Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"Patience is also a form of action."

- Auguste Rodin

"Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

1. Putin’s fall could be the domino that topples the world’s autocrats

2. Inside the Secretive Russian Security Force That Targets Americans

3. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 7, 2023

4. Investors Bought Nearly $1 Billion in Land Near a California Air Force Base. Officials Want to Know Who Exactly They Are.

5. NATO’s New Focus on China Creates Internal Tension About Mission Creep

6. Tesla and Chinese rivals signal EV price war truce in ‘socialist values’ pledge

7. NATO is drafting new plans to defend Europe

8. Opinion | CIA Director Burns: What U.S. intelligence needs to do today — and tomorrow

9. As China ramps up military activity, Pentagon looks to accelerate networked warfare tech and exercises

10. Opinion: Vilnius NATO Summit – a Moment of Truth

11. How Did We Get Putin So Wrong?

12. Recruits Wouldn't Be Tested for Marijuana Under Proposed Defense Bill Amendment

13. Chinese cities open air raid shelters for heat relief as extreme temperatures lead to deaths

14. Opinion | Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine

15. Secret US-Russia talks over Ukraine ‘not sanctioned by Biden administration’

16. US-India Ties: The ‘Defining Partnership’ of the 21st Century?

17. Don’t Let Ukraine Join NATO

18. How America Can Win Over the Global South – It’s Time to Expand the UN Security Council

19. Special Report: Future of Warfare – The war in Ukraine shows how technology is changing the battlefield (The Economist)

1. Putin’s fall could be the domino that topples the world’s autocrats

I say good riddance but I am not optimistic the dominoes will fall. But why does he focus on Hungary, Turkey, and Israel? They are not in Russia's category of autocrat. (Rhetorical question, I think I know why, he has an agenda) We should be looking at these dominoes: PRC, Iran, and north Korea.

But if we can imagine something like this it should beg the question, are we prepared for if one or more dominos do fall? We must ask the proverbial question, what do you do now Lieutenant?

Putin’s fall could be the domino that topples the world’s autocrats

BY AVRAHAM SHAMA, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 07/07/23 1:30 PM ET

The Hill ·· July 7, 2023

Vladimir Putin is likely on his way out as Russia’s president. He will be followed by autocrats governing countries such as Hungary, Turkey and Israel — to name a few. Though this process will take some time, it is a clear triumph of the innovative democratic principles upon which the United States was founded in 1776.

When Putin entered the national political stage in 1999, he was hand-picked by then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin and elected by the Duma. I was doing work in Russia then and witnessed how proud Russians were of their new president. Like them, he was ordinary, critical of how most state enterprises were privatized by a small number of men — the oligarchs or robber barons — and embarrassed by the declining reputation of his country.

A masterful Machiavellian, Putin quickly solidified his position and popularity by raising pensions, investing in economic growth, punishing oligarchs, voicing his desire for a greater Russia, and cooperating with the West.

Less noticeable were his investments in the development of new cyberspace technologies that were eventually used to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, and in the army that would annex the Crimea peninsula in 2013 and invade Ukraine in 2022 — this time with a failure that allowed the private army, the Wagner Group, and its leader and former Putin ally, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to mutiny against him, signaling the end of his tenure.

Though the mutiny was quickly resolved and Putin kept his office, it took him several days to address the Russian and international public. And when he did, he seemed nervous and diffident, did not make eye contact with his audience and spoke as fast as a machine gun to assert his authority. But all many saw was an “emperor with no clothes.”

A similar descent awaits autocrats such as Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister — despite many differences among them.

Orbán became Hungary’s president in 2010 and slowly chipped away at its democratic systems, enacted anti-immigration policies, distanced himself from the more democratic European Union countries, and did not join them to support the Russia-Ukraine war. It was a far cry from the jubilation I observed on the streets of Budapest when Hungary declared itself a democracy in fall 1989. And although Orbán and his party continue to enjoy modest public support, his standing could change as fast as Putin’s.

Erdoğan has been Turkey’s president since 2017 and its prime minister for many years before that. In the election held in May, he suffered the humiliation of having to go through a runoff election because his conservative party, Justice and Development, was unable to garner the support of more than 50 percent of the voters. Next time, or perhaps sooner, he may be forced out.

When Netanyahu first became prime minister in 1996 and an on-and-off prime minister for more than 16 years, he began to build power and links with other parties that he needed to form coalition governments, started taking bribes for which he is awaiting trial, and championed a judicial overhaul that could help acquit him.

Having lived in Israel for many years, I have watched it slide into autocratic, theocratic democracy to a breaking point that has been taking hundreds of thousands of Israelis every weekend for the past 22 weeks in protest. Among the protesters were many army leaders, air force reservists and public figures, such as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak who recently called for “civil disobedience” against Netanyahu’s plan. As a result, Netanyahu has softened his stance, but he could still be ousted in the next elections.

Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Netanyahu are but a few examples of declining autocratic rulers. Others in several ex-Soviet countries and China’s President Xi Jinping are taking note of these developments and calculating their next steps. An important and notable example of this is the recent change in China’s attitude toward the U.S., from despondent to amicable, reflected in the recent meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Xi.

And while it is impossible to predict how these rulers will fall, the tide has clearly turned. Some may be removed by force, others by voters, and some may be forbidden to run for reelection for many years, as was the case of former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil.

Three hopeful signs for Democrats The environmental impacts of war

All of these developments indicate a process of weakening autocracies relative to Western democracies, led by the U.S. This would have been less possible without the Russia-Ukraine war, which crystallized the differences between governments that favor freedom and the rule of law, and those that don’t.

More and more people seem to prefer life where they are “we the people” than where they are “we the subjects.” Our forefathers established such a novel preference in 1776. Now more countries and people are fighting for it.

Avraham Shama is the former dean of the College of Business at the University of Texas, The Pan-American. He is a professor emeritus at the Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico. His new book, “Cyberwars: David Knight Goes to Moscow,” was recently published by 3rd Coast Books.

The Hill · by Rafael Bernal · July 7, 2023

2. Inside the Secretive Russian Security Force That Targets Americans

Excellent and important reporting here.

Excerpts:

The DKRO’s role in the detention of at least three Americans, which hasn’t been previously reported, shows its importance to Russia under Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who led the Federal Security Service, or FSB, before rising to the presidency. The unit intensified its operations in recent years as the conflict between Moscow and Washington worsened.

As with most clandestine activity carried out by covert operatives, it is impossible to know for certain whether DKRO is behind every such incident. The unit makes no public statements. But officials from the U.S. and its closest allies said that DKRO frequently wants its targets to know their homes are being monitored and their movements followed, and that its operatives regularly leave a calling card: a burnt cigarette on a toilet seat. They also have left feces in unflushed toilets at diplomats’ homes and in the suitcase of a senior official visiting from Washington, these people said.

Inside the Secretive Russian Security Force That Targets Americans

FSB unit that took Evan Gershkovich is also believed responsible for incidents blurring the lines between spycraft and harassment, including the mysterious death of a diplomat’s dog

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fsb-evan-gershkovich-russia-security-force-dkro-e9cf9a49?mod=wknd_pos1

By Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw

July 7, 2023 9:06 am ET

For years, a small group of American officials watched with mounting concern as a clandestine unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service covertly tracked high-profile Americans in the country, broke into their rooms to plant recording devices, recruited informants from the U.S. Embassy’s clerical staff and sent young women to coax Marines posted to Moscow to spill secrets.

On March 29, that unit, the Department for Counterintelligence Operations, or DKRO, led the arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, according to U.S. and other Western diplomats, intelligence officers and former Russian operatives. DKRO, which is virtually unknown outside a small circle of Russia specialists and intelligence officers, also helped detain two other Americans in Russia, former Marines Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, these people said.

The secretive group is believed by these officials to be responsible for a string of strange incidents that blurred the lines between spycraft and harassment, including the mysterious death of a U.S. diplomat’s dog, the trailing of an ambassador’s young children and flat tires on embassy vehicles.

The DKRO’s role in the detention of at least three Americans, which hasn’t been previously reported, shows its importance to Russia under Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who led the Federal Security Service, or FSB, before rising to the presidency. The unit intensified its operations in recent years as the conflict between Moscow and Washington worsened.

As with most clandestine activity carried out by covert operatives, it is impossible to know for certain whether DKRO is behind every such incident. The unit makes no public statements. But officials from the U.S. and its closest allies said that DKRO frequently wants its targets to know their homes are being monitored and their movements followed, and that its operatives regularly leave a calling card: a burnt cigarette on a toilet seat. They also have left feces in unflushed toilets at diplomats’ homes and in the suitcase of a senior official visiting from Washington, these people said.

The DKRO is the counterintelligence arm of the FSB responsible for monitoring foreigners in Russia, with its first section, or DKRO-1, the subdivision responsible for Americans and Canadians.

“The DKRO never misses an opportunity if it presents itself against the U.S., the main enemy,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security analyst who has spent years studying the unit. “They are the crème-de-la-crème of the FSB.”

Neither the FSB nor the Kremlin responded to written questions for this article. The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow declined to comment.

This article is based on dozens of interviews with senior diplomats and security officials in Europe and the U.S., Americans previously jailed in Russia and their families, and independent Russian journalists and security analysts who have fled the country. Information also was drawn from public court proceedings and leaked DKRO memos, which were authenticated by former Russian intelligence officers and their Western counterparts. Gershkovich’s lawyers in Russia declined to comment.

“They’re very, very smart on the America target. They’ve been doing this a long time. They know us extremely well,” said Dan Hoffman, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Moscow, about DKRO. “They do their job extremely well, they’re ruthless about doing their job, and they’re not constrained by any resources.”

Evan Gershkovich inside a defendants’ cage at a June 22 hearing to consider an appeal on his extended detention. PHOTO: NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

On March 29, DKRO officers led an operation, hailed by the FSB as a success, that made Gershkovich, 31 years old, the first American reporter held on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War, according to current and former officials and intelligence officers in the U.S. and its closest allies, as well as a former Russian intelligence officer familiar with the situation.

The Journal has vehemently denied the charge. The Biden administration has said that Gershkovich, who was detained during a reporting trip and was accredited to work as a journalist by Russia’s foreign ministry, has been “wrongfully detained.” Friday is his 100th day in captivity.

Putin received video briefings before and after the arrest from Vladislav Menshchikov, head of the FSB’s counterintelligence service, which oversees DKRO, according to Western officials and a former Russian security officer. During the meeting, Putin asked for details about the operation to detain Gershkovich.

DKRO also led the operation to arrest Whelan, in what U.S. officials, the former Marine’s lawyers and his family have said was an entrapment ploy involving a thumb-drive. The U.S. also considers him wrongfully detained.

When Moscow police held Reed, another former Marine, after a drunken night with friends, then claimed he had assaulted a policeman, officers from DKRO took over the case, according to the U.S. officials and Reed. Reed denied the assault and has said Russian law enforcement provided no credible evidence it had taken place. He was given a nine-year sentence, and eventually swapped for a Russian pilot in U.S. custody.

Former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed, who was detained in 2019, was escorted to a plane in April 2022 as part of a prisoner swap between the U.S. and Russia. PHOTO: RU24/REUTERS

U.S. officials blame DKRO for cutting the power to the residence of current U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy the night after her first meeting with Russian officials in January, and for trailing an embassy official’s car with a low-flying helicopter. U.S. diplomats routinely come home to find bookcases shifted around and jewelry missing, for which they have blamed DKRO officers.

More recently, a Russian drone followed a diplomat’s wife as she drove back to the embassy, unaware that the roof of her car had been defaced with tape in the shape of the letter Z, a Russian pro-war symbol. U.S. officials say they believe the group was behind that. U.S. officials strongly believe that the Russian police posted around Washington’s embassy in Moscow are DKRO officers in disguise.

American diplomats posted to Russia receive special training to avoid DKRO and other officers from the FSB and are given a set of guidelines informally known as “Moscow Rules.” It was updated recently to reflect the security services’ increasingly aggressive posture. One important rule, say the officials who helped craft it: “There are no coincidences.”

In May, the spy agency arrested a former U.S. consulate employee, Robert Shonov, and charged him with collaboration on a confidential basis with a foreign state or international or foreign organization. At the time of his arrest, the Russian national was working as a contractor to summarize newspaper articles for the State Department, which called the arrangement legal and the allegations against him “wholly without merit.” Like Gershkovich, Shonov is now in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison.

“Today, the FSB is incredibly powerful and unaccountable,” said Boris Bondarev, a Russian diplomat who resigned and went into hiding shortly after the invasion of Ukraine. “Anyone can designate someone else as a foreign spy in order to get promoted. If you are an FSB officer and you want a quick promotion, you find some spies.”

DKRO officers occupy a privileged position within the security services and Russian society. Its predecessor was the so-called American Department of the KGB, formed in 1983 by a hero of Putin, Yuri Andropov, the longtime security chief who became Soviet leader.

The headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service in central Moscow. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The unit’s officers are well-paid by Russian standards, receiving bonuses for successful operations, access to low-cost mortgages, stipends for unemployed spouses, preferential access to beachside resort towns and medical care at FSB clinics that are among Russia’s best.

The FSB emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union subject to little legislative or judicial scrutiny. Since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, its official duty to expunge spies and dissidents has given it such expansive control over many aspects of Russian life that some security analysts now call Russia a counterintelligence state. In one of his final articles before his arrest, Gershkovich and colleagues reported that the invasion was mainly planned by the spy agency, citing a former Russian intelligence officer and a person close to the defense ministry, and was filtering updates from the front lines—roles usually reserved for the military.

In April, Russia passed new treason legislation that further empowered the FSB to squelch criticism of the war. In May, the spy agency, using wartime powers, said it would start to search homes without a court’s approval.

Putin has publicly berated his spy agencies several times since late 2022, after his so-called special military operation fell short of his expectations. Around that time, U.S. officials noticed an uptick in aggressive actions toward the few Americans still in Russia.

“You need to significantly improve your work,” Putin told FSB leaders in a December speech to mark Security Agents Worker’s Day, a Russian holiday. “It is necessary to put a firm stop to the activities of foreign special services, and to promptly identify traitors, spies and diversionists.”

He repeated the admonishment during a visit to Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters, a month before Gershkovich’s arrest.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in April denied that Putin had a role in authorizing the arrest. “It is not the president’s prerogative. The security services do that,” he said. “They are doing their job.”

Putin likes to be personally briefed on the FSB’s surveillance of Western reporters, said U.S. and former Russian officials. Leaked FSB documents from previous surveillance cases against foreign reporters show agency leaders along the chain of command adding penciled notes in the margins of formal memos, so that higher-ups can erase any comments that might upset the president.

DKRO memos often begin with greetings punctuated by exclamation marks to indicate urgency and militaristic formality—a common style in the Kremlin bureaucracy—followed by meticulous notes about the movements of Westerners in Russia and the locals they meet.

“We ask you to identify an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at his place of employment, interrogate him about the goals and nature of his relations with the British, and as a result, draw a conclusion,” read one 2006 memo reviewed by the Journal.

The FSB has oversight for espionage trials conducted in secret using specialist investigators and judges. During Putin’s 23 years in power, no espionage trial is known to have ended in acquittal.

The First Service, which oversees DKRO, has been led since 2015 by Menshchikov, who previously headed the Kremlin’s Special Programs of the President, which guards secret underground facilities. Like Putin and many of his top security officials, Menshchikov was born in St. Petersburg. He served as the general director of air defense company Almaz-Antey, according to the state TASS news agency.

President Vladimir Putin, second from right, and Vladislav Menshchikov, left, current head of the FSB’s counterintelligence service, which oversees DKRO, in 2013. PHOTO: RUSSIAN LOOK/ZUMA PRESS

The First Service has assigned Chief Investigator Alexei Khizhnyak, an agency veteran who led the case against Whelan, to investigate Gershkovich, according to televised court proceedings.

Russian lawyers who have worked on cases involving Khizhnyak, but who aren’t involved in Gershkovich’s, described a heavyset interrogator who sits behind an L-shaped desk next to bookshelves filled with legal documents. Khizhnyak would alternate between threats and long philosophical discussions of Russian literature, according to one of these lawyers. A person interrogated by him years ago described him as an astute and careful questioner, difficult to fool.

Alexander Zhomov, who led DKRO after the breakup of the Soviet Union, was a familiar face to the CIA, which had once dubbed him “Agent Prologue.”

Zhomov had fooled the U.S. spy agency into believing he was a defector in the late 1980s by claiming to provide detailed information about the KGB’s monitoring of CIA officers in Moscow. In reality, he was a double agent leading the KGB’s “Operation Phantom” to distract the American spy hunters from finding longtime Russian moles—Aldrich Ames at the CIA and Robert Hanssen at the FBI.

After President Boris Yeltsin split the KGB into smaller, less powerful services, including the current FSB, Zhomov found work at the new DKRO, created in 1998, as it surveyed the 1990s influx of American investors, reporters and visitors. Zhomov was promoted to head the unit around the time a new director arrived: Putin.

Since the early years of his presidency, Putin has used DKRO to track American journalists, placing or recruiting Russian informants in their bureaus and receiving detailed memos about their reporting, according to U.S. officials and documents published by the security analyst, Soldatov.

A CBS news crew started reporting in 2005 on health problems suffered by survivors of the FSB’s botched storming of Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater, where Chechen militants wrapped in suicide vests were holding numerous hostages. More than 100 people died during the FSB operation.

The DKRO warned then-FSB director Nikolai Patrushev of the CBS effort in a memo entitled “On the plans of the Moscow office of the American television company CBS,” later published by Russian investigative website Agentura. Patrushev had the title changed to “On the preparation of CBS for an anti-Russian action,” and the memo implied that the TV network’s leaders were trying to make the Russia president look bad during a coming G-8 meeting in the Black Sea city of Sochi, Agentura reported. The memo included references implying there was a mole inside the bureau and detailed information about CBS’s reporting.

Two words appeared penciled in the margins: “Any measures?” The handwriting, said Soldatov and other Russian specialists, was Putin’s.

“It was very unnerving,” said Beth Knobel, CBS’s Moscow bureau chief at the time. “Now there seems to be no limit on what the FSB can do.”

WSJ’s Evan Gershkovich: A Timeline of His Detainment

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 7, 2023

Jul 7, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 7, 2023

Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, George Barros, Nicole Wolkov, Karolina Hird, Angelica Evans, and Frederick W. Kagan

July 7, 2023, 5pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 1pm ET on July 7. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the July 8 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces made tactically significant gains in the Bakhmut area and continued counteroffensive operations in at least three other sectors of the front on July 7. Geolocated footage published on July 6 indicates that Ukrainian forces have made tactically significant gains near Yahidne (2km north of Bakhmut).[1] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations north and south of Bakhmut, and Ukrainian Ground Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrsykyi reported that Ukrainian forces established control over unspecified previously lost positions in the Bakhmut area.[2] Ukrainian General Staff Spokesperson Andriy Kovalev reported that Ukrainian forces also achieved partial success near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[3] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and along the administrative border between Zaporizhia and Donetsk oblasts.[4] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and other Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations in the Kreminna direction along the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast border.[5]

Russian forces have reportedly committed almost the entirety of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces to southern Ukraine. Ukrainian military observer Konstantin Mashovets stated on July 5 that the Eastern Grouping of Forces is comprised of the 5th Combined Arms Army (CAA), the 35th CAA, the 36th CAA, and the 29th CAA (all of the Eastern Military District).[6] ISW cannot confirm the exact composition of the Eastern Grouping of Forces, although it continues to appear that this operational direction command structure is largely coextensive with the Eastern Military District (EMD). Mashovets claimed that the 5th CAA’s 127th Motorized Rifle Division and 60th Motorized Rifle Brigade are operating along the administrative border between Zaporizhia and Donetsk oblasts and that the CAA’s other main unit, the 57th Motorized Rifle Brigade, is operating south of Bakhmut. ISW has observed the 5th CAA‘s 127th Division and 60thBrigade in the Zaporizhia Oblast-Donetsk Oblast border area along with previous Russian claims that the 57th Motorized Rifle Brigade has been operating on Bakhmut’s southern flank.[7] Mashovets stated that the 35th CAA’s 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade, 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade, and 69th Separate Cover Brigade are deployed to western Zaporizhia Oblast and that the 36th CAA’s 37th Motorized Rifle Brigade and 5th Separate Tank Brigade are deployed to areas south of Velyka Novosilka in western Donetsk Oblast.[8] ISW previously assessed that the 35th CAA’s Chief of Staff’s alleged death from a Ukrainian missile strike on June 13 in Zaporizhia Oblast suggested that significant elements of the 35th CAA are likely operating along the Zaporizhia front.[9] The Ukrainian General Staff previously reported on March 19 that elements of the 37th Motorized Rifle Brigade would deploy to western Donetsk Oblast.[10] Mashovets also stated that the 29th CAA, the smallest combined arms army in the EMD, is the only formation of the Eastern Grouping of Forces in reserve.[11] Mashovets added that the 58th and 49th CAAs and 22nd Army Corps of the Southern Military District (SMD) are committed to operations in Southern Ukraine.[12] Mashovets stated that elements of the 68th Army Corps (EMD) are also deployed to southern Ukraine, but suggested that the 68th Army Corps is not a part of the Eastern Grouping of Forces, making it the only higher-level EMD formation separate from the Eastern Grouping of Forces.[13] ISW has also observed elements of the EMD Pacific Fleet’s naval infantry brigades (40thand 155th) continuing to serve in western Donetsk Oblast after suffering heavy losses during the Russian winter spring 2023 offensive.[14] Mashovets‘ reporting and ISW’s current observation of the Russian order of battle (ORBAT) in southern Ukraine indicates that almost the entirety of the EMD’s combat power is committed to defending against Ukrainian counteroffensives, primarily in southern Ukraine.

The deployment of almost the entirety of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces and extensive SMD elements to the frontline in southern Ukraine suggests that Russian defenses in southern Ukraine may be brittle. Mashovets’ report suggests that the only reserve that the Russian military maintains in southern Ukraine consists of elements of the 29th Combined Arms Army – the Eastern Military District’s smallest combined arms army that has only one maneuver brigade: the 36thMotorized Rifle Brigade. Elements of the 36th Motorized Rifle Brigade participated in the Battle of Kyiv in early 2022 and fought near Vuhledar in early 2023 and are thus likely degraded.[15]

Russian defenses in southern Ukraine, while formidable, are not insurmountable. Russian forces in southern Ukraine would likely have to fall back on prepared defensive positions without significant support from operational reserves if Ukrainian forces achieved an operational breakthrough. Withdrawal in contact is an exceedingly difficult military task, and it is unclear that Russian forces in contact would be able to successfully withdraw from their first lines to other prepared lines in good order, especially if those forces - and the forces behind them in echelon - are worn-down and unsupported. ISW previously assessed that Ukrainian forces are likely conducting a gradual effort to systematically degrade Russian combat power in southern Ukraine over time, increasing the brittleness of the Russian defenses.[16]

Russia temporarily disconnected at least partially from the global internet during a test of its “sovereign internet” system overnight on July 4-5. Russian state affiliated media outlet RBK cited telecommunications sources that claimed that Russia successfully conducted a test of the Sovereign Internet system overnight.[17] The test reportedly prevented Russians from accessing common Western services including Google and Wikipedia while retaining access to Russian-hosted web services.[18] The test likely disconnected some Russian government services, however, including Russian Railways and the Russian federal veterinary and agricultural oversight body Rosselkhoznadzor.[19] Russian telecommunications operators Megafon and Beeline also reported outages during the test.[20] Continued tests and development of the ”sovereign internet” indicate that the Kremlin continues long term efforts to be able to isolate Russia from Western influence and the global sphere, and this effort will likely have ramifications that spread beyond the information space.[21] Russia’s economy would likely significantly from protracted internet isolation, for example, because so much international commerce relies on the global internet.

Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against rear areas in Ukraine on June 6 to 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian air defenses shot down 12 of 18 Shahed-131/136 drones and seven of 11 Kalibr cruise missiles.[22] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched the drones from areas near Primorsk-Akhtarsk in Krasnodar Krai and that Russian missiles struck Lviv City, an infrastructure facility in Zaporizhzhia City, and a residential building in Cherkasy Oblast.[23] Ukrainian Permanent Representative to the UN Serhiy Kyslytsya stated that Russian forces have launched over 1,000 Iranian Shahed-131/136 and Mohajer-6 drones against Ukraine since September 2022.[24]

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces made tactically significant gains in the Bakhmut area and continued counteroffensive operations in at least three other sectors of the front on July 7.
Russian forces have reportedly committed almost the entirety of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces to southern Ukraine.
The deployment of almost the entirety of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces and extensive SMD elements to the frontline in southern Ukraine suggests that Russian defenses in southern Ukraine may be brittle.
Russia temporarily disconnected at least partially from the global internet during a test of its “sovereign internet” system overnight on July 4-5.
Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against rear areas in Ukraine on June 6 to 7.
Russian and Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks along the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast border. Ukrainian forces made tactically significant gains in the Bakhmut area between July 6-7.
Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast.
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces launched a renewed wave of counterattacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on July 7.
The Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) continues to restrict international monitors’ access to the facility.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reportedly drafted a law that would expand the list of gross disciplinary offenses within the Russian Armed Forces.
Russian authorities continue to portray themselves as responsible custodians of Ukrainian children in an effort to discredit Ukraine while continuing to forcibly deport Ukrainian children to Russia.
A Belarusian military official stated that Wagner Group forces have not yet decided to deploy to Belarus while giving a press tour of the speculated Wagner Group base in Asipovichy on July 7.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on July 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove), Stelmakhivka (16km northwest of Svatove), west of Karmazynivka (13km southwest of Svatove), and northwest of Berestove (30km south of Kreminna).[25] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces consolidated control over an industrial area in Novoselivske, advanced further into the settlement, and made marginal advances south of Novoselivske.[26] Some Russian milbloggers claimed that unspecified Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) elements recaptured some ground in the Serebrianska forest area (11km south of Kreminna).[27]

Ukrainian forces continued counterattacks on the Svatove-Kreminna line on July 7. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked positions of elements of the Russian 15th and 30th Motorized Rifle brigades (both of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, Central Military District) on the Karmazynivka-Krasnorechenske line (13-17km southwest of Svatove).[28] The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces also attacked Russian positions near Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna), Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna), and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna), and in the direction of Shyplivka (8km southeast of Kreminna). Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian ground attacks near Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna), Yampolivka (14km west of Kremmina) and Torske (13km west of Kreminna).[29]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces made tactically significant gains in the Bakhmut area between July 6-7. Geolocated footage posted on July 6 shows that Ukrainian forces advanced west of Yahidne (2km north of Bakhmut).[30] Ukrainian Ground Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated that Ukrainian forces are making progress and have retaken unspecified territory in the Bakhmut direction.[31] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations to the north and south of Bakhmut and repelled Russian attacks near Berkhivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[32] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted an unsuccessful offensive operation with forces of up to a company in size with armored vehicles south of Ozarianivka (16km southwest of Bakhmut) near the Mayorske checkpoint.[33] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that elements of the Russian Southern Group of Forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Yahidne, Mayorsk (21km southwest of Bakhmut), and Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[34]

Russian and Ukrainian sources continued to disagree over the status of the heights surrounding Klishchiivka. Ukrainian General Staff spokesperson Andriy Kovalev reported that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations north and south of Bakhmut and achieved partial success near Klishchiivka.[35] Some Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces control important heights west and north of Klishchiivka.[36] Other milbloggers disagreed and claimed that Ukrainian forces do not control the dominant heights in the area.[37]

Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on July 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Novokalynove (11km northwest of Avdiivka), Avdiivka, Nevelske (14km southwest of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske, Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka), and Novomykhailivka (36km southwest of Avdiivka).[38] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Captain Valery Shershen stated that Russian forces continue to focus their efforts on offensive operations in the Avdiivka and Marinka directions.[39] The Russian MoD claimed that elements of the Russian Southern Group of forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka), and Vodyane (8km southwest of Avdiivka).[40] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov posted footage purporting to show Chechen Akhmat forces operating alongside Russian 255th Motorized Rifle Regiment (20th Guards Motorized Rifle Division, 8th Guards Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) near Marinka.[41]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on July 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Blahodatne (just south of Velyka Novosilka).[42] A Russian milblogger also claimed that Russian forces attacked and recaptured several positions northwest of Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[43] Russian sources additionally claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks south and southwest of Velyka Novosilka near Staromayorske (7km south), Urozhaine (9km south), Novodonetske (13km southwest), and Pryyutne (15km southwest).[44] A group of mobilized Russian fighters from Altay Krai, Republic of Sakha, and Primorsky Krai posted a video appeal on July 7 claiming that the Russian military command abandoned them on the frontline in the face of Ukrainian counterattacks in Novodarivka (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka), and that their unit has lost 66 men in this area since January 2023.[45] The soldiers complained of a lack of artillery support, provisions, and water, indicating that some Russian forces fighting in western Donetsk Oblast are likely facing high levels of exhaustion and attrition in the face of continued Ukrainian counterattacks.

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces launched a renewed wave of counterattacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on July 7. Several Russian milbloggers claimed that small Ukrainian infantry groups conducted a series of assaults along the western Zaporizhia Oblast frontline on the night of July 6 to early morning of July 7. The milbloggers noted that Ukrainian forces were particularly active southeast of Orikhiv towards the Novofedorivka-Verbove line (20km southeast) and southwest of Orikhiv towards the Nesteryanka-Kopani (10km southwest) and Pyatykhatky-Zherebranky (25km southwest) lines.[46] Russian sources claimed that elements of the Southern Military District, particularly the 19th and 42nd Motorized Rifle divisions, repelled all Ukrainian attacks in these areas.[47]

Russian occupation authorities continue to restrict international monitors’ access to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Raphael Grossi reported on July 7 that IAEA monitors have gained more access at the ZNPP since July 5 but still cannot reach the roofs of the reactor buildings, where Ukrainian officials have warned Russian forces may have placed objects resembling explosive devices.[48] Grossi stated that the IAEA submitted an official request to the Russian occupation leadership of the ZNPP for access to the nuclear reactor containment unit roofs.

Russian forces conducted missile and artillery strikes on the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast on July 7. The Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Administration stated that Russian forces conducted 77 artillery strikes against west bank Kherson Oblast on July 6-7.[49] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk reported that Russian forces additionally targeted the west bank with S-300 surface-to-air missiles and Shahed drones.[50] Russian milbloggers claimed that the situation on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast near the Antonivsky bridge remains unchanged and reported that Ukrainian and Russian forces are conducting mutual artillery shelling of positions on the opposite banks.[51]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reportedly drafted a law that would expand the list of gross disciplinary offenses within the Russian Armed Forces. The bill reportedly would make failure to take measures to respect the “rights and freedoms” of military personnel as well as the issuance of an order without determining measures for logistical support a gross disciplinary offense for Russian commanders.[52] The bill also would make ”obstruction” and ”disobedience” towards Russian military police a gross disciplinary offense.[53] The Russian MoD may be expanding the list of these administrative offenses as a demonstrative response to persistent Russian criticism that commanders mistreat Russian servicemembers in Ukraine.

Russian officials are reportedly continuing to rely on large enterprises for force generation efforts. Russian opposition outlet Verstka reported on July 7 that representatives from Russian Railways subsidiary Transbezopasnost stated that the MoD ordered all large enterprises to provide employees for military service.[54] Verstka also reported that enterprises are paying employees bonuses for signing contracts with the MoD and are also specifically hiring new personnel willing to sign military contracts in order to meet recruitment quotas instead of sending existing employees.[55] Some of these larger enterprises reportedly placed ads on job search websites explicitly asking for employees willing to fill roles within the Russian military and not with the companies themselves.[56]

Russian sources claimed that the Russian military approved a Karakut class corvette for service and that it has joined or will join the Black Sea Fleet. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian officials accepted the state test certificates for the “Zyklon” corvette, with one claiming that the ship will join the Black Sea Fleet in the future and the other claiming that it entered service on July 6.[57] One milblogger claimed that three more Karakut corvette class ships will enter service by the end of 2023.[58] The milblogger claimed that each Karakut class corvette can carry eight Kalibr missiles and may be retrofitted to carry Zircon hypersonic missiles.[59] The milblogger also claimed that the Vasily Bykov class corvette patrol ship ”Viktor the Great” will enter service by the end of 2023.[60]

Omsk Oblast Governor Vitaly Khotsenko stated on July 7 that Omsk Oblast universities will create a drone research center in Omsk City in accordance with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orders to increase drone production. Khotsenko stated that the Omsk State Technical University and the Omsk State Agrarian University will create the drone research center and that the Omsk Aviation College will offer accreditations for drone operators.[61]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian authorities continue to portray themselves as responsible custodians of Ukrainian children in an effort to discredit Ukraine while continuing to forcibly deport Ukrainian children to Russia. Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo announced in a meeting with Russian State Duma Vice Speaker and former Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Anna Kuznetsova that the Expert Council of the Russian State Duma Commission to investigate claimed “Ukrainian criminal acts against minors” will collect information and develop mechanisms to support and rehabilitate children.[62] Saldo also announced that Kherson Oblast Deputy Head Tatyana Kuzmich will serve on the Expert Council. Saldo stated that the Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration has already sent thousands of Ukrainian children in occupied Kherson Oblast to medical institutions and health and recreation camps in Russia. The Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration amplified footage on July 6 showing 185 children from Henichesk Raion in occupied Kherson Oblast at the ”Lan” Camp in Adygea Republic.[63]

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirmed at least 25,710 Ukrainian civilian casualties between February 24, 2022 and June 30, 2023. The report recorded 9,177 killed and 15,993 injured Ukrainian civilians in 1,504 settlements of Ukraine and noted that the actual casualty counts are “considerably higher” because the OHCRH is unable to corroborate reports of civilian casualties in Russian occupied areas.[64] The OHCRH reported that explosive weapons with wide area effects, including artillery, tank, and MLRS fire; cruise and ballistic missiles; and air strikes, caused 90.5 percent of all civilian casualties.[65]

Russian authorities continue efforts to forcibly change the demography of occupied Ukraine by transporting Russians to occupied areas. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian authorities have brought 157,000 Russian military personnel, civil servants, and civilians to occupied Sevastopol, Crimea since Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014.[66] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian authorities also bring workers from across Russia to work in occupied Ukraine. ISW has previously reported on Russian efforts to change the demographic composition of occupied areas of Ukraine by importing Russian military personnel and civilians while forcibly relocating Ukrainian civilians to Russia.[67]

Russian occupation officials may be using the threat of potential escalation around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) to coerce Ukrainian civilians to relocate deeper into Russian and occupied territories. Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko reported that lines at the Novoazovsk border crossing between occupied Donetsk Oblast and Russia reached up to 30km long because civilians are afraid of escalation around the ZNPP.[68] Andryushchenko also noted that lines are long on routes into Crimea due to Russia’s reliance on the Novoazovsk-Simferopol highway as the main logistical artery supporting occupied Crimea.

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks)

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

A Belarusian military official stated that Wagner Group forces have not yet decided to deploy to Belarus as of July 7. Assistant to the Belarusian Minister of Defense Major General Leonid Kasinsky conducted a press tour of the suspected Wagner Group base near Asipovichi, Belarus, on July 7 and told international journalists that the base is intended to train Belarusian military officials and Belarusian territorial defense forces.[69] Kasinsky denied that the base is connected to the Wagner Group but stated that Wagner personnel may inspect the base (presumably to evaluate using it) when Wagner Group personnel make a ”final decision.... to deploy or not to deploy to Belarus.”[70] CNN also visited the camp and provided video from the tents.[71]

Kasinsky’s statements suggest that Wagner Group personnel have not yet decided whether to go to Belarus (presumably to follow Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin if Prigozhin relocates to Belarus), sign contracts with the Russian MoD, or retire – the three options that Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Wagner fighters on June 26.[72] ISW previously reported that Prigozhin may not be upholding the deal that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko mediated given that Lukashenko stated that Prigozhin was not in Belarus as of July 6.[73] The status of the Wagner Group’s reorganization and possible redeployment to Belarus may not be clear until fall 2023 considering that a Belarusian source reported on July 1 that the Wagner Group’s reorganization, transfer of heavy equipment to the Russian MoD, and relocation to Belarus would take one-to-two months.[74]

Russian military personnel and equipment are reportedly redeploying from Belarus to Russia. The Community of Railway Workers of Belarus reported that at least five military cargo trains with Russian military equipment and personnel departed Belarus for Voronezh Oblast in Russia between July 3 to July 5.[75] ISW previously reported on July 6 about the observed dismantling of Russian field camps across multiple Belarusian training grounds in Brest, Vitebsk, and Mogilev oblasts in early July 2023.[76] It appears that these Russian forces are redeploying to Russia after completing training in Belarus but remains unclear if these Russian trainees will remain training in Russia, enter service in reserve, or deploy to frontlines in Ukraine.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

4. Investors Bought Nearly $1 Billion in Land Near a California Air Force Base. Officials Want to Know Who Exactly They Are.

Enquiring minds want to know.

Is this another variation of Lenin: 'The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.'

Investors Bought Nearly $1 Billion in Land Near a California Air Force Base. Officials Want to Know Who Exactly They Are.

Flannery Associates’ purchases near Travis Air Force Base have alarmed local and federal officials

By Kristina Peterson, Jack Gillum and Kate O’Keeffe

July 7, 2023 9:00 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-bought-nearly-1-billion-in-land-near-a-california-air-force-base-officials-want-to-know-who-exactly-they-are-fd868e38?mod=hp_lead_pos9

Flannery Associates, an investment group, has purchased at least 20 parcels of land near Travis Air Force Base in California. PHOTO: HEIDE COUCH/U.S. AIR FORCE

WASHINGTON—Government officials are investigating large land acquisitions near a major air force base northeast of San Francisco, concerned that foreign interests could be behind the investment group that purchased the land.

At the center of the probes is Flannery Associates, which has spent nearly $1 billion in the last five years to become the largest landowner in California’s Solano County, according to county officials and public records.

An attorney representing Flannery said it is controlled by U.S. citizens and that 97% of its invested capital comes from U.S. investors, with the remaining 3% from British and Irish investors. Flannery previously told Solano County the entity “is owned by a group of families looking to diversify their portfolio from equities into real assets, including agricultural land in the western United States.”

“Any speculation that Flannery’s purchases are motivated by the proximity to Travis Air Force Base” is unfounded, the attorney said.

The Air Force’s Foreign Investment Risk Review Office has been investigating Flannery’s purchases of roughly 52,000 acres, including around Travis Air Force Base, according to people familiar with the matter. But the office, which has been looking into the matter for about eight months, has yet to be able to determine who is backing the group, one of the people said.

Flannery-owned parcels

Additional parcels that Flannery

says it purchased or are

under contract

Vacaville

113

Travis A.F.B.

Fairfield

160

Rio Vista

Area of

detail

San Fran.

Calif.

680

160

Grizzly Bay

2 miles

Note: county data is as of June 6 from the Solano County assessor

Sources: Solano County property records; federal court filings

Brian McGill and Jack Gillum/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“We don’t know who Flannery is, and their extensive purchases do not make sense to anybody in the area,” said Rep. John Garamendi, (D., Calif.) the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee’s readiness panel. “The fact that they’re buying land purposefully right up to the fence at Travis raises significant questions.”

Garamendi and Rep. Mike Thompson (D., Calif.), whose districts include the area where land has been bought, have asked for an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., a multiagency panel that can advise the president to block or unwind foreign acquisitions for security concerns.

The U.S. Agriculture Department also has inquired about Flannery’s ownership, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Nearly all of the land is in unincorporated parts of Solano County, and most of it is zoned for agricultural use, records show. Several of the parcels include wind turbines.

The Journal found that at least 20 parcels surround Travis, known as the “Gateway to the Pacific” and home to the largest wing of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, which provides planes to refuel other aircraft and those to transport military personnel and supplies, including munitions used in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.

The Flannery attorney declined to provide more details about Flannery’s investors. Local and federal officials also say they have been unable to learn the identities of those in the Flannery group.

Rep. John Garamendi (D., Calif.) has asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. to investigate Flannery Associates. PHOTO: MARIAM ZUHAIB/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Flannery’s statement that it is U.S.-owned can’t be confirmed or denied by federal agencies at this time, a congressional aide said. Cfius, which is led by the Treasury Department and includes the Departments of Defense, Justice, State and others, declined to comment.

If Cfius takes up the case, the Treasury Department could subpoena Flannery to get more information about its backers, but people familiar with the panel, whose operations are confidential, have said they couldn’t think of a time when the department had used that authority.

Acquisitions around Travis Air Force Base have raised security concerns among Solano County officials, who have been trying to determine the investors in Flannery and their plans for the land for years, said Bill Emlen, the county administrator.

County supervisor Mitch Mashburn said if Flannery intends to develop the land, it would make sense for the group to engage with local officials—but it hasn’t.

“The majority of the land they’re purchasing is dry farmland,” he said. “I don’t see where that land can turn a profit to make it worth almost a billion dollars in investment.”

A spokesperson for Travis said that its officials and other Air Force offices “are aware of the multiple land purchases near the base and are actively working internally and externally with other agencies.”

In a recent federal court filing, Flannery Associates said it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Flannery Holdings, a limited liability company registered in Delaware. LLCs registered in Delaware don’t have to publicly disclose the identity of their owners.

Use of LLCs to purchase land is a common practice. Nearly one in five homes were purchased by investors in early 2023, including LLCs and other corporate entities, according to data compiled by real-estate firm Redfin of more than 40 of the largest U.S. metro areas.

“While I can see Cfius being interested in who owns real estate near a military base, the fact that a property’s ownership is opaque does not mean anything nefarious is going on,” said Rick Sofield, an attorney at Vinson & Elkins who used to run the Justice Department’s Cfius team.

In May, Flannery filed a price-fixing lawsuit in federal court in California, alleging that landowners had colluded against it to drive up prices, in some instances overcharging Flannery and in others refusing to sell their properties.

Attorneys for the defendants didn’t respond to requests for comment or declined to comment. Flannery settled with one group of defendants in late June and filed notice of a contingent settlement with another group of defendants Thursday.

The 52,000 acres Flannery now owns in Solano County is spread out over more than 300 parcels, a Journal analysis of property records shows. The company said in court filings that it has invested more than $800 million in its acquisitions and acknowledged paying prices of “multiples of fair market value.”

A plan by a Chinese-owned company to develop land near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota was halted after the Air Force said it posed a national security risk. PHOTO: LEWIS ABLEIDINGER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Flannery has offered various explanations for its purchases over time. In 2019, Flannery attorney Richard Melnyk said in an email to a Solano County official that Flannery planned to work with local farmers and might explore “new types of crops or orchards,” he said, ruling out any cannabis operations.

In its May price-fixing lawsuit, Flannery said it planned to use the land for renewable energy and related projects. The entity has allowed many sellers to continue farming or remain on the land and collect income from wind turbine leases for the remainder of the lease, according to court filings.

In a June 5 email to Emlen reviewed by the Journal, Melnyk said Flannery was considering leasing “a substantial portion” of its land to olive growers, including some near Travis Air Force Base.

“Nobody can figure out who they are,” said Ronald Kott, mayor of Rio Vista, Calif., which is now largely surrounded by Flannery-owned land. “Whatever they’re doing—this looks like a very long-term play.”

Flannery’s holdings near Travis raised concerns similar to those sparked by a Chinese-owned company’s plan to develop land 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. The plan was halted after the Air Force said it posed a national security risk, and lawmakers have continued to introduce bipartisan legislation restricting foreign ownership of U.S. farmland or increasing transparency around these acquisitions.

The Chinese company’s U.S. arm said at the time the planned facility wouldn’t be used to spy on the U.S.

Flannery told USDA in June that it didn’t need to register its holdings in Solano County because no foreign person “holds any significant interest or substantial control” of Flannery, according to a letter provided by the group’s attorneys.

Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com, Jack Gillum at jack.gillum@wsj.com and Kate O’Keeffe at kathryn.okeeffe@wsj.com

5. NATO’s New Focus on China Creates Internal Tension About Mission Creep

Mission creep? Or a realistic assessment of future threats? Is NATO overcoming the three military failures: failure to learn, failure to adapt, and failure to anticipate?

Note a new "grouping" - "The Asia Pacific Four" (Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan). I admit that I missed the new(?) moniker.

Excerpts:

As they seek more engagement from NATO, the Asia-Pacific Four have shown more willingness to contribute to European security through support for Ukraine. They are providing mostly nonlethal equipment, but South Korea has worked around a longstanding ban on weapons exports by sending the U.S. artillery shells that will be routed to Ukraine. Japan and the U.S. have held talks about a similar arrangement.

NATO has also benefited from exchanges with Asia-Pacific nations over challenges from China such as disinformation campaigns, said Julianne Smith, the U.S. permanent representative to NATO. In turn, NATO members have shared their experiences with Russia.

“It’s been a remarkable moment of learning for both sides,” Smith said.

Still, officials in the Asia-Pacific Four say they aren’t seeking membership in NATO. Under Article Five of the NATO Treaty, members commit to come to the defense of any member that is attacked in Europe or North America.

“There is no plan—no intention—to become a global military alliance with Article Five covering countries beyond North America and Europe,” said Stoltenberg, the NATO chief.

NATO’s New Focus on China Creates Internal Tension About Mission Creep

Leaders of four Asia-Pacific nations are set to attend alliance’s summit for second straight year

By Alastair Gale

July 8, 2023 12:01 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/natos-new-focus-on-china-creates-internal-tension-about-mission-creep-a4a1a77e?mod

TOKYO—NATO was created to deter Soviet tanks and missiles in Europe. Now it is also in the business of deterring China’s global ambitions, spurring concern among some members about mission creep and accusations by Beijing of inciting confrontation.

Leaders from —known as the Asia-Pacific Four—will attend the annual North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit meeting for the second successive year. On the agenda at the summit, set for next week in Lithuania, is increased cooperation in areas such as maritime and cybersecurity, with challenges from China front of mind.

NATO leaders say China’s moves to assert control in the South China Sea, a transit point for trillions of dollars of global trade each year, as well as its growing nuclear arsenal and cyberwarfare capabilities are now as much of a concern for Europe and North America as for Asian nations.

“NATO is and will remain a regional alliance of North America and Europe,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told The Wall Street Journal at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “But this region faces global threats and we have to address them together with our global partners.”

NATO’s concern about China has grown quickly. The organization first expressed worries in a leaders’ statement in late 2019 and last year included a reference in its main guiding document, known as the Strategic Concept, for the first time.

China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values,” NATO said, citing Beijing’s military buildup and its efforts to use economic coercion, as well as its strategic partnership with Russia.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia and China said that their relationship would have “no limits” and that they opposed any further enlargement of NATO.

Part of NATO’s response has been to build closer ties with those that share similar concerns about China.

Tesla and Chinese rivals signal EV price war truce in ‘socialist values’ pledge

Financial Times · by Edward White · July 6, 2023

Elon Musk’s Tesla has joined Chinese automakers in pledging to enhance “core socialist values” and compete fairly in the country’s car market after Beijing directed the industry to rein in a months-long price war.

Tesla and its biggest Chinese rival BYD were among 16 manufacturers to make the commitment in a letter signed at a motor industry conference in Shanghai on Thursday. It follows a battle among makers of electric vehicles after Tesla slashed prices on its Model 3 and Model Y cars last October in the face of rising domestic competition.

Tesla and Warren Buffett-backed BYD have been the chief beneficiaries, boosting sales at the expense of a clutch of smaller rivals and some foreign brands. Both companies reported record sales in the second quarter.

The joint letter, which came at the behest of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, appeared to signal a truce among the top EV makers in the world’s biggest car market.

Miao Changxing, a senior inspector at the ministry, said China’s car industry needed to avoid “reckless” price-cutting.

The letter — which uses language popular with Chinese president Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist party — also highlights how Tesla is navigating an increasingly fraught US-China business landscape and rising competitiveness in the world’s biggest EV market. Tesla was the only foreign carmaker to sign.

Musk has become one of the world’s richest people by growing businesses in the west and riding the boom in Tesla’s stock market value in the final years of the US bull market.

Despite this, he has previously posted on Twitter that he is “a socialist”, writing in 2018: “By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.”

Tesla declined to comment immediately on the pledge. The Chinese market is immensely valuable to the company, accounting for just under one-third of annual sales.

Musk, who also owns Twitter and SpaceX, travelled to China last month and met the foreign, commerce and industry ministers as well as Robin Zeng, the founder and chair of CATL, the world’s biggest maker of EV batteries.

His trip returned the spotlight to restrictions on free speech that have intensified under Xi. Twitter is banned in China, and Musk refrained from using the platform during his visit, drawing criticism from human rights groups over allegations of compliance with Chinese censorship.

Tesla’s commitment to “core socialist values” and Musk’s absence from Twitter while in China appear to clash — at least in spirit — with Musk’s 2022 description of himself as a “free speech absolutist”.

Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher with Human Rights Watch, said the pledge on Thursday undermined Tesla’s standing. “Failing to comply with ‘core socialist values’ has been frequently used by authorities to punish speeches that are critical of the Chinese government,” she said.

The episode is the latest reminder of the tightrope many multinationals must walk amid increasing assertiveness from the Chinese government and hawkishness in their home markets. In recent years, accusations of obeisance to Beijing have hit countless companies from HSBC and Nike to the hotel group Marriott and car company Daimler.

In a separate video address to the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Thursday, Musk forecast the car industry could achieve nearly full self-driving capability later this year.

Experts said Musk’s visit to China last month might help pave the way for the US EV maker to gain Chinese regulatory approvals for new self-driving features in its locally made cars. This is seen as an important hurdle to clear for Tesla to compete in the increasingly cut-throat Chinese EV market.

Musk also said he believed China would develop strong capabilities in artificial intelligence, while also appealing for regulatory oversight of the industry.

“As long as the Chinese people decide to do well in one thing, they will, including AI,” Musk said.

Additional reporting by Peter Campbell in London

Financial Times · by Edward White · July 6, 2023

7. NATO is drafting new plans to defend Europe

Excerpts:

Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, says that some countries “really don’t want to do 2%”—Canada is the largest example—and that others will peak at 2% without being able to sustain it. “There is some backsliding going on,” he warns. “In real terms we [Europe] invest less in defence now than we did in 2021,” complains Kusti Salm, the top civil servant in Estonia’s defence ministry. NATO’s new plans will give national army chiefs and defence ministers more leverage with finance ministers: failure to meet the spending target will no longer be just a source of embarrassment at each annual summit, liable to provoke a gentle dressing-down from Mr Stoltenberg, but may also leave a tangible hole in the continent’s war plans. “It changes the entire discussion around defence spending” says Mr Sayle, “or at least it did in the cold war.”

One catch is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while catalysing reforms, has also cast doubt on whether the threat it poses to NATO members is as great as was previously thought. Russia’s armed forces have proved less capable than most experts and officials had expected. Its army has had perhaps 60,000 men killed, including many of the most professional men and officers. Huge amounts of equipment have been destroyed, including over 1,300 tanks. Some European generals reckon this takes the pressure off: they think it will take Russia a decade to reconstitute.

General Cavoli frequently rebuts this idea. In April he told America’s Congress that the Russian army, though “degenerated somewhat”, was larger than at the outset of war. Russia’s air force was largely intact, he said, with over 1,000 fighters and bombers, as was the navy. Russia’s submarine force remains a particular concern. This is not simply an American view. Russia is developing “frightening underwater capabilities”, warns a German naval officer, pointing to threats to undersea infrastructure such as pipelines and cables. “They are way ahead of NATO in this.” An Estonian field commander notes that, at every level of command, “Russian officers are gaining experience we don’t have.”

NATO’s own assessments suggest that Russia could rebuild its forces in as little as three to seven years. That is less time than it will take to recapitalise and re-equip Europe’s hollowed-out armed forces; to rebuild defence industries capable of meeting wartime demand for shells and weapons; to revive cold-war military skills such as river crossings and division-level command. Eastern allies are not inclined to assume that Russia will dally. And Ukraine’s future is far from assured, with its counter-offensive proceeding relatively slowly. “This month in 2023,” says Mr Salm, “is the most decisive moment for our generation.”

NATO is drafting new plans to defend Europe

They look set to be approved at a crucial summit this month

The Economist

WHEN THE boxer Mike Tyson was asked ahead of a fight whether he was concerned about an opponent’s plan, he had a blunt answer: “Everybody has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth.” With NATO it has been the other way around. For 42 years the alliance prepared meticulously for conventional and nuclear war with the Soviet Union and its allies. In 1991 the Warsaw Pact fell apart and the plans fell into abeyance. Now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has underlined the need for new strategies.

On July 11th and 12th leaders will gather in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, for NATO’s annual summit. They are expected to approve the alliance’s first defensive plans since the cold war. “It’s the most dramatic change…since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” says Matthew Van Wagenen, an American general in the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). The question is whether the allies can live up to their ambition.

There is much to discuss in Vilnius. Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, is expected to have his term extended (the allies could not agree on a candidate to replace him). Ukraine wants an invitation to join the alliance after the war; in the meantime it expects detailed and substantial guarantees of long-term aid. A sticking point will be Turkey’s continued veto of Sweden’s accession to NATO. Another will be the alliance’s relationship with Asia. The allies agree that China is having an ever larger impact on European security—not least through its deepening relationship with Russia—but a row over whether to open a NATO office in Tokyo reveals splits over how to respond.

Despite all this, it is the planned overhaul of NATO’s military machinery that is the most consequential item on the agenda. The architect of the defence reforms is Chris Cavoli, an American general who serves as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). His job was first held by Dwight Eisenhower—whose globe still sits in General Cavoli’s office in the Belgian city of Mons. General Cavoli, a Russian speaker educated at Princeton and Yale, is widely considered to be one of the most impressive officers of his generation. His plans run to 4,000 (classified) pages.

The centrepiece is a trio of regional plans: one for the north, covering the Atlantic and European Arctic; one for the centre, which addresses the Baltic and central Europe down to the Alps; and a southern plan for the Mediterranean and Black Sea. There are sub-plans for space, cyber operations and special forces. Russia, unsurprisingly, is the focus, but not exclusively so: the southern plan, on Turkey’s insistence, splits its attention evenly between the threat from Russia and from terrorist groups.

The first and most important purpose of the documents is deterrence. “The key for NATO war plans has always been that Moscow knows there are NATO war plans,” says Tim Sayle, a historian of the alliance at the University of Toronto.

That said, the plans also provide clear guidance for every armed force in Europe and North America about how to act should conflict erupt. “As a young sub-lieutenant, I knew precisely where my artillery battery was going to go—which town,” says General Darryl Williams, commander of the US Army in Europe, reflecting on his deployment to West Germany in 1983. “We look forward to a time here, very quickly, where we’ll be able to get that kind of clarity again”. Later this year, General Cavoli will allocate specific countries to specific roles or parts of the front. Battalions and brigades can get to know their patch in advance, whether that is a Norwegian island or a stretch of the Carpathians.

Knowing one’s task is not the same as being able to carry it out, of course. Another hope is that the plans will prompt reform and increase accountability. During the cold war SHAPE had a large staff that could continually test how ready national forces were for combat. This team dwindled but is growing once more: “SACEUR has now got a big stick to beat nations with,” says a European official. At last year’s NATO summit in Madrid the allies agreed they would collectively keep over 100,000 troops ready to deploy in fewer than ten days, and another 200,000 on a month’s readiness—a far larger number of high-readiness troops than before. Just as important is that allies will now “declare” to General Cavoli which units are available at any time.

In recent weeks America, Germany and Britain have all practised how they could quickly scale up their battalion-sized deployments in Poland, Lithuania and Estonia into brigade-sized formations. Italy will probably soon run a similar test in Bulgaria. The aim of this is to assure the Baltic states, and to demonstrate to Russia, that these armies are agile enough to reinforce NATO’s eastern front more quickly than Russia can mobilise for an attack. This month Germany, whose armed forces have been in poor shape over the past decade, went further. It promised that it would eventually station a whole brigade on Lithuanian soil—an unprecedented commitment. NATO exercises are also becoming more demanding: they are “more or less rehearsals,” says one official. The largest in decades, Steadfast Jupiter, should take place later this year.

NATO’s new plans will not only keep armies on their toes, but also set priorities for procurement and investment. Collective defence of the continent requires heavy weaponry: jets, tanks and artillery. But for years following the 9/11 attacks allies were fighting guerilla wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that demanded somewhat different kinds of kit: mine-resistant vehicles, transport helicopters and light infantry. NATO did not impose any discipline on what its members purchased: “We have had no requirements on the nations that have really been enforced over the last 30 years,” says General Van Wagenen. The aim is now to bring demand and supply into line again through a mechanism known as the “force structure requirement”—essentially, General Cavoli’s list of what is needed if his military strategy is to work as planned.

A senior NATO official points to five immediate priorities: combat-capable ground forces, particularly heavy armoured brigades; integrated air and missile defence systems capable of protecting units on the move; long-range firepower such as artillery and rocket launchers; digital networks that allow data to move around the battlefield and back to headquarters quickly and securely; and logistics to shunt large armies across Europe while keeping them supplied.

This list largely reflects needs that have been identified while observing the war in Ukraine: old-fashioned artillery has inflicted the majority of casualties; manoeuvring without armour has proven extremely costly. The problem is that the majority of European armies fare woefully on most of these measures (notwithstanding pockets of excellence, such as Finland’s artillery-rich army of conscripts).

A paper published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a think-tank in London, concludes that the number of combat battalions in some of NATO’s largest armies barely changed between 2015 and 2023, despite the growing threat from Russia. France and Germany have each added one battalion’s worth of forces, a piddling amount, and even Poland has added only two. Britain has lost five over that period. “Most…nations now can only field one full-strength brigade,” laments a senior NATO general—a number that would dismay any cold-war general transplanted to the present. The same is true of naval forces. Commodore Carsten Fjord-Larsen, vice chief deputy commander of the Danish navy, laments that in 2002 his navy fielded 34 combat units. The figure is now down to five.

Ammunition holdings are a serious problem. Britain “has probably not got a sufficient stockpile for a heavy armoured brigade to fight an intense war”, says Ben Barry, a retired brigadier now at the IISS and a co-author of the report. In private, British generals agree. Ukraine’s offensive compounds the problem: every ten days that country is chewing through as many shells as America produces in a month. Countries are having to choose between keeping Ukraine solvent and maintaining their own reserves. There are also other gaping holes. NATO has around ten corps headquarters but most are woefully lacking in artillery, air-defence and helicopter brigades to support the divisions under their command, says Mr Barry. “The corps commander hasn’t got any troops he can use to shape the deep battle.”

Such calculations highlight Europe’s dependency on America. The Pentagon puts others to shame by positioning 22 battalion-equivalents in Europe, mostly under V Corps in Poland. That is up from six in 2015; it is roughly the same number that Britain has in total. Will it last? “The inconvenient truth for Europe is that what’s currently in V Corps reflects a lot of reinforcement that took place last year,” says Mr Barry, “but the overall direction of travel of US deployments is away from Europe towards the Indo-Pacific”. If a crisis were to erupt in Taiwan, Europe could find itself worryingly exposed.

And yet the new plans also draw America and Europe closer in important ways. “Not many people really get this,” says the senior NATO official, “but America is coming back into the NATO planning system in a big way.” For the last 20 years, he says, the United States European Command (EUCOM) in Stuttgart in Germany—America’s military command for the continent—largely kept to itself, scribbling defence plans at a time when European armed forces were doing little detailed planning of their own. NATO’s new plans are aligned with American thinking. In many ways they are products of it (General Cavoli is commander of both EUCOM and NATO). That suggests America is plugging back in—despite political jitters over the possible re-election of Donald Trump next year.

Broader reforms being carried out on NATO’s command structure exemplify similar dynamics. SHAPE’s very headquarters is being transformed, says General Van Wagenen: the second floor has been “gutted” to put in a new operations centre. A new land command to handle NATO operations north of the Alps could have been hosted by Poland or Germany, both of whom were interested in the job; instead the US Army is taking on that task itself. The new command will be in General Williams’ headquarters in Wiesbaden. Paradoxically, given fears of American abandonment, some Europeans fret that American generals are taking over. “Yes,” retorts the official, “they’re taking the lead because they intend to fight here: that’s quite good news if you’re European.”

The new reforms are profoundly shaped by the way the alliance’s membership has changed over the past thirty years. In 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO’s border with the Warsaw Pact was essentially the inner-German border—1,380km in length, almost all of it heavily militarised—plus a small stretch in northern Norway. By 2004, when the Baltic states joined NATO, its border with Russia was only 800km long. But when Finland joined on April 4th this year, that more than doubled at a stroke (see map). General Cavoli’s canvas stretches from the Arctic to Anatolia.

In 1989 “everybody had fixed positions,” says General Van Wagenen. Armies were larger, on both sides, and troops were packed densely along the front lines. Now smaller armies are stretched across a far larger front. “You have to have more agile forces,” says the general. “A new alert system aims to sharpen NATO’s intelligence machinery, so that elements of its new plans can be activated in response to early signs of trouble, such as Russian troop movements.

Finland’s accession brings new opportunities, too. Its highly professional and well-equipped army, which can mobilise huge numbers of conscripts extremely quickly, is likely to drive up standards in the alliance, says one official. Its membership “tidies up that Nordic and Baltic geography very nicely,” says another, with Russia’s route out of the Gulf of Finland and into the Baltic Sea increasingly constrained by NATO states (more so if Sweden joins, too). “It poses far more challenges to Russia than to NATO,” adds the official. In March American reconnaissance aircraft began flying over Finland, something that would have been outlandish 18 months ago.

If NATO has an ambitious agenda, the biggest question is how to afford it. “We are champions in announcing things,” says a German NATO commander, “not in implementing”. At a summit in Wales in 2014, following Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, allies promised to “move towards” the NATO target of spending 2% of GDP by 2024. Only three allies met the target then. Now seven do (see chart). Germany will get there next year, France in 2025. But most lag far behind. In Vilnius, the allies are expected to set a new defence investment pledge. The 2% target may become a floor, rather than a target. Eastern allies—such as Poland, which may spend a whopping 4% of its GDP on defence this year, and Estonia, which says it will get to 3%—are keen on this. But raising the target would only highlight the chasm that already exists between hopes and reality.

Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, says that some countries “really don’t want to do 2%”—Canada is the largest example—and that others will peak at 2% without being able to sustain it. “There is some backsliding going on,” he warns. “In real terms we [Europe] invest less in defence now than we did in 2021,” complains Kusti Salm, the top civil servant in Estonia’s defence ministry. NATO’s new plans will give national army chiefs and defence ministers more leverage with finance ministers: failure to meet the spending target will no longer be just a source of embarrassment at each annual summit, liable to provoke a gentle dressing-down from Mr Stoltenberg, but may also leave a tangible hole in the continent’s war plans. “It changes the entire discussion around defence spending” says Mr Sayle, “or at least it did in the cold war.”

One catch is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while catalysing reforms, has also cast doubt on whether the threat it poses to NATO members is as great as was previously thought. Russia’s armed forces have proved less capable than most experts and officials had expected. Its army has had perhaps 60,000 men killed, including many of the most professional men and officers. Huge amounts of equipment have been destroyed, including over 1,300 tanks. Some European generals reckon this takes the pressure off: they think it will take Russia a decade to reconstitute.

General Cavoli frequently rebuts this idea. In April he told America’s Congress that the Russian army, though “degenerated somewhat”, was larger than at the outset of war. Russia’s air force was largely intact, he said, with over 1,000 fighters and bombers, as was the navy. Russia’s submarine force remains a particular concern. This is not simply an American view. Russia is developing “frightening underwater capabilities”, warns a German naval officer, pointing to threats to undersea infrastructure such as pipelines and cables. “They are way ahead of NATO in this.” An Estonian field commander notes that, at every level of command, “Russian officers are gaining experience we don’t have.”

NATO’s own assessments suggest that Russia could rebuild its forces in as little as three to seven years. That is less time than it will take to recapitalise and re-equip Europe’s hollowed-out armed forces; to rebuild defence industries capable of meeting wartime demand for shells and weapons; to revive cold-war military skills such as river crossings and division-level command. Eastern allies are not inclined to assume that Russia will dally. And Ukraine’s future is far from assured, with its counter-offensive proceeding relatively slowly. “This month in 2023,” says Mr Salm, “is the most decisive moment for our generation.” ■

The Economist

8. Opinion | CIA Director Burns: What U.S. intelligence needs to do today — and tomorrow

Excerpts:

In a transition memo I drafted for the incoming Clinton administration at the end of 1992, I tried to capture the dim outlines of the challenges ahead. “While for the first time in fifty years we do not face a global military adversary,” I wrote, “it is certainly conceivable that a return to authoritarianism in Russia or an aggressively hostile China could revive such a global threat.”

I tried, however imperfectly, to highlight the risks that democracies and free markets would inevitably face in a world in which economies were globalizing but, as I put it at the time, “the international political system was tilting schizophrenically toward greater fragmentation.” And I tried, as best I could, to sketch the shared global threats already posed by climate change and health insecurity, especially the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic.

For the next quarter-century, I remained a proud and very fortunate American diplomat, serving mostly in Russia and the Middle East, and in senior positions in Washington. I shared in diplomatic successes, and made my share of mistakes, as America’s unipolar moment faded and some of what I had tried to foresee in that long-ago transition memo began to unfold.

Today, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, I’m afraid to say I’ve now lived and served long enough to face another plastic moment — in a world that is far more crowded, complicated and contested than the one I experienced in those heady days as a young diplomat three decades ago. It is a world in which the United States is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block — a world in which humanity faces both peril and promise.

My job now is to help President Biden and senior policymakers understand and shape a world transformed. And as the president reminds us, we are at an inflection point. The post-Cold War era is over. Our task is to shape what comes next — investing in our foundational strengths and working in common cause with our unmatched network of alliances and partnerships — to leave for future generations a world that is more free, open, secure and prosperous.

Opinion | CIA Director Burns: What U.S. intelligence needs to do today — and tomorrow

The Washington Post · by Washington Post Opinions · July 7, 2023

Opinion CIA Director Burns: What U.S. intelligence needs to do today — and tomorrow

July 7, 2023 at 7:39 p.m. EDT

This essay was adapted from remarks CIA Director William J. Burns delivered July 1 for the annual Ditchley Foundation lecture in Oxfordshire, England. The topic was “A World Transformed and the Role of Intelligence.”

I worked early in my career as an American diplomat for Secretary of State James Baker. It was one of those rare “plastic moments” in history. The Cold War was ending, the Soviet Union was about to collapse, Germany would soon be reunified, and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait would soon be defeated.

It was a world of uncontested American primacy. History's currents seemed to flow in our direction, the power of our ideas driving the rest of the world in a slow but irresistible surge toward democracy and free markets. Our sometimes overbearing self-assurance seemed well-founded in the realities of power and influence, but it also obscured other gathering trends.

Our moment of post-Cold War dominance was never going to be a permanent condition. History had not ended, nor had ideological competition. Globalization held great promise for human society, with hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty, but it was also bound to produce counter-pressures.

In a transition memo I drafted for the incoming Clinton administration at the end of 1992, I tried to capture the dim outlines of the challenges ahead. “While for the first time in fifty years we do not face a global military adversary,” I wrote, “it is certainly conceivable that a return to authoritarianism in Russia or an aggressively hostile China could revive such a global threat.”

I tried, however imperfectly, to highlight the risks that democracies and free markets would inevitably face in a world in which economies were globalizing but, as I put it at the time, “the international political system was tilting schizophrenically toward greater fragmentation.” And I tried, as best I could, to sketch the shared global threats already posed by climate change and health insecurity, especially the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic.

For the next quarter-century, I remained a proud and very fortunate American diplomat, serving mostly in Russia and the Middle East, and in senior positions in Washington. I shared in diplomatic successes, and made my share of mistakes, as America’s unipolar moment faded and some of what I had tried to foresee in that long-ago transition memo began to unfold.

Today, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, I’m afraid to say I’ve now lived and served long enough to face another plastic moment — in a world that is far more crowded, complicated and contested than the one I experienced in those heady days as a young diplomat three decades ago. It is a world in which the United States is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block — a world in which humanity faces both peril and promise.

My job now is to help President Biden and senior policymakers understand and shape a world transformed. And as the president reminds us, we are at an inflection point. The post-Cold War era is over. Our task is to shape what comes next — investing in our foundational strengths and working in common cause with our unmatched network of alliances and partnerships — to leave for future generations a world that is more free, open, secure and prosperous.

That is a very tall order. Our success will depend on our ability to navigate a world with three distinctive features.

First is the challenge of strategic competition from a rising and ambitious China — and from a Russia that constantly reminds us that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones.

Second are the problems without passports, such as pandemics and the climate crisis, which are beyond the reach of any one country to address and are growing more extreme and existential.

And third is the revolution in technology, which is transforming how we live, work, fight and compete, with possibilities and risks we can’t yet fully grasp.

Those singular challenges sometimes conflict with one another, with cooperation on shared global problems both more vital and more difficult, too often the victim of strategic competition. And the revolution in technology is both a main arena for that competition and a phenomenon in which some basic partnership is crucial to set rules of the road.

The most immediate and acute challenge to international order today is Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

I've spent much of the past two decades trying to understand and counter the combustible combination of grievance, ambition and insecurity that Putin embodies.

One thing I have learned is that it is always a mistake to underestimate Putin’s fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices, without which he believes it is impossible for Russia to be a major power or him to be a great Russian leader. That tragic and brutish fixation has already brought shame to Russia and exposed its weaknesses while evoking the breathtaking determination and resolve of the Ukrainian people.

Putin often insists that Ukraine is “not a real country,” that it is weak and divided. As he has discovered, real countries fight back. And that is what Ukrainians have done, with remarkable courage and tenacity. They will not relent, nor will all of us who support Ukraine.

Putin’s war has already been a strategic failure for Russia — its military weaknesses laid bare; its economy badly damaged for years to come; its future as a junior partner and economic colony of China being shaped by Putin’s mistakes; its revanchist ambitions blunted by a NATO that has only grown bigger and stronger.

Less than a month ago, we were riveted by the scenes of Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s armed challenge to the Russian state, with Wagner Group paramilitary forces briefly seizing Rostov-on-Don and moving two-thirds of the way to Moscow before turning back. As President Biden has made clear, this is an internal Russian affair, in which the United States has had and will have no part.

It is striking that Prigozhin preceded his actions with a scathing indictment of the Kremlin’s mendacious rationale for its invasion of Ukraine, and of the Russian military leadership’s conduct of the war. The impact of those words and those actions will play out for some time, a vivid reminder of the corrosive effect of Putin’s war on his own society and his own regime.

Russia’s aggression poses a formidable test. But China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so.

The issue is not China’s rise per se but the actions that accompany it. President Xi Jinping is embarking on his third term with more power than any Chinese leader since Mao. And rather than use that power to reinforce, revitalize and update the international system that enabled China’s transformation, Xi seeks to rewrite it.

In the intelligence profession, we study carefully what leaders say. But we pay special attention to what they do, and here Xi’s growing repression at home and aggression abroad — from his no-limits partnership with Putin to his threats to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait — are impossible to ignore.

What’s also impossible to ignore is the fact that, in this new era, our competition is taking place against the backdrop of thick economic interdependence and commercial ties. These ties have served our countries, our economies and our world remarkably well — but they have also created strategic dependencies, critical vulnerabilities, and serious risks to our security and prosperity.

Covid made clear to every government the danger of being dependent on any one country for lifesaving medical supplies, just as Putin’s aggression in Ukraine has made clear to every government the risks of being dependent on one country for energy supplies. In today’s world, no country wants to find itself at the mercy of a cartel of one for critical minerals and technologies — especially a country that has demonstrated the will and capacity to deepen and weaponize those dependencies. The answer to that is not to decouple from China’s economy, which would be foolish, but to sensibly de-risk and diversify by securing resilient supply chains, protecting our technological edge and investing in industrial capacity.

In a more volatile and uncertain world, in which power is more diffuse, the weight of the hedging middle is growing. Democracies and autocracies, developed and developing economies, and countries from the Global South and other parts of the globe are intent on diversifying their relationships in order to expand their strategic autonomy and maximize their options.

These countries see little benefit and lots of risk in monogamous geopolitical relationships. It’s my view that we’re likely to see more countries pursue more open relationships than we were accustomed to over several post-Cold War decades of unipolarity. And if past is precedent, we ought to be attentive to rivalries between so-called middle powers — which have often been the match that ignited collisions between major powers.

What’s more, we do not have the option of focusing on a single geopolitical pacing threat. We face an equal threat to international order and indeed to the lives and livelihoods of our people from shared or transnational challenges, of which the climate crisis poses the most clear and present danger. We can no longer talk about “tipping points” and “catastrophic climate impacts” in the future tense. They are here and now, imperiling our planet, our security, our economies and our people.

Last month in Washington, you could not see across the Potomac River from CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va., or take a breath without subjecting your lungs to hazardous materials because of smoke from hundreds of wildfires across Canada. Climate change is the quintessential “threat multiplier” — fueling energy, health, water and food insecurities, setting back our progress on economic and human development, turbocharging what is already the worst period of forced displacement and migration in history, and further exacerbating instability and geopolitical tensions and flash points.

These two threats — geopolitical and transnational — are impossible to disentangle. Competition makes cooperation more difficult. But we’re going to have to have both. And we’re going to have to do both in the face of another immensely powerful force: a revolution in technology more profound than the Industrial Revolution or the dawn of the nuclear age.

Advances in computing-related technologies are leading to breakthroughs of remarkable scale and scope. In just the few months since the first public version of ChatGPT debuted in November, we’ve seen newer models outperform humans in graduate-level entrance exams, and in assessments of doctor-to-patient engagements in medical training programs.

We see this “hockey stick” trendline time and again, outstripping our expectations, imaginations and capacity to govern the use of enormously powerful technologies — for good or for ill. Nowhere is that more evident than in biotechnology and biomanufacturing — which can unlock extraordinary climate and health solutions and boost our economies, but whose abuse and misuse could lead to catastrophe.

Leadership in technology and innovation has underpinned our economic prosperity and military strength. It has also been critical to setting rules, norms and standards that safeguard our interests and our values. Our Chinese rivals understand that as well as anyone, and it is therefore no surprise that they are investing heavily in emerging technologies as a central dimension of our strategic competition.

How, then, do we approach the role of intelligence in this world that has been transformed by strategic competition, challenges that don’t recognize borders and a revolution in technology without precedent in human history? When the president sent me to Moscow before the war, in early November 2021, I found Putin and his senior advisers unmoved by the clarity of our understanding of what he was planning, convinced that the window was closing for his opportunity to dominate Ukraine. I left even more troubled than when I arrived.

Good intelligence has helped President Biden mobilize and sustain a strong coalition of countries in support of Ukraine. Good intelligence has helped Ukraine defend itself with such remarkable bravery and resolve, and to launch the crucial counteroffensive now underway.

And the careful declassification of some of our secrets, part of a novel and effective strategy shaped by the president and senior policymakers, has helped deny Putin the false narratives that I have watched him so often invent in the past — putting him in the uncomfortable and unaccustomed position of being on his back foot.

Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw at the Russian leadership, beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at the CIA, at our core a human intelligence service.

We’re not letting it go to waste. We recently used social media — our first video post to Telegram, in fact — to let brave Russians know how to contact us safely on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business.

If Putin’s war in Ukraine is the most immediate challenge in strategic competition, Xi’s China is our biggest geopolitical and intelligence rival — and most significant long-term priority.

We’ve been organizing ourselves at the CIA over the past couple of years to reflect that priority. We’ve set up a new mission center — one of the dozen or so organizational building blocks of the agency — focused exclusively on China. It is the only single-country mission center we have at the CIA, and it provides a central mechanism for coordinating work on the China mission, which extends today to every part of the agency.

We’re hiring and training more Mandarin speakers. And we’re stepping up efforts across the world to compete with China, from Latin America to Africa to the Indo-Pacific.

We’ve also sought to quietly strengthen intelligence channels with China. These discreet channels are an important means of insuring against unnecessary misunderstandings and inadvertent collisions, and complementing and supporting policymaking channels, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Beijing.

Even as Russia and China consume much of our attention, we can’t afford to neglect other pressing challenges on today’s new and complicated landscape.

The successful U.S. strike last summer against Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder and former leader of al-Qaeda, was a reminder of the capability and determination still focused on terrorist threats. For many years to come, we will have to perform a delicate balancing act, juggling renewed major-power rivalry with all sorts of other challenges.

We’re also in the midst of the most profound transformation of espionage tradecraft since the Cold War. In an era of smart cities and ubiquitous technical surveillance, spying is a formidable challenge. For a CIA officer working overseas in a hostile country, meeting sources who are risking their own safety to provide us information, constant surveillance is a very risky business. But the same technology that sometimes works against us — whether it’s mining big data to expose patterns in our activities or massive camera networks — can also be made to work for us and against our rivals.

Technical collection platforms are enormously important in today’s intelligence world. But there will always be secrets we need a human to collect and clandestine operations only a human can execute. Our officers are doing hard jobs in hard places around the world, often operating in the shadows, out of sight and out of mind, the risks they take and the sacrifices they make rarely well-understood.

For our analysts, the revolution in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the avalanche of open-source information, creates new opportunities. When harnessed properly, AI can find patterns and trends in vast amounts of open-source and clandestinely acquired data that the human mind can’t, freeing up our officers to focus on what they do best: providing reasoned judgments and insights on what matters most to policymakers and what means most for our interests.

Another critical priority in this new era is to deepen our intelligence partnerships around the world and renew our commitment to intelligence diplomacy. At its core, the intelligence profession is about human interactions, and there is no substitute for direct contact to deepen ties with our closest allies, communicate with our fiercest adversaries — and cultivate everyone in between.

William J. Burns is the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Washington Post · by Washington Post Opinions · July 7, 2023

9. As China ramps up military activity, Pentagon looks to accelerate networked warfare tech and exercises

Excerpts:

The official expressed concern that China may attempt another bullying naval maneuver around Taiwan later this summer, in response to continued outreach to Taiwan from U.S. lawmakers.

“Members of Congress travel when Congress is in recess,” the official said. “So it looks like an intentional pile-on that's, in fact, just driven by the Congressional calendar and August recess.”

In 2021, Adm. Philip Davidson, then-commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said China could make a play for Taiwan by 2027—the year by which China’s President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be prepared for a possible invasion. Current INDOPACOM head Adm. John Aquilino has neither endorsed nor refuted the date, at least not publicly.

But an invasion is far from a certainty, according to the official who spoke to Defense One, especially if President Xi can absorb Taiwan politically with no bloodshed. Still, that 2027 time frame looks like the most attractive date for an invasion based on a variety of factors, experts say. Perhaps the most important is that China’s weapon modernization efforts are scheduled to reach a key maturity point then—about two years before Taiwan completes similar efforts designed to make an invasion too costly for China to attempt.

To better deter that potential Chinese invasion, the Defense Department is accelerating key efforts in joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, in the region, and INDOPACOM is working to increase the number and scope of its exercises and to bring in more partners to present a broad unified front against Chinese aggression.

As China ramps up military activity, Pentagon looks to accelerate networked warfare tech and exercises

The U.S. is working to retain “decision advantage” in the Pacific, in anticipation of a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

BY PATRICK TUCKER

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, DEFENSE ONE

JULY 7, 2023 05:21 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii—The Pentagon is accelerating the development of new breakthrough technologies and ramping up exercises with regional partners as it prepares for an anticipated increase in aggressive military activity from China in the South China Sea.

The moves are designed to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which many experts believe is coming by 2027.

“Up until about maybe a year and a half ago, we never had a routine, consistent presence of the [Chinese] navy east of Taiwan. Now, they're there all the time,” one senior defense official told Defense One. Those sorts of stunts from China aren’t just to show force, the official said, but also an effort to exhaust Taiwanese defense capabilities and ability to respond.

“It's just wearing out Taiwan's air force for the air stuff and the navy for all of this contiguous presence, because you can't really let it go unchallenged,” the U.S official said. “The Chinese have a lot more airplanes and a lot more capability to fly all the time. It's just running the poor Taiwanese air force into the ground.”

China’s steadily increasing military maneuvers around Taiwan are, in part, a response to increased U.S. political interaction with Taiwan, including then-U.S. House speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s, D-Calif., visit to Taipei in August 2022 and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with current U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., in April.

“Between the beginning of August and the end of the year, I want to say that we're at about 200 centerline crossings,” or instances where Chinese vessels crossed into Taiwanese waters, the senior U.S. official said. “So a clear and deliberate escalation…as a signaling tool.”

The official expressed concern that China may attempt another bullying naval maneuver around Taiwan later this summer, in response to continued outreach to Taiwan from U.S. lawmakers.

“Members of Congress travel when Congress is in recess,” the official said. “So it looks like an intentional pile-on that's, in fact, just driven by the Congressional calendar and August recess.”

In 2021, Adm. Philip Davidson, then-commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said China could make a play for Taiwan by 2027—the year by which China’s President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be prepared for a possible invasion. Current INDOPACOM head Adm. John Aquilino has neither endorsed nor refuted the date, at least not publicly.

But an invasion is far from a certainty, according to the official who spoke to Defense One, especially if President Xi can absorb Taiwan politically with no bloodshed. Still, that 2027 time frame looks like the most attractive date for an invasion based on a variety of factors, experts say. Perhaps the most important is that China’s weapon modernization efforts are scheduled to reach a key maturity point then—about two years before Taiwan completes similar efforts designed to make an invasion too costly for China to attempt.

To better deter that potential Chinese invasion, the Defense Department is accelerating key efforts in joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2, in the region, and INDOPACOM is working to increase the number and scope of its exercises and to bring in more partners to present a broad unified front against Chinese aggression.

Additionally, the U.S. Air Force is in the midst of its largest ever mobility exercise in the Pacific, practicing how it would move troops and supplies around the expansive region during a war with China.

Military leaders often describe JADC2 in terms of a vision for the later half of the decade, when massive data flows to artificial intelligence agents will enable commanders to collapse the time it takes to identify targets and dispatch them with the most appropriate weapon on the battlefield, regardless of whether that weapon belongs to the Navy, Army, or Air Force, and whether if it’s a manned jet, drone, or a missile battery.

But Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who is visiting military and defense officials in Hawaii this week, pushed back on the idea that JADC2 was a future endpoint.

“Some folks like to talk about JADC2 as though it's far off and it's not something we're advancing every day,” she said.

Hicks has already launched a series of efforts to greatly speed up actual JADC2-enabling technologies to the battlefield. One effort, the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve, or RDER, uses reserve funds under the control of the undersecretary—$687 million in the current budget—to boost new technologies that have relevance to the joint force, rather than a specific service.

A sampling of those early technologies includes electronic warfare kits that can detect and emulate the radio or electronic signatures of a wide variety of ships, planes, etc. to convince adversaries to deploy scarce resources to investigate phantom jets and tanks. Another early RDER prototype viewed exclusively by Defense One allows operators to pass data through unsafe IT networks, a major concern in the broader region as China has a growing share of key portions of telecommunications infrastructure even in nations friendly to the United States.

Hicks said efforts like RDER are critical to making joint, all-domain warfighting a reality as soon as possible.

A second senior defense official outlined a number of key mission threads that RDER will address, including integrated air and missile defense, surface warfare, distributed re-supply, long-range fires and logistics under adverse enemy conditions.

INDOPACOM also wants to accelerate key technology areas in order to run more exercises with service branches and partner nations. One effort is a new mission partner environment, envisioned as a kind of virtual destination where INDOPACOM commanders can use data from all the services and from allies, such as the Philippines, much more quickly. One defense official who spoke to Defense One said INDOPACOM plans to conduct its first demonstrations of the capability in September with Japan. A demonstration with Australia would follow soon after.

Another effort, the Pacific Multi-Domain Training and Experimentation Capability, will significantly increase the number of virtual exercises INDOPACOM can conduct and will allow a more diverse set of players to participate in real wargames virtually. For instance, ship crews could practice how they might respond to a certain scenario alongside other air, land, sea, and space forces without having to physically move a ship.

“A lot of what we're spending time on here is about this decision advantage issue of how you bring information at speed and scale to make a difference on the battlefield, and that is where, if you're in INDOPACOM, you may have a particular way you want to manage that visualization of the theater, and we want to enable that,” Hicks said.

While the United States is driving these technology efforts, officials said partner nations want to play a role too, particularly in a more robust schedule of joint exercises as they seek to counter China’s illegal fishing and bullying by the Chinese coast guard.

“Now they are coming to us,” a senior military official said.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

10. Opinion: Vilnius NATO Summit – a Moment of Truth

Conclusion:

Now is the time for NATO to stand up to Russian aggression meaningfully – with determination not appeasement. The result will be a further weakening of the Russian rat currently cowering in a very tight corner of the Kremlin.

Opinion: Vilnius NATO Summit – a Moment of Truth

kyivpost.com · by Askold S. Lozynskyj

In the leadup to the NATO summit in Vilnius, there are certain mistakes made in the past that should not be repeated. Angela Merkel’s appeasement is at the top of the list.

July 8, 2023, 9:19 am

This general view shows flags of some of the participating nations ahead of an extraordinary NATO summit, on display at NATO Headquarters in Brussels on March 24, 2022. Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP

It happened 15 years ago in Bucharest. NATO’s most significant and powerful member, the United States, was prepared to offer Ukraine and Georgia a NATO Membership Action Plan, only to be stymied in its efforts by two militarily insignificant and historically Russia-appeasing members France and Germany. Instead, Ukraine and Georgia were accorded a meaningless NATO assurance that the two countries would one day become NATO members.

The dishonest broker in this was the Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, who with her ties to East Germany and KGB agent Vladimir Putin from Dresden, proceeded to pursue this disingenuous role for more than the ensuing decade. Merkel served as German chancellor for 16 years. Her membership in the Communist Free German Youth, her choice of studying Russian so that she could move up in East German society, her meeting and wedding her first husband in the USSR, and her reluctance to join the East German dissident movement: all these biographical details certainly merit some attention in explaining her longtime affinity with the criminal Putin and her obstruction of Ukraine’s accession to NATO membership.

Russia was emboldened. One month later Russia attacked Georgia and invaded its territory, which resulted in a frozen conflict in Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia that continues to this day. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev issued a decree that declared the two regions independent states. Simultaneously, Russia targeted its efforts on Ukraine, through energy and other mechanisms fomenting discord between Ukraine’s political leaders which resulted in a fraudulent election and a victory for Russia’s surrogate Viktor Yanukovych. The West appeased once again with an endorsement of the Russian puppet by the Financial Times and a recognition that the election was free and fair by Western governmental election monitors.

Yanukovych proceeded to extend Russian control of the Crimean port of Sevastopol for an additional 25 years and depleted the Ukrainian military to less than 10,000 able bodies. By the time the people of Ukraine were able to oust the Russian surrogate in February 2014, Ukraine was ripe for a Russian invasion. And so Russia took Crimea, annexed it with a Russia-style fake referendum, and then invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Ukraine began to rebuild its military, but NATO insisted on simply reiterating its tired old refrain about Ukraine’s future NATO membership. Russia was emboldened further, and so on Feb. 24, 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine with full force, targeting not merely the eastern regions but the capital, Kyiv itself.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has opined often that the ongoing war in Ukraine today is the fault of the West. In fact, it is the result of the disingenuity and, perhaps more of leaders like Chancellor Merkel, the fecklessness of Presidents Obama and Macron, the political ignorance at best and perhaps, the sedition of President Donald Trump and his MAGA and GOP cohort.

Another NATO Summit is about to take place in Vilnius from July 11-12. There are two ways of ending the war in Ukraine. One way is through a total Ukrainian victory, which requires not only a return to the January 2014 borders but the dissolution of the neighboring evil empire through decolonization to preclude imminent and future aggression. This option would take much time and cost many lives. The second and more viable solution is for the Vilnius Summit to accept Ukraine as a NATO member expeditiously – not unlike Finland.

Some have argued that Ukraine may not be accepted while the war is in progress. There is no such prohibition in the NATO Charter. Others have pointed to the fact that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban has announced his opposition to Ukraine’s NATO accession. Orban should be reprimanded privately that while the NATO Charter does not include an expulsion provision, a case can be made for expulsion if a member fails to carry out its duties. There is no prohibition of expulsion. Orban has previously announced that Hungary will not arm Ukraine and, egregiously, that it will not permit the transit of lethal arms to Ukraine over its territory. Ukraine is by far the strongest potential NATO member in Europe. Hungary is one of NATO’s meaningless accoutrements. Even an unhinged Orban has to understand this reality.

Now is the time for NATO to stand up to Russian aggression meaningfully – with determination not appeasement. The result will be a further weakening of the Russian rat currently cowering in a very tight corner of the Kremlin.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

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Askold S. Lozynskyj

Askold S. Lozynskyj is a New York attorney and president of the Ukrainian Free University Foundation. He was president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America between 1992-2000 and president of the Ukrainian World Congress between 1998-2008.

kyivpost.com · by Askold S. Lozynskyj

11. How Did We Get Putin So Wrong?

How Did We Get Putin So Wrong?

THE CZAR HAS NO CLOTHES

The world assumed the Russian leader was a cunning and formidable adversary. Then he launched a disastrous war that has devastated his own country.

David Rothkopf

Updated Jul. 07, 2023 3:41PM EDT / Published Jul. 06, 2023 8:01PM EDT

The Daily Beast · July 7, 2023

opinion

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Getty

Russia has known no other leader in the 21st century than Vladimir Putin. Throughout his nearly quarter-century in power, few global leaders have been so closely scrutinized. U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have observed and analyzed him more closely than perhaps any other single individual.

So how come we keep getting him and the nature of the threat he poses so wrong?

At first the mistakes we made about Putin could be written off to inexperience. In 2001, just a year after Putin had assumed power, George W. Bush famously said he was able to look Putin in the eye and “get a sense of his soul.” As a result of this spiritual journey, the American president concluded that the Russian leader was “very straightforward and trustworthy.”

Like Bush, successive American presidents were played by Putin, cowed by his use of force, seduced into thinking the power of their personalities or diplomacy could contain the threat he posed. As a result, Putin was able to repeatedly catch America flat-footed—in Georgia, in Syria, and in Ukraine. Our responses in each of these cases were too weak and then, under President Donald Trump, the U.S. had a president who went a step further and was seduced by Putin’s seeming strength.

In an insightful 2017 New York Times op-ed, Masha Gessen explored how Trump could fall under the spell of a leader as thuggish and demonstrably corrupt as Putin. They cited several factors that included “ignorance,” “a love of power and grandeur,” “shared prejudice,” “an inability or unwillingness to distinguish fact from fiction,” and “moral neutrality.” On this last point, Gessen was being kind.

The reality is that the Putin lovers were actively evil, admiring his brutality and, in Trump’s case, wishing he could exercise power in the same way.

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Russia's President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on July 7, 2017.

Carlos Barria/Reuters

As recently as a week ago, former New Jersey Gov, Chris Christie cited Trump’s goon-envy, saying he the former president aspired to being “Putin in America.” It was hardly a stretch. Trump was on the record calling Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “genius,” and on numerous other occasions osculating the dictator’s hindquarters.

Perversely, it may be that Trump—in seeing Putin as a fellow gangster—may have better understood the essence of Putin than did Bush or Obama, who repeatedly acted as if somewhere within Putin were the impulses of a world-leader (albeit one who was both an adversary and serially violated international law).

It is fair to say that President Biden came to power with no illusions about Putin. He called Putin a dictator while he was still serving as Barack Obama’s vice president. And of course, once Putin invaded Ukraine, Biden offered the harshest condemnation of the Russian leader any U.S. president has ever expressed, accurately calling the former KGB officer a “war criminal” and even daring to suggest that Russia and the world would be better off without Putin in office.

What is more, of course, not only has Biden offered tough words about his Russian counterpart, he has also taken strong actions, leading the global coalition to support Ukraine in repelling Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion.

No president since Putin took office has had a clearer read on the Russian leader than Biden.

That said, for all the efforts and time spent trying to understand the Putin that Bush was searching for when he looked into his eyes, leaders in the U.S. and around the world have, apparently, continued to be surprised by Putin’s actions.

Prior to the invasion of Ukraine there was a prevailing view that Putin was a “master strategist.” One over-the-top assessment in The Jerusalem Post in 2017 called him “the most gifted leader in the international arena.” He has, for many years, been hailed for being smarter than U.S. leaders.

Russian service members march during a rehearsal for a military parade in the Red Square in Moscow, Russia on May 7, 2022.

Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

He was seen as having built up a great military, the world’s “second best.” For years, we touted it. Even weeks before the Russian escalation in Ukraine last year, The New York Times ran a story headlined, “Russia’s Military, Once Creaky, Is Modern and Lethal,” touting Putin’s impressive build up of his armed forces. “Under Mr. Putin’s leadership,” the article asserted, “(the Russian military) has been overhauled into a modern sophisticated army, able to deploy quickly and with lethal effect in conventional conflicts, military analysts said.”

Putin was also seen as an all-powerful and implacable man who could set and enforce red lines for the West—and who would never negotiate, and then, one by one, cross those red lines without consequence.

Then, suddenly and right before our eyes, the supposedly all-powerful Putin ended up cutting a deal with a rogue mercenary backed by a small force who nearly drove all the way to Moscow.

Apparently, he is not nearly as “in control” as we had thought he was just a few weeks ago.

As for Russia’s army (the one Putin actually controls), according to the chief of staff of the U.K.’s armed forces this week, half of its combat capability has been lost in the past year in its war with Ukraine. Clearly, a geopolitical genius Putin is not.

So, how after all this time can we still be getting Putin wrong?

Well, in addition to the reasons Gessen mentioned six years ago—which still prevail among Trump and his followers—there are a few additional ones.

Fighters of Wagner private mercenary group pull out of the headquarters of the Southern Military District to return to base, in the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on June 24, 2023.

Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters

First, there are important power centers in Washington and in capitals throughout the NATO alliance that have an interest in overstating Putin’s strength, the danger he poses, and the capabilities of his military.

They are, of course, defense contractors and military leaders who depend on formidable enemies to help them pass the massive defense budgets to which they have become addicted. They are, more often than not, abetted by journalists and analysts who seek access to them and, thus, who parrot their lines. (It also just so happens that they benefit when they write stories that are big on drama and ominous foreshadowing.)

That’s not to say that Putin is not dangerous or that an army that possesses the world’s largest nuclear stockpile is not a force to be reckoned with. It is and should be.

That said, it is past time to reassess the Russian threat. If Russia’s armies have fared so poorly against a small neighbor like Ukraine, it must be clear to them (and to all) that they would do disastrously were they to face the combined forces of NATO—by far the world’s most potent military alliance, and one that has gotten significantly stronger as a consequence of Putin’s Ukraine invasion.

In addition, as we have seen in recent weeks, even Russia’s ability to play the nuclear card has been limited by the fact that its most important ally, China, has pressured Moscow not to use weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Ukraine.

Ukrainian service members check a destroyed Russian a BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle near the front line in the newly liberated village Storozheve in Donetsk region, Ukraine on June 14, 2023.

Oleksandr Ratushniak/Reuters

In fact, the China relationship that Putin undoubtedly saw as an empowering factor has been one that has actually limited him throughout the past year, offering words of support and limited aid but not stepping up and providing key weapons or other forms of support that could have strengthened Russia.

Indeed, it is clear now that Putin is not in a relationship of equals with China. He is, as the Biden administration has pointed out, the junior partner in the alliance and losing traction fast. Further, the support he expected from other allies has chilled a bit as Russia has faltered in Ukraine—and committed serial war crimes along the way.

These last points all do provide at least one partially exculpatory explanation for why so many have gotten Putin so wrong. The Vladimir Putin of 2023 is not the Vladimir Putin who assumed power in 2000 or even the one who boldly ignored international law when invading Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2014. He is not even the Vladimir Putin of 2022, prior to the most recent attack on Ukraine.

He is, as we have seen, older, more paranoid and significantly diminished by the gross misalignment between his hubris and his abilities as a leader. He has not only suffered on the battlefield, but his country has suffered grievously from economic sanctions, all losses that will take decades to repair.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend a joint statement following their talks at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia on March 21, 2023.

Mikhail Tereshchenko/Sputnik/Pool via Reuters

In other words, Putin, sitting at the end of his long tables or hiding in his bunker, on some level knows that it will be up to someone else to rebuild the Russia whose standing, economy, and military he has devastated.

None of this means Putin is not capable of inflicting damage. Daily headlines of horrors in Ukraine prove he is. Worrisome reports out of the Zaporizhia nuclear facility suggest unimaginable catastrophes are still possible, especially because he is desperate.

But the past year has been instructive for world leaders. Putin is not ten feet tall. The Russian military has been cut down to being a shadow of its former self. Fortunately, for the most part, threats of retaliation no longer intimidate an emboldened NATO.

Crucial lessons have been learned that all too often come too late with international bullies of Putin’s ilk. Such men (and throughout history these monsters have been mostly men) are always more deeply flawed than they appear. They inevitably sow the seeds of their own downfalls.

We do ourselves a disservice when we overstate their strengths and allow groups within our societies to amplify that overstatement to serve their own narrow interests.

Whereas rogue leaders like Putin feed off the weakness inculcated by their threatening tactics and postures, generating and maintaining the will to stand up to them is the one proven way to bring them down. The strength of Ukraine, of President Biden, of our NATO allies have finally revealed with great clarity the defects of Russia’s tinpot czar.

Let us hope we are able to maintain the strength we need to defeat him in Ukraine, and contain in a lasting way the threat he will pose as long as it takes for his waning power to disappear altogether.

The Daily Beast · July 7, 2023

12. Recruits Wouldn't Be Tested for Marijuana Under Proposed Defense Bill Amendment

All recruiting issues will now be solved. (Note my comment is tongue in cheek - but to really entice recruits the policy would have to be that they are never again tested for marijuana while in the service)

Recruits Wouldn't Be Tested for Marijuana Under Proposed Defense Bill Amendment

military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · July 7, 2023

Military recruits and prospective officers wouldn't have to undergo testing for marijuana under a proposed amendment to the annual defense bill.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., has filed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, that would bar the military services from making someone take a test for cannabis as a condition of enlisting or commissioning.

"Our military is facing a recruitment and retainment crisis unlike any other time in American history," Gaetz tweeted about his amendment, which was first reported by Politico. "I do not believe that prior use of cannabis should exclude Americans from enlisting in the armed forces. We should embrace them for stepping up to serve our country."

The House Rules Committee must still decide which of the more than 1,400 amendments filed for the NDAA will get votes when the bill comes to the House floor next week. Typically, just a fraction of filed amendments for the massive defense bill gets votes, though House Republican leadership at the beginning of the year vowed to allow a more freewheeling amendment process in the chamber than recent years. Spokespeople for Gaetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the prospects for his amendment getting a vote.

The amendment marks the latest effort to remove a leading barrier to entering the military as the services struggle to attract young people to join and is the most recent signal of changing attitudes in Congress surrounding marijuana.

While 23 states allow marijuana for recreational use and 38 allow it for medical use, the drug remains illegal at the federal level, and past use is still technically disqualifying for military service.

But as access to marijuana becomes more widespread and the military faces what some have described as the toughest recruiting environment in the 50 years of the all-volunteer force, the military branches have taken steps to relax enlistment policies.

Last year, the Air Force and Space Force launched a pilot program that allows otherwise qualified applicants who test positive for THC, the main psychoactive component in marijuana, a chance to retest. In the first three months of the pilot program, 43 applicants who tested positive were granted waivers to retest, and the newly minted head of Air Force recruiting has said he expects the policy will likely become permanent.

The Air Force pilot program was inspired by similar efforts from the Army and Navy. Between 2018 and 2022, the Army granted waivers to more than 3,300 recruits who failed a drug test or admitted past drug use, while the Navy has given out 1,375 waivers over the last three years, according to data obtained by The New York Times.

Gaetz's amendment is one of several offered for the NDAA related to marijuana use. Others include one from Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., that would prohibit denying security clearances based only on past marijuana use in states where it is legal; one from Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., and other Democrats that would create an expedited waiver process for recruits with past marijuana use; one from Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., and a bipartisan group of lawmakers to allow Department of Veterans Affairs doctors to recommend marijuana to patients; and one from Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, to allow service members to use CBD, a hemp-derived product that is legal federally.

If any of those amendments were approved, they would join other provisions already in the House NDAA that could relax restrictions on currently illegal drugs. Specifically, the bill would mandate studies on using psychedelic drugs and marijuana as treatments for post-traumatic disorder and other conditions afflicting service members and veterans.

Despite a growing interest in Congress on relaxing rules surrounding marijuana, bills to do so have still struggled to become law amid continued skepticism in the wider GOP conference. Earlier this year, a bill to require the VA to conduct a study of veterans who use marijuana and have chronic pain or PTSD to see how the drug affects their health failed in the Senate. Last year, a House bill to decriminalize marijuana garnered just three Republican "yes" votes -- Gaetz, Mast and Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif. -- and was never voted on in the Senate.

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · July 7, 2023

13. Chinese cities open air raid shelters for heat relief as extreme temperatures lead to deaths

Or an innovative way to conduct civil defense training and remind everyone of the threat the CCP perceives will come from external sources who would bomb Chinese citiies.

Chinese cities open air raid shelters for heat relief as extreme temperatures lead to deaths

https://apnews.com/article/china-extreme-heat-shelters-deaths-8770afb38c09dbd8613a599fb5e36c96

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Cities across China opened their air raid shelters to offer residents relief from the heat Friday as unusually high temperatures across parts of the country started claiming lives.

Northern China is experiencing strings of days with record-high temperatures, compounded by drought. Earlier this week, Beijing reported more than nine straight days with temperatures exceeding 35 C (95 F), according to the National Climate Center — a streak unseen since 1961.

Cities including Hangzhou on China’s east coast, Wuhan in the center of the country, and Shijiazhuang in Hebei province neighboring Beijing over the past week announced opening their air raid shelters to residents seeking to escape the heat.Authorities have issued health alerts and, in the capital and elsewhere, suspended outdoor work.

So far, two deaths in Beijing have been attributed to the scorching heat. Health authorities said a tour guide collapsed and died of heat stroke Sunday while giving a tour of the Summer Palace — a vast, 18th century imperial garden. Last month, a woman in Beijing also died from a heat stroke.

Health authorities in Shaoxing, a city neighboring Hangzhou, said Thursday they have recorded deaths caused by the heat, but did not specify any details.

Chinese cities such as Chongqing, a southwestern metropolis known for its torrid summers, have for years used their air raid tunnels as public cooling centers.

Numerous Chinese cities started building air raid shelters during the Japanese invasion beginning in 1937. The building campaign resumed in the late 1950s, when China’s relationship with the Soviet Union soured and Beijing feared a nuclear attack.

The shelters are now often equipped with seating areas and offer access to water, refreshments, heat stroke medicine, and in some cases amenities such as Wi-Fi, TV sets and table tennis equipment.

Weather authorities warned Thursday about severe drought in northern China threatening crops and stressing overworked electric grids. Meanwhile, in south China, heavy flooding has displaced thousands of people over the past few weeks.

Earth’s average temperature set a new unofficial record high Thursday, the third such milestone in a week that already rated as the hottest on record.

14. Opinion | Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine

Excerpts:

Others say the United States could declare Ukraine a “Major Non-NATO Ally.” This would be nothing more than a symbolic gesture. MNNA status gives a designated country priority access to U.S. military equipment — something Ukraine already has in abundance — but does not entail any security commitments. It would amount to an empty promise, and Putin would conclude that the United States has blinked again.

If progress in retaking territory comes more slowly, and Ukrainian leaders feel confident they can continue to achieve their goals on the battlefield, NATO should support that decision. The alliance can issue a formal invitation to membership at the Washington summit but wait to ratify Ukraine’s accession until its leaders are ready to choose this course. Ultimately, it must be up to Ukraine when to disengage militarily and join NATO.

Right now, President Biden appears to have no theory for victory, much less a theory for peace. He needs to appreciate that he has nailed America’s colors to the mast in Ukraine. We might not have soldiers fighting in this war, but make no mistake: This is our war. If the fight in Ukraine is lost, it will be America’s defeat; if it is won, it will be America’s victory — and, by extension, Biden’s victory. It is baffling that Biden does not see a specific pledge of NATO membership for Ukraine as the key to unlock a historic success. The only way he can end this conflict, and bring stability to Ukraine and the rest of Europe, is for NATO to draw a bright line that Russia dare not cross.

Opinion | Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine

By Marc A. Thiessen and Stephen E. Biegun

July 8, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Marc A. Thiessen · July 8, 2023

Marc A. Thiessen is a Post contributing columnist. Stephen E. Biegun was deputy secretary of state from 2019 to 2021.

At his final NATO summit, in Bucharest, Romania, in 2008, President George W. Bush pushed, cajoled and pleaded with allies to invite Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. Such a move, Bush explained, would send “a signal throughout the region that these two nations are, and will remain, sovereign and independent states.”

Vladimir Putin was at the summit, and he watched as Bush was rebuffed. “Ukraine is not a country,” the Russian leader told Bush. Within six years, Russia had invaded both countries.

Now, NATO can undo at least a part of its mistake. On Tuesday, leaders will gather in Vilnius, Lithuania, with the situation reversed: The majority of allies want to set a specific timetable for Kyiv’s admission, and it is the United States that is resisting, concerned that a specific membership pledge will provoke Russia. It’s the same flawed reasoning that has led the administration to withhold critical weapons such as the tanks, long-range missiles and advanced fighter jets Ukraine needs to retake its territory. Almost 75 years after NATO’s founding, the record is clear. NATO doesn’t provoke war; it guarantees peace.

No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues. That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.

Here are five reasons we must bring Ukraine into NATO — and a clear plan to do it.

To stop Putin

Putin won’t willingly give up on his quest to conquer Ukraine as long as he believes he can succeed. He will use any cessation of hostilities to pause, reconstitute his forces and resume his invasion in a few years’ time — just like he did in after his 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea.

He made his objectives abundantly clear in a nearly 7,000-word manifesto, published in 2021, in which he explained that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” descendants of “Ancient Rus” bound together by common language, culture and religion. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, “Russia was robbed” and Ukrainians were separated “from their historical motherland.” He will not stop until he incorporates Ukraine into a restored Russian Empire.

In pursuing this goal, Putin is playing a long game. He assumes Western interest in helping Ukraine will wane over time as costs escalate and new crises inevitably arise elsewhere. He doesn’t need to win, in his judgment; he just needs to keep fighting until we quit. The only way to stop him is to make his goals impossible to achieve. And the way to do that is to bring Ukraine into NATO.

Critics of NATO membership say it will provoke Putin to keep fighting. Recent history shows otherwise: Putin has invaded only non-NATO countries. To leave Ukraine outside the NATO alliance is an invitation to renewed aggression. NATO membership will cement the reality that Ukraine’s destiny belongs in the West, in NATO and in the European Union. The sooner Putin is confronted with that clear and unmistakable reality, the sooner he will be forced to accept that he has lost his war.

To strengthen Zelensky

If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said today that he was willing to consider a peace deal that left any Ukrainian territory in Russian hands, he’d be thrown out of office. The Ukrainian people are in no mood for compromise. A Gallup poll published in October found that 70 percent favor fighting until victory, which they overwhelmingly define as retaking all territory seized by Russia since 2014, including Crimea. A Democratic Initiatives Foundation poll published in May found those views virtually unchanged: Sixty-seven percent of Ukrainians said that no concessions to Russia were acceptable, while just 22 percent supported some compromises to end the war.

Only by delivering NATO security guarantees can Zelensky sell a cease-fire or armistice to his citizens — especially if Ukraine has not achieved its goals of driving Russia completely out of every inch of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

Right now, Ukraine is in the early stages of its counteroffensive. It needs time and resources to bring that operation to a successful conclusion. The United States should support Ukraine in its effort to recover all of its illegally occupied lands from Russia — and America must not use the promise of NATO membership to pressure Kyiv to make territorial concessions.

But a time might come when Zelensky could face a choice similar to that faced by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1955, when his country was physically divided and at grave risk from the Soviet Union. Adenauer had to decide between holding out for full reunification or securing the part of Germany he controlled by anchoring it in the NATO alliance. He chose security — and 34 years later, his choice was vindicated when the Berlin Wall fell and his country was reunited as a free, sovereign and democratic state.

Zelensky might become strong enough with voters to do the same, former national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley tells us, “if part of the deal is NATO membership — not in six years, not in six months, NATO membership right then. … Because that’s his insurance policy that the Russian invasion is not going to be resumed from that portion of the territory of Ukraine that Russia still occupies.”

It will be up to Ukrainians to decide whether to join NATO before they have fully reunified their country. If they do, NATO should not recognize Russian annexation of any Ukrainian territory — just as allies never recognized the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states. But the only way Ukrainians will be able to make that choice is if it is backed by NATO’s Article 5 guarantee that an attack on one is an attack on all.

To save American taxpayers billions of dollars

Peace is cheaper than war. Without NATO membership, Ukraine will be a constant magnet for Russian aggression — and the United States will continue to be drawn into aiding Ukraine’s self-defense. We must foreclose future attacks. Otherwise, Putin will resume his invasion a few years after any cease-fire — at a cost of further tens of billions to American taxpayers.safelu

Something similar is true when it comes to Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. The World Bank estimates the cost of rebuilding the war-ravaged county at $411 billion. Some of that cost can be covered by tapping the $300 billion in Russian Central Bank assets that Western banks have frozen since last year. Much of the rest can come from private-sector investment — but only if investors have confidence the Russian assault won’t resume.

By creating confidence that attracts private investment, NATO membership will also help the Ukrainian economy, allowing Kyiv to provide for its own defense, just as Poland and the Baltic states — already NATO members — do today. A stable, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine will be a customer and trading partner for America. An unstable Ukraine, under constant threat from Russia, will be a continual drain on U.S. resources.

To normalize relations with Russia

As distant as the possibility seems, the West will never build a constructive relationship with Russia until the option of aggression against Ukraine is off the table once and for all. In Bucharest, Bush declared that “the Europe we are building must also be open to Russia”; that “we have a stake in Russia’s success” and “look for the day when Russia is fully reformed, fully democratic and closely bound to the rest of Europe.” He added that “Russia is part of Europe and, therefore, does not need a buffer zone of insecure states separating it from Europe.”

Russia’s belligerent conduct over the ensuing 15 years makes those words seem fanciful. But Bush was correct: NATO membership for Ukraine would create stability, which in turn might one day turn into cooperation. It could take years, even decades, before Russia is able to accept those opportunities. But it will never come as long as Russia eyes Ukraine as prey to be swallowed — an option that NATO membership would forever foreclose.

To strengthen NATO

Finally, bringing Ukraine into NATO is good not just for Ukraine; it is good for NATO, too. Ukraine now has the most capable, battle-hardened, NATO-interoperable military in Europe. Unlike some allies, it will have no trouble or hesitation meeting its NATO obligation to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense. It will be a net contributor to European security and thus strengthen the alliance.

So what are the next steps?

NATO leaders should approach the Vilnius summit as a two-part process. Part 1, in Vilnius, should be an unambiguous commitment by NATO, led by the United States, to invite Ukraine to join the alliance at the 75th-anniversary summit in Washington next summer. Then, NATO must create the security the alliance will guarantee, by spending the coming year helping Ukraine shape the conflict with Russia to a point where the invitation can safely be extended in 2024.

In shaping conditions on the ground, the United States’ objective should be to help Ukraine regain every inch of its territory as soon as possible. It is a mistake to think that a quick and decisive war creates any greater risk of escalation than a long, drawn-out stalemate. That means delivering all the weapons Ukraine is seeking to make its counteroffensive succeed — including long-range precision missiles, tanks and advanced fighter aircraft. Greater progress on the battlefield will bring the war to a point where a cease-fire is Russia’s only option — and Zelensky’s defense of his country is a clear success. Then, Ukraine can pivot to securing its military gains with NATO membership.

Some have suggested non-NATO alternatives for Ukraine’s long-term security. For example, they point out that America’s commitment to Israel is clear despite the absence of a mutual defense treaty that requires America to come to Israel’s defense. We would argue that Israel’s real deterrent is the perception by its adversaries that it possesses nuclear weapons. (Israel has never confirmed nor denied a nuclear capability.) Ukraine once had its own nuclear deterrent but relinquished the weapons at the insistence of the United States in the 1990s. Absent restoring that deterrent, the only thing that will prevent Russia from violating Ukraine’s sovereignty again is an Article 5 security guarantee from NATO.

Others say the United States could declare Ukraine a “Major Non-NATO Ally.” This would be nothing more than a symbolic gesture. MNNA status gives a designated country priority access to U.S. military equipment — something Ukraine already has in abundance — but does not entail any security commitments. It would amount to an empty promise, and Putin would conclude that the United States has blinked again.

If progress in retaking territory comes more slowly, and Ukrainian leaders feel confident they can continue to achieve their goals on the battlefield, NATO should support that decision. The alliance can issue a formal invitation to membership at the Washington summit but wait to ratify Ukraine’s accession until its leaders are ready to choose this course. Ultimately, it must be up to Ukraine when to disengage militarily and join NATO.

Right now, President Biden appears to have no theory for victory, much less a theory for peace. He needs to appreciate that he has nailed America’s colors to the mast in Ukraine. We might not have soldiers fighting in this war, but make no mistake: This is our war. If the fight in Ukraine is lost, it will be America’s defeat; if it is won, it will be America’s victory — and, by extension, Biden’s victory. It is baffling that Biden does not see a specific pledge of NATO membership for Ukraine as the key to unlock a historic success. The only way he can end this conflict, and bring stability to Ukraine and the rest of Europe, is for NATO to draw a bright line that Russia dare not cross.

The Washington Post · by Marc A. Thiessen · July 8, 2023

15. Secret US-Russia talks over Ukraine ‘not sanctioned by Biden administration’

Was it a trial balloon?

Secret US-Russia talks over Ukraine ‘not sanctioned by Biden administration’

Washington denies authorising former officials’ meeting with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov

Dan Sabbagh and David Smith in Washington

Fri 7 Jul 2023 13.41 EDT

The Guardian · by Dan Sabbagh · July 7, 2023

Joe Biden’s administration did not sanction or support secret meetings that former top US national security officials held with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and other Russians on potential talks to end the Ukraine war, the White House and state department have said.

America’s NBC News network reported that the former officials met Lavrov in New York in April, joined by Richard Haass, a former US diplomat and outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington, and two former White House aides, Charles Kupchan and Thomas Graham.

It was not clear how frequently the group, which included former Pentagon officials, held discussions with other prominent Russians thought to be close to the Kremlin, NBC News said. At least one unidentified group member travelled to Russia, it added.

US expected to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine

“The Biden administration did not sanction those discussions,” a state department spokesperson said on Thursday. “And as we’ve said repeatedly, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

The spokesperson was referring to an administration policy of not discussing possible negotiations on ending the war without involving Ukrainian officials. He said the administration would continue providing weaponry to Kyiv so Ukrainian officials “can negotiate from a position of strength when they think the time is right”.

Former diplomats said the US did make use of former diplomats to conduct back-channel discussions, although this did not mean they would lead to more serious negotiations. Lavrov would be highly unlikely to meet retired US officials unless they had some link to official channels, they added.

A former western official said they were aware of the talks but their status was unclear: “But even if not authorised this visit shows that some ‘realists’ in DC want to do a deal with Russia over Ukraine’s head.”

Haass is a former White House, Pentagon and state department official who has just stepped down as head of the Council on Foreign Relations after two decades. He has been described as “the dean” of the foreign policy establishment.

In a Substack post on Friday, he confirmed his participation in the meeting but declined to offer details, arguing that such exchanges have the best chance of success when kept confidential. He also defended himself against “nasty, ad hominem attacks” and suggested the intervention could undermine Ukraine’s position.

“Since they are not official meetings, participants often feel more comfortable speaking candidly and testing new ideas or proposals,” Haass wrote. “Critically, such meetings are conversations, not negotiations. Those involved speak for themselves, not for any institution they might be affiliated with, and certainly not for the US government, although relevant government officials are kept informed about what is taking place.”

Haass noted that he had been a “a strong and vocal critic” of Vladimir Putin’s unjustified war and a supporter of US military support. He also acknowledged co-writing an article advocating that a ceasefire be proposed at the end of the current fighting season if Ukraine falls short of recovering all territory occupied by Russia.

He added: “The interesting news is that the Ukraine government, sobered by how difficult and costly the counteroffensive is proving to be, seems to be contemplating the introduction of a diplomatic dimension thus far largely missing from the conflict.

“Some of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters might take this into account before they reject out of hand any attempt to explore diplomatic options. Diplomacy is not a favor granted to another side but a tool whose use should be weighed against that of other options to advance one’s foreign policy objectives.”

NBC News, quoting six people briefed on the discussions, said the talks were aimed at laying the groundwork for possible talks on ending the war that erupted with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

It quoted two sources as saying that the discussions took place with the administration’s knowledge but not at its direction, and that those who met Lavrov briefed the White House afterwards.

The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, also told CBS News the administration was aware of the unofficial discussions.

“But I want to make it clear that these discussions were not encouraged or engendered by us and we were not supporting them in any active way,” he continued. “As the president has said, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

Ex-officials have previously taken part in “track two” interventions in the Middle East, North Korea and other contexts with mixed results. Foreign policy analysts argue that the push could be useful in defining parameters for the kind of negotiation that will be the inevitable end of the Ukraine war.

Philip Crowley, a former assistant secretary of state, said on Friday: “What’s notable here is Lavrov’s participation. Lavrov has credibility and it’s a way that the United States can have an indirect conversation while not violating the spirit of its pledge that there be no negotiations without Ukraine.

“It’s at least a way of getting some idea of how much flexibility exists on the Russian side and the fact that it’s with former officials means that the administration is informed by it but can also keep it at arm’s length.”

But news of the talks caused a division in Washington’s foreign policy establishment, with some critics suggesting the former diplomats’ effort could undermine the Ukrainian government and give the impression that the US is desperate for a deal.

Rajan Menon, director of the grand strategy programme at the Defense Priorities thinktank, who has visited Ukraine three times during the war, said: “Many of the people who are ardent supporters of Ukraine have argued that this is a betrayal and stab in the back.

“I really think people need to stand back and take a deep breath and understand that the United States has provided $46bn in military assistance to Ukraine since the war began and is about to provide another $800m in the latest package, which is about 10 times more than any other single country has provided.

“So while supporters of Ukraine in this country might be up in arms, the Ukrainian government would be well advised to simply say, we know that this meeting took place between private individuals and Lavrov; however, we deal with the Biden administration and we are confident of their support.”

The Guardian · by Dan Sabbagh · July 7, 2023

16. US-India Ties: The ‘Defining Partnership’ of the 21st Century?

Excerpts:

For the US, courting India also matters because India continues to maintain secure ties with Moscow. New Delhi continues to buy weapons from Russia, and it remains a key buyer of Russian oil as well. Instead of following a policy of sanctioning New Delhi and forcing it to change its policy, Washington is keen to attract India using an alternative way.

There are two aspects of this alternative way. First, the Biden administration has decided to ignore the Modi regime’s politics. In other words, the US apparently has no problems with the Modi regime’s tacit implementation of Hindutva. Second, the Biden administration is keen to turn India into an alternative hub of global supply chains. This is particularly evident from Washington’s willingness to invest in establishing the industry to produce semiconductors in India.

This imperative syncs perfectly well with the Modi regime’s own politics of rapid economic development to not only provide for what is now the most populous country but also use the politics of rapid – but not necessarily inclusive – development to stay in power.

In this context, there is little denying that a strategic convergence exists between Washington and New Delhi, and that this convergence may prove to be very consequential, if not completely defining, vis-à-vis the politics of the new world order. However, where this alliance is truly defining is in the willing sacrifice of democracy.

In his speech to the second Summit for Democracy, Biden lamented the decline of democracy in the world in the past 15 years. If the summit was meant to arrest that decline, Biden’s alliance with India is only furthering it. In short, the Biden administration’s India policy directly undercuts its politics of global democracy.

US-India Ties: The ‘Defining Partnership’ of the 21st Century?

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/us-india-ties-defining-partnership-21st-century?r=7i07&utm

When expediency trumps ideals

JUL 7, 2023

∙ PAID

By: Salman Rafi Sheikh

With an eye on China and the geopolitics of the 21^st century that requires crucial geopolitical realignments, Washington is courting allies all over the world. Nowhere is this diplomatically more evident – or more contradictory – than with India.

From a realpolitik standpoint, there are advantages. With its growing tensions with Beijing, Delhi is by far the region’s biggest counterbalance with China and is increasingly beginning acting like it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s June visit to Washington, DC was a love fest, with the two leaders agreeing to deepen defense and tech cooperation between their countries.

But India’s braggadocio of being the world’s biggest democracy is hollow bluster. The US is allying with a country that, more fundamentally than ever, contradicts the foundations of American politics and the values the country professes to cherish.

When it comes to the growing ties between the two – the so-called ‘defining partnership’ of the 21^st century – Washington seems hardly bothered by the fact India is being led since 2014 by a man whose democratic credentials have been questioned by the US itself. Narendra Modi is currently the face of this “defining partnership,” but he also was legally barred from entering the US by the US State Department in 2005 for nearly a decade because Modi “was responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”

None of that matters now, as Modi paid a state visit to the US in June and apparently led US-India ties to new heights. Many agreements were signed, even as the US is projecting India as an alternative hub of global supply chains to undercut China. Washington is also very keen to deepen military-to-military ties with India, the world’s largest importer of weapons.

This state visit is a clear contrast to US President Joe Biden’s own avowed democratic vision, a vision he has been very keenly spreading via various ‘Summits for Democracy’ and one that supposedly reinforces citizens.” That is a vision the leaders of India’s 80 percent Hindi population seem intent on denying to the other minorities, most of the Muslim.

There is no denying that full and equal participation is the hallmark of modern democracies. But as the Freedom House Index reveals, India’s democratic credentials have consistently declined since the arrival of the Modi regime and its relentless pursuit of an exclusionary model of politics reinforced by the Hindu majoritarian ideals of Hindutva. The US government is not unaware of this decline.

According to the 2023 report of The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, in 2022, “… religious freedom conditions in India continued to worsen. Throughout the year, the Indian government at the national, state, and local levels promoted and enforced religiously discriminatory policies, including laws targeting religious conversion, interfaith relationships, the wearing of hijabs, and cow slaughter, which negatively impact Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits, and Adivasis (indigenous peoples and scheduled tribes).”

The national government, the commission report said, “also continued to suppress critical voices—particularly religious minorities and those advocating on their behalf—including through surveillance, harassment, demolition of property, and detention under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and by targeting non government organizations (NGOs) under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA).”

But when it comes to making moves inimical to the national interests, such reports are hardly relevant. Even though the US is seeking to counter China – and Washington believes China’s political system does not meet the standards of modern democracies – it would make no sense to court a country that is hardly different when it comes to political and social repression of minorities. It would make no sense unless this logic is tied to wider geopolitics.

China, in alliance with Russia, is seeking to build a new, alternative world order to challenge US dominance. The politics of a new world order is, for Washington, a direct attack on the post-Second World War world order the US built and consolidated throughout – and after – Cold War.

In this context, the imperative of protecting the ‘old’ world order demands a kind of politics that, more than ever, requires sacrificing principles of democracy. This is evident from a marked shift towards Saudi Arabia as well, which Biden, during his presidential campaign, vowed to make a “pariah” state because of its flagrant violations of human rights evident from the state-sponsored murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. But Biden didn’t hesitate to change his objective when it became crucial to have Saudi Arabia on Washington’s side to control the supply and price of oil in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war.

While Biden couldn’t successfully court Saudi’s Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), he is finding a lot of success in India, where New Delhi is itself very keen to build its capacity vis-à-vis China and sees an enduring partnership with Washington as a crucial step towards ultimately becoming a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

For the US, courting India also matters because India continues to maintain secure ties with Moscow. New Delhi continues to buy weapons from Russia, and it remains a key buyer of Russian oil as well. Instead of following a policy of sanctioning New Delhi and forcing it to change its policy, Washington is keen to attract India using an alternative way.

There are two aspects of this alternative way. First, the Biden administration has decided to ignore the Modi regime’s politics. In other words, the US apparently has no problems with the Modi regime’s tacit implementation of Hindutva. Second, the Biden administration is keen to turn India into an alternative hub of global supply chains. This is particularly evident from Washington’s willingness to invest in establishing the industry to produce semiconductors in India.

This imperative syncs perfectly well with the Modi regime’s own politics of rapid economic development to not only provide for what is now the most populous country but also use the politics of rapid – but not necessarily inclusive – development to stay in power.

In this context, there is little denying that a strategic convergence exists between Washington and New Delhi, and that this convergence may prove to be very consequential, if not completely defining, vis-à-vis the politics of the new world order. However, where this alliance is truly defining is in the willing sacrifice of democracy.

In his speech to the second Summit for Democracy, Biden lamented the decline of democracy in the world in the past 15 years. If the summit was meant to arrest that decline, Biden’s alliance with India is only furthering it. In short, the Biden administration’s India policy directly undercuts its politics of global democracy.

17. Don’t Let Ukraine Join NATO

Authors from CATO. I do not think CATO supports any alliances.

Excerpts:

At a time when Washington already faces serious resource demands both at home and in Asia, it risks being backed into a corner: with Ukraine in NATO, Washington will need to divert resources from other priorities, some of which are arguably of greater importance, or accept increased risk along what would be a dramatically expanded eastern front. In either case, the United States will have incurred large costs and burdens at a moment when American time, attention, and resources are needed elsewhere.

Finally, these costs could balloon because of the perverse incentives that offering Ukraine a path into NATO creates for Moscow. Russia has shown itself willing to fight over the future strategic orientation of Ukraine, but the United States and others have not. Moscow knows this. Tragically, offering Ukraine a path into NATO is therefore likely to give Russia reason to continue its war against Ukraine for as long as possible in order to avoid creating conditions in which Ukraine can start on the road to NATO membership. In this sense, an invitation to join the alliance promises to prolong the current bloodshed and make any diplomatic settlement less likely. On the other hand, if the current war were to abate and Ukraine began the accession process, Moscow would be encouraged to lash out again in a bid to prevent that move before the process was complete. Unless NATO could admit Ukraine via some kind of fait accompli—no easy task given the alliance’s requirements for unanimity and consensus—a plan for long-term membership makes Russian aggression in Ukraine more rather than less likely. In either case, the costs of defending Ukraine go up.

Ukraine’s desire to join NATO is understandable. It makes perfect sense that a country that has been bullied and invaded by a stronger neighbor would seek the protection of an outside power. Still, strategy is about choice, and the United States’ choices today are stark. For much of the post-Cold War period, the United States could expand its international commitments at relatively low cost and risk. Those circumstances no longer exist. With fiscal pressures at home, a grave challenge to its position in Asia, and the prospect of escalation and an erosion of credibility vis-à-vis Moscow, keeping Ukraine out of NATO simply reflects U.S. interests. Instead of making a questionable promise that poses great dangers but would yield little in return, the United States should accept that it is high time to close NATO’s door to Ukraine.

Don’t Let Ukraine Join NATO

The Costs of Expanding the Alliance Outweigh the Benefits

By Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson

July 7, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson · July 7, 2023

As the war in Ukraine grinds on, policymakers and pundits ranging from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, are pushing for NATO to offer Ukraine what French President Emmanuel Macron calls “a path toward membership” after the conflict concludes. This is not just show. Ukraine’s membership aspirations will now be a central topic of debate at NATO’s summit next week in Vilnius, with Ukraine arguing—as its former defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk wrote recently in Foreign Affairs—that it “should be welcomed and embraced” by the alliance. The way in which this issue is settled will have serious consequences for the United States, Europe, and beyond.

The stakes could not be higher. Membership in NATO encompasses a commitment by the allies to fight and die for one another. Partly for this very reason, its members worked throughout the post-Cold War era to avoid expanding the alliance to states that faced a near-term risk of being attacked. NATO leaders have also long understood that admitting Ukraine involves a very real possibility of war (including nuclear war) with Russia. Indeed, the chance of such a conflict and its devastating consequences is the main reason that the United States and other NATO members have sought to avoid being drawn in more deeply into the war in Ukraine. The tension is clear: almost no one thinks that NATO should fight directly with Russia for Ukraine today, but many favor promising Ukraine a path into the alliance and committing to fight for it in the future.

Ukraine should not be welcomed into NATO, and this is something U.S. President Joe Biden should make clear. Kyiv’s resistance to Russian aggression has been heroic, but ultimately states do what is in their self-interest. And here, the security benefits to the United States of Ukrainian accession pale in comparison with the risks of bringing it into the alliance. Admitting Ukraine to NATO would raise the prospect of a grim choice between a war with Russia and the devastating consequences involved or backing down and devaluing NATO’s security guarantee across the entire alliance. At the Vilnius summit and beyond, NATO leaders would be wise to acknowledge these facts and close the door to Ukraine.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

At the NATO summit in Romania in 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush took everyone by surprise by lobbying for Georgia and Ukraine to join the alliance. It was Bush’s last NATO summit as president, and he wanted to “lay down a marker” for his legacy, according to an administration official at the time. A number of European member states, including Germany and France, balked at the idea out of concern over the inevitable Russian reaction and the implications for the alliance. The diplomatic deadlock yielded a compromise in which NATO declared that the countries would become members someday but provided no plan for getting them there. Yet even this compromise brought a forceful denunciation from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Speaking in Bucharest, Putin said:

We view the appearance of a powerful military bloc on our borders, a bloc whose members are subject in part to Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, as a direct threat to the security of our country. The claim that this process is not directed against Russia will not suffice. National security is not based on promises.

Four months later, Russia invaded Georgia and still occupies some of its territory to this day. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea in a prelude to the full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022. Russia’s behavior is thuggish, illegitimate, and dangerous. Nevertheless, it underscores the core issue at play: even as NATO remains formally committed to Ukrainian (and Georgian) accession, further NATO enlargement into areas that Moscow views as uniquely central to its national security means courting war with Russia.

RIGHT ENDS, WRONG MEANS

To date, advocates of further U.S. and NATO involvement in the Ukraine war have failed to clarify the U.S. strategic interests at stake. The Biden administration has argued that history shows “when dictators do not pay the price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and engage in more aggression,” as the president himself put it. But Russia has already paid an enormous price for its aggression. By holding its ground and pushing back the Russian military, Ukraine has humiliated Putin, who just two years ago denigrated Ukraine as a non-country. It will take decades for Russia to rebuild its military even to the shabby state it was apparently in when Putin launched the war; the United States estimates that more than 100,000 Russian fighters have been killed or injured. The recent mutiny launched by the mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin suggests that the war may destabilize Putin’s rule at home.

The U.S. interest in admitting Ukraine to NATO is even less clear, with a tangle of arguments present in the policy discourse. One view holds that European stability and security require Kyiv to join the alliance. By this logic, if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will expand his aims and attack NATO member states. A second line of reasoning focuses on Ukraine itself, arguing that NATO membership is the only way to protect the country from Russian designs. Finally, there is a sense that Ukraine has “earned” NATO membership by fighting and weakening an adversary of the alliance. In this view, deepening NATO cooperation with Ukraine would reward its heroism and add another layer of deterrence against a renewed Russian assault.

These claims are understandable but wrong. For one thing, Ukraine’s resistance to Russian bellicosity is noble, but noble actions and even effective self-defense do not themselves justify taking on the high risks of an open-ended security commitment. More importantly, the stakes of the game today do not warrant Ukraine’s accession to NATO.

Strategy is about choice, and the United States’ choices today are stark.

For over 100 years, U.S. aims in Europe have been counterhegemonic: in World War I, World War II, and again in the Cold War, the United States bore high costs to prevent one country from dominating the continent. Today, however, even a Russia that somehow defeated Kyiv would not be poised to control Europe. Had Russia annexed all of Ukraine without firing a shot, its GDP would have grown by 10 percent, making it barely larger than Italy’s. True, Russia would have also won itself a second major port on the Black Sea, but it would still remain far weaker than the European members of NATO. As even Robert Kagan “there is no way that Putin’s conquest of Ukraine” would have “any immediate or even distant effect on American security.”

Thankfully, though, Russia is not going to conquer Ukraine. Its military campaign has been an embarrassment, with the war proving Russia’s army to be less than a pale shadow of the Soviet one. The idea that Russia could pose a serious threat to Poland, much less to France or Germany, is outlandish. Couple this with the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the Atlantic Ocean, and one can see that the gains for Washington in inviting Ukraine to join NATO are limited.

Even if Ukraine is, as its foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, argued in Foreign Affairs, “defending NATO’s entire eastern flank and sharing what it learns with alliance members,” it is unclear why it must join the alliance for the United States to reap these benefits. Unless it were to surrender to Russian domination—which Kyiv has demonstrated it is not inclined to do—Ukraine’s geography consigns it to acting as a bulwark against Russia irrespective of NATO membership. The events since February 2022 show that Ukraine does not need to be in NATO for the United States and its allies to effectively help it resist Russian aggression.

UNKEPT PROMISES

Admitting Ukraine to NATO would also present problems for the alliance, especially the security guarantees embedded in Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty. To be sure, Article 5 only formally commits the NATO allies to treat an attack on one as an attack on all and to render the assistance they “deem necessary.” In practice, however, member states have viewed NATO membership and the Article 5 guarantees that go along with it as a U.S. commitment to go to war on behalf of its allies. As President Barack Obama declared on a visit to Estonia in 2013,

Article 5 is crystal clear: An attack on one is an attack on all. So if, in such a moment, you ever ask again, “who will come to help,” you’ll know the answer—the NATO Alliance, including the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

Or as Biden described the commitment more recently, Article 5 constitutes “a sacred oath to defend every inch of NATO territory.” This is why Ukraine believes NATO membership will help protect it against future Russian aggression.

The problem with extending such guarantees to Ukraine is twofold. First, an Article 5 guarantee could pull the United States into a direct conflict with Russia. Unlike other countries that recently joined the alliance, Ukraine will likely continue to have an unresolved dispute with Russia inside its borders. Not only will Moscow and Kyiv have rival claims on territory, but the surge of Russian and Ukrainian nationalism provoked by the war will limit room for diplomacy. Under these conditions, it is not difficult to imagine how relations could further deteriorate even if an arrangement is reached to end the fighting. If Ukraine were in NATO, the United States could be pushed to come to Ukraine’s defense by deploying troops and even threatening to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine’s behalf. American policymakers may hope to deter future Russian aggression against Ukraine by creating a path for Kyiv into NATO, but doing so creates a real possibility of drawing the United States into what Biden has called a “World War III” scenario.

The gains for Washington in inviting Ukraine to join NATO are limited.

Extending Article 5 protections to Ukraine could also undermine their overall credibility. For the past 16 months, the Biden administration has made it clear that it does not believe it is worth directly fighting Russia in a dispute over Ukraine. Many influential Republican politicians—including the GOP presidential frontrunner, former President Donald Trump—are particularly disinclined to risk American lives for Ukraine. On the other hand, Russian policymakers from Putin down have revealed that they do feel Ukraine is worth fighting for, even at great cost.

Under these circumstances, an American commitment to fight for Ukraine would be open to question. Russia might well test that pledge, leading to future crises. If called upon to fight, it is plausible that the United States could renege on its assurances, leaving Ukraine in the lurch. And should the United States back away from Ukraine when it is under attack, other vulnerable NATO allies such as the Baltic states would naturally question the strength of the alliance’s security commitments backed by American military power. A true credibility crisis for NATO could result.

Some advocates for Ukraine’s joining NATO argue that the sort of weapons, training, and diplomatic support already being given to Kyiv are sufficient to meet NATO’s Article 5 mandate, meaning it is not necessary to also promise or deploy military forces. Yet if Article 5 allows the United States and other allies to stop short of going to war to protect a member, it turns NATO into a tiered alliance, with some members (such as France and Germany) remaining confident that Washington would use force to come to their aid, and others far from certain. That could prompt an intra-alliance scramble as members struggle to determine which kind of Article 5 guarantee they enjoy. Moreover, offering this more limited Article 5 guarantee is of uncertain help to Ukraine. After all, since Ukraine is already receiving many of the other benefits of NATO membership, it can only be the prospect of direct U.S. (and others’) intervention via Article 5 that adds deterrent and political value to Kyiv.

PAYING FOR IT

There is also the question of the costs of defending Ukraine. NATO is already struggling to find the conventional forces and operating concepts it needs to service the alliance’s existing commitments. The war in Ukraine has made clear that modern, high-intensity conflict between conventional militaries consumes incredible quantities of resources. Viewed in this light, inviting Ukraine to join NATO would exacerbate the gap between the alliance’s commitments and its capabilities.

Of course, since the NATO countries as a whole are wealthier, more technologically advanced, and more populous than Russia, that gap theoretically could be filled with an aggressive rearmament program. European members of NATO, however, have a long way to go because they have underinvested in conventional military power since the Cold War. Ukraine itself is a partial exception to this general trend, but even here, Ukraine’s admirable military performance is—as Zelensky, other Ukrainian leaders, and outside analysts acknowledge—due in large part to the exceptional scope and scale of military aid provided by the United States and its partners. Should Ukraine join the alliance, the burden of finding the resources to defend Ukraine short of nuclear war is therefore likely to fall disproportionately on the United States.

At a time when Washington already faces serious resource demands both at home and in Asia, it risks being backed into a corner: with Ukraine in NATO, Washington will need to divert resources from other priorities, some of which are arguably of greater importance, or accept increased risk along what would be a dramatically expanded eastern front. In either case, the United States will have incurred large costs and burdens at a moment when American time, attention, and resources are needed elsewhere.

Finally, these costs could balloon because of the perverse incentives that offering Ukraine a path into NATO creates for Moscow. Russia has shown itself willing to fight over the future strategic orientation of Ukraine, but the United States and others have not. Moscow knows this. Tragically, offering Ukraine a path into NATO is therefore likely to give Russia reason to continue its war against Ukraine for as long as possible in order to avoid creating conditions in which Ukraine can start on the road to NATO membership. In this sense, an invitation to join the alliance promises to prolong the current bloodshed and make any diplomatic settlement less likely. On the other hand, if the current war were to abate and Ukraine began the accession process, Moscow would be encouraged to lash out again in a bid to prevent that move before the process was complete. Unless NATO could admit Ukraine via some kind of fait accompli—no easy task given the alliance’s requirements for unanimity and consensus—a plan for long-term membership makes Russian aggression in Ukraine more rather than less likely. In either case, the costs of defending Ukraine go up.

Ukraine’s desire to join NATO is understandable. It makes perfect sense that a country that has been bullied and invaded by a stronger neighbor would seek the protection of an outside power. Still, strategy is about choice, and the United States’ choices today are stark. For much of the post-Cold War period, the United States could expand its international commitments at relatively low cost and risk. Those circumstances no longer exist. With fiscal pressures at home, a grave challenge to its position in Asia, and the prospect of escalation and an erosion of credibility vis-à-vis Moscow, keeping Ukraine out of NATO simply reflects U.S. interests. Instead of making a questionable promise that poses great dangers but would yield little in return, the United States should accept that it is high time to close NATO’s door to Ukraine.

JUSTIN LOGAN is Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

JOSHUA SHIFRINSON is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.

Foreign Affairs · by Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson · July 7, 2023

18. How America Can Win Over the Global South – It’s Time to Expand the UN Security Council

Conclusion:

Such renewal is essential to keep the UN functioning. The impasse over Security Council reform has endured for generations. At some point, this brittle, archaic system will buckle beneath the weight of the world. Such a collapse may not seem imminent, but, as with fault lines in the earth, geopolitical dynamics can shift unexpectedly, irreversibly, and sometimes catastrophically. And although the council is often dismissed as impotent, its implosion for failure to accommodate long-standing frustrations would leave behind a more chaotic and dangerous world.

How America Can Win Over the Global South

It’s Time to Expand the UN Security Council

By Suzanne Nossel

July 7, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Suzanne Nossel · July 7, 2023

Across much of the world, there is growing resentment about the amount of attention and money that the West is funneling toward Ukraine. Counties outside of Europe are plagued by war and hardship, yet their suffering commands only a fraction of the attention paid to Kyiv. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar put it in June 2022, the priority that the richest states have given to Ukraine treats Europe’s problems “as the world’s problems,” even though “the world’s problems are not considered to be Europe’s problems.”

This discontent poses a challenge for the Biden administration. In fighting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, and in dealing with the economic, political, and territorial ambitions of an ascendant China, the United States will need to look beyond its stalwart Western allies and shore up support worldwide. It will especially need to bolster its ties to the many rising powers, such as Brazil and India, that currently balance between Washington and its main rivals. Some of these governments share U.S. interests; New Delhi, for example, is also contending with an increasingly muscular Beijing. Yet none of them will become full partners with the United States if they feel like American policymakers neither take their desires seriously nor treat them as geopolitical peers.

These countries have diverse interests, making it impossible for the United States to please them all. But there is a way for Washington to take the lead in supporting these countries’ ambitions and reflecting their increasing clout: jump-starting the long-stalled debate over expanding the UN Security Council. Many of the world’s most powerful developing states have long sought a place in the body, and a credible U.S. drive to add them would have singular, symbolic significance. If successful, the drive could also yield practical benefits. An updated global security architecture would fortify the post-1945 rules-based system that the Biden administration champions, tamp down on geopolitical resentments fostered by the West’s perceived influence hoarding, and offer possible ways to more effectively isolate and stigmatize China and Russia when they breach global norms.

Crafting a workable proposal will not be easy, and the drive is not without risks. Decades of past schemes, after all, never gained much traction, and the bar for change is high. To be enacted, a proposal for Security Council reform must win the support of two-thirds of the member states of the UN General Assembly (or 128 of the current 193) as well as all of the council’s current permanent five members.

So far, most formulas have focused on adding specific countries as permanent members of the Security Council, a highly controversial proposition both because it might dilute the influence of the council’s existing permanent seat holders and because it could privilege a new group of nations in perpetuity at the expense of their regional rivals. The Biden administration could lower the hurdle by proposing that the UN create a new, more flexible tier of council seats allocated, based on the objective criteria of population and gross domestic product. The occupants would shift periodically—perhaps after a decade of service—if their statistical rankings changed. Although extending veto rights to such long-term members would not be politically viable, they would enjoy other benefits, including a long-term voice and vote in the world’s premier security forum.

Building in such flexibility would help safeguard the council’s credibility over the long run. The UN Security Council’s structure has not changed since its inception, and so it is now out of sync with current geopolitical realities, diminishing its global importance. By allocating seats based on objective criteria, the body would naturally evolve alongside the world it is intended to serve. And if the change came in response to a plan from Washington, the United States would earn credit for its leadership on an issue that matters to the capitals it needs most.

ACTIONS AND WORDS

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it seemed as if the world might rally behind the principles of nonaggression, sovereignty, and human rights. But outside of the West there was skepticism. Major African, Asian, and South American states abstained from UN General Assembly resolutions condemning the war. Many African and Middle Eastern countries complained that Europe was welcoming Ukrainian refugees while spurning arrivals from Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere. According to U.S. officials, South Africa has even supplied arms to Russia, despite pledging to remain neutral. The war has strained global food supplies, disrupted the flow of energy, and exacerbated inflation—especially in developing states. The result has underscored long-standing resentments over the current world order and the traditional great powers that continue to dominate it.

The Biden administration knows that it needs to improve its ties to intermediate states, especially as Beijing and Moscow try to woo these countries away from Washington’s orbit. It knows that championing Security Council reform would be an effective way to do so. That is why, in an address at the UN last September, U.S. President Joe Biden stressed that he supports increasing the number of nonpermanent and permanent council members. He reaffirmed the United States’ prior calls for certain countries to receive permanent seats (Washington has backed the council aspirations of Germany, India, and Japan) and spoke of the need for representation for Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Africa, on an enlarged council. Biden’s speech appears to have been more than just empty rhetoric. According to reporting by The Washington Post, U.S. diplomats, including U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, have been canvassing ideas for expansion—a process that is intensifying as this year’s General Assembly opening session approaches in September.

Biden’s words were well received and echoed by other global leaders. The United Kingdom’s foreign minister, for instance, called for expanding the council in June. Biden’s remarks also kindled some measure of anticipation among aspirants, suggesting that their long-standing hopes may not be forever in vain. But to show that it is serious about not just endorsing but driving forward a more representative world order, Washington has to champion a proposal that can surmount the barriers that have stalled Security Council reforms for decades.

Foremost among those obstacles are the council’s five permanent members. Each of these states—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—has used its sway to rebuff past expansion efforts through either active opposition or passive indifference that reinforced the status quo. Their reasoning is simple and self-serving: these countries are unwilling to relinquish their own veto power and would rather not afford commensurate privileges to other states, which could potentially obstruct their interests.

But the permanent members are not the only obstacles. There are many countries outside the Security Council that would covet positions in it, and they are at odds with regional rivals over who should get new spots. Egypt and Ethiopia, for example, have no interest in seeing Nigeria represent their continent. Italy would hate to see Germany ascend. Argentina and Mexico oppose Brazil’s ambitions. And even if these states could sort out their differences, would-be reformers have struggled with practical considerations. A council that is too large, unwieldy, and veto-ridden might fail to carry out routine work—such as mediating conflicts and overseeing peacekeeping missions in Africa—that today proceed relatively smoothly.

FAIR ENOUGH

It is possible, however, for the United States to craft a proposal that overcomes many of these hurdles. It can start by steering clear of adding new permanent members, and instead call for a fresh, separate class of long-term seats allocated based not on fiat or horse-trading but on objective criteria. Such a system would leave the current permanent five states’ veto powers intact; realpolitik means that that facet of the system is effectively impossible to change. But the long-term seats would still render the Security Council’s decision-making more inclusive and representative.

There are reasons to think most of the contenders, and maybe all of them, would accept such a proposal. Although some council aspirants, such as India, have voiced reluctance to accept anything short of a veto-wielding seat, others—including Japan and Germany—are thought to be more open to compromise scenarios that would fulfill some, if not all, of their hopes. And governments bent on getting a veto, like New Delhi, might ultimately come around if long-term seats were available but permanent membership seemed far away. The often fierce competition for two-year rotating council seats is testament to the value that capitals attach to being part of the inner sanctum of peace and security. Even without a veto, a council seat means getting to speak in front the cameras, table proposals, and set the council agenda when taking a turn as the body’s rotating monthly chairperson. It allows countries to rub shoulders with the world’s foremost powers.

The new states would also still be able to drive forward council action and help stop proposals from passing. Today, council decisions are based on an affirmative vote of nine out of 15 members, subject to veto by any of the five permanent members. In a reformed council, the threshold for action could remain a majority plus one, giving the new members a chance to help vote measures up or down.

The Biden administration knows that it needs to improve its ties to intermediate states.

Rather than preselecting countries for these long-term seats, the U.S. proposal should set objective measures to determine which ones get elevated. The simplest to use are the most up-to-date International Monetary Fund and UN figures on GDP and population. They are, after all, perhaps the best quantifiable proxies for a country’s international sway and power. Washington could specifically propose adding two members to the Security Council—one for population and one for GDP—from each of the UN’s five regional groups: Asia-Pacific, Africa, Latin America and Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe and Other (which includes the United States as an observer and for voting purposes). If the leading states from one group are already permanent members, the second-place states based on each criterion would be elevated instead. If a single state led in both population and GDP, the second seat could go to the country with the second-largest populace.

From Asia-Pacific, this formula would give seats to India for population and Japan for GDP. From Africa, Nigeria and South Africa would become members. Brazil and Mexico would be elevated from the Latin America and Caribbean group. Poland and Ukraine would join from Eastern Europe, while Germany and, depending on the timing, either Italy or Canada would ascend from the Western Europe and Other group. If the tier of ten short-term elected council members were left untouched, a new proposal could yield a total council size of between 20 and 24 (depending on the specificities of the plan adopted): a figure within the range of other proposals that have long been under discussion.

This allocation would make the council’s representation much broader than it is right now. It would, however, still overrepresent Europe and, potentially, North America. If other continents objected to the skew, the United States could propose capping each UN region to three or four countries in total, perhaps depending upon whether the United States is treated as a formal member of the Western European and Other group. If reformers wanted even more parity, they could cap the number of states per region at two, grandfathering in existing states, and prioritizing population over GDP when needed. A cap of two would prevent any new additions from Western Europe and Other and limit Asia-Pacific and Eastern Europe to just one new member. Instead of nine or ten new countries, such a formula would yield just six: Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, and Ukraine. Other variations on this proposal could allocate the number of new seats per region proportionately, based on the total population of the area, or based on the number of individual sovereign General Assembly members within an area.

For Washington, security council expansion is a risk worth taking.

This system would not quell the misgivings of Pakistan about an Indian seat, or of Egypt about Nigeria’s ascension. But by continuing to limit veto rights and ensuring that the seats could change hands over time, the proposals would at least be more palatable. India could not, for example, singlehandedly stop a resolution that would make life easier for Pakistan. Egypt could take comfort in the fact that South Africa might not be on the council forever.

Crucially, adopting a criteria-based system subject to regular updating would help prevent the Security Council from simply adopting a new, calcified makeup. To create additional permanent seats in the 2020s would doom the Security Council of the 2040s or 2050s to the very same politically enshrined obsolescence that has bedeviled the body for years. And by codifying up front that GDP and population calculations for long-term seats would be reviewed after each decade, no country—even those on the council—could dispute what the latest figures on GDP and population dictate in terms of council composition. As with the body’s well-established existing system of rotating temporary seats, the periodic refreshes would be carried out methodically, without opening up new political debates.

There is, in fact, precedent for UN reform that incorporates automatically updating eligibility. In 1973, the General Assembly adopted a peacekeeping scale of assessment that gave certain developing countries steep discounts on their payment shares. But after 27 years, some of the beneficiaries—including Qatar, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates—had grown wealthy and therefore no longer needed concessions. In 2000, the UN membership negotiated an overhaul of this system, stripping undeserving states of their lowered rates and fashioning a new scale that pegged discounts to per capita GDP—ensuring that countries’ payments would adjust as their relative wealth shifted.

RISKS AND REWARDS

It is true that many of the countries most likely to receive membership under this proposal—particularly Germany, India, and Japan—top the list of states that Washington is already on record as wanting to add. And, on balance, there is reason to think that Washington would gain from this proposal. The newly elevated long-term members would include established democracies whose presence could raise the reputational cost for China and Russia exercising their veto to shield human rights abusers, or for standing in the way of efforts to quell conflicts—like the civil war in Syria—that mostly defied council action for years in the 2010s. If the United States and its allies were successful in making common cause with new long-term members on key priorities, the political costs of Russian and Chinese obstruction would rise even further. Washington is already deepening ties to India and Nigeria, and if the U.S. proposal to get them on the council succeeds, these relationships could grow warmer.

But the merits of a criteria-based system transcend any country’s particular national interests. The metrics, after all, are objectively fair reflections of the international system: money gives states substantial might, as do people. By adding countries with bigger populations, the United States would also help make sure that the council represented far more of the world than it does right now. Although it seems virtually impossible for anyone the council to morph into a truly equitable global body, at least for the time being, even the most vehement critics of American power would be hard-pressed to argue that admitting the planet’s most populous or prosperous countries is a self-serving proposal.

In fact, there are ways that Washington could lose from the additions. New Delhi, Pretoria, and other Security Council aspirants are home to deep-seated anti-Western strains that have come to the forefront in their responses to Russia’s invasion. Although the U.S. veto would remain a forceful bulwark against unpalatable outcomes, it is possible that these governments and other new admits could harden into an unfriendly bloc. By advancing this reform, the United States would be gambling that, in drawing leading global South countries closer to the inner circle of international governance, it could prevent such a group from emerging—and achieve diplomatic strides with some tough counterparts. Although securing agreement on a new Security Council formula with Beijing, Moscow, and the U.S. Senate is a daunting task, a scheme attracting substantial global backing could build powerful momentum, forcing key outliers to negotiate their differences and make concessions. A scenario in which Washington champions a popular new paradigm only to have China and Russia block passage could scramble current international alignments.

For Washington, then, opening discussion on a criteria-based system is a wager worth taking. The United States needs closer friends outside of Europe, and it desperately needs to safeguard the rules-based international order. Working to increase the size of the Security Council would help bolster Washington’s reputation while affording the United Nations a new lease on life at a time when the post–World War II system of global governance is at risk of collapse. Doing so would inaugurate a new chapter for the existing international order. Indeed, even if the UN does not agree to Washington’s proposals in the near term, they could still help spark progress. Inserting new ideas in an effort to unstick the debate could catalyze the council to reinvent itself.

Such renewal is essential to keep the UN functioning. The impasse over Security Council reform has endured for generations. At some point, this brittle, archaic system will buckle beneath the weight of the world. Such a collapse may not seem imminent, but, as with fault lines in the earth, geopolitical dynamics can shift unexpectedly, irreversibly, and sometimes catastrophically. And although the council is often dismissed as impotent, its implosion for failure to accommodate long-standing frustrations would leave behind a more chaotic and dangerous world.

SUZANNE NOSSEL is CEO of PEN America and a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations.

Foreign Affairs · by Suzanne Nossel · July 7, 2023

19. Special Report: Future of Warfare – The war in Ukraine shows how technology is changing the battlefield (The Economist)

A series of articles below from the Economist.

1. The war in Ukraine shows how technology is changing the battlefield

2. A new era of high-tech war has begun

3. Western armies are learning a lot from the war in Ukraine

4. How Ukraine’s enemy is also learning lessons, albeit slowly

5. Why logistics are too important to be left to the generals

6. The latest in the battle of jamming with electronic beams

7. Technology is deepening civilian involvement in war

8. How oceans became new technological battlefields

9. Video: How we studied the lessons of Ukraine

10. Sources and acknowledgments

Graphics at the link: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/07/03/the-war-in-ukraine-shows-how-technology-is-changing-the-battlefield?utm

The war in Ukraine shows how technology is changing the battlefield

But mass still counts, argues Shashank Joshi in the first of seven chapters of a special report on the future of warfare

The Economist

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

IN THE 1970s Soviet generals realised that America, with its lead in microelectronics, was racing ahead in the development of long-range precision weapons, sensors (such as satellites) to spot targets, and networks to connect the two. They gave this a grand name: the “reconnaissance-strike complex”. Operation Desert Storm, America’s swift and easy triumph over Iraq in 1991, seemed to offer further proof of the concept. Why duke it out over trenches when you could paralyse the enemy with pinpoint strikes on command posts and logistics deep behind the front lines? American thinkers hailed a “revolution in military affairs”, or RMA.

Even hard-nosed armies like the Israeli Defence Forces agreed. “Future wars, its senior commanders believed, would no longer include major manoeuvres of massed formations,” wrote Eado Hecht, a lecturer at Israel’s staff college. “The conquering of territory was deemed irrelevant and even…counter-productive.” Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in 2020 seemed to confirm the dominance of precision weapons over ground forces. “We have to recognise that the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on the European landmass are over,” said Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, in November 2021. “There are other, better things we should be investing in [such as] cyber—this is how warfare in the future is going to be.” Three months later Russia invaded Ukraine.

The ensuing war has been a lesson in old-style attrition: an industrial-scale contest of manpower, steel and explosives. Russia is thought to have had over 200,000 casualties, killed and wounded. That is four times the number of Soviet casualties in Afghanistan, a war that lasted for a decade. It is two and a half British armies. More than 20,000 Russians died between December 2022 and April 2023 alone, say American sources, most of them in or around Bakhmut, a previously inconsequential town in eastern Ukraine. Not since Iran’s ruinous siege of Basra in 1987 has an army expended so much, in such a short time, for so little.

Ukraine, too, has bled badly. Leaked American intelligence reports in late February suggest that it has suffered over 100,000 casualties itself, including more than 15,000 killed. The pre-war armies of both Russia and Ukraine have been annihilated and created anew, filled out with conscripts and volunteers with little or no military experience. Many of those in the vanguard of Ukraine’s current counter-offensive will have had just a few weeks of training. Some European countries, like Finland, would be able to mobilise many troops in short order, if put in a similar situation. Most, having abandoned conscription, would not.

The war’s quintessential weapon, artillery, would be familiar to a Napoleonic soldier

Comparisons with the first world war are overheated: Britain alone fired over 200,000 shells a day in the week before the Somme offensive in 1916, compared with Ukrainian estimates of 60,000 at Russia’s peak rate of fire last summer. But ammunition consumption has far outstripped both pre-war expectations (causing artillery barrels to melt) and production capacity, exposing gaping holes in the West’s industry. “Munitions are like cement,” writes Jonathan Caverley of the US Naval War College. “Consumers do not always need them but require massive amounts when they do.” Ukraine’s counter-offensive would be impossible without an influx of shells from South Korea.

This orgy of indecisive human and material destruction over a trench-scarred landscape is not what military technologists had in mind when they talked up the RMA. The war’s quintessential weapon, artillery, would be familiar to a Napoleonic soldier. “What blunted the Russians north of Kyiv,” says Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a think-tank, “was two brigades of artillery firing all their barrels every day.” Ukraine serves as a rejoinder to the idea that technology always trumps mass: that quality can replace quantity. General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British army, put it acerbically last year: “You can’t cyber your way across a river.”

But the paradox of the war is that mass and technology are intimately bound together. Even the artillery war shows this. Weeks before the invasion, America sent Ukraine Excalibur shells. Inside each was a small, rugged chip that could receive GPS signals from America’s constellation of navigation satellites. Whereas Russia often relied on barrages over a wide area, Ukrainian gunners could be more precise. Such rounds were “disproportionately effective”, noted a study published by Mr Watling and his colleagues at RUSI, drawing on data from Ukraine’s general staff. Not only did they take out targets more reliably; they reduced the number of shells needed, lowering the logistical burden (shells are heavy).

Enter the drones

Drones are at the heart of precision fire. The idea of correcting shellfire by aerial observation dates from the American civil war, when balloons were used for the job, notes Richard Barrons, a retired British general. Drones which returned film by parachute were employed from the 1970s, he says. By the 1980s these could send back data in real time, if the drone remained in the right line of sight. Now the skies are thick with them: during the battle for Bakhmut there were 50 up at any one time. Around 86% of all Ukrainian targets are derived from drones, says T.J. Holland, the top enlisted soldier in America’s XVIII Airborne Corps.

In the first six months of the war, Russian artillery units that had their own drones, rather than relying on those from headquarters, could strike targets within three to five minutes of detecting them. Those without drones took around half an hour—with lower accuracy. The drones are essentially disposable: around 90% of those used by the Ukrainian armed forces between February and July 2022 were destroyed, according to RUSI. The average life expectancy of a fixed-wing drone was approximately six flights; that of a simpler quadcopter a paltry three. A more recent study says Ukraine is losing 10,000 per month.

For years, the West’s armies have aspired to a way of war in which a cornucopia of “sensors” (video cameras, thermal imagers, radio antennae and so on) would detect targets, pass data to the best-placed “shooter”, whether a howitzer, missile or warship, and create a “kill chain”—or, to use a newer buzzword, a “kill web”—of unprecedented speed and efficiency. This was the vision of the Soviet reconnaissance-strike complex and the RMA: a transparent and semi-automatic battlefield. Ukraine is not yet that. But it is a test bed for the technology, and a tantalising glimpse of the possible.

Consider a drone filming a Russian position. If the operator spots a Russian tank, he can manually mark its location on Kropyva, a Ukrainian-built app, sharing its position with every artillery battery in the area. That system, sometimes dubbed Uber for artillery, has brought engagement times down from tens of minutes to a couple, often the difference between success and failure. Such digital links between sensors and shooters are being refined further.

Drones are collecting vast amounts of video footage, running to petabytes per hour. They cannot send it all back: there is not enough bandwidth, and communications are often jammed. The work must be done “on the edge”, meaning on the drone itself. An increasing number of Ukraine’s drones have “fairly rudimentary AI capability” aboard, says a European general. Small, low-powered chips can work out whether an object below is a T-72 or a T-90 tank, a job that could once have been done only on a distant cloud server. The drone can transmit a few kilobytes of essential information—say, the type of target and its co-ordinates—even if its communications are intermittent.

This digitisation of hardware reflects a collision of old and new ways of war. Much kit Ukraine has received is vintage, such as American howitzers or Soviet missile launchers designed before the Cuban missile crisis, or is stripped of sensitive components. Ukraine is pioneering “the ability to turn it from a dumb piece of cold-war metal into something that’s genuinely networked and part of this algorithmic warfare,” says a foreign adviser in Kyiv. “It is maddening,” noted James Heappey, a junior British defence minister, that “I am providing to the Ukrainians…capability that we’re still years away from getting in the British armed forces.”

Information is everywhere. Ukraine’s access to Starlink, a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, an American firm, means that the lowliest soldiers have connectivity and intelligence that might once have been confined to brigade commanders. No complex equipment is required. In the corner of a smart Kyiv restaurant, a Ukrainian soldier flips open a Macbook and shows this correspondent a live feed of the battlefield, complete with Russian jets on the move.

The Delta app, developed by tech-savvy volunteers, combines everything from drone feeds to information gleaned from Russian social media. It is integrated with America’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, so users can pull up images from commercial satellites (though not the most sensitive ones). This allows data streams to be combined in clever ways. A battalion might use American radio-frequency satellites to detect emissions from a Russian radar in a general area, and then send a cheap Chinese-made drone on a one-way mission to pinpoint its location.

At the tactical level, Russia has waged a form of networked warfare. After a sluggish start, it now uses computerised command and control to knit together drones and artillery batteries. It also has good human intelligence (ie, spies) and satellites of its own. But the war has shown that intelligence is not enough: you also have to use it well. Russia’s air force failed to pick off Ukraine’s air defences in the first days of fighting not just because of poor training and preparation, but because it took two days, and sometimes longer, for Russian military intelligence to send target information to a command centre in Moscow and onwards to warplanes. The targets were typically long gone by then. Even now, 16 months on, the Russian army struggles to find and strike moving targets.

Ukrainian planners, in contrast, waged “data-driven combat” at a level of “speed and precision that NATO has not yet achieved”, concludes a report by Nico Lange, a former chief of staff at Germany’s defence ministry. Sometimes that has been down to tools like Kropyva and Delta. Firms such as Palantir, an American tech company, have used cutting-edge AI to help Ukraine find high-value targets. But data-driven warfare can be quietly prosaic, too. A Ukrainian police officer explains that last year his units were locating Russian troops simply by intercepting 1,000 conversations a day (the figure is now higher). If they found a general, the details were shared in an ad hoc WhatsApp group. “We were connected to the people who were literally bombing.”

This speed and precision has consequences for tactics. “We’re going to fight under constant observation and in constant contact,” says General James Rainey, head of the US Army’s Futures Command. “There is no break. There is no sanctuary.” One response is to resort to century-old methods. Trenches and fortifications run for hundreds of kilometres across eastern Ukraine. Camouflage is another tactic, though it is getting harder as sensors are combined: a thermal blanket might confound an infrared camera, but radar satellites will pick up subtle tyre tracks leading to a concealed position. The best way of surviving, says RUSI, is simply to disperse and move more quickly than the enemy can spot you. Even Ukrainian special forces operating in small teams can be found by Russian drones if they stay in one place for too long.

This jeopardy is reflected in a curiously sparse battlefield. In Ukraine some 350,000 Russian troops are arrayed on a front line stretching 1,200km (750 miles)—around 300 men per km and, at times last year, less than half that. That is around a tenth of the average for the same area in the second world war, notes Christopher Lawrence, head of the Dupuy Institute, which collects such data. Battalions of several hundred men fill areas that would once have been covered by brigades of a few thousand.

In theory, says Mr Lawrence, this seems a ripe environment for attackers. Thin front lines are easier to break through. And new sensors, more accurate munitions and better digital networks make it easier to find and strike targets. The catch is that attackers must concentrate their forces to pierce well-defended front lines, as Ukraine is now trying to do with its counter-offensive. And such concentrations can be detected and struck—not always, but more often than in the past. “At this time,” concludes Frank Hoffman of the National Defence University in Washington, “a shift in favour of the defender is evident in ground warfare just as it was in the days of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, when the firepower revolution of the late 19th century made massed formations and manoeuvre prohibitively difficult.”

The result is a paradox. Precision warfare can counter some advantages of mass: Ukraine was outnumbered 12 to one north of Kyiv. It can also complement mass. Software-based targeting saves around 15-30% in shells, according to sources familiar with the data. But what precision cannot do, says Michael Kofman of the Centre for Naval Analyses (CNA), a think-tank, is substitute for mass. The idea behind the Soviet reconnaissance-strike complex or America’s RMA was to win by paralysing the enemy, not wearing him down. But there seems to be no escape from attrition. War on the cheap is an illusion. Many people expected Russia’s invasion to be “a second Desert Storm”, says Andrew Krepinevich, an American defence official who pioneered the idea of the RMA in the 1990s. “What we got was a second Iran-Iraq war.”

This special report focuses on the military lessons, especially for the West, from the war. These include logistics, civil defence and naval warfare. Russia, too, is learning lessons. The place to begin, however, is with a technology that threatens to blunt some of the advantages of drones and precision: electronic warfare.■

The Economist

Conclusion:

Silicon Valley and the Somme

For liberal societies the temptation is to step back from the horrors of Ukraine, and from the vast cost and effort of modernising their armed forces. Yet they cannot assume that such a conflict, between large industrialised economies, will be a one-off event. An autocratic and unstable Russia may pose a threat to the West for decades to come. China’s rising military clout is a destabilising factor in Asia, and a global resurgence of autocracy could make conflicts more likely. Armies that do not learn the lessons of the new kind of industrial war on display in Ukraine risk losing to those that do.

A new era of high-tech war has begun

Technology has transformed the battlefield. Democracies must respond accordingly

The Economist

Big wars are tragedies for the people and countries that fight them. They also transform how the world prepares for conflict, with momentous consequences for global security. Britain, France and Germany sent observers to the American civil war to study battles like Gettysburg. The tank duels of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 accelerated the shift of America’s army from the force that lost in Vietnam to the one that thumped Iraq in 1991. That campaign, in turn, led China’s leaders to rebuild the People’s Liberation Army into the formidable force it is today.

The war in Ukraine is the largest in Europe since 1945. It will shape the understanding of combat for decades to come. It has shattered any illusions that modern conflict might be limited to counterinsurgency campaigns or evolve towards low-casualty struggles in cyberspace. Instead it points to a new kind of high-intensity war that combines cutting-edge tech with industrial-scale killing and munitions consumption, even as it draws in civilians, allies and private firms. You can be sure that autocratic regimes are studying how to get an edge in any coming conflict. Rather than recoiling from the death and destruction, liberal societies must recognise that wars between industrialised economies are an all-too-real prospect—and start to prepare.

As our special report explains, Ukraine’s killing fields hold three big lessons. The first is that the battlefield is becoming transparent. Forget binoculars or maps; think of all-seeing sensors on satellites and fleets of drones. Cheap and ubiquitous, they yield data for processing by ever-improving algorithms that can pick out needles from haystacks: the mobile signal of a Russian general, say, or the outline of a camouflaged tank. This information can then be relayed by satellites to the lowliest soldier at the front, or used to aim artillery and rockets with unprecedented precision and range.

This quality of hyper-transparency means that future wars will hinge on reconnaissance. The priorities will be to detect the enemy first, before they spot you; to blind their sensors, whether drones or satellites; and to disrupt their means of sending data across the battlefield, whether through cyber-attacks, electronic warfare or old-fashioned explosives. Troops will have to develop new ways of fighting, relying on mobility, dispersal, concealment and deception. Big armies that fail to invest in new technologies or to develop new doctrines will be overwhelmed by smaller ones that do.

Even in the age of artificial intelligence, the second lesson is that war may still involve an immense physical mass of hundreds of thousands of humans, and millions of machines and munitions. Casualties in Ukraine have been severe: the ability to see targets and hit them precisely sends the body-count soaring. To adapt, troops have shifted mountains of mud to dig trenches worthy of Verdun or Passchendaele. The consumption of munitions and equipment is staggering: Russia has fired 10m shells in a year. Ukraine loses 10,000 drones per month. It is asking its allies for old-school cluster munitions to help its counter-offensive.

Eventually, technology may change how this requirement for physical “mass” is met and maintained. On June 30th General Mark Milley, America’s most senior soldier, predicted that a third of advanced armed forces would be robotic in 10-15 years’ time: think of pilotless air forces and crewless tanks. Yet armies need to be able to fight in this decade as well as the next one. That means replenishing stockpiles to prepare for high attrition rates, creating the industrial capacity to manufacture hardware at far greater scale and ensuring that armies have reserves of manpower. A nato summit on July 11th and 12th will be a test of whether Western countries can continue to reinvigorate their alliance to these ends.

The third lesson—one that also applied for much of the 20th century—is that the boundary of a big war is wide and indistinct. The West’s conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by small professional armies and imposed a light burden on civilians at home (but often lots of misery on local people). In Ukraine civilians have been sucked into the war as victims—over 9,000 have died—but also participants: a provincial grandmother can help guide artillery fire through a smartphone app. And beyond the old defence-industrial complex, a new cohort of private firms has proved crucial. Ukraine’s battlefield software is hosted on big tech’s cloud servers abroad; Finnish firms provide targeting data and American ones satellite comms. A network of allies, with different levels of commitment, has helped supply Ukraine and enforce sanctions and an embargo on Russian trade.

New boundaries create fresh problems. The growing participation of civilians raises legal and ethical questions. Private companies located outside the physical conflict zone may be subject to virtual or armed attack. As new firms become involved, governments need to ensure that no company is a single point of failure.

No two wars are the same. A fight between India and China may take place on the rooftop of the world. A Sino-American clash over Taiwan would feature more air and naval power, long-range missiles and disruptions to trade. The mutual threat of nuclear use has probably acted to limit escalation in Ukraine: nato has not directly engaged a nuclear-armed enemy and Russia’s threats have been bluster so far. But in a fight over Taiwan, America and China would be tempted to attack each other in space, which could lead to nuclear escalation, especially if early-warning and command-and-control satellites were disabled.

Silicon Valley and the Somme

For liberal societies the temptation is to step back from the horrors of Ukraine, and from the vast cost and effort of modernising their armed forces. Yet they cannot assume that such a conflict, between large industrialised economies, will be a one-off event. An autocratic and unstable Russia may pose a threat to the West for decades to come. China’s rising military clout is a destabilising factor in Asia, and a global resurgence of autocracy could make conflicts more likely. Armies that do not learn the lessons of the new kind of industrial war on display in Ukraine risk losing to those that do. ■

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The Economist

Western armies are learning a lot from the war in Ukraine

Ukraine is teaching armies to think, train and plan differently

The Economist

SALISBURY PLAIN in England is a far cry from Zaporizhia. But—briefly—Russians are here. A battalion from the British Army’s parachute regiment plays Task Force Hannibal, a unit that mimics Russian doctrine. They face battalions from the Royal Irish and Gurkha regiments. The “Storm Wessex” exercise imitates conditions in Ukraine: precise firepower, the “pervasive stare” of sensors and jamming galore. The visual and electronic signatures of each unit are shown to commanders. In the control centre, a satellite image shows the radar-reflecting corrugated-iron roof of a defensive position: the lesson, it is better to use wood. Engine exhausts are covered to hide from infrared cameras. Voices are hushed to evade acoustic sensors.

Soldiers learn by failing. In round one a battlegroup uses high-frequency radio. The source is located and wiped out. In round two troops communicate securely. Hannibal sends a drone to investigate. The group’s camouflage is sub-par and it is destroyed again. In round three the group is quiet, concealed and its sentry shoots down the drone. That is a mistake: Hannibal rains fire on its last recorded position. By round five the defenders have wised up to use decoy electronic emitters. “By doing this,” says an officer, “our young leaders are learning in a much more visceral way.”

Western armies are busily identifying what lessons they can find from Ukraine. Every two weeks the British army collects data from the battlefield and from Wiesbaden in Germany, a hub for supporting Ukraine. A “Russia-Ukraine Insights Hub” led by Rear Admiral Andrew Betton has written a highly classified 70-page report. “It’s reinforcing some age-old lessons,” says the rear admiral. “Resilience is one of the core strands that comes out of our work: the resilience of your military, the resilience of your industrial base, but fundamentally the resilience of your society.”

It is still early to draw firm conclusions. The urban grind of Bakhmut differs from armoured thrusts. Tactics that work one month fail the next, as people adapt. And a war on the European steppe between two Soviet-legacy armies differs from a future air and sea war in the Pacific. But some principles are emerging.

First, the modern battlefield can be an unsparing place. Modern sensors can see things with unprecedented fidelity. Modern munitions can hit them with unprecedented precision. Artificial intelligence, whether on board a drone or in a corps hq, fuelled by torrents of data, can identify and prioritise targets with unprecedented speed and subtlety. But Western armies are not optimised to master these technologies. America’s years-long procurement cycle is “fine for tanks or helicopters”, says T.J. Holland of America’s XVIII Corps, but “too slow to keep up with the pace of cyber”.

Need to keep moving

Second, armies that want to survive must disperse, hide and keep on the move. Camouflage and deception are back in vogue. Headquarters must shrink in size, frequently change location and mask their radio emissions. “I haven’t met a soldier who hasn’t learned something from our Ukrainian partners,” says Major-General Chris Barry, director of the British Army’s land-warfare centre. “The way they dig their positions…it drives [our] standards up.” One official notes that Ukrainian troops, having learned the hard way to minimise electronic signatures, do not switch their mobile phones on even in the English countryside.

Fitness still matters. The need for “constant movement” will be brutal on troops, observes General James Rainey of the us Army’s Futures Command: “What are the effects on the humans operating at that kind of tempo?” An attack that would once have required a three-to-one numerical advantage over the defender might now require nine-to-one, he says, for soldiers will not have time to rest.

Third, technology is pushing firepower and intelligence further down the chain of command. A platoon with access to Ukraine’s Delta app, loitering munitions and Starlink terminals can see and strike targets that would once have been the preserve of higher echelons. “This journey of combining arms is getting lower and lower,” says General Barry, pointing to Russia’s failure to seize an airfield north of Kyiv on the war’s first day. “The defining act at Hostomel, the destruction of the first aircraft that really unpicked the Russian assault, was probably done by an individual with a phone, a Stinger [missile] and a drone.”

This has many implications. It will complicate logistics: how do you push food, ammo and medical care to a larger number of smaller units that are increasingly spread out? It will change recruitment and training: soldiers need more initiative, technical knowledge and skill. It is also an opportunity. Armies once had to concentrate forces in one place to achieve mass. Now they can deliver the same effect in a decentralised way. The us Marine Corps, which is pushing precision weapons down to squads of 13 people, is reorganising itself on these principles.

There is a fourth lesson, too. Technology can make war more efficient. But if both sides have the technology, even a highly efficient war is likely to involve enormous costs in blood, metal and treasure. Armies without the size and depth to absorb losses and remain viable on the battlefield may find that no amount of digital wizardry or tactical nous can save them.■

The Economist

How Ukraine’s enemy is also learning lessons, albeit slowly

Russia is also absorbing lessons from the war

The Economist

EveRYONE IS learning from the war, including Russia. A paper by Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of RUSI shows how its tactics have improved. The authors have published detailed studies of the war that are read avidly by the West’s armed forces and defence ministries. Their report draws on interviews with Ukraine’s general staff and its brigades.

Consider infantry tactics. Russia now sends small packets of “disposable” infantry, a handful of men at a time, often under the influence of amphetamines, to “skirmish…until killed”, exposing Ukrainian positions. Larger groups of better-trained assault infantry then move in, backed by armour, mortars and artillery. If a position is taken, it is fortified within 12 hours. “The…speed with which Russian infantry dig, and the scale at which they improve their fighting positions, is noteworthy,” say Mr Watling and Mr Reynolds. Russian engineers have built fortifications and bridges and laid minefields.

Russian gunnery is improving. Drones can be connected to artillery batteries via the Strelets computer system, letting Ukrainian targets be struck within minutes of detection. One tactic, say the authors, “is for the Russians to withdraw from a position that is being assaulted and then saturate it with fire once Ukrainian troops attempt to occupy it.” Such “fire pockets” are one of the biggest risks to Ukraine’s counter-offensive. Russian tanks also make better use of camouflage. They fight at dusk and dawn when their temperature signature is less obvious. Russia’s reactive armour, which explodes outward, has “proven highly effective”, with some tanks surviving multiple hits.

Russian air defences, much derided on social media, are increasingly connected, allowing them to share data on incoming threats. They are shooting down a significant proportion of strikes by GMLRS—the GPS-guided rockets, fired from American HIMARS launchers—that played havoc with Russian headquarters last year. Russia has been pulling command-and-control centres farther back, dispersing and hardening them and wiring physical cables to brigades closer to the front. Meanwhile Russia’s air force, an irrelevance for much of the war, is making more use of glide bombs, in which a guidance kit is fitted to older “dumb” munitions. That poses a growing threat to Ukrainian troops moving south.

Early in the war one masked Ukrainian soldier gained fame when he said: “We’re lucky they’re so fucking stupid.” Russia’s army is beset by problems, including poor recruitment and a lack of modern equipment. Its elite units have been decimated. It is unlikely to have serious offensive capability for the rest of this year. The recent short-lived mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries will not have boosted morale. Yet the army remains a formidable obstacle. “There is evidence of a centralised process for identifying shortcomings in employment and the development of mitigations,” conclude the RUSI authors. Major-General Viktor Nikolyuk, in charge of army training for Ukraine, says: “It is impossible to say that the enemy does not know how to fight. We learned a lot from them, too, [on] tactics.”■

The Economist

Why logistics are too important to be left to the generals

Russia’s invasion shows how war can hinge on logistics

The Economist


THE ISRAELI historian Martin van Creveld called armies “ambulant cities”. Keeping hundreds of thousands of armed men fuelled, fed and equipped is a Herculean effort. Sending them to war without regard for such things can go badly wrong. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 offers a cautionary tale. In the first days of the war Russian troops flooded south from Belarus with inadequate food, fuel or ammunition. Military convoys clogged up the roads to Kyiv—including a remarkable 60km (37 miles) traffic jam north of the capital. Ukrainian drones, special forces and artillery tormented the slow-moving invaders. Unarmoured fuel trucks and other logistics vehicles were especially juicy targets. In a battle south of Chernihiv, says a general, “They thought they had us surrounded…we just cut off all the logistics for them and that’s it.” The unit was destroyed with artillery.

Such foul-ups revealed deeper problems. All modern armies use two approaches to logistics, explains Ronald Ti, a military logistician at King’s College London: “pull” logistics, which involve responding flexibly to consumption and demand signals by units in the field, and “push” logistics, in which ammo and material are dispatched based on predetermined rates of use. Russia relies on the second, says Dr Ti, largely because of a Soviet legacy of top-down command and a lack of modern supply-chain management. That works well if consumption is stable. It rarely is—as the first days of the war in Ukraine showed.

Western armies tend to have high “tooth-to-tail” ratios, with as many as ten support personnel for every combat soldier. Russia has fewer. Like the Soviet Union, it relies on moving fuel by pipeline and other material by rail. That can be highly efficient: Russia’s army managed to shift and fire a cumulative total of 700,000 tonnes of shells and rockets in the first five months of the war. But it ties the army to railheads and large depots nearby. That has turned out to be a problem. In the spring of 2022 Russian shellfire was grinding down Ukraine’s army in the eastern Donbas. Russian guns out-pounded Ukrainian batteries by three to one. That changed when Ukraine acquired American HIMARS launchers and European systems capable of firing rockets precisely over 70km. Suddenly it could hit Russian fuel depots and ammo dumps well behind the front lines. Many had not budged since 2014.

The ensuing bonfire of supplies starved Russian guns of ammo. It forced Russia to switch from big, centralised depots to smaller, dispersed ones farther from the front. The longer distances to haul heavy shells, plus a paucity of trucks, pallets and logisticians, threw grit into the wheels of Russia’s military machine. Ukrainian officials say this paved the way for successful offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv. Nico Lange, a former German defence official, says that a Ukrainian soldier chalked up this success to understanding Russia’s logistical weaknesses: “It’s basically like fighting ourselves from ten to 15 years ago.”

Ukraine is not immune to such problems. Many of its arms depots were blown up in the years before the war in suspected Russian sabotage. Others have been struck since. Its army also relies on railways. But its supply lines have proved more reliable, agile and resilient—helped by the fact that it is fighting on its own soil. Mr Lange points out that Ukraine’s rail-based logistics depend on domestic steel and metal industries, which provide a ready stock of parts and tools, and a rapid repair capacity. Old locomotives and transport cars have been pulled out of storage. “It is probably no exaggeration to state that no European NATO state today would be capable of military logistical achievements like those of Ukraine during this war,” he concludes.

One lesson is that logistics are too important to be left to the generals. Some 30 flights a day land in Rzeszow, in eastern Poland, carrying military aid for Ukraine. It is sent on overland to depots around the country, where military units get it to the front line. This has been a joint effort by the state, private sector and civil society, says a Ukrainian minister closely involved. About 90% of it is financed by the private sector, he says, with money and vehicles coming from agricultural firms, energy companies with petrol stations, and banks. Close co-operation with Poland means that paperwork at the border for arms shipments takes minutes—a degree of frictionless cross-border military movement that would be the envy of many NATO members.

The problem is keeping the weapons going once they arrive. Steven Anderson, a retired American general who oversaw logistics in Iraq, says that the “operational readiness rate” for equipment there was 95%. Anything below 90% would get a commander pulled up in front of bosses. In Ukraine anecdotal data suggests it is only around 50%, he says. “Half of what we give them is broken at any given time and they’re struggling mightily.” For much of the war, Ukraine’s exhausted artillery pieces have been sent to eastern Europe to fix. Since the autumn, more can be repaired in Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city near the southern front. But its capacity is limited. Mr Anderson complains that less than 4% of American aid has been allocated to support and maintenance.

The rush to improvise

One result is improvisation. A scramble for spares is part of every war. During the Falklands war Britain raided aviation museums around the world for refuelling probes for Vulcan bombers. Ukraine’s challenge is acute: it operates what is probably the most diverse arsenal of artillery and armour anywhere. Each system requires different ammo, spare parts and skills. And each is working more intensively than its manufacturers expected. Repair kits designed for moderate use have proved completely unsuitable for barrel-melting, gun-shaking barrages.

That is forcing Ukraine to pioneer new forms of wartime sustainment. Ukrainian volunteers are 3D-printing spare parts in buildings a few hours’ drive from the front. Key to this is decentralisation. Individual brigades often find their own parts rather than asking the general staff’s logistics command. “They just go to the garage,” says one source familiar with the underground supply chain, “and say: I need this piece. Can you do it?” Separately, America’s Airborne XVIII Corps is using algorithms to estimate the barrel life of Ukrainian howitzers, when they need spare parts and when fresh munitions must be pushed to the front.

America has grown used to sustaining wars thousands of miles away with scant threats to ships, planes and trucks carrying supplies to ports, airfields and depots. Those days are over. “Decades of wargaming, analysis, and empirical evidence suggest that attacking [American] logistical dependencies…is the most effective way of fighting the United States,” concludes Chris Dougherty, a former Pentagon planner, in a paper. Chinese attacks on logistics have “paralysed” American forces in war games, he says. He urges the Pentagon to shift money from combat forces to logistics. Armies need to position more stocks forward and “live off the land” to acquire fuel, lubricants, food and spare parts locally. Troops must fight on their own for weeks with minimal support, he adds. Logistics have long had “second-class status”, he says, despite a “starring role” in military history. Ukraine shows that anew. ■

The Economist

The latest in the battle of jamming with electronic beams

Jamming is knocking drones and missiles out of the sky

The Economist

WHEN UKRAINIAN gunners began firing Excalibur precision-guided shells early in the war they were cock-a-hoop. Ordinary shells required many rounds to hit their targets, even if you knew precisely what you were aiming at. Excalibur, guided by GPS, appeared to be a silver bullet: one shot, one strike. But in March 2023 something changed. Excalibur shells began falling out of the sky or failing to destroy their targets. And not just one: weeks went by without registering a successful hit. It was an unsettling reminder of how the electronic war in Ukraine has profoundly affected the visible one.

If modern warfare rests on three pillars—ever-more powerful sensors to detect targets, increasingly precise munitions to hit them, and networks that connect the two—electronic warfare can chip away at each. Excaliburs were probably dropping like flies because Russia was turning on powerful jammers that disrupted the GPS signals guiding them to their targets or, more likely, the radar fuze that tells them when to explode. They were not the only weapons to be discombobulated in this way.

Leaked Pentagon documents from the spring show that four out of nine Ukrainian air strikes with American-supplied JDAM-ER bombs may have missed their targets because of Russian GPS jamming. “[Russian] jammers are a high priority,” read one slide, “and we will continue to…recommend that those jammers are disrupted/destroyed…to the maximum extent possible.” GMLRS, the precision-guided rockets fired by American HIMARS launchers, have also increasingly missed targets or failed to achieve their desired effects. The airwaves in Kyiv and Moscow are thick with jamming as both sides seek to deflect drones and missiles.

This sort of electronic warfare (EW, in the lingo) is not new. It probably began in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese war. Although the shells of that era were dumb—the radar proximity fuze was 40 years away and GPS satellites more than 70—the age of radio had arrived. An enterprising Russian radio operator in Port Arthur drowned out transmissions from a Japanese warship that was helping correct naval gunfire. During the second world war, the so-called battle of the beams saw Britain jam and deceive radio signals used by German bombers to navigate to their targets. And as air power grew in importance through the cold war, finding and jamming the emissions of air-defence radars became vital.

Ukraine sometimes loses as many as 2,000 drones in a single week

Russia was long believed to excel at this. It invested heavily in new EW vehicles a decade ago and battle-tested many in Ukraine in 2014 and then Syria in 2015, often causing disruption to civilian airliners. But its latest invasion of Ukraine offers a more mixed picture. Russian EW was “highly effective” in some areas, concludes the RUSI think-tank. Ukrainian jets initially found that their communications, navigation and radar were all disrupted and in some cases knocked out. The disruption to Excalibur has disturbed some Western officials. But Russia’s land and maritime capabilities have been “lacklustre”, argues Thomas Withingon, an expert analyst of EW. “Our [pre-war] assessment of Russian EW capability was at the pessimistic end of the range,” agrees Edward Stringer, a retired air marshal in Britain’s Royal Air Force. “Russian EW is eminently beatable.”

It may not always feel like that to a drone operator. Ukraine sometimes loses as many as 10,000 drones in a single month. Around half of those losses are directly caused by electronic attack, according to Andriy (not his real name), a senior officer in Ukraine’s general staff. Jamming often blocks the control signals used to fly a drone remotely or the communication link needed to send data. Operators can get round this by telling a drone to fly a preset route and downloading data when it returns, but that delays targeting by hours. And it does not resolve the core problem: that most drones are lost when their GPS signal is disrupted, causing them to wander off.

This creates a stark trade-off for defenders. Military drones (and missiles) can be fitted with special receivers that read “M-code” signals from American GPS satellites. Those signals are higher powered than civilian GPS and encrypted, making them both easier to pick up and harder to jam—about eight times harder, says Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a non-profit in Virginia. But M-code receivers are subject to export controls and pricier. Electronic shielding costs money and adds weight. Ukraine’s drone fleet is mostly cheap to the point of being easily disposable.

That is changing, albeit slowly. Ukrainian officials hope to phase out the Chinese DJI consumer drones that are ubiquitous on both sides of the front line in favour of more professional platforms. “One of the takeaways from Ukraine is that having any unencrypted radio link is no longer a choice,” says Mr Withington. “If you’re NATO, you need to encrypt everything.” Even then, M-code would offer only “marginal” benefit, cautions Mr Goward, because the technology is now nearly two decades old and GPS signals are inherently weak.

Being weak is not the same as being unusable. Western armies have long worried that Russia’s electronic blitz might counter their technological advantage. “Electronic warfare is the great leveller,” wrote Major-General Charles Collins, assistant chief of the general staff in the British army, in a recent paper. “By depriving forces of connectivity, it drives armies back to the 20th century.” Yet that has not proved true in Ukraine.

In truth, jamming is imperfect and intermittent. One reason is that EW systems are scarce. Russia has been forced to keep some at home to protect cities and bases. Another is that using them comes at a price. Big jammers emit a powerful signal, making them conspicuous targets. Russia has had to pull many of its best ones farther to the rear, says one official. This leaves gaps to exploit. America is providing Ukraine with cuts, or maps, of electromagnetic activity—essentially, the location of jamming and the frequencies used—32 times a day, says T.J. Holland of America’s XVIII Corps. That is a boon to Ukrainian drone operators.

Jamming the jammers

It is not the case that EW has cut off all communications, either. Russia has failed to knock out the Starlink terminals that give Ukraine’s army near-universal internet access via communication satellites. One reason is that a Starlink beam is extremely narrow —you have to get within 100-200 metres to spot it, says Andriy. Russian EW vehicles also seem incapable of jamming Starlink radio frequencies or the SINCGARS tactical radios that America has supplied to Ukraine, says Mr Withington.

If Russian EW has frequently fallen short, at times it has also been too powerful for its own good. A paper by Justin Bronk and his colleagues at RUSI describes “serious electronic fratricide”. Two days into the invasion, Russia had to scale down ground-based jamming because it was hindering the Russian army’s own communications. That is one reason why Ukrainian air-defence radars could be turned back on, causing Russian warplanes to be downed in significant numbers by March 2022. Moreover, Russian jets flying in pairs found that EW pods on one interfered with the other’s radar. In effect, they could choose between jamming incoming missiles or having a functioning radar.

There are other ways to defeat EW. Drones that have GPS jammed can resort to terrain matching: comparing images of the ground below to a stored map. The technique dates to the 1950s and is used by many cruise missiles, like America’s Tomahawk. But modern algorithms and computing power allow it to be done with remarkable precision, at lower cost and on a tiny chip.

GPS can also be supplemented with signals from communications satellites in low orbit (like Starlink), ground-based transmission sites (like Russia’s Loran system) and even magnetic-field navigation, suggests Mr Goward. And as weapons increasingly morph into explosive computers, the line between EW and cyber-attacks is blurring. Andriy, the Ukrainian officer, says Ukraine often inserts malicious code into Russian drones mid-flight.

EW is ultimately a game of cat and mouse. Russia and Ukraine both seek “electromagnetic supremacy”, says Mr Withington, but neither can achieve it for good. “Control will ebb and flow throughout the battle.” Jammers will find a way through; defenders will eventually plug the gap. America helped fix the problems with JDAM-ER by ensuring that the bombs acquired a good GPS signal before leaving the plane, according to leaked documents. Excalibur is now hitting its targets again, says a Western official. “In EW, things change very fast,” says Andriy. But the battle must be waged. “In this war, we see that if you do not dominate this domain, you will not be effective in other domains.”■

The Economist

Technology is deepening civilian involvement in war

Another chapter in our special report on the future of warfare considers the big legal questions raised by the fusion of civilian and military activity

The Economist

EARLY IN THE war 20 Russian fuel tankers rolled into Sedniv, a small town in Chernihiv province, north of Kyiv. “The locals called us,” says Major-General Viktor Nikolyuk, commander of Ukrainian forces in the north, “and said: what should we do?” His answer was simple: “Drain them.” Locals on horses and tractors, carrying bottles, barrels and teapots, siphoned off fuel with the cry of Slava Ukraini—glory to Ukraine. The general could hardly believe it when another round of tankers appeared shortly afterwards. Those, too, were relieved of their cargo.

Small wars are fought by a country’s armed forces. Total wars are waged by entire nations. Civilians have played a huge role in the defence of Ukraine. When Ukrposhta, Ukraine’s national postal agency, held a competition to design a stamp, the winning entry depicted a tractor towing away a captured Russian tank—one of the war’s most iconic images. When Kyiv was under threat, civilians mixed Molotov cocktails to hurl at invading armoured vehicles. Volunteers have raised money for vehicles and drones. The Serhiy Prytula Foundation, a civilian charity, even bought a satellite for the army. “Kyiv has placed cross-society resistance at the heart of its national defence,” writes Hanna Shelest of Ukrainian Prism, a think-tank.

Not uncommonly for total wars, the civilian-military distinction has broken down. “A huge role was played by the local population,” says General Nikolyuk. Locals hid mobile phones from Russian troops and revealed the location of their equipment by dropping virtual pins on Google Maps (a dedicated government app, eVorog, now offers a way for civilians to pass on intelligence). Colonel Oleh Shevchuk, commander of Ukraine’s 43rd artillery brigade, and Serhiy Ogerenko, his chief of staff, speaking to Ukrainska Pravda, a newspaper, say civilians helped correct artillery fire, even using their own commercial drones.

Colonel Shevchuk says that, if his men knew that Russians were near a particular village but were unsure precisely where, they would open Google Maps, find a local shop and cold-call it. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine! Do you have any kaptsaps [Russians] about? Yes. Where? Where? Behind Grandma Hanna’s house. Which house is that? Well, everyone knows her! So you talk to people a little bit and work out where everything is.” On one occasion, he says, a petrol-station owner offered the password to its surveillance camera, giving the army a live view of a Chechen column heading for Kyiv.

Digitally enabled popular resistance on this scale would have been largely impossible 15 years ago. Jack McDonald of King’s College London points out that, when America invaded Afghanistan in 2001, less than 1% of the local population had access to the internet. In Syria in 2011, when a civil war was already under way and mobile-phone footage of combat became widespread, the rate was still only 22%. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 it had reached 46%. When it did it again last year the figure had shot up to almost 80%. “What you’re seeing in Ukraine,” he says, “is what’s going to be standard.”

This connectivity and the proliferation of smartphones that rely on it has accelerated and transformed an older form of civilian-military collaboration, familiar from the resistance networks of occupied France in the second world war. For some time, says General Sir Jim Hockenhull, Britain’s chief of defence intelligence at the outset of the invasion, armies tried to make every soldier and platform a sensor. “What’s happened is that so many people have become sensors.” The result, he says, is a crowd-sourced “civilian sensor network” that has proved “really, really important”.

Digitally enabled popular resistance on this scale would have been impossible 15 years ago

The civilian network is not just for sensing. On February 26th, two days into the war, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy minister, publicly appealed to volunteers to conduct cyber-attacks against Russian businesses and government departments. The result was the IT Army of Ukraine, a group of nearly 200,000 volunteer hackers. Mr Fedorov asked hackers to target Russian state agencies, state-owned firms and banks.

Civilian involvement extends beyond Ukraine’s borders. By providing connectivity through its Starlink satellites, SpaceX has become an integral part of the Ukrainian army’s kill chain. Satellites operated by ICEYE, a Finnish firm, provide detailed radar images of Russian military positions. Ukraine’s Delta app, essentially a live map which fuses military intelligence from different sources, is hosted on cloud servers abroad, points out Keir Giles of Chatham House, a think-tank.

Who is fighting whom?

This growing “civilianisation of the digital battlefield”, as Kubo Macak, a legal adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), calls it, has legal consequences. ICEYE satellites may be legitimate military objectives, legal experts say. Since Delta is facilitating combat operations, Russia would consider its cloud servers abroad to be “valuable targets”, suggests Mr Giles. The IT Army’s activities have prompted serious misgivings among scholars of international law and cyberspace.

A core principle of international humanitarian law is that armed forces must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. But if civilians are building drones, hauling military gear over the border from Poland, reporting on troop movements through apps and correcting artillery fire over video chat, do they become legitimate military targets? The Geneva Conventions lay down that civilians lose protection “for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities”. But what this means is hotly disputed.

The ICRC says direct participation must involve actions that deliberately affect military operations in favour of one side. That is a high bar. Experts agree that civilians who just answer questions do not meet the threshold. Colonel Shevchuk’s phone calls would not automatically implicate those who pick up. Moreover, most intelligence passed on by apps is “too general or insignificant to meet the threshold of harm criterion,” argues Mr Macak. A civilian would have to gather and transmit information “as part of a co-ordinated operation for the purposes of a specific attack”. But flying a drone to correct shellfire would surely qualify.

One lesson is that connectivity is increasingly a vital military resource. The Taliban long ago tore down mobile-phone towers to stop Afghan villagers sending tip-offs to security forces. Mexican drug cartels now use signal-jamming equipment. General Nikolyuk says that civilian assistance was less forthcoming in Kharkiv and Donetsk in the east because Russia had disrupted mobile-phone networks in those areas.

All this presupposes that armies are making good-faith efforts to discriminate between civilians and soldiers—that they care about the laws of war. If Ukrainian civilians have so often been willing to jeopardise their status as non-combatants, it may be because Russia’s army has shown scant regard for such niceties. General Nikolyuk recalls Russian troops establishing a headquarters in a school in Yahidne, a village south of Chernihiv. Hundreds of locals were imprisoned in the basement. On another occasion in nearby Lukashivka, he says Russian soldiers, spotting a Ukrainian drone, forced women and children to walk down the street as human shields. “What do you do in such cases? You bite your fists with impotence and that’s it.”■

The Economist

How oceans became new technological battlefields

Ukraine has repelled the Black Sea Fleet. But naval drones may not be enough to defeat it

The Economist

“LARGER FLEETS win,” says Rear Admiral James Parkin, the Royal Navy’s director of development. Out of 28 maritime battles, he says, all but three were won by the bigger fleet. When Russia invaded Ukraine last year it had around 20 warships in the Black Sea. Ukraine’s navy barely existed. On day one, it scuttled its sole frigate—a rusty Soviet-era cruiser on which this correspondent once hitched a ride to Odessa—to stop it falling into Russian hands. Yet the war at sea, like the one on land, has confounded expectations. “After the war we will certainly write a textbook,” says Vice-Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, Ukraine’s navy chief. “And we’ll send it to all the NATO military academies.”

The inflection point came on April 14th 2022, when Ukraine sank the Moskva, a Russian cruiser, the largest loss of a warship since the Falklands war in 1982. The Black Sea Fleet promptly moved back and is still 100-150 nautical miles off the Ukrainian coast, says Admiral Neizhpapa. That has lifted the threat of an amphibious assault on Odessa: anti-tank obstacles that once guarded roads have been pushed aside and soldiers sent to other parts of the front. And it paved the way for a deal in July whereby Russia agreed to let Ukraine keep exporting grain. This helps not only Ukraine, 70% of whose pre-war trade went through the Black Sea, but also grain-importing countries of the global south.

There was nothing revolutionary about the Moskva operation. “To me, it shows the importance of proper land-based anti-ship missiles, sea mines and good intelligence,” says Niklas Granholm of FOI, Sweden’s defence research agency, “all put together in a coherent operational concept.” Luck played a role: atmospheric conditions might have let Ukraine’s radars see unusually far. So did Russia’s ineptitude. Just as its massive tank losses were down to poor tactics, not technological change making armour obsolete, so the Moskva is a cautionary tale of getting the basics right.

Being hit is one thing; failing to control the subsequent fire is another. “Damage control remains a key metric against which professional naval standards should be assessed,” concludes Alessio Patalano of King’s College London. “On the day of the sinking I was confronted by army colleagues: this must surely be the end of the idea of building big warships?” recalls Rune Andersen, chief of the Norwegian navy. “I said no: it’s the end of having a 40-year-old warship which hasn’t been updated and without trained crews.” A newer warship with better air defences and a sharper crew might have parried the Ukrainian missiles.

A striking feature of the war has been Ukraine’s use of uncrewed surface vessels

The maritime contest is in stalemate. Ukraine has achieved “sea denial” near its coast, stopping Russian ships coming close. But Russian warplanes roam freely, preventing Ukrainian naval vessels from coming out. The result is a “grey area” of 25,000 square kilometres in the north-west Black Sea in which neither side can “move freely”, says Admiral Neizhpapa. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet squats in relative safety, imposing a distant blockade and frequently lobbing Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine. Ukraine has good intelligence on the fleet’s movements thanks to America and Britain, which are fusing data from satellites and surveillance aircraft. But it lacks missiles with sufficient range to hit what it sees. That has forced it to turn to other means.

A striking feature of the war has been Ukraine’s use of uncrewed surface vessels (USvs), essentially drone boats, to reach Russian-controlled territory. In October and November these were deployed alongside aerial drones to attack Sevastopol, headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and an oil depot in Novorossiysk, a Russian port. Other attacks have followed, including an apparently successful hit on an intelligence ship near the Bosporus on May 24th. These carry on a long tradition of naval raiding.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels used a USV to strike a Saudi frigate in 2017. America tried drone boats as early as the 1940s. But modern electronics, powerful artificial intelligence and ubiquitous satellite communications—in Ukraine’s case via Starlink—have made possible sleek USVs that are less conspicuous on radar and have the ability to navigate over long distances and find targets. Ukraine cannot match the Black Sea Fleet on equal terms. But it can chip away at its ports and logistics.

“Drones are very important elements of our warfare right now,” says Admiral Neizhpapa. “The warfare of the future is a warfare of drones.” He adds that Ukraine is learning by doing. “No other country has as much experience using naval drones.” Whether that will be enough to break Russia’s blockade is another question. A raid on Sevastopol in March seems to have been repelled, with one USV blocked by a boom and two others destroyed by machineguns. Not every USV will get through. But the technology is proving itself on another, murkier front of the naval war.

On September 26th 2022 explosions ripped through the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea. The culprits remain unknown. But the incidents underscored the vulnerability of underwater infrastructure to sabotage. Russian reconnaissance of cables and pipelines is decades old, well-resourced and growing in intensity, according to American and European security officials.

In April a Scandinavian documentary unveiled details of a fleet of Russian ships, disguised as fishing trawlers and research vessels, operating in the North Sea. One of those ships, the Admiral Vladimirsky, was tracked near seven wind farms off the British and Dutch coasts during a single trip. When journalists approached, they were greeted by masked gunmen.

Protecting every inch of cable or pipeline is impossible, concede naval officials. But drones are part of the answer. After the Nord Stream attacks, European governments urgently wanted to map out potential threats. Admiral Andersen says Norway reached out to private companies working offshore in activities such as oil and gas. “We found an industry with a huge sense of responsibility and a willingness to contribute.”

Within days he had 600 advanced undersea drones, some remotely operated and others autonomous. Working with Britain, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, these scanned “every inch” of gas infrastructure over 9,000 square kilometres, before moving on to power and data cables. The project showed how technology that once seeped from the military into the civilian world can now move in the other direction. On February 15th NATO established a new critical undersea infrastructure co-ordination cell to encourage such defensive co-operation.

Offence is another matter. The paradox is that the countries helping Ukraine to build such systems—often in deep secrecy—and providing it with the intelligence necessary to use them effectively, such as up-to-date maps of Russian jamming, are themselves constrained in their ability to develop the same technology at home. “The things that a British company funded by British taxpayers’ money and cohered by British military officers can do in Ukraine I cannot do in the UK because peacetime regulations forbid it,” laments Admiral Parkin.

European maritime authorities do not want drones wandering off course into civilian waters. That prevents navies from training and experimenting as boldly as they might. Pity the ambitious admiral. “We’re at a bit of a moment in uncrewed surface vessels in particular which is equivalent to the man with a red flag walking in front of a motor car.”■

The Economist

4:25 minute video at this link: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/07/03/video-how-we-studied-the-lessons-of-ukraine

Video: How we studied the lessons of Ukraine

The Economist

Shashank Joshi, The Economist’s defence editor, has spent months analysing how technology is reshaping warfare. Artificial intelligence, drones and satellites are increasingly changing the characteristics of war, but old lessons still matter. Here he explores what can be learned from the Ukraine war, which has become a testbed for technologies of the future.

The Economist

Sources and acknowledgments

The Economist

In addition to those quoted in this report, I am grateful to many others who shared their expertise in one form or another. My colleagues Oliver Carroll, Arkady Ostrovsky and Marta Rodionova have provided vital insights. I have benefited greatly from the work of those who translate material related to the war, including wartranslated.com. Thank you also to Dima Adamsky, Ben Barry, Eyal Berelovich, Mykola Bielieskov, Justin Bronk, General Thierry Burkhard, Rear Admiral Andrew Betton (and his team), Major General James Bowder, Samuel Cook, Ryan Evans, Robert Dalsjo, Captain John Foreman, Franz-Stefan Gady, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, David Johnson, Michael Kofman, Anthony King, Rob Lee, Julian Lindley-French, Whitney McNamara, Nick Reynolds, William F. Owen and Jack Watling. Many others, particularly those in Ukraine, must remain anonymous.

The Economist

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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FAIR ENOUGH

RISKS AND REWARDS

The war in Ukraine shows how technology is changing the battlefield

But mass still counts, argues Shashank Joshi in the first of seven chapters of a special report on the future of warfare

Enter the drones

Silicon Valley and the Somme

A new era of high-tech war has begun

Silicon Valley and the Somme

Western armies are learning a lot from the war in Ukraine

Ukraine is teaching armies to think, train and plan differently

Need to keep moving

How Ukraine’s enemy is also learning lessons, albeit slowly

Russia is also absorbing lessons from the war

Why logistics are too important to be left to the generals

Russia’s invasion shows how war can hinge on logistics

The rush to improvise

The latest in the battle of jamming with electronic beams

Jamming is knocking drones and missiles out of the sky

Jamming the jammers

Technology is deepening civilian involvement in war

Another chapter in our special report on the future of warfare considers the big legal questions raised by the fusion of civilian and military activity

Who is fighting whom?

How oceans became new technological battlefields

Ukraine has repelled the Black Sea Fleet. But naval drones may not be enough to defeat it

​4:25 minute video at this link: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/07/03/video-how-we-studied-the-lessons-of-ukraine​

Video: How we studied the lessons of Ukraine

Sources and acknowledgments

4:25 minute video at this link: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/07/03/video-how-we-studied-the-lessons-of-ukraine