on power. And Xi surely knows that the PLA cannot guarantee it could win a war for Taiwan, which would involve complex joint operations to execute an amphibious invasion and airborne assault, some of the most challenging military operations in the world.
Finally, the PLA would not merely be confronting the challenges of operating in the choppy waters of the Taiwan Strait against a highly motivated set of Taiwanese defenders who have seen the repression that occurs in places the PRC rules such as Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The PRC armed forces would also have to contend with the near-certain intervention of the U.S. and Japan, and potentially of other actors such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the European allies, who could contribute diplomatic, economic, intelligence, or other support.
While there are good reasons why the PRC may not launch such an attack, Taiwanese, American, or Japanese policymakers might not feel overly confident that conflict will not occur: Xi has consolidated enough authority in his own hands that if he mistakenly concludes that he can win, or that he has no other choice but to fight, he might initiate hostilities even if he judges such a conflict to be high-risk. For this reason, Taiwan, the U.S., and Japan might consider accelerating joint preparations to ensure that deterrence holds and that their defense capabilities are sufficient to defeat any PRC effort at military coercion.
There has been a wave of commentary by current and former officials and experts in the United States warning of impending conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Several such analyses even have defined timespans during which war will become likely.
The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) recent behavior has contributed to growing alarm about Taiwan’s security. In the past few years, Beijing has drawn blood at the Sino-Indian border, threatened Vietnam, become more aggressive in cyber espionage, committed mass-scale atrocities in Xinjiang, bolstered its military presence in the South China Sea, increased its operations near the Senkaku Islands, trampled Hong Kong’s autonomy, and intensified its military intimidation of Taiwan. The PRC is investing heavily in military capabilities for a Taiwan contingency. The PRC’s top leaders also continue to emphasize publicly their determination to achieve unification with Taiwan.
Given these realities, it would be imprudent to ignore risks of conflict. Beijing certainly is not acting as if it has forsworn military options for resolving cross-Strait differences. The U.S. and Taiwan accordingly must strengthen their deterrent capability.
At the same time, viewed from Beijing’s vantage, there are still powerful reasons for the PRC to choose strategies other than use of force in pursuit of its preferred outcome on Taiwan. Any PRC attempt to take Taiwan by military means very likely would draw U.S., Japanese, and potentially other countries’ militaries into the conflict. Beijing couldn’t enter the fight with confidence in its ability to contain the geographic scope or control escalation, including the use of nuclear weapons. PRC leaders also would expose their own national vulnerabilities. The PRC relies on imports of food, fuel, and other critical inputs to feed its people and power its economy. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy does not presently possess the capability to protect long supply lines through which these imports flow.
Any PRC use of force against Taiwan also would poison China’s image in the world. It would generate volatility that could trigger capital flight and diversion of trade flows. PRC leaders would, in effect, need to put all other national goals at risk in service of the pursuit of unification with Taiwan, an outcome that would be far from preordained in any conflict scenario.
Some may rejoin that this analysis underweights the PRC’s growing military pressure on Taiwan. Although concerning, PLA operational activities on their own are not a signal of imminent conflict. They also serve as visible symbols in Beijing’s narrative that it has the capacity to deter Taiwan from declaring independence and registering opposition to closer U.S.-Taiwan ties. Beijing would like for its military maneuvers to generate alarm in Taipei and Washington as well as attention at home; PRC leaders want to be perceived as dealing strongly with the situation.
Beijing’s approach to Taiwan can be better understood as a light dimmer rather than a switch. Beijing already is working along a continuum of efforts to “win without fighting”—to compel Taiwan to enter negotiation over the terms of the political relationship across the Taiwan Strait. An overemphasis on scanning the horizon for an invading flotilla risks losing sight of the proximate pressures Taiwan faces right now and of developing effective ways to respond.
3. Air Force special operations’ next big battlefield: Facebook
We need to conduct a superior form of political warfare.
A couple of my recent tweets in response to similar discussions:
GPC is political warfare. We must conduct our own superior form of political warfare to protect, sustain, and advance our interests. One of the key lines of effort in PW is leading with influence because to our enemies politics is war by other means.
Use the right force for the right mission. Learn to lead with influence. The moral is to the physical as 3 is to 1 (Bonaparte). In the 21st C the influence is to the kinetic as 10 is to 1. Let’s out think & out influence as well as out fight our adversaries and competitors.
Excerpts:
To promote a joint force response to disinformation, RAND recommended the military dive deeper into foreign social media platforms; train for responding to disinformation campaigns, and conduct a military-wide review of the structure and authorities responsible for that response. That advice extends to the entire U.S. government, which RAND said should not only publish a counter-information strategy but also include private industry and the rest of civil society in its response.
RAND’s recommendations were similar to those of Molly McKew, the disinformation expert when she testified before Congress in 2017.
“We need a whole-of-government response driven by a unity of mission,” she said. “Clear leadership amplifies results. If our government is more open about the threat and the results, media and civil society actors can follow along and take more action.”
If we don’t, McKew warned, America can expect more of the same divisions that disinformation has inflamed both here and abroad.
“We as Americans want to believe this warfare doesn’t work on us, that oceans are still a barrier to foreign invasion,” she said. “But we really have no basis in fact for remaining comfortable with that belief.”
Air Force special operations’ next big battlefield: Facebook
“We as Americans want to believe this warfare doesn’t work on us ... but we have no basis for remaining comfortable with that."
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There’s a war going on and, like it or not, you’ve already been drafted into it. But there’s no battlefield, no explosions, and no uniforms in this fight. Instead, it’s unfolding in Reddit threads, Facebook comments, and other social media forums where people swap information and, unwittingly or not, disinformation. Unlike misinformation, which includes false, incomplete, or misleading information shared without the intent to mislead a target population, disinformation is deliberately designed to mislead targeted groups of people, and is being used by other countries such as Russia and Iran to advance their own interests in the United States.
While social media may be the latest tool for deploying it, disinformation is nothing new in warfare. The famous Ghost Army of World War II involved the U.S. Army’s use of inflatable tanks, planes, artillery pieces, and fake messages to convince Nazi Germany that the Allies had two more divisions than they actually did. More recently, disinformation has become much more high-tech and effective at sowing confusion in rival countries.
Russia used disinformation to try to discredit the government of Ukraine during its 2014 invasion of the country. Moscow’s army of shit posters sought to portray the government as a fascist, xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic junta in an effort to sow unrest among its people, according to Foreign Policy. The trick still seems to be working: just two months ago, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) shared Russian propaganda in an attack on a U.S. Army corporal after she talked about how her two moms inspired her to join the Army in a recruiting commercial. Russia also used disinformation to try to undermine the effectiveness of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
“These manipulations don’t create tendencies or traits in our societies,” said Molly McKew, an expert on information warfare, at a 2017 Senate hearing on Russian disinformation. “They elevate, exploit, and distort divides and grievances that already are present.”
British army Soldier Cpl. Jamie Hart, 77th Brigade, 6th United Kingdom Division, captures photos of a simulated protest during Dragoon Ready 20 at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center, Hohenfels, Germany, Nov. 4, 2019. British Soldiers with the 77BDE use information warfare by specializing in civil affairs, public affairs, media and psychological operations to achieve mission success. (U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Michael Ybarra)
But there might be a way to turn things around, and Air Force special operations might be near the center of it. The RAND study was commissioned by Air Force Special Operations Command, which, like the Army Special Operations Command, hosts psychological warfare units. Such units have become too focused on operational security (i.e. preventing data leaks, watching for aircraft spotters) during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they have fallen out of the practice of proactively detecting and countering disinformation campaigns, RAND found.
The Air Force seems to be aware of this problem. In 2016, the service created a new career field called 14F Information Operations. The first nine airmen to join the field graduated skills training in December, 2020, where they learned all about “military information support operations, operations security, and military deception,” according to a press release.
14F is a step in the right direction, RAND wrote, but the problem is that the unit “lacks both the resources and the training to look for disinformation campaigns,” nor does it have a mechanism for passing the information to another element that can investigate further. The Air Force could learn from the Marine Corps, which has a Marine Information Group; training exercises where information operations plays a role in larger combat, and a three-star general in charge of developing plans, policies and strategies while serving as Deputy Commandant for Information, RAND wrote.
That kind of know-how will become invaluable as disinformation attacks step up over the next decade like they are expected to, RAND wrote.
The Air Force “will need to regrow its [information operations] capability as disinformation campaigns on social media increasingly become a staple of competition—and, perhaps, conflict,” the study authors said.
RAND was encouraged by the Air Force 24th Special Operations Wing (the home of elite combat controller units like the 24th Special Tactics Squadron) developing a bigger social media presence. But interestingly enough, some of RAND’s recommendations focus on a modified cargo aircraft that you’ve probably never heard of: the EC-130J Commando-Solo. The Commando-Solo is a C-130 equipped with digital, radio and television broadcasting devices. In the past, the aircraft and its older models were used to try to convince Iraqi soldiers to surrender, relay messages from Haitian leaders to their people to prevent a coup; and to try to prevent ethnic cleansing in Ukraine. But the aircraft’s 60 year history of broadcasting propaganda has convinced other countries such as Russia that its mere presence “presented a dire threat to Russia’s security,” RAND wrote.
The Air Force must be very careful about deploying Commando-Solo near Russia in the future, RAND wrote, particularly because Russia is one of the most prolific disinformation spreaders in the world.
An EC-130J Commando Solo from the 193rd Special Operations Squadron takes flight from Harrisburg Air National Guard Base, Pa., Oct. 2, 2020. The EC-130J Commando Solo, a specially-modified four-engine Hercules transport, conducts airborne Information Operations via digital and analog radio and television broadcasts. (U.S. Air Force photo)
“China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have embraced disinformation on social media as a weapon of conflict, driven in part by their own deep-seated anxieties about the possible impact of the internet and social media on domestic stability,” RAND wrote. “All these countries are worried to varying degrees that the West will mount disinformation campaigns against them—particularly on social media—and spark unrest. Russian writings often exaggerate the West’s actual capabilities in this arena and portray Russia’s own disinformation efforts as merely trying to keep up with Western dominance.”
The U.S. military is forbidden by law from conducting information operations inside the United States, RAND wrote, which is why the military needs to be just one part of a total government response to the issue. If the U.S. can coordinate its response to disinformation, it may have a better chance of turning back attacks.
To promote a joint force response to disinformation, RAND recommended the military dive deeper into foreign social media platforms; train for responding to disinformation campaigns, and conduct a military-wide review of the structure and authorities responsible for that response. That advice extends to the entire U.S. government, which RAND said should not only publish a counter-information strategy but also include private industry and the rest of civil society in its response.
RAND’s recommendations were similar to those of Molly McKew, the disinformation expert when she testified before Congress in 2017.
“We need a whole-of-government response driven by a unity of mission,” she said. “Clear leadership amplifies results. If our government is more open about the threat and the results, media and civil society actors can follow along and take more action.”
If we don’t, McKew warned, America can expect more of the same divisions that disinformation has inflamed both here and abroad.
“We as Americans want to believe this warfare doesn’t work on us, that oceans are still a barrier to foreign invasion,” she said. “But we really have no basis in fact for remaining comfortable with that belief.”
More great stories on Task & Purpose
covers the Air Force and anything Star Wars-related. He joined Task & Purpose in 2019, after covering local news in Maine and then FDA policy in Washington D.C. He loves hearing the stories of individual airmen and their families, and he also holds the unpopular opinion that Imperial stormtroopers are actually excellent marksmen. david.roza@taskandpurpose.com Contact the author here.
4. Pentagon Grappling With New Vaccine Orders; Timing Uncertain
Looking at the low number of deaths in the military is not a useful statistic. This should be a readiness and resiliency issue. If we have to deploy military personnel around the world we need to provide the maximum force protection for individual military personnel but also to ensure unit readiness is sustained. COVID is worse in many parts of the world, especially in conflict zones than it is on US military bases in CONUS. If deployed military personnel come down with COVID it could severely impact the unit's ability to operate. We should learn from the USS Theadore Roosevelt and the ROK Navy's destroyer Munmu the Great in the Gulf of Aden.
Pentagon Grappling With New Vaccine Orders; Timing Uncertain
Though military deaths from the virus are small, cases have been increasing lately
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is vowing he “won't let grass grow under our feet” as the department begins to implement the new vaccine and testing directives. But Pentagon officials were scrambling at week's end to figure out how to enact and enforce the changes across the vast military population and determine which National Guard and Reserve troops would be affected by the orders.
The Pentagon now has two separate missions involving President Joe Biden's announcement Thursday aimed at increasing COVID-19 vaccines in the federal workforce. The Defense Department must develop plans to make the vaccine mandatory for the military and set up new requirements for federal workers who will have to either attest to a COVID-19 vaccination or face frequent testing and travel restrictions.
Austin said Friday that the department will move expeditiously, but added that he can’t predict how long it will take. He said he plans to consult with medical professionals as well as the military service leaders.
Any plan to make the vaccine mandatory will require a waiver signed by Biden because the Food and Drug Administration has not yet given the vaccine final, formal approval. According to federal law, the requirement to offer individuals a choice of accepting or rejecting use of an emergency use vaccine may only be waived by the president and “only if the president determines in writing that complying with such requirement is not in the interests of national security.”
Mandating the vaccine before FDA approval will likely trigger opposition from vaccine opponents and drag the military into political debates over what has become a highly divisive issue in America.
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Military commanders, however, have also struggled to separate vaccinated recruits from unvaccinated recruits during early portions of basic training across the services in order to prevent infections. So, for some, a mandate could make training and housing less complicated.
Military service members are already required to get as many as 17 different vaccines, depending on where they are based around the world. Some of the vaccines are specific to certain regions. Military officials have said the pace of vaccines has been growing across the force, with some units seeing nearly 100% of their members get shots.
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According to the Pentagon, more than 1 million service members are fully vaccinated, and 233,000 have gotten at least one shot. There are roughly 2 million active-duty, Guard and Reserve troops.
A vaccine mandate will also raise questions about whether the military services will discharge troops who refuse the vaccine.
National Guard officials said initial guidance suggests that Guard troops who initially refuse the vaccine once its mandatory will receive counseling from medical personnel. If they still refuse, they would be ordered to take it, and failure to follow that order could result in administrative or punitive action.
On Friday, Guard officials said leaders were still nailing down legal recommendations on which citizen soldiers would be affected by the new requirements. Officials said it appears the bulk of the Guard would eventually have to get the vaccine, when it is mandated.
Guard troops on federal active duty would be given the vaccine in their units wherever they are deployed, and others would get it when they report to their monthly drill weekend or annual training. The system, according to Guard officials, would resemble any other vaccine requirement.
Guard members who are on state active duty would not be subject to the requirement initially because they are subject to state laws. But once they return to a monthly drill, the order would apply to them. Guard officials spoke about the new vaccine process on condition of anonymity because procedures are still being finalized.
While the number of COVID-19 deaths across the military has remained small — largely attributed to the age and health of the force — cases of the virus have been increasing.
As of this week, there have been more than 208,600 cases of COVID-19 among members of the U.S. military. Of those, more than 1,800 members have been hospitalized and 28 have died.
Earlier this year, the number of cases and hospitalizations had been growing by relatively small, consistent amounts, and the number of deaths had stalled at 26 for more than 2 1/2 months. In recent weeks, the totals spiked. The number of cases increased by more than 3,000 in the last week alone, and those hospitalized grew by 36. Two Navy sailors also died in the last week.
5. Who’s against the jab: Our statistical model throws light on America’s vaccine hesitancy
Objective analysis? Data is data.
Excerpt:
But many other factors also matter. African-Americans were disproportionately less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to receive their shots; Hispanics and Hindus were more likely to do so. Geographic factors mostly cut along expected lines: people in blue-state cities were likelier to get a vaccine, those in rural, redder regions were disproportionately hesitant.
Who’s against the jab
Our statistical model throws light on America’s vaccine hesitancy
Jul 31st 2021
WASHINGTON, DC
A FOURTH WAVE of covid-19 infections is sweeping across America. It is strongest in the heartland and southern states: cases per 100,000 people are highest in Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas; Missouri has the highest hospitalisations. But the rapidly spreading Delta variant threatens other places, too. Since vaccinations have stalled at around 155m adults, or 60% of the population aged 18 or over, few if any parts of the country have reached herd immunity. The new wave is likely to crash everywhere.
Identifying the causes of vaccine hesitancy can help policymakers decide where to target their efforts. The Economist has collaborated with YouGov, a pollster, to collect weekly surveys on Americans’ intent to get vaccinated for covid-19. Using the demographic profiles of some 24,000 Americans, we have built a statistical model to estimate how likely each respondent is to say they have received, or will get, their jab—and to reveal the biggest causes of hesitancy.
According to our modelling, the single greatest predictor of whether an American has been vaccinated is whether they voted for Joe Biden or Donald Trump last November. Relative to the profile for the average American—a white, 49-year-old female with some college education who earns a middle-class income, lives in a Midwestern suburb and did not vote in 2020—the impact of voting for Mr Trump is a 13 percentage-point reduction in vaccine probability. Holding everything else equal, Mr Biden’s supporters were 18 points likelier to get their jabs. Whether someone was a self-proclaimed conservative or liberal ranked second.
But many other factors also matter. African-Americans were disproportionately less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to receive their shots; Hispanics and Hindus were more likely to do so. Geographic factors mostly cut along expected lines: people in blue-state cities were likelier to get a vaccine, those in rural, redder regions were disproportionately hesitant.
Prominent conservative television hosts, such as Fox News’s Sean Hannity, made a spectacle of endorsing the covid-19 vaccine last week. Yet according to YouGov’s most recent poll, conducted on July 24th-27th, the share of Republican adults who say they will not get the jab has held steady at 30%. The phase of the pandemic where Americans would listen to such messaging might well be over. After all, they have been seeing adverts about jabs for months. Instead of focusing on partisans, public-health policy could be designed to increase access for poor and rural Americans, and focus on outreach and information-dissemination for the uneducated.
Dig deeper
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Hesitancy in numbers"
6. DoD really has no idea who it’s hired to do private security, report finds
I nominate Sean McFate to lead a task force to solve the PMC issues for DOD and the US or to be the person to fill the "single, senior level position" to solve this problem.
Excerpt:
“DOD lacks a single, senior-level position assigned to fully monitor whether DOD and various entities are carrying out their respective PSC oversight roles and functions,” the report found. “Without assigning this position, DOD increases the risk of incidents that its framework aims to prevent.”
DoD really has no idea who it’s hired to do private security, report finds
Private security contractors, often referred to as mercenaries, have made a poor reputation for themselves throughout the Global War on Terror. And it turns out the Pentagon isn’t really monitoring whom it’s hired, or verifying their backgrounds and compliance.
“For example, GAO reviewed data for deployed contractor personnel with the job title of ‘security guard’ and found that about 12 percent of those individuals were employed by companies not on a DOD list of certified PSC companies.”
This happened for a few reasons, according to the report. To start, contractor oversight is shared between DoD and the companies themselves, with no single entity taking accountability overall. Then, there is no code in personnel databases for security contractors, so it’s impossible to know how many there are and what jobs they’re doing.
When GAO searched contractor databases for “security guard,” they found that there were actually eight other job titles that included aspects of what would generally be considered a security position, whether the employee was working in contingency, peace-keeping or other missions.
Not only couldn’t GAO get a complete list of DoD’s private security contractors, but what they did find didn’t include “the type of operation or exercise they support, or their functions, activities, and armed or unarmed status,” according to the report.
Evan Liberty is one of four former Blackwater contractors pardoned by President Donald Trump, freeing them from prison after a 2007 shooting rampage in Baghdad that killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians.
Eric Tucker, The Associated Press
January 3
The most notorious case of security contractor misconduct dates back to 2007, when four Blackwater employees escorting a diplomatic convoy opened fire on a crowded Baghdad square, killing 17 and injuring 20 unarmed Iraqis, claiming they were responding to an ambush.
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They were convicted of murder in 2014 and sentenced to between a decade in prison to life. Former President Donald Trump pardoned them before leaving office.
The Pentagon did try to take a crack at oversight in 2009, setting up a framework that assigns the Pentagon to verify whether contractors are allowed to be armed and to monitor performance, while the contracted companies are required to report incidents and comply with standards.
But because DoD didn’t monitor that implementation, it has no metrics to show whether it has improvement contractor oversight.
“DOD lacks a single, senior-level position assigned to fully monitor whether DOD and various entities are carrying out their respective PSC oversight roles and functions,” the report found. “Without assigning this position, DOD increases the risk of incidents that its framework aims to prevent.”
The Pentagon agreed with the GAO’s findings, resolving to create an oversight position and tighten up its tracking capabilities.
7. U.S. scheme to hype South China Sea issue sanctimonious - Xinhua
To be expected from a PRC/CCP propaganda mouthpiece.
U.S. scheme to hype South China Sea issue sanctimonious - Xinhua | English.news.cn
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Aerial photo taken on July 13, 2020 shows an expedition vessel in the South China Sea. (Xinhua/Zhang Liyun)
More ironically, when urging others to follow international law, the United States itself refuses to join the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is a vivid reflection of Washington's hypocrisy.
by Xinhua writer Yan Jie
MANILA, July 31 (Xinhua) -- Hyping up the so-called "China threat" is Washington's habitual trick as it needs excuses for transforming the South China Sea into a hunting ground for its geopolitical self-interest.
Geared up to form an anti-China clique, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has recently visited three nations in Southeast Asia, during which he kept pointing an accusing finger at Beijing with groundless charges, stirring up new waves in the regional waters.
Speaking in Singapore on Tuesday, Austin vowed to challenge what he called China's aggression, reiterated Washington's support for nations involved in disputes with China in the South China Sea, and accused China's claims in the regional waters of having "no basis in international law."
Moreover, during later trips to Vietnam and the Philippines, Austin spared no effort in advocating the so-called "freedom of navigation" in the South China Sea.
To anyone who knows the region's history and current situation, the Pentagon chief's remarks during his visits are totally absurd and ignorant.
Aerial photo taken on July 29, 2020 shows the Kantan No.3 offshore oil platform and its supply ship in the northern waters of the South China Sea. (Xinhua/Pu Xiaoxu)
It is a clear fact that China's sovereignty, rights and interests in the South China Sea have been formed in the course of a long history and have abundant historical and legal basis.
What's more, Washington's claimed threat to the "freedom of navigation" is purely fabricated. While some 100,000 merchant vessels now travel in this busy shipping route annually, not a single ship has ever reported its safety threatened in the South China Sea.
If there is any such threat, it must be the increasing U.S. military presence in the region. Under the guise of safeguarding "freedom of navigation," the world's sole superpower frequently sends its warships and aircraft carriers to the regional waters and has conducted a multitude of war games.
This time, Austin used the same pretext to persuade the Philippines to recall the abrogation of the Visiting Forces Agreement, with the only aim to strengthen the U.S. military presence in the region.
Dolphins and whales are seen in the South China Sea, July 20, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Liyun)
More ironically, when urging others to follow international law, the United States itself refuses to join the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is a vivid reflection of Washington's hypocrisy.
In sharp contrast, China has always advocated friendly negotiations and consultations on issues concerning the South China Sea, treated its neighbors as equals, and exercised maximum restraint when safeguarding its sovereignty, rights and interests in the South China Sea.
In the regional waters, there is no room for confrontation, zero-sum games, or bloc rivalries. The so-called "China threat" is merely one of the many tricks adopted by Washington to deliberately smear China, sow discord between regional countries, and contain China's development.
However, Washington's sanctimonious scheme is bound to fail. Instead of just calculating its own geopolitical gains, the United States should do things that are really conducive to regional peace and stability. ■
8. Army Says Drowning Wasn't the Cause of Green Beret's Death, Retracting Prior Claim
The impact of this Special Forces soldier's death is not lessened and of course the stress on the families is made worse by the uncertainty. Unfortunately these types of investigations can be complicated and lengthy. From my layman's perspective it seems like he might have had a previously unidentified medical condition that might have contributed to this.
Excerpts:
The Army Combat Readiness Center, which sent a team to investigate Walker's death, initially described the accident as a "drowning mishap" in a release Wednesday.
On Friday, the Combat Readiness Center issued another release saying that was incorrect.
"While a comprehensive investigation of the incident continues, drowning has been ruled out as a cause of death," Michael Negard, head of public affairs for the Combat Readiness Center at Fort Rucker, Alabama, said in Friday's release.
It is unclear what other possible causes of death are still being investigated.
Army Says Drowning Wasn't the Cause of Green Beret's Death, Retracting Prior Claim
Investigators have ruled out drowning as the cause of death for a Green Beret who died while training Tuesday at the Special Forces Underwater Operations School in Key West, Florida, contradicting the Army's first reports on the death.
Staff Sgt. Micah Walker, 31, of 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group, at Fort Carson, Colorado, was taking part in dive training when he died at Naval Air Station Key West, the 1st Special Forces Command said in a release Thursday.
The Army Combat Readiness Center, which sent a team to investigate Walker's death, initially described the accident as a "drowning mishap" in a release Wednesday.
On Friday, the Combat Readiness Center issued another release saying that was incorrect.
"While a comprehensive investigation of the incident continues, drowning has been ruled out as a cause of death," Michael Negard, head of public affairs for the Combat Readiness Center at Fort Rucker, Alabama, said in Friday's release.
It is unclear what other possible causes of death are still being investigated.
Walker, who was originally from Peyton, Colorado, is survived by his wife and three children.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife and children, his parents, and his teammates," group commander Col. Lucas VanAntwerp said in the Thursday release. "Micah was an exceptional Special Forces operator, a loving husband, and father. We grieve with the family and stand ready to honor Micah's service and his legacy."
The Army's John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, or SWCS, said in a Wednesday release that Walker was a student in the Special Forces Combat Diver Qualification Course, and was taking part in a strenuous conditioning exercise in the pool Tuesday.
During this exercise, which stresses students' hearts and lungs, Walker went below the water and did not come back up, according to the SWCS press release. Instructors immediately went in after him, but found him unresponsive, it adds.
A medical officer first tried to resuscitate him, according to the press release, and he was then taken to the emergency room at the Lower Keys Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
Walker joined the Army in April 2017 and completed the Special Forces Qualification Course in January. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion at Fort Carson in March.
9. Philippine, US Troop Pact In ‘Full Force Again’
But what will happen if Duterte is succeeded by his daughter? Will she use the VFA to try to extort concessions from the US?
Philippine, US Troop Pact In ‘Full Force Again’
By Aie Balagtas See
The 70-year-old defense alliance between Manila and Washington is back on track after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he would fully restore a key bilateral military pact following his meeting with Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin in Manila, officials announced Friday.
The U.S. defense secretary visited the Philippine capital as he wrapped up a weeklong tour of three Southeast Asian countries located in the heart of the contested South China Sea, a geopolitical issue that headlined the agenda during his stops in Singapore, Hanoi and Manila.
On Friday, Austin’s Philippine counterpart, Delfin Lorenzana, who challenged recent incursions by Chinese ships into Philippine-claimed territory in strategic waterway, announced the decision about the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement.
“Last night, after the meeting between Secretary Austin and the president … the president decided to recall or retract the termination letter for the VFA,” Lorenzana told reporters during a joint press conference with Austin.
“So the VFA is in full force again. There is no termination letter pending and we are back on track,” he said, adding that Duterte’s letter informing Washington of his plan will be “retracted as if nothing happened.”
Lorenzana’s announcement reverses Duterte’s February 2020 pronouncement to scrap the 22-year-old pact after Washington had denied a U.S. visa to Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, his former national police chief and main enforcer of his administration’s bloody war on drugs.
Duterte would later rescind that decision after Washington, under then-President Donald Trump, reinstated dela Rosa’s visa, but the VFA needed to be renewed every six months. At the time of the last renewal in February, Duterte told the U.S. to pay for the right of American troops to stay in the Philippines.
At their joint news conference, Lorenza and Austin both emphasized that the military pact was back for good – meaning military drills and exercises in Philippine territory involving U.S. troops would proceed unhampered.
Duterte’s office, meanwhile, said that the president and Austin had an “open and frank” discussion on Thursday focused on enhancing the two countries’ military cooperation in the South China Sea.
According to Duterte’s office, both men “agreed that the alliance can be further strengthened through enhanced communication and greater cooperation, particularly in the areas of pandemic response, combating transnational crimes, including the war on illegal drugs, maritime domain awareness, the rule of law, and trade and investments.”
On Friday, Lorenzana and Austin discussed the way ahead for the Philippine-U.S. alliance.
“This visit is another manifestation of the shared commitment to the alliance between our defense establishments and the inherent risks and challenges of the times,” Lorenzana said.
Responding to a question on Friday about Duterte’s decision, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said he was aware, but did not specifically comment about it.
“China always maintains that state-to-state exchanges and cooperation should not only benefit the countries concerned but also regional and global peace and stability,” he said.
Austin said he was pleased to visit the Philippines to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to the alliance in person. He also thanked Duterte for restoring the Visiting Forces Agreement.
“Our countries face a range of challenges from the climate crisis to the pandemic. And as we do, a strong, resilient, U.S.-Philippines alliance will remain vital to the security, stability and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific,” Austin said in a statement released by the Pentagon. “A fully restored VFA will help us achieve that goal.”
Austin also said he had a “productive discussion” on Friday with Lorenzana on maritime and counterterrorism cooperation along with efforts to modernize the Philippine military.
“We also talked about how we can work toward a free and open Indo-Pacific rooted in a rules-based international order, a region in which countries work together to realize their highest aspirations and to safeguard the rights of all other citizens,” he said.
During a speech in Singapore on Tuesday, Austin repeated the U.S. view that China’s claim to almost all the South China Sea “has no basis in international law” and “treads on the sovereignty of states in the region,” according to a transcript from the Pentagon.
“Unfortunately, Beijing’s unwillingness to resolve disputes peacefully and respect the rule of law isn’t just occurring on the water,” Austin said.
Later, while in Hanoi, he assured Vietnam that he was not seeking to force that nation to choose between China and the U.S., saying allies and partners should have the “freedom and space to chart their own futures.”
President Duterte, whose six-year term ends in less than a year, has spent much of his time in office building up Manila’s relationship with Beijing while backing off on bilateral ties with Washington.
In late August, the U.S. and the Philippines will mark the 70th anniversary of the Mutual Defense Treaty, under which the two allies are bound to come to each other’s military aid if one of them comes under attack from another power.
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that America would invoke that treaty if Philippine ships or aircraft came under attack in the South China Sea – an indirect warning aimed at Beijing, which has vast territorial claims in the maritime region.
Despite his efforts, analysts have said Duterte and the defense establishment have been under pressure from the public and the political opposition over China’s continued expansion in the South China Sea. Earlier this year, government patrols reported spotting 240 Chinese ships in Philippine waters.
Geopolitics analyst Chester Cabalza, founder of the Manila-based International Development and Security Cooperation, noted that the burden of proof that Duterte’s announcement has repaired ties with Washington has yet to be seen.
He said Duterte, in his final State of the Nation speech to Congress on Monday, showed he has not closed the door on diplomatic efforts with Beijing. The president had previously said he was indebted to Chinese leader Xi Jinping for Beijing’s help during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The U.S. has to work harder as China enjoys preferential treatment in the Philippines,” Cabalza told BenarNews.
10. China theme runs through Philippine weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz’s Olympic gold medal
Good for Hidilyn Diaz. Maybe she is a PSYOP NCO in the Air Force. Or maybe some good PSYOP NCOs are exploiting a previous photo of her on social media.
Excerpts:
The Philippine government under former president Benigno Aquino III coined the term “West Philippine Sea” to better define the country’s exclusive economic zones and maritime waters in the South China Sea following incursions from China.
A picture of Diaz wearing the T-shirt resurfaced and was shared on social media, but was apparently taken well before the Tokyo Olympic Games, where she won the country’s first gold medal on Monday.
China was a theme that seemed to run strongly through Diaz’s Olympic victory. She lifted 127kg to defeat Chinese world champion Liao Quiyun.
“I couldn’t believe I did it … at last I beat China,” Diaz recalled in an interview with ABS-CBN news.
China theme runs through Philippine weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz’s Olympic gold medal
- Diaz has made her stance on the South China Sea clear, saying ‘what’s ours is ours’, and defended wearing a T-shirt stating ‘West Philippine Sea’
- She thanked her Chinese coach, Gao Kaiwen, while the Chinese embassy in Manila praised her victory
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Published: 9:30pm, 29 Jul, 2021
Philippine Olympic gold medallist Hidilyn Diaz waves to photographers as she arrives home in Manila on Wednesday. Photo: AFP
Olympic gold medallist Hidilyn Diaz once wore a T-shirt saying “West Philippine Sea” in both Chinese and English “because I wanted to say that what’s ours is ours”.
Speaking a day after her triumphant return home from the Tokyo Olympics, Diaz, 30, told This Week in Asia that somebody had given her the shirt and she had put it on as a way of sending a message to Filipinos.
“Ordinary people who don’t know much about [maritime] lines and international disputes and political things – I just wanted to say to them, this is what I know. The West Philippine Sea is ours,” the weightlifter and air force staff sergeant said during an online media conference hosted by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines on Thursday.
The Philippine government under former president Benigno Aquino III coined the term “West Philippine Sea” to better define the country’s exclusive economic zones and maritime waters in the South China Sea following incursions from China.
A picture of Diaz wearing the T-shirt resurfaced and was shared on social media, but was apparently taken well before the Tokyo Olympic Games, where she won the country’s first gold medal on Monday.
China was a theme that seemed to run strongly through Diaz’s Olympic victory. She lifted 127kg to defeat Chinese world champion Liao Quiyun.
“I couldn’t believe I did it … at last I beat China,” Diaz recalled in an interview with ABS-CBN news.
Her coach Gao Kaiwen, 64, is the retired coach of the Chinese Bayi weightlifting team and a former head coach of the Chinese army team for women. He helped train two of China’s Olympic Gold medallists – Zhou Lulu in 2012 for the 75kg category and Chen Xiexia in 2008 for the 48kg category.
He was hired by a group of local Filipino-Chinese to take Diaz under his wing in 2018. Diaz gave credit to Gao for her victory, saying that under his supervision, “my training changed, my technique [became] different from before, when it wasn’t Chinese in style”.
To avoid distractions, Diaz first trained in Taiwan, and when the Covid-19 pandemic made travel there impossible, she moved to Malaysia.
“We didn’t know anybody [in Malaysia], we didn’t know where we would stay, where we would train,” she told reporters. At one point they had to improvise weights out of water bottles and bamboo poles.
Talking to Xinhua on July 27, Gao said “it was not an easy job for a girl coming from a poor family of Zamboanga City, the Philippines, to keep up intense training at the age of 30”.
It was the fourth Olympic Games for Diaz, who won a silver medal in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
China’s ambassador to the Philippines, Huang Xilian, congratulated Diaz in two separate Facebook posts on July 26 and 27.
“Glad to learn that Hidilyn’s team is composed of Chinese head coach Gao Kaiwen, strength and conditioning coach Julius Naranjo, psychologist Dr Karen Trinindad, and sports nutritionist Jeaneth Aro,” he said in his second post.
“Truly humbled to see that a Chinese coach has helped in making this historic win happen for the Philippines!”
He added that “apart from trade and investment, China and the Philippines have had numerous cooperations in many fields and athletics is just one of them! Hope to see more fruitful outcomes in our future cooperation”.
According to reports, the Chinese Olympic weightlifting team was less enthused. “I know that the coaches [of the Chinese team] got angry at Gao because he didn’t tell them how strong I was,” Diaz said.
She said Gao’s attitude was: “Why should I tell them when they didn’t ask me?”
Gao told Xinhua that while he was happy for Diaz, “it was a great pity to watch the athlete from my country take a silver”.
Diaz said the Chinese coach is currently in Manila. “What I know is he plans to go back to China to be with his family,” she said.
Asked if she was worried about Gao, Diaz said: “No, I know he’s OK, his future will be brighter even if he’s in China because he was able to produce a gold medal.”
11. Why a post-US Afghanistan poses a litmus test for China as a military power
But will it be sucked into an Afghan mess? I think China might know how to avoid doing so and still accomplish its objectives.
Why a post-US Afghanistan poses a litmus test for China as a military power
- If China, as viewed by the US, is an aggressive power with an offensive agenda, it will be sucked into the Afghan mess. If it truly is a defensive power, it will resist the temptation
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Published: 10:00pm, 30 Jul, 2021
US soldiers in Soltan Khel, Afghanistan, in 2013. The US assumes China has aggressive, expansionist intent and expects it to be the next hegemon to be embroiled in Afghanistan. Photo: TNS
Whether because of hubris or naiveties, it seems there are some lessons global hegemons rarely learn. One is that certain corners of the world not for taking – like Afghanistan.
As President Joe Biden ends a forlorn 20-year effort at nation-building, the United States joins a line of aspiring conquerors and peacemakers that stretches back centuries. Hearts can only bleed for the modernising Afghans left behind, in particular their women and those seen to have assisted American occupying forces, as the Taliban wreak havoc, provide safe haven to Islamic extremists, and weave around a tribal mosaic that has made Afghanistan ungovernable for a millennium.
Before Biden, the Russians suffered a similar humbling Afghan fate, along with British colonial forces, Tamerlane, the Moghuls and Genghis Khan. Even before the last Americans are airlifted out, speculation has begun on how long the Afghan government will survive, and which naive hegemon will next be sucked in.
Thousands of Afghans flee as UN warns of 'unprecedented' civilian deaths from Taliban offensives
The US consensus – from the Defence Department and Council on Foreign Relations to leading academics such as John Mearsheimer and Graham Allison – would be China, which has swiftly deepening economic and strategic interests in the region, and which, from a US perspective, is set for conflict with the West.
Despite the intellectual weight and experience of this view, I believe this consensus is mistaken. Just because the US assumes China has aggressive, expansionist intent does not mean this is so.
Just as likely is a sensible defensive strategy that seeks global economic engagement, better livelihoods for Chinese people and domestic security after a dismal century of humiliating occupation by Western colonisers.
If, like Mearsheimer, you believe aggression is inevitable, there can be little doubt that China’s Belt and Road infrastructure-building strategy is a covert bid to build soft power and extend control.
Yet China’s strategy can equally plausibly help to stabilise and build the economies of neighbouring countries, providing China with more domestic security and wealthier neighbours with which to invest and trade.
But America’s Afghanistan withdrawal provides a litmus test: Will China be sucked in? Are the hawks right that China is an aggressive power with an offensive agenda? Or is it a defensive power set on protecting the economic gains that have lifted 800 million Chinese out of poverty and restored China’s dignified and respected place in the world?
China pledges to support Taliban role in restoring peace in Afghanistan after US withdrawal
Part of this narrative is that China’s military budget has leapt by 76 per cent to US$252 billion over the past decade, that it now has the world’s largest naval fleet, an integrated air defence system, and a massive armoury of long-range ballistic and cruise missiles.
As the US Defence Department reported to Congress, the Communist Party “has a strategic end state that it is working towards, which if achieved and its accompanying military modernisation left unaddressed, will have serious implications for US national interests and the security of the international rules-based order”.
The US started with an assumption of a Chinese “offensive agenda” and cherry-picked data that supports the assumption. This justifies blocking China’s technological development, barring investment from or trade with its companies, and even decoupling.
But take the same data sets and look at China’s intentions through a fresh prism. Yes, Chinese defence spending is significantly up, but it is modest (1.9 per cent of gross domestic product) compared with US spending of US$778 billion last year – 4.4 per cent of GDP, 39 per cent of military spending worldwide, and more than the next 11 military spenders combined.
Yes, China has a military base in Djibouti in east Africa, but Djibouti hosts a total of six military bases, including for the US and Japan. In contrast, the US has an estimated 800 bases worldwide.
Apart from its modest Djibouti footprint, China has military personnel in a signals intelligence presence in Myanmar, and a tiny outpost in Tajikistan, close to the Wakhan Corridor which provides a narrow link between China and Afghanistan – underwhelming compared with the 172,000 American troops on active duty overseas.
China has fought just one war in the past 50 years – the brief and embarrassing invasion of Vietnam in 1979. In contrast, the US has fought about 14 wars since 1980.
What US military experts seem to fear is not the reality of Chinese offensive activity, but its offensive potential. A working assumption is that a country with such potential will not be able to resist the temptation to use it aggressively.
But once you flip this logic and think it possible that defensive reflexes have driven China’s military modernisation, then the assumption that China is on a path of hegemonic expansion crumbles.
True, China has a tiny outpost in Tajikistan close to Afghanistan, but if the intent is defensive, then a Chinese intervention in Afghanistan will not occur any time soon. Its interests in Pakistan, and its role as a Pakistani ally, could well create temptations to intervene in Afghanistan if the Taliban further destabilise the region and undermine hopes of reaching the Indian Ocean and the Gulf via the Pakistani port of Gwadar.
It is such temptations – and the supposedly irresistible pull of offensive realism – that have for centuries sucked great powers into a humiliating mess in places like Afghanistan. Let’s see if the pull of China’s “defensive realism” can make a difference.
David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view
12. DIA Medical Sleuth Busts China Biowarfare Plot Theory
Excerpts:
“It would probably rank, in terms of monumental stupidity, as high as you could get—to release an organism that you have no countermeasures against, that was highly infectious, highly dangerous and highly lethal.”
DIA Medical Sleuth Busts China Biowarfare Plot Theory
Top former expert in little known DIA medical intelligence unit coughs on conspiracy theory
Denis Kaufman, a former top infectious diseases analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s obscure National Center for Medical Intelligence, says that the conspiracy theory circling the Internet that China invented the Covid-19 virus as a biological warfare weapon is, well, stupid.
“There's a spectrum of hypotheses about where it came from and why it got released,” Kaufman said in a SpyTalk podcast interview this week with co-host Jeanne Meserve.
“I think you can take almost all of this idea that this was some kind of nefarious action off the table,” Kaufman said.
“It would probably rank, in terms of monumental stupidity, as high as you could get—to release an organism that you have no countermeasures against, that was highly infectious, highly dangerous and highly lethal.”
The wave of misinformation and spread of deliberate disinformation about Covid-19 is worrying, Kaufman added, not just because of the staying power of the current pandemic but because it will undermine defenses against the next virus.
“Unless we get our act together and figure out how to stop the disinformation, how to silence people who are spreading lies,” the next virus will flourish, Kaufman said.
13. How the U.S. Learned to Stop Worrying About the Pacific and Love the ‘Indo-Pacific’
I personally preferred Asia-Pacific but I understand and appreciate the logic.
And Admiral/Ambassador Harris had an appreciation for the importance of acronyms.
Excerpt:
“You can’t have an Indo-Asia-Pacific Command. How would that [work]? IAPCOM?” Harris asked. “You have to look at the thing from a salesmanship perspective also. INDOPACOM is almost too long. But AFRICOM, three syllables. EUCOM, two syllables. SOUTHCOM, two syllables. You’re playing in this selling game as well.”
How the U.S. Learned to Stop Worrying About the Pacific and Love the ‘Indo-Pacific’
The United States has a new lens for its rivalry with China.
In early 2017, U.S. and Japanese strategists were pouring over maps on the top floor of the U.S. State Department. Satoshi Suzuki, a Japanese official, and Brian Hook, his U.S. counterpart, zoomed in on almost every touch point in Asia: the honeymoon between then-newly elected U.S. President Donald Trump and then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the emergence of India, and a potential flare-up on the Korean Peninsula. And then Suzuki widened the lens.
The Japanese side presented a series of maps, labeled “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy.” Suzuki told Hook that Tokyo wanted to radically redraw the geography of the region, from the north-south orientation of the World War II era focused on the first and second island chains of the western Pacific Ocean to a two-ocean strategy that envisioned Japanese policy in Asia stretching to India and even as far as the Persian Gulf.
“It wasn’t the old and more narrow Asia-Pacific. It was the broader Indo-Pacific, and it recognized the significance of India in particular,” said a former senior Trump administration official. “It was a sense that, you know, we weren’t going to get what we wanted by asking Beijing nicely.”
Something clicked. The idea caught fire in Washington. Hook quickly began briefing the idea to then-U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and shared the Japanese maps with European allies. The Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, had been looking for a way to bring India in from the cold of its nonaligned Cold War stance and focus on China. Now, the Japanese were giving the new U.S. administration a way to say it.
Four years and a change of administrations later, the Indo-Pacific remains the flavor du jour of U.S. policy in Asia. The first foreign visits of U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration touched down in Japan and India. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are currently on their own Indo-Pacific tours. Meanwhile, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad) partnership that also includes the United States and Australia is one of the most buzzed-about diplomatic groupings around.
And the shift in tone, spurred by Japan and encouraged by Australia, has major implications for U.S. military strategy as the Biden administration decides how—and where—it will counter China’s rise.
Although the term has given the United States’ friends the ability to call out Beijing on its territorial expansion without stepping on its toes, some experts and former officials worry that by hemming too closely to Tokyo and Canberra’s wonts, the United States could risk taking its eye off the ball in the Western Pacific, such as a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
“From a military perspective, the focus really needs to be tightly on the Pacific, especially the first island chain and Taiwan,” said Elbridge Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Trump administration who helped craft the 2018 National Defense Strategy. “The Indian Ocean is a distinctly secondary theater for the United States and shouldn’t distract from that primary focus.”
What’s in a name? For Harry Harris, the U.S. military commander overseeing all U.S. troops from Hawaii to the edge of the Persian Gulf, it meant a lot. Nearly 5,000 miles from Washington, at U.S. Pacific Command’s headquarters in the tree-lined hills above Honolulu’s Waikiki Beach, Harris had long sensed strategic ground was shifting beneath the U.S. Defense Department’s feet, even if that message wasn’t always getting across in the Pentagon’s outer ring.
Harris had risen through the ranks from a maritime patrol officer flying turboprop surveillance planes from India’s southern coast in the mid-1990s to become the highest-ranking Japanese American in the entire Navy. And when his predecessor, Adm. Samuel Locklear, overstayed his allotted time at Pacific Command, Harris had some extra time between his 2014 confirmation and 2015 start date to think about how he wanted to change the region.
He didn’t hesitate to make his thoughts known once he got started. In speech after speech and meeting after meeting, Harris insisted the region’s geography was changing. He used the term “Indo-Asia-Pacific,” a nod to a bigger region stretching from Hollywood to Bollywood, as he liked to say—something that captured the economic linkages between nations of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
But not everyone understood what he was talking about, and even Harris felt his own term was a bit long. He needed something catchy that could capture attention and political support like other U.S. combatant commands do.
“You can’t have an Indo-Asia-Pacific Command. How would that [work]? IAPCOM?” Harris asked. “You have to look at the thing from a salesmanship perspective also. INDOPACOM is almost too long. But AFRICOM, three syllables. EUCOM, two syllables. SOUTHCOM, two syllables. You’re playing in this selling game as well.”
Suzuki’s 2017 meeting in Washington wasn’t the genesis of the term. A decade earlier, Abe, an early proponent of the Quad, took to the stage during a visit to India and borrowed a phrase from a 17th-century Mughal prince. Abe proposed there was a “confluence of the two seas” between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, using the speech to trace deep civilizational ties between the two.
That was long before Western governments began to spot China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea. But Abe’s speech also gave Japan, which has legal limits on pursuing foreign wars, and India, a nonaligned power between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, an opportunity to talk about China’s growing military might without directly poking the bear.
Abe, who’d already been defeated in a shock election weeks before that speech, didn’t have the time or political capital to push his vision very far. But Australia was ready to pick up the mantle. For years, Australia had been torn between its identity as a Western country and its location near Asia. By embracing a broader conception of its region, Australia went some way toward sorting out its own strategic muddle.
“I think U.S. strategy has benefitted from Australia’s long-term strategic identity crisis,” said Rory Medcalf, who heads up the National Security College at the Australian National University and who wrote a book on the rise of the Indo-Pacific. “Australia was the first country to really seriously codify the Indo-Pacific in policy.”
Australia, unlike Japan, actually is in the Indian Ocean—but also has deep trade ties with Asia and security links across the Pacific with Washington. In 2013, Australia’s defense white paper, a public blueprint for its strategy, first made that observation in connection with the words “Indo-Pacific,” suggesting the region was at a fork in the road. With cargo ships, oil tankers, and military vessels pouring down the sea lanes connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans, it could become a highly competitive or reasonably cooperative strategic environment.
“It made a lot of sense because the Indian Ocean washes one of our shores,” said Richard Maude, who served as deputy secretary for the Indo-Pacific Group in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade until 2020. “And the pioneers on this could see that we should be thinking about the region in a way that was vertical as much as horizontal—that is, looking west or northwest to India as much as we look straight north to the rest of Asia.”
The Indo-Pacific had come full circle, from a kernel of an idea in Abe’s mind to something bigger: official government policy in an allied country.
For Abe, the timing could not have been better: Chinese President Xi Jinping had announced a strategy that would become the Belt and Road Initiative in a September 2013 visit to Kazakhstan, a sign China’s appetite for economic expansion throughout Asia was greater than ever, and later stressed a maritime component of the ambitious initiative in a trip to Indonesia. What’s more, China had begun applying more pressure on the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, which are disputed between the two countries, sending patrol boats into contested waters and flying fighter jets into Japanese airspace.
By 2016, those economic and military ambitions had become even more closely intertwined: China was setting up its first overseas military base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, tucked in right next to Japanese and U.S. troops. China’s military challenge was outgrowing the Pacific region.
Back in the United States, Harris just had to bring the idea home to Washington. He called up former commanders of U.S. Pacific Command to take their pulse on the proposed name change and heard no dissenting voices. He pitched the U.S. ambassador in India as well as India’s deputy foreign minister. Eventually, Harris talked up the idea with aides of then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. They liked it too. He didn’t find any pushback until he took the idea to Carter himself in a letter to the secretary in 2016, arguing the name change better reflected changes in the region, including the centrality of India and the Indian Ocean. Carter wasn’t having it and formally rejected the plan that summer.
But the idea didn’t lay dormant for long. Trump’s shock victory in November 2016 drove Harris to bring the same briefing back to the new defense secretary, James Mattis. The name change was unveiled at Harris’s passing of Pacific Command to Adm. Philip Davidson in May 2018: U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
But despite the shift in emphasis, the United States has struggled under Biden and Trump to contain potential Chinese buildups closer to where U.S. forces operate, officials said. China has begun constructing runways that could eventually fit its next-generation bombers at Ream Naval Base in Cambodia and has increased the military utility of the atolls and sand spits it reclaimed in the South China Sea. Even further east, China is looking at plaits location near Asiaitns to construct an airstrip in Kiribati that would put People’s Liberation Army (PLA) bombers within range of U.S. troops in Hawaii; one U.S. official said the Biden administration never offered an alternative proposal to kick out the Chinese.
“The establishment of a Chinese military base in the South or Western Pacific would be a game changer on any number of levels, in essence allowing the Chinese to construct an invisible, yet fortified wall between U.S. forces stationed in Hawaii and those already operating in theater,” Craig Singleton, an adjunct fellow studying great-power competition with China at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who previously served in sensitive U.S. national security roles, said in an email. “In the event of a crisis scenario involving Taiwan, a Chinese base could allow the PLA to potentially cut off U.S. re-supply.”
A stronger regional footprint could also give Chinese units the ability to harass their U.S. counterparts with ships and planes. Singleton worries a permanent PLA base in the region “would also have the effect of essentially boxing in U.S. forces operating closer to China’s territorial waters, even if only temporarily.”
Chinese owners have also bought a stake in Australia’s Darwin Port, near the basing point for hundreds of Marines, a deal Canberra is reviewing for national security risks.
Those buildups, grabbing fewer headlines than foreign trips and “Indo-Pacific” speeches from cabinet members, have raised questions about the military efficacy of the phrase. Some officials within the Trump administration were privately skeptical of focusing on the Indo-Pacific, fearing it would distract from more pressing military challenges in the Western Pacific, such as Taiwan. Could the United States, squeezed by forces on both the left and the right that thin out its global military footprint, really do both of those things at once?
The Aussies and the Japanese may have gotten the ball rolling on calling the region the Indo-Pacific, but the Trump team moved surprisingly quickly to articulate an Indo-Pacific strategy of its own, producing in late 2017 a national security strategy centered on the new idea. The 10-page document, which was mostly declassified in January, just days before Trump left office, sets the table for a broad long-term competition plan with China in the region, extending from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Strait and back into the Western Pacific, where military planners privately and publicly fear a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could be imminent. One big component: a rejuvenated U.S. alliance system in Asia, with the inclusion of India on China’s western flank.
“A strong India, in cooperation with like minded countries, would act as a counterbalance to China,” the Trump administration strategy read.
It’s begun to have an impact. Indian officials are now often quick to raise China-related issues early in meetings with Biden administration counterparts before Pakistan, which New Delhi has traditionally seen as a top security threat. And Japan, which has veered away from foreign conflicts since World War II, has been signaling more loudly in recent months it could be ready to help defend Taiwan.
Now, as the Biden administration approaches its own strategic inflection point—its first National Security Strategy is due in early 2022—it will have to define its vision for the United States’ new role in Asia. Biden and his team will have to decide how to calibrate the United States’ military posture to manage China’s ascent while contending with real financial, political, and military limits to U.S. power.
But regardless of how Washington approaches the region and its rivalry with China, some U.S. allies see a greater give and take between Washington and Beijing, not a zero-sum game.
“I don’t think this is about winning or losing against China,” Medcalf said. “I think this is about creating a context where we can cope with Chinese power and limits to Chinese assertiveness. And the game is far from over.”
14. ‘Complete disaster’: Inside the Biden team’s chaotic bid to evacuate Afghan interpreters
Ouch. A strong critique.
‘Complete disaster’: Inside the Biden team’s chaotic bid to evacuate Afghan interpreters
The Biden administration has expedited the process for a number of applicants who are in the final stages, but thousands are left waiting for answers.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, left, and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley walk to greet Gen. Scott Miller, the former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, upon his return Wednesday, July 14, 2021, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo
07/30/2021 02:00 PM EDT
President Joe Biden had just announced plans to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan in April when, during a classified briefing with top national security officials on Capitol Hill, one lawmaker stood up and asked a pointed question.
What was the Biden administration’s plan to evacuate the thousands of Afghan nationals who aided the U.S. war effort, and expedite their visas?
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin didn’t have an answer. “We’ll get back to you on that,” Austin said, according to two people in the room and a defense official familiar with the interaction.
Austin’s response shocked them — and it foreshadowed what many members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, now see as a failure by the Biden administration to sufficiently prepare for the avalanche of visa applications and the need to quickly evacuate those Afghans from the country as the Taliban make steady territorial gains.
“It’s my view that the evacuations should have started right after the announcement of our withdrawal. That evacuation started too late,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, said in an interview. “But it started. And I appreciate the fact that it’s going, and that they’re doing it aggressively now.”
Biden’s decision to unconditionally withdraw U.S. troops and end the nearly 20-year war effort came under intense criticism from Republicans, but lawmakers from both parties agreed on the need to protect the Afghans who played indispensable roles as translators and interpreters for American forces.
Biden and his national security team have been accused of abandoning those who risked their lives to help the U.S. military — and there are growing fears that once the final combat troops leave, those Afghans who are left behind will be tortured, killed or both.
That was a primary focus for the lawmakers who had gathered inside a secure room in the Capitol for their first of many opportunities to press Biden’s top deputies about their plans for Afghanistan and the intelligence assessments on the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground.
“Wouldn’t it have been prudent to have these plans in place before the withdrawal announcement?” another lawmaker asked during the briefing, according to the people in the room.
As the bipartisan criticism mounted, Biden ordered evacuation flights to begin at the end of this month for roughly 700 applicants and their family members, a total of up to 3,500 people, Tracey Jacobson, head of a new task force focused on the relocation effort, said in an interview this week at the group’s State Department headquarters.
The first of those Afghans arrived at Dulles airport outside Washington from Afghanistan’s capital city Kabul early Friday morning and were bussed to Fort Lee, an Army base in Virginia, where they will spend up to one week completing the final steps of their application process.
But many thousands remain all throughout Afghanistan, including in parts of the war-torn country that the Taliban now controls. And despite increasing public pressure and military gains by the Taliban, the State Department did not establish a task force until July 19 — far too late in the process, lawmakers say.
“They spent so much time debating what direction they wanted to go in on Afghanistan writ-large,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who was involved in the congressional push to expand access to the special visas. “When they finally made the decision of a hasty surrender and withdrawal, they didn’t anticipate some of the unintended consequences or really play out a lot of the details — [visas] among them.”
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby defended Austin’s role in the effort, saying the secretary “has been engaged in this discussion from the start.” Austin, the former head of U.S. Central Command, “believes strongly in our obligation to these brave men and women and their families. And he is committed to helping find suitable locations for them to complete their visa process.”
The tense moment between Austin and lawmakers during the congressional briefing “happened very early in the process, when there was still much to figure out,” a defense official said.
Officials across the government are now working overtime to avoid a potentially disastrous outcome. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who has been briefed consistently on the matter, said the Biden administration is “on a full surge” to make up for lost time. But there are doubts that the U.S. government can finish the job.
No plan for thousands of applicants
The Biden administration has expedited the process for a number of applicants who are in the final stages, but thousands are left waiting for answers.
The Afghans are seeking refuge in the U.S. through the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa program, which was established by Congress in 2009 to resettle those interpreters, translators and other Afghan nationals who helped the American war effort. But for years, the program has been plagued by significant delays and currently has roughly 20,000 people at some stage of the application process.
The threat has become more dire in the weeks since Biden announced the Sept. 11 deadline for the American withdrawal from Afghanistan: The Taliban have made huge territorial gains and now threaten to overrun the country within months, according to some intelligence assessments. The applicants fear retaliation from the militants, who have threatened to hunt down and execute their families.
Already, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee have warned that the current backlog “does not align with the pace of withdrawal and the rapid deterioration in security” in Afghanistan.
“This whole thing is just a complete disaster, and it’s not getting better any time soon,” Gallagher lamented.
‘I’m not timing this according to the military’s withdrawal’
Still, the administration touted the arrival of the first of the flights from Kabul in the U.S. early Friday morning. After landing, just over 200 passengers were loaded onto buses en route to Fort Lee, to complete the final stages of their application process, Russ Travers, Biden’s deputy homeland security adviser, previewed for reporters on Thursday.
The applicants and their families are expected to remain at Fort Lee for final medical and administrative checks for up to a week before being resettled in the U.S. The rest of the 700 total applicants and their family members, now estimated at roughly 2,500 people, will be relocated over the next few weeks, joining 70,000 other Afghans who have resettled in the U.S. through the special visa program since 2008, Travers said.
The Biden administration has also been working to secure safe passage from Kabul to other countries outside the U.S. for another 4,000 applicants and their family members who were approved by the U.S. chief of mission there but have not completed security background checks.
While Jacobson would not say which countries these Afghans would be taken to, POLITICO reported that the administration is in final talks with Qatar and Kuwait to relocate the individuals to U.S. military bases in those countries.
The task force’s goal is to begin relocation flights for that second tranche of applicants in August, Jacobson said. In total, she estimates this group to include up to 20,000 people, including family members.
As of this month, approximately 50 percent of the total applicants, or about 10,000 people, were in the initial stage of the process and need to provide additional information before the U.S. government can begin processing their case, according to the State Department. Of the remaining applications, roughly 30 percent are still awaiting approval by the chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
But the task force does not currently have a plan to expedite the processing of thousands of applicants who remain in the pipeline, despite the fact that the troop withdrawal is essentially complete.
“I’m not timing this according to the military’s withdrawal,” Jacobson said. “It’s really hard to predict the future because we just started this pipeline … so I can’t say exactly what it’s going to look like two months from now.”
Many in Washington say it’s a mistake to ignore the withdrawal timeline because the military apparatus is key to getting as many Afghans out of the country as possible. Until Aug. 31, the U.S. still has a combat presence in the country and can conduct airstrikes in support of the Afghan security forces and against the Taliban. Meanwhile, the closing of Bagram air base, the hub of the U.S. military’s Afghanistan operation for the last 20 years, significantly diminishes America’s airlift capability, forcing officials to coordinate flights out of Kabul’s main airport.
“That lag coupled with seeing the military accelerate their withdrawal — that’s when we really started getting worried,” said Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a former Army Green Beret who served in Afghanistan and worked with Afghan interpreters. “When those last wheels go up, you’ve handed them a death sentence.”
“Now we have no military infrastructure, no helicopters, no bases, no nothing,” Waltz added. “And I think we’re still in a very bad place.”
Caught off guard
Although officials at the State Department and Pentagon were aware of the precarious situation the applicants faced as the Taliban gained ground across the country, officials say the Biden administration was caught off guard by how quickly the security situation in Afghanistan deteriorated after the president announced the withdrawal.
The State Department is “just groaning under the weight of the task,” said one senior defense official. “I also don’t think anyone thought Afghanistan would turn so badly so quick.”
Afghans who live outside Kabul are finding it increasingly dangerous to travel to the capital city as Taliban militants continue to expand their reach across the country. The visa system requires applicants to travel to Kabul to complete certain steps in the application process, such as submitting documents for proof of employment; and those being evacuated must get to the capital city to board the flights. Some intelligence assessments have indicated that Kabul could fall to the Taliban in as little as six months, the senior defense official said.
“We’re out of time. People are dying now,” Crow said. “The situation is getting worse. It’s harder and harder to get to Kabul with each passing day.”
The military has been monitoring the worsening security situation and the associated humanitarian threat to the special visa applicants and thousands of other Afghans since the president announced the withdrawal deadline in April, defense officials said.
Starting in May, the State Department requested that the Pentagon provide documents to help corroborate applicants’ employment history — a crucial step in the application process, said Garry Reid, the Defense Department’s lead for the relocation effort.
The idea was to accelerate the processing of visas that were stuck in the application pipeline due to difficulties validating their claims that they had met the two-year employment requirement, Reid said. DoD has now completed that submitted corroborating data for 6,000 to 7,000 applicants and is working on more, he added.
Meanwhile, the State Department added staff at the embassy in Kabul and in Washington to accelerate the processing of applications on the administrative side, officials said at the time.
While critics argue the administration took too long to take significant action, Jacobson said she is proud of the work the task force has done in a short period of time to coordinate between the different agencies — primarily State, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security — to reach “a battle rhythm.” Although the State Department had been working intensively to relocate Afghans at risk before July 19, the establishment of the task force has accelerated the results, she said.
“I’ve watched it happen several times here: An issue comes up, and all the right people are standing there to resolve it rather than have it done over time. So this is I think a force multiplier,” Jacobson said.
Asked whether the task force should have been established sooner, she declined to comment.
“We’re happy to be at the heart of it and as to what should have been, could have been done before, I wasn’t here for it so I can’t say,” she said.
Kelli Ann Burriesci, who runs the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, said in an interview that various agencies have been working on the issue since before the task force was created, but acknowledged that it has been “a little bit more difficult in a virtual environment.”
“This is certainly the most important thing I’ve ever worked on during my time at DHS since 2007 and probably my entire government career,” Burriesci added.
In the meantime, Congress has since tried to rectify the Biden administration’s missteps and speed up the applications.
On Thursday, the House and Senate passed a bill that eliminates some steps in the vetting process, raises the admission cap and allocates an additional $600 million in funding for resettlement of the Afghans in the U.S.
Some lawmakers said that while the legislative effort was necessary, the push-and-pull between the executive and legislative branches is to be expected.
“I don’t think the president was not cognizant of these risks. Clearly, we had to push a little harder to make sure there was quick action,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.). “There is no daylight between any of us — the administration and Democrats, and probably most Republicans.”
Pentagon in a supporting role
Early on in the process, lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for not doing more to help the applicants — many of whom have personal ties to the American troops who fought in the conflict — and for not immediately crafting an evacuation plan.
But the Pentagon’s role has been limited to supporting the State Department program, officials said. In early July, the Pentagon established a crisis action group to support Jacobson’s parallel effort at the State Department, which launched about a week and a half later, Reid said.
The group has spent the past few weeks working to find appropriate relocation sites and preparing them for applicants to arrive, including conducting a walk-through with Jacobson at Fort Lee last week.
“We couldn’t have done any of that in April or early May until we had that level of specificity identified by the State Department,” he said.
In addition to the Afghans arriving at Fort Lee, the State Department has requested that the Pentagon provide options for relocating another 20,000 applicants and their family members at U.S. installations both in the U.S. and in other countries, Reid said.
While the applicants at Fort Lee are expected to stay for only a few days, the department is planning for future tranches of people to remain on U.S. installations abroad for much longer — potentially for nine to 12 months, Reid said. Some of the proposed relocation sites could require the construction of temporary facilities to house the influx of people, similar to the “tent cities” erected for large numbers of U.S. forces in transit to active conflict zones.
At least two locations overseas will likely be needed to accommodate all 20,000 people, Reid said.
Evacuating the tens of thousands of Afghans who qualify for the special visa program by the end of August will be a Herculean task, but Reid and other top administration officials and allies projected confidence.
“The important thing is to achieve the goal, and I think they’re well on their way to doing that,” Menendez said.
15. FBI probe shows amount of chemicals in Beirut blast was a fraction of original shipment
Well this is certainly worrisome. Where will the next "accident" or terrorist attack occur?
FBI probe shows amount of chemicals in Beirut blast was a fraction of original shipment
- Summary
- Ammonium nitrate cargo arrived in Beirut in 2013
- Blast was one of biggest ever non-nuclear explosions
- FBI say blast consistent with 552 tonnes of chemicals
July 30 (Reuters) - The amount of ammonium nitrate that blew up at Beirut port last year was one fifth of the shipment unloaded there in 2013, the FBI concluded after the blast, adding to suspicions that much of the cargo had gone missing.
As the first anniversary approaches on Aug. 4, major questions remain unanswered, including how a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate - which can be used to make fertiliser or bombs - was left unsafely stored in a capital city for years.
The blast was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded, killing more than 200 people, wounding thousands, and devastating swathes of Beirut. read more
The FBI's Oct. 7, 2020 report, which was seen by Reuters this week, estimates around 552 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded that day, much less than the 2,754 tonnes that arrived on a Russian-leased cargo ship in 2013.
The FBI report does not give any explanation as to how the discrepancy arose, or where the rest of the shipment may have gone.
In response to a detailed request for comment, an FBI spokesperson referred Reuters to the Lebanese authorities.
FBI investigators came to Beirut after the blast at Lebanon's request.
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A view shows the site of the August 4 explosion at Beirut port, Lebanon February 18, 2021. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir/File Photo
A senior Lebanese official who was aware of the FBI report and its findings said the Lebanese authorities agreed with the Bureau on the quantity that exploded.
Many officials in Lebanon have previously said in private they believe a lot of the shipment was stolen.
The ammonium nitrate was going from Georgia to Mozambique on a Russian-leased cargo ship when the captain says he was instructed to make an unscheduled stop in Beirut and take on extra cargo.
The ship arrived in Beirut in November 2013 but never left, becoming tangled in a legal dispute over unpaid port fees and ship defects. No one ever came forward to claim the shipment.
The senior Lebanese official said there were no firm conclusions as to why the quantity that exploded was less than the original shipment. One theory was that part of it was stolen. A second theory was that only part of the shipment detonated, with the rest blown out to sea, the official said. read more
The FBI report said "an approximate amount reaching around 552 metric tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in warehouse 12".
It noted the warehouse was large enough to house the 2,754 tonne shipment, which was stored in one-tonne bags, but added "it is not logical that all of them were present at the time of the explosion".
Editing by William Maclean
16. Russia-Japan Tensions Rise As Moscow Eyes Kuril Development
The Russia-Japan territorial disputes are often overlooked. And there has been no end of war declaration between Russia and Japan.
Excerpts:
These strategic moves directly challenge demarcation and maritime security. Russia’s merchant marine fleet plays an important role and can be seen as an ancillary to the Chinese fishing fleet model.
Japan’s Hokkaido is separated from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula by the Sea of Okhotsk. Hypothetically, Russian development of the archipelago would act as both a barrier and point of projection for shipping and maritime activity, including for the increasingly assertive Pacific Fleet of the Russian Navy.
Russia-Japan Tensions Rise As Moscow Eyes Kuril Development – Analysis
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s visit to the Kuril Islands last week was an important message to Japan, but also to other audiences. The island chain has been claimed by Russia since the end of the Second World War, but Tokyo does not acknowledge Moscow’s claim. The debate is not new and the islands are a constant thorn in Tokyo’s side. Russia and Japan have previously struggled over property rights surrounding the archipelago.
The Kuril Islands, for the most part, fall under Russian administration, but Japan claims the four southernmost islands, including two of the three largest islands, Iturup and Kunashir, as Japanese territory (known as the Northern Territories). Russia’s governance of the Kuril archipelago drives its claims. Over the years, Russo-Japanese talks on resolving the dispute have been off and on. The latest round is likely to lead to tensions, with Tokyo possibly taking a stronger position than usual. Mishustin’s visit occurred as the Tokyo Olympics were underway, telegraphing a particular message to Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. Suga’s approval rating is dropping and the timing of the Russian prime minister’s visit was a clear power play over the islands and their use.
Mishustin is touring Russia’s Far East and Siberia, with the Kuril Islands his first stop, specifically Iturup. During his visit, the Russian PM sent a message to Japan about Moscow’s development plans for the Kuril Islands, including the establishment of a free trade zone (FTZ), prompting a harsh rebuke from the Japanese foreign minister. Mishustin is acting on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct orders: Putin told him to pay special attention to the Kuril Islands during his trip to the Far East, noting that Moscow is working with Japanese partners to create the necessary conditions for increasing economic activity.
An FTZ on what is perceived to be Japanese territory is a bold step by the Kremlin as it seeks to stake its geostrategic claims in terms of islands and seabeds. The melting of the Arctic ice cap and the opening of the Northern Sea Route are part of the emerging geoeconomic red lines that are popping up. Russia sees Japan’s participation in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) in the Indo-Pacific in terms of a new security arc against both China and Russia. In a 2021 joint statement, “The Spirit of the Quad,” the group described “a shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific,” while emphasizing the rules-based international order.
These strategic moves directly challenge demarcation and maritime security. Russia’s merchant marine fleet plays an important role and can be seen as an ancillary to the Chinese fishing fleet model.
Japan’s Hokkaido is separated from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula by the Sea of Okhotsk. Hypothetically, Russian development of the archipelago would act as both a barrier and point of projection for shipping and maritime activity, including for the increasingly assertive Pacific Fleet of the Russian Navy.
The FTZ’s objective, according to Mishustin, is to create a special regime on Iturup that would allow for the intensification of economic activity throughout the island chain. The FTZ would help to build business for Iturup’s industries, which can be spread up to the archipelago. The increased strategic value of the archipelago under an overarching FTZ may be attractive to logistical operators, as well as industrial factories.
Mishustin’s trip also occurred just a few weeks before the 2021 Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) is due to be held in Vladivostok. This is scheduled to be a large in-person event that will likely result in specific strategic decisions and investment strategies. Infrastructure deals are to be emphasized and likely signed by many investment firms from around the world. Importantly, both Putin and Suga are expected to attend. In a recent Russian Security Council meeting, Putin said Russia would present Japan with new proposals for an agreement on the Kuril Islands dispute.
So the groundwork for development on the islands is already in play and an assertive Russia is likely to get what it wants out of the EEF conference. It wants to start developing the archipelago as soon as possible as part of the emerging strategic challenges it faces as a result of climate change. It will be important to watch as Moscow makes this economic move, which may be a challenge to the legal regimes and norms emphasized by its Indo-Pacific partners.
• Dr. Theodore Karasik is a senior adviser to Gulf State Analytics in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @tkarasik
17. Re-Shaping the USMC as a Crisis Management Force: Working Naval Integration
Excerpts:
In the exercise, the Marines will work with P-8s in a variety of ways, including FARP refueling that will optimize sustainment of land operations ashore.
This is about Marine-Navy cross training which has not been done with regard to the P-8.
As one participant put it: “It’s a data sharing experiment.
“The Marines deploy in the littorals with our unique capabilities.
“And they integrate with the fleet in order to provide data which the fleet might not otherwise have access to.
“By so doing, we can paint a more accurate picture for the commander and joint force, so better targeting decisions can be made.”
As one participant noted: “We will have 2 TACRON representatives onboard on a ship and two deployed to the expeditionary base.”
As one participant noted: “The biggest thing with that exercise and that experimentation and training is working the targeting process.
“How do you speed up the process of target identification using machine aided decision making tools.”
In short, as the Marines undergo modernization in preparation for strategic competition, a key part of the effort is working more effective integration with the Navy and leveraging innovation being generated within the joint force.
Re-Shaping the USMC as a Crisis Management Force: Working Naval Integration - Second Line of Defense
By Robbin Laird
The Marines are re-focusing their efforts from the Middle East land wars to shaping their way ahead to build a purpose-built force to facilitate sea denial and assured access in support of fleet and joint operations against potential adversaries.
One way they are doing this is working with the U.S. Navy in new ways to operate together.
Because the U.S. Navy is itself undergoing fundamental change as they return to a clear priority on blue water operations and littoral engagements, this means that the Marines are changing with a sense of urgency while the Navy is itself.
It is really an interactive engagement exploring ways to shape more effective crisis management and combat capabilities to deal with strategic competition.
During my visit to 2nd Marine Air Wing in July 2021, I had a chance to discuss the evolving approach with the G-3 or operations team at 2nd MAW.
I met with Col. Eilertson, the head of G-3, Maj. Barnes, the G-3 Future Operations Officer which involves the planning and engagement in exercises, and Col. (Ret.) Michael Watkins, the newly appointed senior civilian advisor in G-3.
We focused most of our discussion on the upcoming Naval exercise to be held in August.
This exercise will focus on a variety of operational vignettes testing out a variety of ways the Navy and the Marines can work together in enhance joint maritime littoral warfare capabilities.
Maritime power is an essential element of the National Defense Strategy, in light of increasingly capable maritime adversaries it is absolutely critical to the success of our nation.
During the past two years, I have asked a number of Naval officers what they considered to be contributions which the Marines might make to the maritime fight and one of the most often capabilities highlighted was the possibility of deploying sensors as part of an inside force to facilitate sea denial and sea control in support of fleet operations and the joint force.
And this is going to be done in the August exercise.
They referred to the Marine Corps side of this as training to deliver maritime capabilities “far from the sea.”
A case in point is bringing the major sensor deployed by the Marines and setting up a sensor expeditionary base.
There they will be strategically postured to provide counter-air situational awareness for the Navy and operate from an expeditionary base within an enemy’s Weapon Engagement Zone.
Another example is refueling Navy aircraft from Forward Aerial Refueling Points or FARPS or expeditionary refueling points.
But here they are testing the ability of Marine Corps AAVs to do refueling of rotorcraft for the Navy.
A third example is training with P-8s.
One clear trajectory of change I have seen over the past two years is the Navy realizing that the capabilities onboard the P-8 in terms of sensors can be used more broadly for the joint force.
In terms of works with the Marines, this means working ways for what have been different data management and communication systems to be worked to become more integrated.
In the exercise, the Marines will work with P-8s in a variety of ways, including FARP refueling that will optimize sustainment of land operations ashore.
This is about Marine-Navy cross training which has not been done with regard to the P-8.
As one participant put it: “It’s a data sharing experiment.
“The Marines deploy in the littorals with our unique capabilities.
“And they integrate with the fleet in order to provide data which the fleet might not otherwise have access to.
“By so doing, we can paint a more accurate picture for the commander and joint force, so better targeting decisions can be made.”
As one participant noted: “We will have 2 TACRON representatives onboard on a ship and two deployed to the expeditionary base.”
As one participant noted: “The biggest thing with that exercise and that experimentation and training is working the targeting process.
“How do you speed up the process of target identification using machine aided decision making tools.”
In short, as the Marines undergo modernization in preparation for strategic competition, a key part of the effort is working more effective integration with the Navy and leveraging innovation being generated within the joint force.
Post Views: 566
18. 6 key takeaways about the state of the news media in 2020
Some interesting data about the media environment. Please go to the link to view the graphics and correct formatting
JULY 27, 2021
6 key takeaways about the state of the news media in 2020
Every two years, Pew Research Center updates its series of fact sheets on the U.S. news media industry, tracking key audience and economic indicators for a variety of sectors. Here are some key findings about the state of the industry in 2020.
How we did this
For the first time, newspapers made more money from circulation than from advertising, according to an analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings of publicly traded newspaper companies. For more than 50 years, U.S. newspapers had more annual revenue from advertising than from circulation (e.g., selling subscriptions or single issues). But with ad revenue in a long-term decline and circulation revenue holding steady, the two streams finally crossed in 2020.
In a year dominated by major news events, cable news channels saw explosive audience growth in 2020. In prime time, Fox News’ average audience increased by 61%, CNN’s increased by 72% and MSNBC’s grew by 28%, according to Comscore TV Essentials® data. Other TV news sectors also saw audience growth, but to smaller degrees. The average audience for network nightly news, for example, increased by between 7% and 16%, and the average audience for local TV evening news increased 4%. Spanish-language news on Telemundo and Univision also generally saw an audience increase in 2020.
Political ad revenue at local TV stations was dramatically higher in 2020. Though it always rises in election years, it totaled $2 billion in 2020 – far above any prior year, according to an analysis of SEC filings of five major publicly held local TV station companies.
Individual giving is making up a larger piece of the revenue pie for public broadcasters. In 2014, for example, just 3% of nonpublic funding for the PBS NewsHour came from individuals. By 2020, the share had climbed to 24%. Over the same period, contributions from corporations fell from 41% to 18%, according to information provided by PBS NewsHour. At public radio stations, meanwhile, individual contributions rose from $261 million to $430 million between 2008 and 2019, while underwriting revenue has risen far less, according to an analysis of public filings provided by 123 of the largest news-oriented licensees.
Total advertising revenue – beyond just news – is now mostly digital, according to eMarketer estimates. As of 2019, more ad revenue came from digital advertising than nondigital advertising, such as print and broadcast. A major driver of this trend has been mobile advertising, which rose roughly sixtyfold between 2011 and 2020, from $1.7 billion to $102.6 billion.
While terrestrial radio listenership declined in 2020, the audience for online audio has grown. NPR’s weekly podcast audience, for instance, nearly doubled in the past two years, from about 7 million in 2018 to about 14 million in 2020, according to data provided by the broadcaster. (NPR now makes more money from underwriting on its podcasts than its radio shows.) Around three-in-ten Americans ages 12 and older (28%) now say they listened to podcasts in the past week, according to “The Infinite Dial” report by Edison Research and Triton Digital.
But after years of almost perfectly steady listenership, terrestrial radio (i.e., AM/FM) saw its overall audience – not just for news – decline in 2020. The decrease coincided with a sharp decrease in automobile use during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, 83% of Americans ages 12 and older listened to terrestrial radio, down from 89% in 2019 and 92% in 2009, according to Nielsen Media Research data published by the Radio Advertising Bureau.
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Michael Barthel is a senior researcher focusing on journalism research at Pew Research Center.
19. The Return of Hypocrisy
We cannot address every problem in the world. Is this criticism valid? What about Cuba? What about Burma?
This is actual a key question:
A related question is to what extent the United States can actually influence the internal affairs of faraway countries. Is there much Biden can do? The short answer is yes. If Tunisia’s president doesn’t begin reversing course, the Biden administration can threaten a full—not a partial—suspension of aid. Partial aid suspensions don’t generally work, because they confuse and dilute American leverage. They are also self-undermining, because they communicate to authoritarian leaders that U.S. officials are hedging their bets and unwilling to follow through on their own stated commitments. Half measures can be the worst of both worlds—they anger target governments while failing to accomplish much besides virtue signaling to the foreign-policy community. If you’re going to piss off an ally, at least make it count.
Conclusion:
I realize that this may be a losing battle. To be disappointed is to be realistic. The Biden administration is unlikely to act boldly, however bold its rhetoric has been up until this moment. In a small, obscure Arab country, then, a surprise coup attempt may mark—after a short interregnum—the return of American hypocrisy.
The Return of Hypocrisy
Lofty prodemocracy rhetoric is back, but the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to thwart a coup in Tunisia.
Governments, even democratic ones, are often ineffective or simply bad. Elections sometimes produce uninspiring results, particularly when a patchwork of parties forms an unwieldy coalition government that struggles to get much of anything done. This doesn’t mean it should be overthrown. Nor should the United States ignore coup attempts staged in the name of bypassing the messiness of democracy. Yet in Tunisia, this is what the Biden administration appears to be doing, revealing the widening gulf between American words and deeds.
On Sunday, Tunisian President Kais Saied, who is supposed to share power with Parliament and a prime minister, suspended the former and dismissed the latter. In case anyone doubted his intentions, Saied addressed the nation while flanked by top military and security officials. On Monday, the army surrounded Parliament and blocked legislators from entering the building. Most Americans probably don’t care that Tunisia is—or, perhaps more precisely, was—the lone success story of the Arab Spring. But the atmospherics of the story might resonate. A president longing to be a strongman is something that we in the United States recently experienced. As a long-standing democracy, America had institutions that rose to the challenge and restrained former President Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts. Young, fragile democracies are rarely so lucky.
From the very start of his presidency, Joe Biden identified the struggle between democratic and authoritarian governments as the central challenge of both the present and future. As he put it in his first press conference as president: “It is clear, absolutely clear … that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.” This lofty rhetoric was somewhat surprising, especially for a man who had viewed the 2011 Arab uprisings with evident skepticism. In one memorable moment, just two weeks before the Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak fell amid mass protests, Biden said: “Look, Mubarak has been an ally … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”
Believing in the power and possibility of democracy is easy in theory. The problem with democracy in practice is that it is never quite as good as its proponents hope it might be. The same can be said for how the United States responds to breaches of democracy in the Middle East. Despite ostensibly being on the side of popular rule, the White House has so far refused to take sides in Tunisia, instead expressing “concern” over the developments there. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki informed reporters that administration officials were in touch with their Tunisian counterparts “to learn more about the situation, urge calm, and support Tunisian efforts to move forward in line with democratic principles.” (After Egypt’s 2013 coup, it was Psaki who infamously said, “We have determined we are not going to make a determination” about whether to call it a coup.)
In the Middle East, Tunisia’s crisis is the first real test of Biden’s professed commitment to a new democracy doctrine. During the unusual presidency of Donald Trump, Americans could easily forget that sustaining a gap between rhetoric and policy was a storied U.S. tradition. In his unapologetic disregard for supporting human rights and democracy abroad, Trump offered a natural experiment. The difference wasn’t so much that he couldn’t be bothered, but more that it didn’t occur to him to be bothered in the first place. For the first time in decades, the gap between words and deeds closed considerably. The United States, under Trump, had become less hypocritical. Dissidents no longer had to wonder if the United States would come to their aid. Under no illusions about American interest in their plight, they could adapt their activism accordingly and focus exclusively on their own local context. In his frank disregard, Trump was simply incapable of betraying them.
Under Joe Biden, America is speaking in terms of values and morality once again, both at home and abroad. Other countries, particularly weak ones, do not have the luxury of high-minded idealism. To pretend, in other words, is a privilege, one that America has insisted on and even earned. Its unrivaled power allows it two things: the ability to have ideals but also the ability to ignore them. For the United States, the charge of hypocrisy is effective precisely because it speaks to something true: We would like to be better, but we can’t.
But why can’t we? Why can’t we thwart a slow-motion coup in Tunisia, a relatively remote country where the risks of being too bold are minimal? Unlike Egypt, the Middle East’s most populous nation, Tunisia can’t claim to be central to U.S. regional objectives, such as the promotion of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (however imaginary such a solution might be).
A related question is to what extent the United States can actually influence the internal affairs of faraway countries. Is there much Biden can do? The short answer is yes. If Tunisia’s president doesn’t begin reversing course, the Biden administration can threaten a full—not a partial—suspension of aid. Partial aid suspensions don’t generally work, because they confuse and dilute American leverage. They are also self-undermining, because they communicate to authoritarian leaders that U.S. officials are hedging their bets and unwilling to follow through on their own stated commitments. Half measures can be the worst of both worlds—they anger target governments while failing to accomplish much besides virtue signaling to the foreign-policy community. If you’re going to piss off an ally, at least make it count.
To be sure, threatening an aid suspension is risky. But all bold policy action is risky (otherwise it wouldn’t be bold). We also know that not threatening an aid suspension seems almost certain to lead to an undemocratic result—a continuation of Tunisia’s current course of elevating a would-be strongman over Parliament and other constitutional constraints. So one option, while risky, is considerably more promising than the other. Some observers legitimately worry that suspending assistance to the Tunisian government might backfire. But this perspective misunderstands the direction of leverage; Tunisia needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs Tunisia. The Biden administration should of course coordinate any such effort with the European Union and individual member states. Considering Europe’s proximity to and influence in Tunisia, any pressure campaign is likely to fail without European buy-in.
Also capable of playing a decisive role is the International Monetary Fund, which has invested in bailing out Tunisia’s battered economy (exacerbated by some of the worst per capita COVID-19 death rates in the world). The IMF’s Articles of Agreement impose no political conditions; autocrats and democrats alike are eligible for support. Even so, the U.S. and European nations, as the largest shareholders, can exercise their voting rights as they see fit. There is precedent for attaching conditions to prospective financial-support packages. During Egypt’s brief democratic opening in 2012 and 2013, the IMF requested that the elected Islamist government secure broad support, including from opposition parties, for an IMF deal. In short, the claim that President Biden lacks sufficient leverage to pressure the Tunisian government simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
I realize that this may be a losing battle. To be disappointed is to be realistic. The Biden administration is unlikely to act boldly, however bold its rhetoric has been up until this moment. In a small, obscure Arab country, then, a surprise coup attempt may mark—after a short interregnum—the return of American hypocrisy.
20. DoD needs to get a handle on quality of life at remote, isolated U.S. bases, report finds
DoD needs to get a handle on quality of life at remote, isolated U.S. bases, report finds
Some troops and families are having to drive three hours to get routine medical care during pregnancy, or commuting 53 miles to work on an installations that are remote or isolated in the U.S., according to a new government report, highlighting the need for Defense officials to look at the full picture of support services for troops and their families at these bases.
DoD needs to gauge the risks of not providing those support services, and develop a strategy to meet those needs of troops and families, according to the report from the Government Accountability Office, which took a deep dive into life some of these U.S. installations.
Since 1989, 43 installations in the United States have been given that “remote or isolated” status for the purposes of morale, welfare and recreation, by either DoD or Congress, auditors said. Three of those were designated by DoD between 2011 and 2020 — Naval Support Activity, Crane, Ind.; Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif.; and Fort Hunter Liggett, Monterey, Calif. While there are more than 207 remote or isolated installations worldwide for MWR purposes, this congressionally-mandated report focused on those in the U.S.
For now, that designation matters when it comes to MWR programs. When these installations get that designation of “remote” or “isolated,” they may qualify for additional MWR funding for service members and families, under a process established by DoD. Some key MWR programs are child care and fitness centers, among others.
But there’s more to be considered than MWR, auditors said, and DoD’s current policies for housing, medical care and education don’t include a process for designating a base as remote or isolated for the purpose of extra resources for that particular support service. And without a system for assessing whether those support services are meeting the needs of service members and their families, DoD and the services may not be able to target funding to those needs.
In their response to GAO, DoD officials agreed with the recommendations, and committed to review its policies and to look at the ways military families’ needs are met at these remote locations.
While DoD policies generally rely on communities near the installations to provide troops and families with the support services they need, those community services may not be available at the remote or isolated installations, auditors found. They may not even have a local community within close proximity.
Auditors examined the services available at four such remote installations: Dugway Proving Ground, Utah; Naval Air Station Key West, Fla.; Clear Air Force Station, Alaska (for unaccompanied personnel only); and Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, Calif.
Auditors said officials at the installations and service members surveyed described a number of financial effects experienced, such as increased commuting costs, higher costs of consumer goods, travel distance and time needed to reach grocery stores, and the high cost of off-base housing. Officials from two of the bases said that in some instances, young service members leave the military after being posted at a remote or isolated base.
Medical care: Service members at three of the locations faced commutes of an hour or more to reach health care providers within DoD’s Tricare network. For example, at Naval Air Station Key West, neither the on-base medical clinic nor the community outside the gate can provide certain types of specialty care, such as obstetric and gynecological care. Service members and their dependents must drive three hours to Miami to get this care. Officials at the installation told auditors that a policy that designates installations as remote or isolated for health care purposes would help them draw wider attention to that situation and boost their argument for more medical resources.
Defense Health Agency officials told auditors that requirements related to improving services in rural, remote and isolated areas of the U.S. are expected to be addressed in the next generation of Tricare contracts that are expected to being in 2023.
Housing: At Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, Calif., the privatized family housing community is located about 21 miles from the installation; but most of the service members live in a local community about 53 miles away. Officials at three of the installations GAO auditors visited identified the condition of base housing as a concern, too. A little more than half of the service members at the four remote installations who responded to a GAO survey said they were satisfied with the condition of their housing, whether it was located on or off the base. They cited problems such as mold in base housing and dormitories, inadequate air conditioning, and general disrepair.
GAO auditors note that the web-based survey size was small —– sent to 756 service members at those four installations, with 28 percent, or 212, responding. So the results can’t be generalized across all the remote or isolated installations, they said, but can be used to identify issues at those specific bases.
Auditors identified two key problems with housing — the lack of available, affordable housing and insufficient Basic Allowance for Housing. This has increasingly become an issue this year with service members, whether they live in remote areas or not, because of the hot housing market affecting both purchasers and renters.
Education: None of the bases examined have Department of Defense schools for children. The three installations with families rely on public schools to provide education for their children, as do most other military bases in the U.S. About 83 percent of the respondents to the GAO survey at the four installations said that their public schools met the needs of their school-aged children to a “moderate” extent. About 29 percent expressed dissatisfaction with the education options available for their children. Some cited lack of special education resources, athletic programs and extracurricular activities.
MWR: While bases are designated as remote or isolated for MWR purposes, there’s dissatisfaction with some MWR programs among the troops.
Nearly half of the survey respondents at these four installations said they were “somewhat” or “very” dissatisfied with the availability of recreation programs and travel services at their installations; and nearly half also said they were dissatisfied with the quality of these programs.
Installation officials said their ability to provide MWR services is negatively affected by their difficulty in attracting and retaining civilian employees because of factors like low pay, commute time and cost of living.
DoD guidance states that the military services should provide comparable and consistent MWR support to all eligible personnel on DoD installations — to include the remote installations. While DoD expects many MWR programs to be self-sufficient, it provides flexibility for more funding for MWR programs at remote or isolated installations.
21. The Secret Source Who Helped Fuel Trump’s Big Lie
A fascinating read. It is hard to believe someone like this guy can have legitimacy and credibility and influence political leaders at the highest level. I was going to say it does ridicate the problems with our political system. But upon reflection it illustrates the problems with some "operators" within our political system.
And it is amazing how conspiracy theories like former President Bush's "new world order" persist. It is amazing how that rather innocuous phrase to describe the Post -Cold War World became the basis for a conspiracy theory.
The Secret Source Who Helped Fuel Trump’s Big Lie
A Dallas information-technology consultant, code-named Spider, believes that the New World Order stole the 2020 election.
by Mike Giglio
Twelve days after Joe Biden was declared the winner in the 2020 Presidential race, Donald Trump’s legal team laid out its master theory of the election in a dramatic press conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters. “What we are really dealing with here, and uncovering more by the day, is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, and the interference with our elections here in the United States,” Sidney Powell, one of the President’s lawyers, declared as she stood before a row of American flags. Powell said that a Colorado-based company called Dominion Voting Systems had secretly manipulated the vote count in machines that were used in at least two dozen states and helped sway the results in Democrats’ favor. In addition to foreign Marxists, the key conspirators included the Clinton Foundation and a large circle of élite business leaders. When Rudy Giuliani took his turn at the microphone, he added George Soros and big tech companies to the list. “Global interests,” Powell had explained, were behind the failure of major news outlets to report on the fraud.
The following week, Powell began filing lawsuits with affidavits purporting to back her claims. One of them was from an anonymous hacker who was identified as “Spyder,” or sometimes “Spider,” a pseudonym inspired by the web-like diagrams that filled his supporting documents. By examining Dominion’s network connections and finding vulnerabilities in its Web site, Spider alleged, he had uncovered “unambiguous evidence” that the company had allowed America’s foreign adversaries to manipulate election results. In early December, Spider was unmasked after his name appeared in a bookmark of a court document: he was Joshua Merritt, a forty-three-year-old military veteran and information-technology consultant living in Dallas with his wife and children.
Acting on a hunch, I searched for Merritt’s name in a leaked database that I had obtained the previous year which listed members of a militant right-wing group called the Oath Keepers. Merritt, it turned out, had joined the group in 2010, listing himself as a soldier with an address at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. Known for seeking to recruit current and former military and law-enforcement officials, the Oath Keepers had helped promote a version of a decades-old conspiracy theory that a globalist business and political élite—often called the New World Order—were attempting to undermine American democracy and sovereignty. The theory mirrored, in many ways, the claims that Powell, Giuliani, and members of Trump’s legal team advanced after the election. In his membership form, Merritt had written, “I have been in since after Sept. 11 to take up what I felt was the calling of our nation.” He said that his time in Afghanistan and Iraq had left him with unsettling questions. “I started wondering why it felt wrong, there were things that didn’t add up, and I looked around to see who else agreed,” he wrote. Online, Merritt came across a video by an early advocate for the Oath Keepers, and, he wrote, “his words hit me like a wall of reality.” I sent an e-mail to the address on his form. “You’re well researched,” Merritt quickly replied. “Give me a call.”
In the months since, I’ve spent hours speaking with Merritt in person and over the phone. He said he was a turret gunner in Iraq and provided security for a counter-I.E.D. unit in Afghanistan; he received a commendation for serving in combat. A largely self-trained computer sleuth, Merritt can come across as a jarring blend of geek and grunt, moving seamlessly between war stories peppered with military jargon, obsessively detailed accounts of his cybersecurity exploits, and conspiracy theories. During our conversations, he laid out a political journey that illuminates the advance of a once-fringe ideology into the heart of contemporary U.S. politics. Months of interviews that I’d conducted with current and former Oath Keepers had made clear to me that the New World Order theory played a central role in motivating many members to arm themselves and prepare for political violence. The theory’s history runs much deeper on the American right than QAnon.
Months after Biden took office, a third of Americans—and about two-thirds of those who lean Republican—continued to believe that he won the Presidency only through voter fraud. One of them is Merritt. During our conversations, he remained polite and genial, no matter where the discussion went. Despite his deep convictions—about election fraud and the shadowy actors he believes are behind it—he never seemed disappointed to find me unconvinced, displaying the quiet assurance of someone who’d long ago stopped worrying about being dismissed.
Merritt was about five years old the first time that he heard about what many Trump supporters now call the “deep state.” He was living in San Antonio, Texas, when he overheard his step-grandfather and his father, whom he described as “a full-blown conspiracist,” talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His father believed that the C.I.A. had been involved in his killing. He and Merritt’s mother were ex-hippies who had retained their suspicion of government and their addiction to drugs, according to Merritt and another family member. “My dad always told me don’t ever believe anything the government says, because if they say it, there’s an agenda behind it,” Merritt told me.
When he was eight, Merritt woke one night to find his parents packing suitcases. They coaxed him back to sleep, and left. He ended up staying with his grandmother. Merritt described himself as a difficult child, prone to unruly behavior, and, after three years, his grandmother surrendered him to a group home in San Antonio for at-risk children. Its counsellors and rigid program helped him live what he considered close to a normal life. He attended local middle and high schools, played on the football team, and joined the R.O.T.C. At the same time, Merritt was creating a second life on the early Internet. He used the group home’s shared computer to practice coding and script writing, explore, and hunt for information. As Merritt saw it, he was venturing out on his own to discover how the world really worked. When I asked him what he learned as a teen-age hacker, he replied, “Research. I learned to research.”
Merritt had little contact with his parents, but, on weekends, he would often visit relatives in the Waco area including his paternal grandfather, a veteran of the Second World War and ham-radio operator who used a scanner to tune in to police traffic and eavesdrop on neighbors as they chatted on cordless phones. In 1993, the F.B.I. and other federal law-enforcement agencies conducted a seven-week siege of a compound near Waco that housed members of the Branch Davidians, a heavily armed religious sect. Merritt recalled sitting at his grandfather’s kitchen table listening to the scanner, fascinated by the sense that he was getting an inside account of history. The standoff ended with an F.B.I. raid and the deaths of more than seventy Branch Davidians, including more than twenty children. The experience was seminal for the fifteen-year-old Merritt, vivid proof that his father had been right in his warnings about the government. After high school, following the example of a mentor at his group home, he enlisted in the Marines. After the discovery of a physical condition that he declined to discuss, except to say that it was later resolved, he was medically discharged, he said. From there, Merritt bounced between jobs. For a time, he was also a professional wrestler on an underground circuit where he said he was hit in the head with steel chairs and fluorescent light bulbs. He was also in a psychobilly band. Eventually, he recalled, he ended up in California working as a computer-assisted designer.
After 9/11, he joined the Army. It was in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, that he finally “woke up,” and the conspiratorial thinking he’d been around all of his life solidified into a more cohesive belief system. Guarding an Afghan prisoner one day, Merritt told me, he fell into conversation with a tribal elder who’d been arrested for aiding the Taliban. As the man pressed him on what America was really doing in his country, Merritt realized that he didn’t have a good answer. “I saw myself in him,” he told me. “He was helping his countrymen.” At the time, Merritt had begun interacting online with the supporter of the Oath Keepers and believed that American citizen militias, too, might one day have to face U.S. troops. He remembered thinking, of his Afghan prisoner, “That could very easily end up being one of us.”
The New World Order is a contemporary appellation of the centuries-old fear that a secret international cabal is surreptitiously seeking global domination. For some adherents, the theory took on new credibility after George H. W. Bush, a former C.I.A. director, used the term in a speech he gave as President ahead of the Gulf War. “Out of these troubled times, a new world order can emerge, a new era, freer from the threat of terror and more secure in the quest for peace,” Bush said. (The theory is also referred to as the One World Government, among other names.) Merritt and other adherents contend, roughly, that an alliance of business and political élites secretly use Marxism to weaken Western democracies. The main obstacles to the plotters are committed proponents of small government in America and the country’s millions of gun-owning patriots. The New World Order, or N.W.O., manufactures conflicts, like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to expand its power, and has co-opted much of the U.S. political, business, and media establishment. In some versions, the theory is steeped in anti-Semitism and racism: the cabal behind it are Jews, including Soros, who use racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants to destabilize the U.S. In others, the New World Order is not about race or religion but oligarchy. Mainstream politicians of both parties, especially Democrats, along with the government and intelligence officials who make up the so-called “deep state,” are part of the scheme. Limited government, nationalism, anti-leftism, and gun rights are the solutions.
Waco was a central event for Merritt and other followers of this theory, who cite it as an example of the violence that the U.S. government is willing to unleash on American citizens. Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran who had travelled to Waco to witness the siege, believed that it presaged a coming battle with the New World Order. On the two-year anniversary of the Waco deaths, he detonated a truck bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people. The war on terror provided a push into conspiratorial thinking for a new generation of Americans, shaking their faith in the political and national-security establishment, which appeared to be sowing chaos abroad to enrich itself and acquire new powers at home. Disenchanted soldiers like Merritt certainly thought so. He found a natural home in the Oath Keepers, whose membership included passionate believers in the New World Order theory.
The group, which was launched online in early 2009, derives its name from the oath that soldiers take to “support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Its founder, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, an Army veteran and Yale Law School graduate, argues that members of both the armed forces and the police can refuse to carry out orders, especially those related to gun control, that would supposedly enable tyranny. Other orders that they vowed to resist included placing Americans in detention camps and allowing foreign troops on U.S. soil. If it came to it, they could also fight. Membership in right-wing militant groups rose after Barack Obama took office, and their overarching view of American politics—as a battle between freedom and tyranny—was mirrored by many Tea Party conservatives. Rhodes published a code of conduct that prohibited racial and religious discrimination, helping to make the Oath Keepers more acceptable to a broader segment of conservatives. Dozens of people in the leaked database I obtained noted that they’d learned about the Oath Keepers through the Tea Party. Others said they were local Republican Party officials when they joined.
In 2013, Merritt received an honorable discharge from the military. As he transitioned to civilian life, it seemed as if his fears of the New World Order were being embraced even by people who might not have heard of it. In years past, he’d stayed awake deep into the night listening to conspiratorial talk radio to indulge in the theory. Now he could hear echoes of it on Fox News. “More people were seeing it,” he said.
Less than a year after Merritt left the Army, right-wing militants staged an armed standoff with federal authorities at the Bundy cattle ranch in Nevada. Rhodes and others gathered at the ranch to defend the family’s desire to graze its cattle on federal land. Merritt told me that he remained in Texas but relayed what he thought was a helpful tip to Rhodes. He said he advised him that he had heard that the Obama Administration was planning to conduct a drone strike on the Bundy encampment, and urged people there to cloak themselves in heat-trapping Mylar blankets as a way to block drone temperature sensors. (An attorney for Rhodes told me that he doesn’t remember who gave him the tip.) Instead of aiding the group, the tip sowed panic, and the militants descended into infighting, with the Oath Keepers ordering their people to leave. Eventually, the standoff ended without shots being fired. The episode so disappointed Merritt that he quit the Oath Keepers. It also revealed how paranoid many on the right had become regarding the Obama Administration, believing it capable of treating them as dangerous insurgents, just like Merritt’s former Afghan prisoner.
In 2016, Trump evoked the conspiratorial narrative of the New World Order theory. He never mentioned it by name, but his talk of élites exploiting average Americans, and his tirades against the “deep state” after taking office, convinced Merritt and other adherents that he was fighting the same battle. To Merritt, Trump was an avenging outsider, the slayer of both the Bush and the Clinton dynasties, the opponent of foreign wars, and the enemy of treacherous U.S. intelligence agencies. “Trump really opened a lot of people’s eyes up, because now everyone goes, ‘Wow, a guy who’s running for President, and is talking about the same stuff we’ve heard for the past twenty years,’ ” Merritt told me. When Trump entered the White House, Merritt saw him as “a buoy sitting in the middle of an ocean full of sharks.”
In 2017, after attending a technical college in Texas, Merritt found a job at a private-intelligence firm named Allied Special Operations Group, or A.S.O.G., in Dallas. “Guys in the military used to always say I hung around shitty people, had weird theories about the world,” Merritt told me. Now his work at the firm put him in contact with well-connected Republicans, who were willing to listen to his concerns. Adam Kraft, an Army veteran and former official at the Defense Intelligence Agency, had recently co-founded the firm. (Kraft did not respond to a request for a comment.) Another executive was Russell Ramsland, a former Tea Party candidate and conservative political operative. According to the Washington Post, the firm offered cybersecurity services, physical protection, and open-source intelligence services to private, government, and corporate clients. At first, Merritt said, he stuck primarily to I.T. work, setting up servers and e-mail systems for its handful of employees, who worked out of an office in a hangar at Addison Airport, north of Dallas. Eventually, he began gathering information online on behalf of clients, he told me, professionalizing the cyber-sleuthing that he had been doing since he was a teen-ager. Merritt said he focused on mining open-source information and searching the dark Web.
Around the time of the 2018 midterm elections, the firm began to focus on election fraud. Merritt purports to have been a key part of this. According to the Post, their early work on the issue included investigating the recent loss of Pete Sessions, a Republican congressman in Dallas; Sessions described Merritt as a “top computer forensic expert.” From there, Merritt’s research expanded. He investigated the Web sites of electronic-voting companies. He looked to see if administrators used weak password security or if private details about poll workers could be discovered. He believed that he was uncovering “flaws within the system”: vulnerabilities that malicious hackers could exploit.
Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar have accused private-equity-owned voting-software companies of shoddy work that put profit over security. Merritt, however, saw something darker. Although no proof has ever emerged that U.S. voting machines have been manipulated to change election results, Merritt believed that votes had been switched in the midterms. He looked into the employees and advisory boards connected to the voting-software companies and flagged foreign nationals, and he identified former government officials who took jobs with these firms. Just as the New World Order theory can grow from an acorn of truth—the idea that the super-rich and corporations exert outsized power—Merritt took legitimate issues with voting-system security and the revolving door between business and politics and declared them conspiracies. He believed that the vulnerabilities he found had to have been intentional. He believed that the companies must want votes to be hacked.
For years, Republicans had pushed exaggerated claims of election fraud as they worked to pass voting laws that might limit Democratic turnout. In 2016, Trump injected new life into these claims, saying without evidence that Democrats had tried to steal the election, an accusation he repeated in 2020. Ramsland, Merritt told me, began to share Merritt’s work on election fraud with Republican politicians in Washington, including Louie Gohmert, an eight-term Republican congressman from a district east of Dallas. Gohmert did not respond to a request for comment, but the Washington Post reported that he was briefed by A.S.O.G.
At the firm’s offices in Dallas, Merritt said he briefed Sidney Powell, before she became Trump’s lawyer; and Allen West, before he became chairman of the Texas Republican Party. (Powell and West did not respond to requests for comment.) Pro-Trump Republican donors from the Dallas area and beyond, Merritt said, also were briefed on his research. Kevin Freeman, a Dallas-area author and security consultant who is well connected in conservative circles, told me that he sat through Merritt’s briefings with West and others. He said that Merritt’s work impressed people in the room and described him as “highly skilled,” “highly motivated,” and “highly patriotic.”
In late 2019, Merritt left A.S.O.G. to work on his own, but stayed in touch with Ramsland. About a year later, on Election Night, Merritt said Ramsland called him and asked him if he was following the claims of late-night ballot dumps and other fraud circulating on conservative media. That night, Merritt began compiling the research that, together with affidavits from other sources, Powell would use to make her claims about Dominion Voting Systems.
After the election, the people in the A.S.O.G. network started promoting Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the election. On his Web site, Freeman called the race “one of the most contested elections in history” and predicted that the “far left” would conduct a violent insurrection; Louie Gohmert acted as a megaphone in Congress for Trump’s claims of election theft; Allen West seemed to threaten that Texas and other “law-abiding” states would secede. Sessions, newly reëlected to Congress, called for the results to be investigated and voted on January 6th against certifying Biden’s victory. And Powell, of course, led the charge.
Merritt initially wanted to protect his identity because he feared that liberals, or members of the “deep state,” might target him with harassment or even violence. He described working with Trump’s legal team as chaotic. “They just kept telling me, ‘O.K., we need it in this direction, we need info on this group and that group,’ ” he said. “I would then kick it up the chain.” Merritt shared several e-mails from this period with me. One shows someone named Benjamin setting up a call with him about what became known as the Spider affidavit. Others were from a former Trump Administration staffer. “Your testimony is playing a HUGE role,” the person wrote, and said he was passing Merritt’s work to “Sidney.” “Do you also have anything showing that China played more of a role than Russia? I am not sure if it is true, but trying to understand all the different adversaries at play here and their different attack vectors.” At the end of one of his e-mails, which included multiple Christian invocations, he thanked Merritt. “Great work and keep the faith, Gideon’s army!!!”
More than a hundred Republican members of Congress and seventeen attorneys general eventually joined a lawsuit repeating key parts of Powell’s unsubstantiated Dominion claims. After lawmakers announced plans to challenge the Electoral College result on January 6th, Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, called it the last chance to stop the globalist conspiracy. Merritt remained in Dallas, but more than a dozen alleged Oath Keepers and their associates were charged with participating in the Capitol riot. One was Jon Schaffer, whose name was listed in the leaked database that I had received. Schaffer, a heavy-metal guitarist, later pleaded guilty to breaching the Capitol. “I’m a devout patriot,” his entry in the database reads, “and can get word to the youth on a worldwide level about the NWO and their agenda.”
In February, I travelled to Dallas to meet Merritt in person for the first time. He said he’d pick me up at my hotel, and I waited on a patch of grass down the street, figuring he would call when he arrived. Instead, a large pickup pulled up beside me, and Merritt stepped out to shake my hand. He was broad-shouldered and tall, though middle age had softened his wrestler’s frame. His hair was receding around the edges of a buzz cut. In his truck, the console was strewn with bullets for his pistol, and the earphones that he wears at the shooting range hung beside his window. Six years had passed since he had quit the Oath Keepers after the Bundy Ranch fiasco, but he still had his faded membership card in his wallet. On the back was the group’s list warning of gun grabs and detention camps, a nod to the New World Order theory. When I asked how it felt to see elements of the theory become more mainstream, he corrected me, saying, “It became reality.”
Merritt drove me to a barbecue restaurant, where he said he and his wife often drink beer on the patio while their daughter is at karate. I asked him how, if he really thought the New World Order had stolen the election, he could continue living his normal life. He found my question odd. New World Order adherents believe that a secret global cabal has been controlling the country’s affairs for decades. The Trump years were just a brief respite. Now things were back as they long had been, with politicians controlled by the New World Order back in power. Ramsland was still at A.S.O.G., while Adam Kraft, the former Defense Intelligence Agency official, had, according to his LinkedIn profile, joined a government-contracting firm based in Virginia. Merritt, meanwhile, was struggling to find new work. But he still felt some optimism about all that had happened with the election. The chaos surrounding the results, he said, would help more Americans to “wake up,” as he once had, to how the world really worked.
During our conversations, Merritt spoke about his sense of purpose. He said that he’d lost it when he left the military. “I couldn’t get anywhere. I couldn’t get a normal job,” he recalled. “You grow a beard. You get tired of exercising. You don’t like routines anymore, because, I mean, it sort of comes off as being pointless. Once you’re a civilian, then why am I going to wake myself up at six in the morning?” He struggled to relate to those who hadn’t served. Meanwhile, friends from the military were dying from suicide. One was Erik Jorgensen, who served with him in Afghanistan. “We all left our units, and he went back home to Idaho,” Merritt recalled. “And he never reached out to any of us. I always told my guys, no matter where I was, give me a call, if you need just to talk. And, um, they found the dude on the back forty of the range with a round in his head.”
He said that he found new meaning in his work for A.S.O.G. “And then, when we got into the election fraud, I started getting a sense of purpose,” Merritt told me. “It sort of helped me focus myself as a veteran and now civilian, because I was lost.” I thought, when he said this, that he’d touched on a fundamental appeal of conspiracy theories. They bring a community and a sense of mission. They offer a chance to participate in an urgent effort to stop a plot. Thanks to his claims about the 2020 election, Merritt was able to participate in such an effort more than he likely had ever dreamed. He also demonstrated the risk of conspiracy thinking: once people surrender to it, it’s impossible to know where it will lead. When I asked Merritt about the anti-Semitic elements of some versions of the New World Order theory, he responded that, while he didn’t believe the conspiracy was “a Jewish idea,” he did think there were “more people within those systems that are Jewish than aren’t.” During our conversations, he outlined a form of grievance politics that reached new prominence in the Trump era, telling me that the most marginalized people in America are “white Christians,” and that the New World Order was stoking fears about racism and white supremacy in order to “balkanize” U.S. society.
Merritt told me that he was disappointed in Trump, who he felt had given up the fight against the stolen election too easily. Despite courts rejecting claims of widespread voter fraud, Merritt still spoke about his theories regarding the firm with excitement. He dreamed of doing a TED-style talk that would lay it all out in a way that more people could understand. When he complained that members of Powell’s team were prevented from conducting their own firsthand analysis of the Dominion machines, I asked him if even that would have convinced him that no fraud had taken place. Merritt responded, “I would have to see the source code.” There would always be another layer of the plot to uncover.
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22. Lithuania leads in defying China
Thu, Jul 29, 2021 page8
- Lithuania leads in defying China
- By Jerome Keating
The small Baltic nation of Lithuania last week announced that it would accept a Taiwanese representative office in its capital, Vilnius, and that it would establish its own trade office in Taiwan by the end of the year.
This was more than a welcome announcement to Taiwan and goes far beyond the normal establishment of trade relations.
Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Gabrielius Landsbergis summed it up succinctly, boldly saying: “Freedom-loving people should look out for each other.”
With these words, Landsbergis was purposefully going beyond normal diplomacy; he was also presenting a moral challenge and reminder to other democratic nations.
A look at Lithuania’s recent past reveals what lies behind the new trade offices.
As a nation of 2.8 million people, Lithuania can definitely be considered minute, especially when compared with medium-sized Taiwan’s 23.5 million people.
However, despite its size, Lithuanians still have a clear concept of national identity and democratic goals. They know what their identity is and how democracy can be challenged and taken away.
In 1940, following the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by which Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide eastern Europe, Lithuania was unwillingly annexed by the Soviets.
It remained under Moscow’s rule until March 1990, when Lithuanians took the advantage of having a say in their future.
Then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had instituted reforms that allowed democracy in the many Soviet states. Lithuania did not hold back and chose to become the first of the Baltic states to reject Soviet membership by plebiscite. As the Soviet Union subsequently collapsed in 1991, Moscow accepted that rejection.
However, Russia has remained an imposing giant neighbor to Lithuania, and independence did not remove the reality of Russia being a constant military and economic threat. To maintain its independence, Lithuania set about making sure that at least economically, it would never become reliant on Russia. This was important: Despite its small size, Lithuania still does not want Russia or any other nation to exercise undue influence on its politics.
Three decades have since passed, and it is amazing that Lithuania and the two other Baltic states have been able to maintain their independence. This is a lesson that other nations should note and learn from. It is important because that same issue arises not only as regards Russia, but also as regards the economic behemoth of China.
An increasing number of nations are flocking to link to Beijing to benefit economically from trade with China.
However, with economic benefits come a price, particularly for democratic nations.
Living on the edge itself, Lithuania knows that and is standing by Taiwan, a kindred nation, which lives on the edge due to threats and claims from its hegemonic neighbor China.
Taiwan learned its lesson and in 2014 countered China, when Taiwanese began to realize that the proposed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China had too many strings attached to simply give it a blanket approval in the legislature.
Following the Sunflower movement protests, voters insisted that legislators go over each of the ECFA’s many items to see which were beneficial and which were not. As a result, the many pitfalls and dependency traps in ECFA were revealed and the agreement eventually died.
There is, of course, more involved between Taiwan and Lithuania.
A separate symbolic factor of this mutual establishment of trade offices is the naming of Taiwan’s office, which is set to become its first office in Europe that bears the name of “Taiwanese Representative Office.” Other offices’ names usually begin with the diminutive name of Taipei.
Despising the name and how it implies the de facto independence of Taiwan, China prefers the more disrespectful and diminutive implications of names such as “Chinese Taipei” and tries to insist on them being used in international organizations.
As China continues on its hegemonic path, it will naturally press on with its insistence that Taiwan belongs to it, and there is no doubt that a time will come when other democratic nations will have to choose whether they stand by Taiwan’s democracy.
As an example of its ambition, China constantly plays word games with other nations, dangling the offer of lucrative economic trade as bait. Nomenclature also plays a part when Beijing tries to get other nations to accept what it calls the “one China” principle, by which it falsely claims territorial sovereignty over Taiwan.
If that fails, Beijing usually settles for a vague, deceptive “one China” policy, which because of its phrasing, still implies its sovereignty over Taiwan.
This is the challenge for other democratic nations: How much do they believe in democracy, not only for themselves, but also for others? Would they sacrifice Taiwan’s democracy to gain trade opportunities with China?
Lithuania is a tiny giant in this regard. It is looking out for Taiwan, and stands as a beacon and model to others. Its message is clear: “Our principles and actions are before you. We have resisted the undue influence of Russia and China. If we can do it, so can you.”
Jerome Keating is a writer based in Taipei.
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23. QAnon is not Dead: New Research into Telegram Shows the Movement is Alive and Well
QAnon is not Dead: New Research into Telegram Shows the Movement is Alive and Well - GNET
Following the role that QAnon adherents, and other actors, played in the insurrection on 6 January 2021, large social media platforms cleaned house and deplatformed a plethora of groups and movements of diverse ideologies. In this shakeup, QAnon adherents migrated to various alt-tech platforms, yet two of them (Telegram and Gab) in the past seven months have turned into central hubs, where adherents and influencers have built new communities. In May 2021, Jared Holt and Max Rizzuto analyzed data from Gab, Parler, Dot-Win forums, 4chan and 8kun. Though extremely insightful, the authors did highlight that “Our analysis did not include data from Telegram, which is a popular venue for QAnon followers to distribute information among themselves, due to a lack of comprehensive data available for the platform.”
Since the electoral loss of former president Donald-Trump, as well as the silence of ‘Q’, the QAnon movement has had to significantly deal with the failure of their prophecies. In October 2020 Amarasingam and Argentino analysed the impact of failed QAnon prophecies and highlighted ways in which QAnon would potentially carry on after an electoral loss. The authors highlighted three responses:
- “There could be instances of violence, as followers undertake an urgent campaign to bring about the arrest of supposed corrupt elites, celebrities, and the deep state as a whole.”
- “We may see factionalism in the movement, with some followers being siphoned off into other movements and groups and continuing their activism in ways that become only loosely tied to QAnon.”
- “We may see the movement carry on as if nothing has changed […] that the movement is older and bigger than Trump himself, and it’s now up to them to carry the torch.”
6 January exemplifies point one; however, relevant to this piece are points two and three. Over the past seven months, QAnon has seen some members siphoned off into other movements, or movements adjacent to QAnon, while other members simply continue to carry the torch and fight against the supposed deep state. Telegram is an important ecosystem to analyse the factionalism and evolution of QAnon in 2021. This piece seeks to analyse the QAnon community on Telegram by examining a curated list of 30 Telegram groups of varying sizes to determine a minimum baseline figure of how many potential active members presently operate on Telegram while assessing the health of these communities.
Methodology
Currently in our database there are more than 3,500 Telegram groups and channels that refer directly to QAnon and a further 10,000+ groups and channels linked to these, demonstrating a network of QAnon-adjacent chats in a multitude of languages and representing conspiracy movements internationally.
Channels represent most of the QAnon digital assets on Telegram, some of these are simple and are used only for broadcasting messages, whereas others offer the capacity to comment on posts, a feature released in October 2020. While some channels are controlled by a single user, others are controlled by a group of admins (in one QAnon channel, 38 of the influencers that have been central to the movement administrate the channel together). As channels are not consistent in how they operate and many do not have the capacity to comment on posts, it is difficult to assess the level of user activity and engagement in these spaces, as well as how many users participate or lurk. Additionally, channel data available through the Telegram API does not offer a comprehensive way of measuring channel engagement with posts at an individual user level. To that end, though fewer in number, groups on Telegram offer the capacity to examine unique user activity, with which we can determine which accounts have been active and engaged with content and which accounts simply lurk.
To gather the data, complete member lists and chat archives for each group were collected through Telegram’s API. For each group, the message archives were filtered based on the groups’ member lists to identify currently active members. For the selected sample, all except six of these groups were created after August 2020.
The post frequency of members with active accounts was calculated based on the number of posts each account made in the lifetime of the associated chat. To establish the number of users who had not posted in the group, the total number of active accounts was subtracted from the total group members figure. The data was then broken up into four categories: US (6 groups), key Qanon influencers (7 groups, all of which are US-based), European groups (10 groups, includes those for the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Poland) and International (7 groups, includes those which target an international audience or are for regions outside the US and Europe).
In some groups, welcome messages, or initial user verification (such as a CAPTCHA-like tests) resulted in users engaging once by default, to confirm they’re human. In at least one group, inactive users are removed if they do not complete this verification, in another, users are prevented from posting if they fail to complete this test. In general, this results in such groups having a high percentage of users who post only once.
Findings
In the assessed sample there are currently 229,797 unique accounts that are members of the surveyed 30 groups, of those, 227,792 are members of three or fewer groups and 135,150 have posted at least once. We were also able to collect data from accounts that have been active since the creation of these groups and who have since left the group, revealing a total of 639,909 accounts which have posted at all in the lifetime of these chats (including current members).
The ability to determine if an account is active is important, as it indicates the number of people who have engaged with QAnon content in these spaces. Most users likely joined Telegram as a response to the mass deplatforming of QAnon and other ideological movements in January 2021. However, if the new users found Telegram difficult to use or didn’t enjoy the content, most would have deleted the app. This neither deletes a user’s account data nor removes them from groups. However, a basic security feature of Telegram is that, by default, accounts and their data (including messages, media and contacts) are deleted after six months of inactivity.
Similar to the findings of Holt and Rizzuto, we can point to a decrease of 78.19% of active membership in QAnon groups; however, 135,150 currently active accounts in these 30 groups alone still make the QAnon the largest active extremist community on Telegram.
As the number of active accounts alone is not enough to examine levels of engagement with the content, we broke down user activity into several brackets to scale the levels of activity based on the number of posts an account made (See Table 1). We found that 74.62% of users either had never posted or posted only once (likely to complete the verification to join the chat). While single posts are enough to confirm an account entering a group is intentional, these users can not be considered regularly active participants. From the remaining users, which we categorised as regularly active, 1.68% (4,599) are responsible for the vast majority of posts made into these groups, with an additional 3.35% (9,219) being moderately active (25 to 100 posts), and a larger potion 20.36% (56,035) being only a little active (2 to 24 posts).
When we break down the chats by category, we found that the chats associated with channels controlled by QAnon influencers and US based chats had fewer superposters compared to the European and international categories. Though influencers rarely post in their own chats, users in these chats regularly share posts from the associated influencer’s channel to discuss. Thus they inadvertently act as a superuser that the community engages with and responds to. Furthermore, there is likely a transference of users who were already actively following these influencers on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, thus they were already committed to consuming the content and messaging created by these influencers.
Of the European chats, those that are not dominated by English speakers had the highest number of superusers (500+ posts). This is not abnormal, as most of the content is translated and contextualised from a US-centric outlook to an international or localised context by influencers in these communities, and not necessarily by US-based QAnon influencers. Nevertheless, former US President Trump’s statements had a significant influence in these communities, especially as they recontextualised (and sometimes mistranslated) his statements to apply to their own contexts. Additionally, international communities reacted to their own geo-political news, which is shared and driven by their own subset of influencers, further developing and sometimes fragmenting QAnon canon in these localised contexts.
We see a similar pattern of superusers in the international chats, where content is often translated and contextualised in a similar way. The original major QAnon influencers are mostly US-based; however international communities have their own subset of influences and conspiracy theories unique to them and associated with QAnon. Because QAnon is a ‘big-tent’ conspiracy ideology, some theories that predate QAnon narratives become part of the localised canon, such as sovereign citizen movements as well as recent additions, such as ‘big-pharma’ conspiracies alleging that an elite group is trying to control the population through advances in medicine and a growing number of conspiracy theories around climate change.
Conclusion
Though there has been a decline in QAnon activity on Telegram from its peak in early 2021, a healthy and active community still exists on the platform. The QAnon ecosystem follows the rule of participation inequality (the phenomenon that a very small percentage of participants contribute the most significant proportion of information to the total output), but what is interesting about the chats is that QAnon influencers aren’t always highly active in the groups themselves, resulting in user-generated content created by rank-and-file QAnon adherents gaining prominence. It is in these chats that we see the formation of factionalism, this occurs either when QAnon adherents are introduced to more extreme content by individuals seeking to syphon them off into other movements, as a result of infighting between QAnon influencers which trickles down to the rank-and-file follower, the introduction of new theories by group members based on local or international current events, or by adherents doing their own decodes or reinterpretations of Q-drops or Trump statements and crafting their own new conspiracy theories.
When comparing with other ecosystems on Telegram, QAnon chats dwarf those found on Terrorgram and in violent extremist ecosystems combined, yet there is cross-pollination between all three ecosystems. QAnon content often ends up in violent extremist ecosystems, but more concerning is the violent extremist and terrorist content which ends up in QAnon chats. Although most QAnon groups and channels will likely remain as part of their own ecosystems, there are some that have (and others that may) moved towards violent extremism. An example of this would be the group linked to GhostEzra’s Telegram channel. GhostEzra is a QAnon influencer who runs the largest QAnon channel on Telegram at more than 332,000 subscribers, and the associated Telegram group chat had, at the time of analysis, 6,162 members (by publication, this had risen to more than 7,300.) GhostEzra is also the QAnon influencer who has moved from coded antisemitism to explicit Nazi propaganda and narratives, with Arieh Kovler, writer and former head of policy and research for Britain’s Jewish Leadership Council, tweeting in May that it “might now be the largest antisemitic online channel or forum in the world.”
Therefore, though we are far from the numbers that were seen when QAnon was on mainstream social media platforms, the community that remains is still active and cross-pollinating with more extreme movements on Telegram. Factionalism will continue to form, and new factions are increasingly influenced by the Telegram extremist ecosystem. While it is most likely that QAnon will remain behind the screen, even with a more violent extremist slant, it does also mean that a large pool of individuals also present themselves as targets for recruitments by violent extremists. Furthermore, this ecosystem has established a captive audience for QAnon as it establishes itself as a political force, with a number of QAnon-supporting candidates intending to run for US Congress in 2022.
Another possibility, is that with the creation of a MAGA ecosystem on Telegram, as well as a presence of conservative media outlets and personalities, there are some QAnon adherents that will carry on as if nothing has changed and continue to thrive off of the statements and narratives of former President Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Lin Wood, Sydney Powell, Mike Lindell, and any other voice who is aligned with the Big Lie and/or QAnon conspiracy theories.
With an established baseline, it is now possible to periodically repeat this research with a larger sample size and adjustment for fixed timeframes to continually monitor the size and engagement rate of these communities, as well as the threat level of these ecosystems.
These findings were also published by Logically.
Jordan Wildon
Marc-André Argentino
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
