Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Life is short. That’s all there is to say. Get what you can from the present – thoughtfully, justly."

- Marcus Aurelius

“Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me; I want people to know ‘why’ I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way, and some of the roads weren’t paved.”

- Will Rogers

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing the evidence that they never existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 11 (Putin's War)

2. Breadbasket Diplomacy: Preserving Wheat as a Tool of American Statecraft

3. People Win Wars: A 2022 Reality Check on PLA Enlisted Force and Related Matters

4. How Putin’s Ukraine War Has Only Made Russia More Reliant on China

5. The big Taiwan question, as China issues warnings and holds military drills: Is a Chinese invasion imminent?

6. The Other Ukrainian Army

7. Russia Can’t Fight a War and Still Arm the World

8. On Taiwan, China meets its ‘gray-zone’ warfare match

9. FDD | Time for Change at the UN’s Human Rights Division

10. Time for Israel to pivot away from Beijing - opinion

11. Five Minutes from Disaster (Iran)

12. Recruitment is now a real threat to a frail force facing formidable foes

13. How Things Could Have Gone Wrong – and Still Can – in the Taiwan Strait

14. Observations on Iran’s Plot to Kill John Bolton

15. Did Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip Close the Thucydides Trap?

16. US foreign arms sales spike to nearly $20B in the dog days of summer

17. Will the Crimea explosions escalate the Ukraine war?

18. China and Russia Can't Be Ignored by the West Anymore

19. The New ‘Monuments Officers’ Prepare to Protect Art Amid War

20. U.S. Secretly Bolstered Security at Federal Buildings Against Possible Iranian Attacks After Soleimani Killing

21. Xi Jinping’s Reach Exceeds His Grasp

22. Rhythm of War: A Thunderous Blast, and Then a Coffee Break

23. Alleged Tornado Cash developer arrested in Amsterdam

24. China’s growing reach is transforming a Pacific island chain

25. How does use of ‘ninja missile’ change counterterrorism?

26. Here are the veterans who will benefit from Congress’ sweeping toxic exposure bill

27. The Army is making its first uniform bra. Vets say it’s long overdue.

28. Scandals in US adviser brigade alarm leaders behind closed doors

29. 'Founded on a culture of excellence': New Fort Bragg commander to oversee training of special operation forces

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 11 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.iswresearch.org/2022/08/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment_1 1.html

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 11

iswresearch.org · by Alexander Mitchell · August 12, 2022

Kateryna Stepanenko, Layne Philipson, Angela Howard, Katherine Lawlor, Karolina Hird, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 11, 9:00 pm 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.

The US State Department called on Russian forces to cease all military activity surrounding the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and support the creation of a demilitarized zone amidst new reports of shelling at the ZNPP on August 11.[1] The US State Department also called on Russia to return control of the plant to Ukraine.

Ukrainian and Russian occupation authorities accused each other of shelling the ZNPP on August 11. Ukraine’s nuclear operating enterprise Energoatom reported that Russian shelling damaged the area of the commandant’s office, storage of radiation sources, and the nearby fire station.[2] The fire station is approximately 5km east of the ZNPP. The Ukrainian Strategic Communications Center stated that Russian forces are deliberately staging provocations at the ZNPP and are carrying out dangerous experiments involving power lines to blame Ukrainian forces at the United Nations (UN) Security Council.[3] Russian-appointed Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Administration Head Yevgeniy Balitsky claimed that Ukrainian shelling damaged the ”Kakhovskaya” high-voltage power line, resulting in a fire and a large cloud of smoke seen on social media footage from the city.[4]

Russian officials have previously accused Ukraine of striking positions of crucial significance to Ukrainians – such as the falsely-claimed HIMARS strike on the Olenivka colony in occupied Donetsk Oblast. A CNN investigation concluded that “there is almost no chance that a HIMARS rocket caused the damage to the warehouse where the prisoners were being held.”[5] Russians may be continuing a similar narrative around the ZNPP to discourage further Western support to Ukraine. ISW cannot independently verify the party responsible for the shelling of the ZNPP.

Russia’s 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade (64th SGMRB) of the 35th Combined Arms Army (CAA) has likely been destroyed in combat, possibly as part of an intentional Kremlin effort to conceal the war crimes it committed in Kyiv Oblast. Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty (RFEFL) investigative journalist Mark Krutov conducted an investigation into the brigade following its participation in atrocities in Bucha and concluded that after heavy fighting on the Izyum and Slovyansk axes, the brigade has largely ceased to exist.[6] Krutov stated that out of 1,500 soldiers who were in the brigade before the war, 200 to 300 were likely killed.[7] Krutov quoted CNA Russia Studies director Michael Kofman’s estimates that the typical ratio for those killed to those wounded in action is around 1 to 3.5, which would mean that the 64th SGMRB suffered up to 700 to 1,000 wounded in action.[8] It is typical for Russian units that are so severely degraded during combat to be disbanded and survivors reallocated into other combat elements, but Krutov noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot disband the 64th SGMRB without embarrassment. Putin had awarded the brigade the honorary ”guards” designation on April 18, following the emergence of evidence that it had committed war crimes in Bucha.[9] The brigade was rushed back into combat in eastern Ukraine after it had completed its withdrawal from around Moscow without much time to rest, refit, receive replacements, or recover. Speculation at the time ran that the Kremlin was eager to have the brigade destroyed in combat to avoid revelation of its war crimes.[10]

Ukrainian intelligence warned that the Kremlin is setting conditions to launch an informational attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an effort to discredit him. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that the Russian Presidential Administration approved the creation of a new informational task force within the Russian special services responsible for establishing the fake “Zelensky Foundation.”[11] The foundation will feature an unspecified falsified proposal targeting foreign aid organizations and will operate as a ”multi-level marketing” scheme likely focusing on recruitment in European countries. The GUR noted that the main concept behind the foundation is to distribute misinformation in the European media sphere. The GUR noted that as of August 10, Russian special services had created a site for the foundation, prepared social media fake screenshots and comments, and established a network of bloggers to promote the foundation. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar echoed similar concerns that Russia has intensified its information operations by spreading rumors in an effort to create friction between Ukrainian military and political officials.[12]

A collection of complaints sent to the Russian military prosecutor’s office and verified by Bellingcat and the Insider included instances of Russian authorities tricking or coercing conscripts into taking combat positions, limiting the extent of information provided to the families of Russian soldiers, and failing to provide soldiers with basic food or medical care. The archive includes reports that Russian commanders have ordered soldiers to launch assaults with no equipment, refused to allow soldiers to quit or to dismiss them for clearly fileable offensives, and failed to notify soldiers’ relatives of their death.[13] The report also highlighted complaints from residents of occupied Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts that accused Russian forces of looting, trespassing, and firing military equipment from civilian infrastructure.

Ukrainian General Staff Main Operations Deputy Chief Oleksiy Gromov stated that Ukrainian forces were not responsible for explosions at the Zyabrovka airfield near Gomel, Belarus overnight on August 10-11.[14] The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MOD) claimed that an inspection run caused an engine fire at the Zyabrovka airfield and that there were no casualties.[15] Senior Advisor to Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovkaya Franak Viacorka amplified local reports of at least eight explosions near the Zyabrovka airfield.[16] Social media video footage showed flashes near the airfield.[17]

Key Takeaways

The US State Department called on Russian forces to cease all military activity surrounding the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) amidst new reports of shelling at the ZNPP.
Russian forces conducted ground attacks east of Siversk and northeast and southeast of Bakhmut.
Russian forces continued ground attacks on the north and southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City.
Ukrainian officials confirmed additional Ukrainian strikes on Russian command posts and ammunition depots along the Southern Axis.
Russia’s Khabarovsk Krai is forming two new volunteer battalions.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those 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 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.

· Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);

· Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts

· Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City

· Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis

· Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts

· Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks in the Izyum area on August 11. Russian forces conducted an airstrike near Zalyman (30km northwest of Izyum) and continued to shell settlements along the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border around Izyum and Slovyansk on August 11.[18]

Russian forces conducted several ground attacks east of Siversk on August 10 and August 11. Russian forces attempted ground assaults around Hryhorivka (7km northeast of Siversk), Verkhnokamyanske (3km east of Siversk), and Ivano-Darivka (7km southeast of Siversk).[19] Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai noted that private military company forces now launch most Russian attacks, likely due to the continued degradation of conventional forces.[20] Russian forces continued routine shelling in the Siversk direction.[21]

Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks around Bakhmut on August 11 and are likely concentrating forces in the Bakhmut direction to capitalize on recent marginal gains along this axis of advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops retreated following failed offensives in the directions of Yakovlivka (16km northeast of Bakhmut), Bakhmutske (10km northeast of Bakhmut), Zaitseve (20km south of Bakhmut), Vershyna (13km southeast of Bakhmut), and Dacha (18km south of Bakhmut) and an unsuccessful reconnaissance-in-force attempt near Yakovlivka.[22] Russian forces targeted the Bakhmut area with air, artillery, and anti-aircraft missile strikes on August 9 and 10 and will likely continue efforts to advance on Bakhmut from the north, east, and south.[23]

Russian forces continued ground assaults to push northwest from Donetsk City on August 11. The Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian retreats following failed offensive operations in the direction of Marinka (5km west of the southern outskirts of Donetsk City) and Pisky (6km north of Donetsk City).[24] Russian and Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) sources claim to control roughly 90% of Pisky, excluding a small Ukrainian-held section of northwest Pisky, as well as major chunks of Marinka and Zaitseve.[25] Several social media sources posted imagery of Russian forces firing heavily on Pisky with TOS-1A thermobaric artillery systems, which suggests that Russian forces are using combined arms army-level artillery assets to complete the capture of small villages after leveling them and leaving essentially nothing behind.[26] Russian forces have previously relied heavily on artillery systems to completely destroy small rural villages, which they then claim control of. Russian troops will likely continue to seek strategic positions northwest of Donetsk City and in the Avdiivka direction to push fighting further away from occupied Donetsk City.

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground assaults along the Kharkiv City Axis on August 11. Russian forces conducted airstrikes on Staryi Saltiv, approximately 45km northeast of Kharkiv City, and Rtyshchivka, approximately 60km southeast of Kharkiv City, and continued shelling Kharkiv City and settlements to the north and northeast using tank, tube, and rocket artillery.[27] The Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor’s Office reported on August 11 that Russian forces used S-300 missiles to strike civilian infrastructure in Kharkiv City overnight on August 10-11.[28]

Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)

Russian forces continued to launch air and artillery strikes along the Kherson Oblast administrative border but did not conduct offensive operations on August 11. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched airstrikes on Andriivka, Bila Krynytsya, Lozove, and Velyke Artakove (near the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River), and Novohryhorivka and Myrne (north of Kherson City).[29] Ukrainian General Staff Main Operations Deputy Chief Oleksiy Gromov noted that Russian aviation operations have decreased since the explosions at the Saky airfield in Crimea.[30] Russian forces fired artillery along the entire line of contact in Kherson Oblast. Russian forces launched rockets from Grad and Uragan MLRS systems at Nikopol and Kryvyi Rih districts, respectively.[31] Russian forces also continued to shell Mykolaiv Oblast with tube and rocket artillery.[32]

Ukrainian military officials confirmed additional Ukrainian strikes against Russian command posts and ammunition depots in Southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported hitting the command post of the Russian 126th Guards Coastal Defense Brigade in Novokamyanka and an ammunition depot in Barvinok, 62km east and 20km northwest of Kherson City, respectively.[33] Ukrainian forces also reportedly damaged a command and observation post of a battalion tactical group of the 76th Airborne Assault Division in Ischenka (just east of the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River) and destroyed a command post of the 49th Combined Arms Army (CAA) near Chervonyi Mayak (about 30km northeast of Nova Kakhovka).[34] ISW has previously reported that Ukrainian forces reportedly struck a command post of the 49th CAA in Chornobaivka (about 5km northwest of Kherson City) on August 6, which could suggest that Russian forces either split or moved their command posts from Kherson City.[35] Both strikes suggest that Russian forces are maintaining or relocating their positions within the range of US-provided HIMARS systems. Ukrainian forces inflicted significant losses on Russian officers and senior personnel in Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy Oblasts situated in command posts near the frontline even before receiving HIMARS systems in part because Russian commanders moved close to the front lines to control their troops. Russian forces are apparently continuing to endanger their command posts, likely to be ready to control their forces in anticipation of a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive. It is unclear when or if Ukrainian forces will launch a large-scale ground counteroffensive in southern Ukraine, but they are effectively using Russian preparations for such a counteroffensive to attrit Russian leadership and logistics capabilities.

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

Russian federal subjects (regions) continued to form regionally-based volunteer battalions. Khabarovsk Krai Governor Mikhail Degtyaryev announced on August 10 that Khabarovsk Krai registered two battalions, named “Baron Korf” and “Svyatitel Innokentiy,” that are actively recruiting volunteers to deploy to Ukraine.[36] Degtyaryev stated that the battalions will accept anyone ages 18-50 and will provide a one-time payment of 250,000 rubles (approximately $4,124) for signing a short-term contract for a period of 6 months to 3 years.[37]

Russian military officials continued taking measures to compensate for personnel losses in Ukraine. Ukrainian General Staff Main Operations Deputy Chief Oleksiy Gromov reported that Russian forces are appointing former sergeants to platoon commanders upon completing brief officers' courses.[38] Gromov noted that forced mobilization for the 2nd Army Corps reserves continues in occupied Luhansk Oblast, with Russian occupation authorities planning to call up 8,000 people in occupied Ukrainian territories.[39] Gromov reported that 60% of the Russian Armed Forces consists of volunteers under short-term contracts and that morale within the Russian ranks remains low.[40] Gromov’s statements are consistent with ISW’s assessment from early March that Russian forces will continue to rapidly replace degrading reserves with less prepared volunteer forces.[41] Gromov also emphasized that Kremlin officials have suspended and are actively investigating 30-40% of generals and officers who assisted in planning the Ukraine invasion due to “strategic failures.”[42] Gromov suggested that Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov only remain in power to prevent the complete discreditation of the Russian military and its leadership.[43]

Unconfirmed reports claim that Russian officials replaced Black Sea Fleet Commander Igor Osipov with Vice Admiral Viktor Sokolov on August 11.[44]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Russian occupation authorities in Mariupol are preparing for show trials and potential executions of Ukrainian Prisoners of War (POWs) from the Azovstal plant. Russian sources on August 9 and 10 published videos showing the preparation of halls in the Mariupol City Philharmonic for public tribunals and of cage-like cells to hold the POWs.[45] Ukrainian Mayor of Mariupol Vadym Boychenko stated on August 11 that the tribunal may be held on August 24, the 31st anniversary of Ukraine’s independence.[46] Mariupol Mayor Advisor Petro Andryushchenko reported that Russian forces also conducted demonstrative arrests of civilians dressed in uniforms with Azov Regiment chevrons in order to create the illusion of taking action to address the Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol.[47] Andryushchenko’s statement indicates that Russian authorities are using both the arrests and trials to create a narrative for domestic audiences that presents Russian law enforcement efforts in occupied territories as capable and effective while demoralizing Ukrainian forces, civilians, and partisans. Preparations for these show trials are reminiscent of the Stalinist “Moscow Trials” of 1936-38, a component of the Great Purge in which Stalin used sham judicial proceedings in public trials followed by executions.

The head of the Russian proxy Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), Denis Pushilin, stated on August 11 that he will announce the date of the referendum on accession to Russia "as soon as [the DNR] is liberated within the constitutional boundaries.”[48] The illegitimate DNR constitution claims all of Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, much of which Russia does not yet control. Pushilin is an imperfect and unpredictable proxy spokesman and may have made this statement as part of an internal bureaucratic debate over which parts of Donetsk Oblast (if any) the current DNR government will be able to govern after Russia annexes the territory. Alternatively, Pushilin could be signaling that the Kremlin will postpone its faux annexation referenda beyond the expected date of September 11, contradicting ISW’s August 10 assessment that the Kremlin may accelerate the annexation of occupied Ukrainian territory.[49]

Ukrainian partisans in occupied territories continue to resist the occupation and the planned pseudo-referendum, particularly in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on August 11 that partisans are preparing to target Russian occupation officials who are preparing for the sham referendum in Melitopol. The Center implicitly confirmed that partisans were responsible for an explosion at the headquarters of United Russia, the political party of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Melitopol on the night of August 8 and warned that the explosion should serve as a “warning” to those who attempt to legitimize the referendum.[50] Ukrainian Mayor of Melitopol Ivan Fedorov claimed on August 11 that partisans also destroyed a service center for the Russian Internal Affairs Ministry at which Russian policemen were distributing Russian passports and Russian car registration.[51] The advisor to the Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol, Petro Andryushchenko, reported a large explosion in Mariupol’s Central District on August 10, which he attributed to ”resistance.”[52] Andryushchenko claimed that occupation authorities are trying to strengthen counter-sabotage measures in response.

Russian officials continue to gloss over partisan attacks; the Russian-appointed head of the Kherson Oblast Occupation Administration Kiril Stremousov claimed on August 11 that Kherson is ready ”to join the large and friendly Russian family” despite Ukrainian claims of debilitating partisan activity and resistance.[53]

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.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-backs-calls-demilitarized-zone-around-ukraine-nuclear-power-plant-state-dept-2022-08-11/

[2] https://t.me/energoatom_ua/8849; https://t.me/orlovdmytroEn/793 ; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/16971; https://t.me/energoatom_ua/8847; https://t.me/energoatom_ua/8842; https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1557720019152343040; https://t.me/energoatom_ua/8842; https://t.me/stranaua/57234;

[3] https://t.me/spravdi/15136

[4] https://t.me/BalitskyVGA/170; https://t.me/mariupolnow/17276; https://t.me/mariupolnow/17277; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1557719533166940160; https://t.me/entime2022/1319

[5] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/08/europe/olenivka-donetsk-prison-attack/index.html

[6] https://svoboda.org/a/31981693.html; https://t.co/xkKYrGMG6D; https://t.co/Oaeepl95jC; https://twitter.com/kromark/status/1557380744900743168?s=20&t=W8c9yJBvYm6jykPfb6a7zA

[7] https://twitter.com/kromark/status/1557380744900743168?s=20&t=W8c9yJBvYm6jykPfb6a7zA

[8] https://twitter.com/kromark/status/1557380744900743168?s=20&t=W8c9yJBvYm6jykPfb6a7zA

[9] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-army-casualty-rate-64th-brigade-bucha-deaths/31982194.html

[10] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-5

[11] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/pro-pidhotovku-informatsiinoi-aktsii-po-dyskredytatsii-prezydenta-ukrainy.html

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQnKkO9-IZg

[13] https://theins dot ru/politika/252097

[14] https://www dot ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3548317-u-genstabi-ne-pidtverdili-pricetnist-zsu-do-vibuhiv-na-teritorii-biloruskoi-zabrovki.html

[15] https://t.me/modmilby/16963

[16] https://twitter.com/franakviacorka/status/1557492757933039616; https://twitter.com/franakviacorka/status/1557503626926514179; https://twitter.com/franakviacorka/status/1557606601317548033; https://twitter.com/franakviacorka/status/1557696773166190594

[17] https://twitter.com/franakviacorka/status/1557696773166190594

[18]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid032HoWcRg4oLpCpuesHascMYhX5z1pDesjRJZWnwG1rtAtgmR5PofANk8RRmzbYu2wl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02C5G18iBC3GeU5hzFMsnew2iaid6JzXHULtDdKjUWpABKdBGEo7H5NzF2m67RRQwVl; https://t.me/synegubov/3880; https://t.me/spravdi/15121; https://t.me/rybar/37024

[19]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid032HoWcRg4oLpCpuesHascMYhX5z1pDesjRJZWnwG1rtAtgmR5PofANk8RRmzbYu2wl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02C5G18iBC3GeU5hzFMsnew2iaid6JzXHULtDdKjUWpABKdBGEo7H5NzF2m67RRQwVl; https://t.me/rybar/37009

[20] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/4915

[21]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02C5G18iBC3GeU5hzFMsnew2iaid6JzXHULtDdKjUWpABKdBGEo7H5NzF2m67RRQwVl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid032HoWcRg4oLpCpuesHascMYhX5z1pDesjRJZWnwG1rtAtgmR5PofANk8RRmzbYu2wl; https://t.me/rybar/37024

[22]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid032HoWcRg4oLpCpuesHascMYhX5z1pDesjRJZWnwG1rtAtgmR5PofANk8RRmzbYu2wl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02C5G18iBC3GeU5hzFMsnew2iaid6JzXHULtDdKjUWpABKdBGEo7H5NzF2m67RRQwVl

[23]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid032HoWcRg4oLpCpuesHascMYhX5z1pDesjRJZWnwG1rtAtgmR5PofANk8RRmzbYu2w; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02C5G18iBC3GeU5hzFMsnew2iaid6JzXHULtDdKjUWpABKdBGEo7H5NzF2m67RRQwVl; https://t.me/pavlokyrylenko_donoda/4495; https://t.me/rybar/37024

[24]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid032HoWcRg4oLpCpuesHascMYhX5z1pDesjRJZWnwG1rtAtgmR5PofANk8RRmzbYu2wl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02C5G18iBC3GeU5hzFMsnew2iaid6JzXHULtDdKjUWpABKdBGEo7H5NzF2m67RRQwVl

[25] https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/16525; https://t.me/sashakots/34863; https://t.me/sashakots/34874; https://t.me/sashakots/34876; https://regnum dot ru/news/3667823.html

[26] https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1557649889022169088; https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1557470246793281536; https://t.me/stranaua/57194; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1557673012094189569; https://t.me/milchronicles/1008; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1557661959503454208; https://t.me/stranaua/57194; https://t.me/milchronicles/1008; https://t.me/milinfolive/88588; https://t.me/kommunist/8300

[27]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid032HoWcRg4oLpCpuesHascMYhX5z1pDesjRJZWnwG1rtAtgmR5PofANk8RRmzbYu2wl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02C5G18iBC3GeU5hzFMsnew2iaid6JzXHULtDdKjUWpABKdBGEo7H5NzF2m67RRQwVl; https://www.facebook.com/Zadorenko/posts/pfbid0365rtxoTwTvKNqdbYPvV51TVRwKaHbDU2YYQ7Sjt8SFDUhGMjDBRahWKrtUKbLjrYl; https://t.me/rybar/37024

[28] https://t.me/prokuratura_kharkiv/5410

[29]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid032HoWcRg4oLpCpuesHascMYhX5z1pDesjRJZWnwG1rtAtgmR5PofANk8RRmzbYu2wl; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02C5G18iBC3GeU5hzFMsnew2iaid6JzXHULtDdKjUWpABKdBGEo7H5NzF2m67RRQwVl

[30] https://www dot ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3548352-pisla-vibuhiv-u-krimu-intensivnist-aviacii-rf-na-pivdni-znizilas-genstab-zsu.html

[31] https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1524; https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1524; https://t.me/vilkul/1705; https://t.me/vilkul/1704; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1232003107558887; https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/488; https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/480; https://t.me/vilkul/1706

[32] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1232003107558887; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1526071881140511; https://t.me/senkevichonline/2016; https://t.me/mykolaivskaODA/2089;

[33] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1526071881140511

[34] https://t.me/khersonskaODA/797; https://t.me/spravdi/15119

[35] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-6

[36] https://vostokmedia dot com/news/politics/11-08-2022/habarovskiy-kray-formiruet-imennye-dobrovolcheskie-batalony-rezerva-vooruzhennyh-sil

[37] https://vostokmedia dot com/news/politics/11-08-2022/habarovskiy-kray-formiruet-imennye-dobrovolcheskie-batalony-rezerva-vooruzhennyh-sil

[38] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/11/okupanty-planuyut-mobilizuvaty-na-tot-luganshhyny-shhe-8-tysyach-osib/

[39] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/11/okupanty-planuyut-mobilizuvaty-na-tot-luganshhyny-shhe-8-tysyach-osib/; https://www dot rbc.ua/ukr/news/okkupanty-hotyat-mobilizovat-eshche-8-tysyach-1660221359.html

[40] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/11/okupanty-planuyut-mobilizuvaty-na-tot-luganshhyny-shhe-8-tysyach-osib/

[41] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/explainer-russian-conscription-reserve-and-mobilization

[42] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/11/tretyna-okupantiv-shho-planuvaly-speczoperacziyu-represovani/

[43] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/11/tretyna-okupantiv-shho-planuvaly-speczoperacziyu-represovani/

[44] https://t.me/milinfolive/88585; https://sevastopol dot su/news/istochniki-soobshchili-o-smene-komandovaniya-chernomorskim-flotom-v-sevastopole

[45]https://t.me/historiographe/3940; https://t.me/historiographe/3924; https://t.me/andriyshTime/2238; https://t.me/historiographe/3931; https://t.me/historiographe/3928; https://t.me/andriyshTime/2237; https://t.me/mariupolnow/17238; https://t.me/stranaua/57038; https://t.me/mariupolrada/10510

[46] https://t.me/mariupolrada/10524; https://t.me/mariupolnow/17272; https://t.me/kommunist/8309; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTYcUyz8m0Q; https://t.me/stranaua/57204

[47] https://t.me/andriyshTime/2260; https://t.me/mariupolnow/17263

[48] https://t.me/stranaua/57143; https://ria dot ru/20220811/referendum-1808764583.html

[49] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-10

[50] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/08/11/v-melitopoli-partyzany-ogolosyly-polyuvannya-na-organizatoriv-psevdoreferendumu/

[51] https://t.me/zalpalyanytsya/1317

[52] https://t.me/andriyshTime/2259

[53] https://t.me/Stremousov_Kirill/211

iswresearch.org · by Alexander Mitchell · August 12, 2022

2. Breadbasket Diplomacy: Preserving Wheat as a Tool of American Statecraft

Conclusion:

Recognizing wheat security and export capacity is a national security issue, and the United States needs a strategic plan for wheat, appreciating wheat as a diplomatic tool beyond food aid.

Breadbasket Diplomacy: Preserving Wheat as a Tool of American Statecraft - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Rosella Cappella Zielinski · August 11, 2022

Is the world facing “a potential mass starvation event” due to the war in Ukraine? It is starting to look that way. Vladimir Putin is weaponizing food and America is losing wheat as a tool of statecraft to counter it. The invasion and Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea has created unprecedented market volatility and fears of a global food crisis. States that rely on Ukrainian wheat — notably those in the Middle East and Africa such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen — will bear the immediate blunt of the crisis, but it will have far-reaching global effects.

While various attempts to unlock Ukrainian wheat are taking shape, most notably the tenuous deal brokered by Turkey and the United Nations at the end of July, they will not come soon enough to prevent starvation for some or in significant enough volumes to provide price relief for others. As Michael Kofman noted, while the Kremlin supports the deal, it knows little Ukrainian grain will make it to market and that Russia can let the deal collapse when it is convenient. These are also short-term solutions; the war will have longer term effects on Ukrainian wheat. Russian shelling in the Kherson region has resulted in large-scale fires with hundreds of hectares of wheat burned. More notable is the loss of prime agricultural producing regions to Russia and long-term loss of export capacity due to war damage to port facilities and loss of territorial control of key ports.

Become a Member

The United States, historically one of the largest wheat exporters, has been unable to come to the rescue as wheat has lost it place on U.S. farms and in government stockpiling programs. The United States, once referred to as the “Breadbasket of the World,” has seen sharp declines in wheat plantings and its share of global exports as U.S. farmers have increasingly chosen to plant other, more profitable commodities.

It is critical the United States get this capacity back not only in response to the war in Ukraine but in preparation for possible future attempts by Russia to incite a wheat crisis. States that would prefer not to enrich Putin’s coffers by purchasing stolen Ukrainian grain from Russia or even Russian wheat may not have another viable choice. Perhaps more importantly, securing American wheat export capacity is critical in the face of global food security challenges due to climate change and rising shipping and transport costs.

American Wheat as a Tool of Statecraft

Until recently, American wheat has been a vital tool of U.S. statecraft.

During World War I, the loss of French wheat fields to trench warfare and Russian and Ukrainian wheat due to the closing of the Dardanelles meant European allies would face food insecurity. Scarcity and high wheat prices in Britain, France, and eventually Italy resulted in political instability and bread riots. In March 1918 the prime ministers of France, Great Britain, and Italy issued a joint statement proclaiming their “deliberate conviction that food shortage, with its effect on the morale of the population, which has been one of the principal causes of the breakdown of Russia, is the greatest danger at present threatening each of the European Allies.”

American wheat was critical to the war effort against Germany and Austria-Hungary. As early as 1914, U.S. exports to its European allies were dominated by grain. American economist Edwin Clapp wrote in 1916 that, “Contrary to the general impression, our main exports to Europe have not been the weapons of war … The explanation for our great increase in exports is found rather in the group we call food, especially in breadstuffs.”

Shipped across the Atlantic under great peril, American wheat ensured the civilian populations in Britain, France, and Italy were fed at reasonable prices, allowing the respective governments to focus on the war effort. War posters in all the allied countries reflected the importance of wheat.

By 1918, American wheat imports were more critical to the European allies than munitions. In a joint statement, the leaders of France, Britain, and Italy declared to the Americans that a shipment of 1,000,000 tons of wheat in February and March of 1918 was the “minimum” because “the need of bread cereals in Europe cannot be exaggerated.” The shipping required to provide more wheat was achieved but was only “possible by reduction of the importation of munitions to such an extent as would not have been contemplated but for the critical character of the food situation.”

Wheat aid continued after the end of the war. In 1921, drought and famine broke out in the Volga and Ural regions in the Soviet Union. The famine, exacerbated by the government’s mass requisition of grain in previous years, is estimated to have killed about 100,000 people a week. Key to the relief effort was American wheat. Led by Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Administration, in December 1921, Congress passed an appropriation to send $20 million worth of corn and wheat seed to the Soviet Union. A survivor of the famine, Zukra Ibragimova, later captured the effect of American food aid: “People used to call that food ‘America,’” she says. “So we were handed out ‘America.’ At home, people cooked soup out of it, fed their children. This, of course, was a great help to us. My father used to say, ‘See, the Americans did the right thing, sent us help.’”

Other examples of wheat as a tool of statecraft abound. In the first ever televised U.S. presidential address from the White House, on October 5, 1947, President Harry S. Truman said of Europe, “Their most urgent need is food. If the peace should be lost because we failed to share our food with hungry people, there would be no more tragic example in all history of a peace needlessly lost.” President Truman’s recognition of the role ample food plays in maintaining peace was put into federal law under President Eisenhower shortly after the United States entered the Cold War. The Agricultural Trade, Development and Assistance Act of 1954, better known as its later title, “Food for Peace,” took surplus commodities from U.S. farmers to provide humanitarian assistance to around the world.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States capitalized on its wheat abundance to demonstrate American superiority though often under the guise of humanitarian assistance and economic development. In 1958, Sen. Hubert Horatio Humphrey undertook a yearlong study to review the operation, goals, and achievements of the Food for Peace program. The report, Food and Fiber as a Force for Freedom, criticized the narrow use of the program and noted, “A breakthrough in the conquest of hunger could be more significant in the cold war than the conquest of outer space.” The report was explicit in its recommendation, the United States should compete with the Soviet Union on food:

Thanks to our farm people, the United States is in a far better position than Russia to lead the world toward the conquest of hunger and want. At a time when we are trying to catch up with the Soviet Union in other areas of competition, agriculture is one segment of our economy already geared to meet any emergency challenge, already offering us fully productive resources to meet any Soviet threat of economic warfare throughout the world.

Both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations heeded the report’s recommendation and embraced American food — specifically wheat — power. In 1963, an increasing grain crisis forced the Soviet Union to seek wheat on the global market. In early October, Soviet officials approached the United States to purchase four million tons of American wheat. The National Security Council and Congress both took up the issue, using the sale of American wheat to draw down Soviet monetary reserves. President John F. Kennedy stated the sales would also represent a propaganda victory because they would “advertise to the world, as nothing else could, the success of free American agriculture. They demonstrate our willingness to relieve food shortages, to reduce tensions and to improve relations with all countries; and they show that peaceful agreements with the United States which serve the interests of both sides are a far more worthwhile course for our adversaries to follow than a policy of isolation and hostility.”

The Johnson administration continued to use American wheat surplus to meet national security goals. In the mid-1960s, facing reduced food production due to lower than expected rainfall and the inability to purchase grains from commercial suppliers due to foreign exchange constraints, India appealed to the United States for food assistance. President Lyndon B. Johnson, instead of providing food aid outright, engaged in short-term month-to-month contracts (known as short-tether policy) to extract concessions from India. Specifically, he used American wheat shape Indian agricultural reforms and foreign policy, specifically less vocal criticism to U.S. war policy in Vietnam.

This surplus of wheat continued to become part of America’s arsenal of democracy. In 1974, the secretary of agriculture, described food as a weapon that could be used to achieve American national objectives. He later told Time that his influence with both American and foreign diplomatic officials increased considerably during the 1970s because when he came “calling with wheat in my pocket, they pay attention.”

Losing Wheat as a Tool of Statecraft

Though the United States is still the largest provider of in-kind food aid in the world (half of which is wheat), it no longer has the wheat capacity to come to the aid of others. Indeed, when the Russians stole Ukrainian grain and blocked the rest of it from leaving the country, America was unable to fill the needs of the wheat-importing nations effected.

Until the 1990s, various farm programs (coupled deficiency payments, the farmer-owned reserve, and marketing loan programs) all ensured a large supply of wheat. While these policies were criticized for producing overwhelming stocks of grain and depressing prices for farmers, they provided large stocks of wheat available for U.S. foreign policy objectives. “Food for Peace” and “Food for Progress” are two such programs that date back to the early days of the Cold War that allowed America’s agricultural bounty to be used as a tool of statecraft.

Changes to U.S. farm policy in 1990s — the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990 and the Freedom to Farm Act of 1995 — eroded this surplus. The end of federal acreage allotments occurred almost simultaneously with rapid technology gains in other grains and oilseeds — namely the adoption of genetically modified technology. U.S. farmers went from planting an average of more than 70 million acres of wheat at the end of the Cold War to less than 50 million today.

At the same time U.S. wheat acres began to shrink and production leveled off, it began to face increasing competition in overseas markets — especially from Russia and former Soviet Union countries that were modernizing their agricultural production systems. In 2004, Putin led a program aimed at ensuring 80 to 95 percent self-sufficiency in grain production. By 2017, Russia had become the world’s top wheat exporter, passing the United States and Canada for the first time and making Russia an agricultural export powerhouse. Putin was quoted as saying, “We are number one. We beat the U.S. and Canada.” Russian newfound wheat production was heavily directed at price-sensitive markets across the Middle East and North Africa. With the benefit of growing domestic production and cheap regional freight Russia and other Black Sea suppliers gobbled up wheat market share.

While Russia has emerged as the world’s top wheat exporter, China has emerged as the largest producer, consumer, and stockpiler of wheat in the world. It is estimated that over half of the world wheat stocks reside in China, which has made wheat and food a national priority and part of its national strategy.

“Considering the persistently rising grain demand, and the complicated international situation, grain security must be highlighted constantly. We’d rather produce and stockpile more. The pressure of more is incomparable to that of less,” said President Xi, according to the recently disclosed transcript of his speech. While China’s wheat production appears to ensure self-sufficiency rather than weaponization, China’s efforts to prioritize wheat supply with ambitious intent and policies has led them to be challenged with noncompliance with WTO rules and have been found in violation with subsidy programs.

Knowing the United States could no longer be the cheapest wheat supplier in the world, U.S. wheat growers and exporters turned towards premium export customers and geared the entire supply chain to deliver quality wheat at higher prices. This industry direction has effectively removed a tool from the U.S. foreign policy toolbox — the promise of ample, affordable wheat supplies. That tool, which was used to feed allies in World War I, rebuild Europe after World War II, and to garner the support of countries around the world in the Cold War, is no longer there. Worse yet for America’s strategic position, it has been claimed by Russia and potentially China. With Russian status as the world’s largest wheat exporter and reports of a coming record harvest, hungry countries around the globe are about to be put in the uncomfortable position of securing food from a widely sanctioned regime that has shown no restraint in its willingness to use food as a weapon of war.

Reinvesting in Wheat as a Foreign Policy Tool

To safeguard American wheat as a tool of statecraft, the United States needs to ensure its competitiveness in the global market. To once again become competitive, policymakers need to adopt new wheat technologies, invest in infrastructure to reduce transportation costs, and revive America’s strategic intent to be a leader in humanitarian grain assistance.

The United States ought to embrace genetically modified technology in food production. It is critical the wheat industry, with the support from the Biden administration, get serious about policies and approvals necessary to bring genetically modified wheat traits to the market. While in the 1990s corn and soybean framers embraced the genetic revolution, wheat farmers were deterred, concerned that U.S. trading partners would not purchase genetically engineered seed varieties and, in turn, hurting exports. With the loss of Ukrainian wheat, fertilizer shortages, and climate extremes continuing to stress global food systems and regional crop production, U.S. trading partners are now willing to purchase GM wheat. But the federal government must approve it. Steps are indeed being taken in this direction. In June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration concluded a review of Argentinian genetically modified wheat, but the drought-resistant wheat would still need to be cleared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Embracing these technologies could be the most pivotal action for addressing world wheat production since Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution.

The United States ought to correct transportation issues in the wheat supply chain. Notably, transportation costs for food commodities. The primary U.S. wheat-growing regions are uniquely dependent on access to railroads to move their product to overseas customers. Without direct access to ocean ports or other waterways, wheat has been captive to the increasingly investor-returns-minded railroads. Railroads have recognized that dependency and, in turn, charge a substantial premium to ship wheat, especially compared to corn, sorghum, or soybeans. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has recognized this discrepancy that disadvantages wheat, stating in a 2017 report that, “Wheat shippers, in particular, have found it difficult to compete in export markets, as they face higher rail rates than other grain shippers over similar corridors and rates that have not declined in response to changes in world wheat markets.” While there are a host of potential rate-related solutions in front of the Surface Transportation Board, the most straightforward is to correct the 1980s regulations that allowed railroads to price commodities differently for the same haul — so-called “differential pricing.”

Washington ought to incorporate grain in its national security policy and re-sow the seeds of what diplomacy. Policymakers need to conceive of wheat as a tool of statecraft. The time for such a discussion is ripe, as Congress is in the middle of considering changes to federal agricultural support laws, commonly known as the Farm Bill. Lawmakers are currently on listening tours and hosting hearings reviewing a wide myriad of programs covering the breadth of the U.S. food supply chain. Congressional leaders would do well to pay special attention to those policies impacting wheat production. Critical food assistance and development programs should be reviewed to ensure they are filling both the dual needs of reducing food insecurity and supporting ample domestic food production, which will allow the United States to aid its allies and secure its national security goals. Research program funding should be increased and targeted at core investments in stable crops and export credit programs should be adjusted to cover additional risk for the neediest markets and expanded repayment periods to ensure developing countries have reliable options to source key foodstuffs from.

Recognizing wheat security and export capacity is a national security issue, and the United States needs a strategic plan for wheat, appreciating wheat as a diplomatic tool beyond food aid.

Become a Member

Rosella Cappella Zielinski is an associate professor of political science at Boston University, a senior visiting fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, and a non-resident fellow at the Krulak Center for Center for Innovation and Creativity and the Marine Corps University.

Justin Gilpin is the chief executive officer of the Kansas Wheat Commission and Kansas Association of Wheat Growers.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Rosella Cappella Zielinski · August 11, 2022

3. People Win Wars: A 2022 Reality Check on PLA Enlisted Force and Related Matters

A professional NCO corps is the key to successful armies.

Excerpts:

Xi’s attendance at a Central Military Commission “Talent Work Conference” in late 2021 highlighted that the PLA is engaged in more than just talk. In recent years, the PLA took on a series of ambitious personnel reforms and policy adjustments in the hope of strengthening its enlisted force and boosting its overall readiness level. Have things been going as planned?

Overall, yes. The PLA has made tangible improvements to the readiness of its conscript force in the short term. It has also enacted sensible policies that have the potential to boost quality of new noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and retention rates of experienced NCOs. However, the PLA will not know if this potential payoff will occur until a generation from now.

Conclusion:

Whether stated explicitly or implicitly, Xi and the senior Chinese military leadership agree that fixing the PLA’s people problems is at the core of increasing the force’s combat readiness and becoming a world-class military. Due in part to social factors beyond their control, the timeline to solve the personnel management challenge is decades or a generation in the future, not years. However, the PLA may not have decades or a generation. There is always the chance that the Chinese Communist Party, possibly reacting to external actors’ behaviors or political messaging, feels the need to use force to reverse perceived threats to national sovereignty or security interests before the PLA fully resolves its personnel management issues. In this case, the PLA will have little choice but to fight with the force it has.

People Win Wars: A 2022 Reality Check on PLA Enlisted Force and Related Matters - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Marcus Clay · August 12, 2022

Editor’s Note: One of the authors of this article is protected with a pseudonym. Regular readers of War on the Rocks know that we allow this in only the rarest of cases. Please see our submissions guidelines to read more about how we make these judgments.

Modeled after the Soviet Red Army at its creation from its name to its first flag, the People’s Liberation Army has also long struggled with one of the problems on display in Russia’s war against Ukraine: weaknesses in the enlisted force. The people of the PLA remain the weakest link of China’s defense modernization effort, as we discussed in these pages in 2020, and this may have direct consequences for Chinese Communist Party leaders’ calculations on the use of force — especially their confidence in initiating conflict. Citing Xi Jinping’s key instructions on force building given at a PLA Rocket Force (then-Second Artillery Force) base in 2015, official commentators frequently emphasize the point that “without our grassroots officers and enlisted force, no matter how magnificent the strategy is, it won’t be executed; no matter how advanced the weapon system is, it won’t work.” Those instructions remain operative today.

Become a Member

Xi’s attendance at a Central Military Commission “Talent Work Conference” in late 2021 highlighted that the PLA is engaged in more than just talk. In recent years, the PLA took on a series of ambitious personnel reforms and policy adjustments in the hope of strengthening its enlisted force and boosting its overall readiness level. Have things been going as planned?

Overall, yes. The PLA has made tangible improvements to the readiness of its conscript force in the short term. It has also enacted sensible policies that have the potential to boost quality of new noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and retention rates of experienced NCOs. However, the PLA will not know if this potential payoff will occur until a generation from now.

To understand why this is the case, we provide an updated account of the state of the PLA enlisted force and related force-design matters as of summer 2022. While it may be assessed that the overall readiness level of the PLA has slightly improved now that it brings conscripts on board twice a year instead of once — a change made in 2021 — new challenges have emerged in training as well as in interpersonal relationships between the spring and fall recruits. Corruption in the recruitment process continues to be prevalent. As China’s economic growth stagnates, the Chinese government openly calls on the PLA to create “job opportunities” for college graduates to help alleviate the pressure on the tightening civilian job market. Meanwhile, the PLA continues to adjust its NCO corps, allowing them to serve longer as they assume greater leadership responsibilities and the contingent of non-active-duty civilian personnel continues to be expanded. Yet official assessments of PLA officer and NCO leadership capabilities continue to be lower than expected. As recently as in July 2022, PLA press was referencing a statement made by Xi in late 2015 that reflects his dissatisfaction with the state of the PLA’s human capital:

“What I think most is whether our army can always adhere to the Party’s absolute leadership, whether they can fight victoriously, and whether commanders at all levels can lead troops to fight and command in war when the Party and the people need it.”

Twice a Year, Twice the Problems?

Roughly 700,000 personnel out of the PLA’s 2 million strong active-duty force are conscripts. Although these conscripts are the least trained and capable in the PLA’s human talent pool, they still play a vital role in not only manpower-intensive missions such as ground combat operations, but also in select technical missions. These conscripts serve for two years, so the manner in which the PLA recruits and trains these personnel with a very limited service-period is of the utmost importance.

The PLA’s two-year service period for conscripts far exceeds Taiwan’s four-month service requirement and Russia’s 12-month requirement. However, the PLA’s once-a-year conscription cycle resulted in wild swings in terms of personnel readiness. In an effort to remedy this issue, the PLA shifted to a twice-a-year cycle in 2021 by distributing the flow of conscripts into and out of the force across two time periods rather than one. This shift to spring and fall recruitment is designed to improve personnel readiness levels by optimizing training schedules rather than increasing the total force size and results in higher average unit-manning levels year-round. While the overall conscription number remains unchanged, the new practice, according to a staff officer working for the mobilization bureau of Anhui Military District, dictates that the spring recruitment meets 45 percent of the annual quota and fall recruitment takes in the rest of 55 percent of the total annual force.

New PLA conscripts must undergo three months of basic training to become minimally trained and likely are not considered experienced until they take part in the PLA’s annual summer training season. Under the old once-a-year system, roughly 50 percent of the PLA’s conscripted force would qualify as “experienced” across the year. Between October and December, newly recruited conscripts were still undergoing basic training and thus could not contribute towards unit readiness. As such, for those three months, 50 percent of conscripts in the PLA were unable to support even basic combat operations. For the remaining nine months, those conscripts met minimum training requirements and only become experienced as the previous batch of conscripts cycled out of the force.

Under the new twice-a-year system, training schedules ensures that the PLA always has at least 75 percent of its conscripts at a minimally trained level and available.

The PLA seeks to use “precision recruitment (精准征兵)” to fill billets in units with new personnel with the proper education and background. In order to do so, some recruiters in thousands of People’s Armed Forces Departments in townships, commercial enterprises, and schools throughout China have begun to use big data and social media to target specific individuals or their skills. However, there also are reports that “the phenomenon of ‘not being able to use who is recruited, and not being able to receive what is needed’ still exists.” And retaining college students beyond their initial service is a problem because some recruits do not feel their expertise is properly utilized.

The PLA openly acknowledges that the new schedule poses challenges to the existing conscription institutions and the workforce supporting force recruitment is adapting to the new situation. As we noted in 2020, zhuanwu ganbu (专武干部), who are civilian cadres manning People’s Armed Forces Departments, were already notoriously underpaid and overworked prior to the reform. Spring conscription, which takes place around the Chinese New Year, also overlaps with their existing tasks such as militia training and readiness training. Furthering the workload is the expansion of “pre-enlistment training (役前训练)” for new recruits conducted by local People’s Armed Forces Departments before they are shipped off to PLA training bases. During “pre-enlistment training,” new soldiers receive uniforms, learn the basics of drill and ceremony, and undergo political and physical fitness tests, intended to weed out those who might not finish basic training. Despite the moderate expansion of the size of the cadre by assigning a portion of the PLA’s non-active duty, civilian personnel to work in People’s Armed Forces Departments, many, according to PLA Daily, have been thrown into “panic mode (手脚忙乱).”

While the challenges recruiters face were somewhat anticipated, the PLA units on the receiving end appear to be ill-prepared to manage the interpersonal relationships among its “twice-a-year” recruits who now enter service six months apart yet wear the same military rank. For instance, a private who enlisted in fall 2020 and was assigned to an artillery battalion in the 72nd Group Army confessed that he attempted to bully another private in his unit who was a spring 2021 recruit just to demonstrate his “senior” status. Although official PLA accounts seek to depict such topics in a positive light, the fact that such an issue receives official acknowledgement suggests that it is possibly a prevalent issue that warrants high-level attention.

PLA and China’s Youth Problem

While some American analysts believe that the United States is “on the cusp of a recruiting crisis,” China has been taking on sophisticated approaches to address its recruitment and retention problems for years, with mixed results.

It is generally believed that a tightening civilian job market is conducive to military recruitment. However, youth unemployment remains a politically sensitive issue to the Chinese Communist Party. The PLA, by definition, serves as a political tool to safeguard and advance the party’s interest, hence it is likely to be tasked to absorb unemployed workers. China’s National Bureau of Statistics reports that as of June 2022, the estimated youth unemployment rate in urban areas was 19.3 percent compared to 13.5 percent in early 2021. Perhaps in response, in late 2021, China’s Ministry of Education openly called on the PLA to create “job opportunities” for college graduates to help alleviate the pressure on the civilian job market. This makes an interesting contrast to India’s recent military reform known as the “Agnipath Scheme” — recruiting new soldiers for only four years — which fueled violent protests in India’s southern state of Telangana. Chinese news outlets, with or without official affiliations, appear to conclude that youth unemployment concerns and lack of government-provided support may have contributed to such unrest.

The decision to change the conscription cycle from once-a-year to twice-a-year in 2020 (ultimately implemented in 2021 due to COVID-19 lockdowns) was likely based not only on readiness considerations but possibly also on desires to increase the proportion of college graduates recruited into the force. Indeed, various local government and university mobilization websites made it abundantly clear that the spring recruitment was designed to target college graduates. The PLA also intends for the fall induction period to make entering the military more convenient for recent college graduates and students who plan on resuming their studies after their two-year enlistment. In terms of the quality of recruits, Chinese online commentators (with possible PLA affiliations) note that the new approach better accommodates college students’ senior-year schedule to mitigate the adverse effect of “distractions from internship, job hunting, and temporary unemployment.” In 2022, the PLA organized a designated career fair for college student enlistees who completed their two-year conscriptions. Preferential treatment was also given to college-student conscripts who seek to join the PLA’s civilian personnel workforce, which is now managed by a designated bureau nestled within the Central Military Commission’s Political Work Department, separate from the enlisted force management. This effort may also alleviate the aforementioned youth unemployment issues.

Further complicating the issue, in recent years China’s notorious “996 work culture” and increasingly unbearable living cost has given rise to its own version of a counterculture movement — an increasingly larger Chinese youth population embraces the sentiment of “lying flat (躺平)” and “doing nothing” to reject official preaching for self-realization. Despite the lack of official acknowledgement of this issue, it is almost certainly that such a movement and an overall lack of interest in work among relatively better-educated Chinese youth from middle-class families will have direct impact on the PLA’s recruitment numbers.

The NCO Corps: Head of the Soldiers, Tail of the Officers

Professionalization of any NCO corps is not a binary state, but rather a constantly evolving process. While the PLA is quite forthcoming about perceived deficiencies in its own NCO corps, this does not suggest that the PLA does not trust its NCOs. PLA NCOs fill and succeed in a variety of roles across the force, including master chief and sergeant majors at battalion level and above, staff NCOs on battalion and higher staffs, and squad leaders. Sometimes they serve as acting platoon leaders and in that role sometimes lead Chinese Communist Party organizations, i.e. ad hoc “party small group (党小组).”

Given the importance that NCOs play in providing leadership and technical expertise, the PLA is continually seeking to improve the way in which it manages this portion of the force. In 2022, the PLA announced a series of changes to its NCO corps. It started with a name change in Chinese. NCOs are no longer called shi guan (士官), or “officer of soldiers,” a Chinese translation used for Western NCO systems, but rather jun shi (军士), a more traditional Chinese term for NCO. The names of the two NCO intermediate ranks also were changed in Chinese (to 一级上士 and 二级上士, presumably sergeant first class and sergeant second class), but no official English translation has been provided. The new names now parallel the form of the three senior NCO ranks (一级军士长, 二级军士长, 三级军士长), translated from highest to lowest as master sergeant class one, two, and three, which have been used since 2009. See table below.

PLA conscripts and NCOs “Three Grades and Seven Ranks (三等七衔),” from lowest to highest in rank.

More importantly, interim regulations for NCOs and enlisted personnel were issued in the spring. Though details have not been spelled out publicly, the new regulations broadly aim to improve the quality of new NCOs, modernize NCO development, and strengthen retention incentives.

For example, the new regulations bifurcate NCOs as “management (管理军士),” those presumably in leadership billets, and “skilled (技能军士),” those in technical positions. They establish a system for certain billets to be filled by certain NCO ranks, and in what numbers, creating a codified path for promotion. To help bring new and better-educated NCOs into the ranks faster, the new regulations also allow qualified conscripts to become an NCO before their two-year service commitment is up. There is also the potential for faster promotions and extending time in rank under the new regulations.

In order to manage the retention of desirable NCO candidates who have not been able to receive promotions or do away with undesirable NCOs, the regulations also establish three types of separation from service. Namely, general separation that meets service requirement (期满退役) based on age or time in rank, controlled separation (调控退役) for intermediate and senior NCOs allowing them to serve longer than four years in one rank, and involuntary separation (强制退役) due to performance issues.

In short, these adjustments likely provide the PLA with greater flexibility to retain and promote higher quality NCOs and do away with those who are less qualified.

Conclusion

The changes to how the PLA manages its enlisted force lead to two noticeable benefits. In the short term, personnel readiness levels, especially in conscript-heavy units like PLA Army combined arms brigades and most marine and airborne units, noticeably improved because of the reforms to the conscription cycle. One potential problem is that this new cycle leaves potential troughs in personnel readiness in late spring, which also happens to be the optimal time of year to conduct amphibious operations in the Taiwan Strait, and late fall. This, however, can be solved by a circumstance-driven extension of service, as has been done in the past at the end of the once-a-year conscription cycle. Furthermore, if the PLA’s efforts to improve its NCO corps management system bear fruit, improvements to the proficiency of its enlisted force will slowly emerge over time.

But such changes also bring short and long-term uncertainties. The revisions to the conscription cycle potentially overloads local military recruitment offices and open the door for more corruption. Potential NCO force-management policies may not pan out, leading to stagnation within the NCO corps. Lastly, long-term economic and social prospects in China could drive the overall quality of new PLA personnel downward by prompting a further loosening standards for induction.

In the next five years leading to the centennial anniversary of the founding of the PLA, the development of military personnel remains a critical benchmark affecting Xi’s key military decisions. Two days before Aug. 1, Xi called on the PLA to “overcome outstanding contradictions and problems restricting the military’s personnel work and for innovation in talent cultivation, including deepening the military academy reform, and innovating military human resource management.” Much remains to be accomplished.

Whether stated explicitly or implicitly, Xi and the senior Chinese military leadership agree that fixing the PLA’s people problems is at the core of increasing the force’s combat readiness and becoming a world-class military. Due in part to social factors beyond their control, the timeline to solve the personnel management challenge is decades or a generation in the future, not years. However, the PLA may not have decades or a generation. There is always the chance that the Chinese Communist Party, possibly reacting to external actors’ behaviors or political messaging, feels the need to use force to reverse perceived threats to national sovereignty or security interests before the PLA fully resolves its personnel management issues. In this case, the PLA will have little choice but to fight with the force it has.

Become a Member

Marcus Clay is an analyst and Roderick Lee is the research director with the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Dennis J. Blasko is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel with 23 years of service as a military intelligence officer and foreign area officer specializing in China. From 1992 to 1996, he was an Army attaché in Beijing and Hong Kong. He has written numerous articles and chapters on the Chinese military, along with the book The Chinese Army Today: Tradition and Transformation for the 21st Century.

Image: China Military

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Marcus Clay · August 12, 2022

- War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Marcus Clay · August 12, 2022

Become a Member

“What I think most is whether our army can always adhere to the Party’s absolute leadership, whether they can fight victoriously, and whether commanders at all levels can lead troops to fight and command in war when the Party and the people need it.”

Twice a Year, Twice the Problems?

Under the new twice-a-year system, training schedules ensures that the PLA always has at least 75 percent of its conscripts at a minimally trained level and available.

PLA and China’s Youth Problem

The NCO Corps: Head of the Soldiers, Tail of the Officers

PLA conscripts and NCOs “Three Grades and Seven Ranks (三等七衔),” from lowest to highest in rank.

In short, these adjustments likely provide the PLA with greater flexibility to retain and promote higher quality NCOs and do away with those who are less qualified.

Conclusion

Become a Member

Image: China Military

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Marcus Clay · August 12, 2022

4. How Putin’s Ukraine War Has Only Made Russia More Reliant on China

Per this conclusion, when China does decide to "cash in" on this relationship Russia is probably screwed for making a deal with the devil.

Conclusion:

So far, China has only mildly cashed in on its senior status in the partnership and has refrained from publicly humiliating Russia by demanding concessions, which is partly why the partnership has remained fruitful. However, if Russia’s ultimate objective is to “get up from the knees,” as Putin’s supporters often claim, it will find that doing so on Chinese shoulders is not the way to get there.

How Putin’s Ukraine War Has Only Made Russia More Reliant on China

Despite Putin’s imperial dreams, in the last six months China has increasingly dictated the direction of the partnership and squeezed more concessions from the Russians.

By THOMAS LOW and PETER W. SINGER

AUGUST 11, 2022 02:28 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Thomas Low

Just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Sino-Russian strategic cooperation has no end limits, no forbidden areas, and no upper bound.

In the months following, however, Russia learned that the rhetoric does not match reality. While the wave of global sanctions on Putin’s regime and allied oligarchs have seemingly strengthened political, economic, and military ties between the two countries, the real strategic effect for Russia has been increasing reliance on China. And Chinese Communist Party leaders have shown no qualms about using this growing dependence to their advantage. China has increasingly dictated the direction of the partnership and squeezed more concessions from the Russians, hiking up prices and walking a diplomatic tightrope with Western nations from which it can’t afford to commercially detach. Rather than making Russia great again, as hoped, President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has instead deepened Russia’s position as the clear junior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship, militarily and economically.

A review of open source information shows us that the war has not just confirmed existing Sino-Russian military cooperation, but intensified potential imbalances. Despite Western outrage at the war, military cooperation between the two countries is still under way. China and Russia held their first joint military exercise since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine on May 24, with both countries sending out nuclear-capable bombers while President Joe Biden visited the region. In July, People’s Liberation Army troops, tanks, and vehicles set out for Russia to participate in the so-called “War Olympics.” China has also indirectly supported the Russian war machine by exporting off-road vehicles for transporting command personnel, as well as drone components and naval engines.

The war’s effects are most dire in the defense market, though. In 2014, Western sanctions gave Russia’s military industrial complex new impetus to sell technology to the PLA.Today, the Kremlin has even fewer customers or partners, and its reliance on China’s technology after its Ukraine invasion could accelerate burgeoning joint development and operations, if only for a while. In the long term, Russia’s struggling arms manufacturers cannot bet on China to sustain or grow them. China’s increasingly assertive defense firms are already seeking out more customers on the world stage. The country increased its share of the global arms trade to 4.6 percent in recent years, putting it in fourth place behind the United States, Russia, and France. China is also building on what had once been a niche role in the now booming market in drone technology, and modernizing its air force with domestically built aircraft that will also increase exports.

As China emerges as a competitor in the arms export market, the effect of sanctions and the poor performance of Russian gear bodes a gloomy future for Russia. Russia’s arms sales to Southeast Asia had already declined sharply over the past seven years, dropping from $1.2 billion in 2014 to just $89 million in 2021. Chinese firms are in a good position to plug the holes that Russian firms can no longer fill.

Russia’s comparative advantage in the global defense market has been that it has been able to offer advanced military technology at relatively low prices, and its willingness—bordering on delight—to sell tanks, small arms, and fighter jets to nations regardless of the character of their governments. China has shown a similar willingness to engage with unsavory regimes in their Belt and Road initiative and existing arms sales.

Furthermore, Russia might not be able to manufacture equipment at previous rates because of sanctions. Reportedly, some Russian arms plants have halted production as they face difficulties in importing source components. Currently, only three of the world’s 40 biggest arms importers—Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar—buy a majority of their weapons from China. That could increase if China fills the market that Russian arms makers dominated, facilitating Beijing’s continued rise as a major weapons exporter—and gaining the political and economic benefits that accompany that.

In trade, the two nations have a seeming synergy. Russia supplies China with important raw materials and energy, while Russia needs Chinese investment and high-tech products. Trade between China and Russia grew by 36 percent last year, to $147 billion, clearly an effect of the sanctions. In March, after Russia launched its invasion, overall trade between the two countries rose over 12 percent from a year earlier.

But those numbers hide the enormous and growing trade imbalance favoring China. In 2013, China accounted for 11 percent of Russia’s trade. In 2021, the figure was 18 percent, while Russia represented a puny 2 percent share of China’s trade. This imbalance is even more striking when considering that 70 percent of Russia’s exports to China are energy related.

The war in Ukraine has accelerated these inequalities in their economic relationship and confirmed Russia’s subservience to Beijing. China has refused to turn its back on Moscow, but it hasn’t refrained from cashing in on its ally’s plight either. For example, after being left with a near-monopoly following the mass exodus of Western manufacturers, Chinese car makers such as Haval have jacked up their prices by 50 percent, while Russia is selling its oil to China at a 35 percent discount.

For the moment, it appears that Beijing is not keen on rescuing Moscow with substantial economic lifelines and risking secondary sanctions. Most of its major banks, including the Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), have begun to restrict dollar—and possibly yuan—transactions for Russian commodity imports. Chinese smartphone titans Xiaomi, Oppo, and Huawei have cut their supplies to Russia, and TikTok suspended services after blocking Russian state media. Huawei, which still operates in Russia, and other Chinese tech hegemons could not shore up the Russian market even if they wanted to. Huawei heavily relies on other chip suppliers, which generally employ U.S.-designed technology. In 2019, of the 50,000 5G base stations sold by Huawei, only 8 percent were free from U.S. technology or components.

The sum of these outcomes from the war in Ukraine is clear: Russia is accelerating its own decline as a world power, not just by failures to its Western border, but also in a loss of power in its relationship to its East. Yes, in trading arms and natural resources to China, Russia gets a lifeline from Western sanctions. But it also risks becoming the ever weaker ally in the military relationship, while little more than a backroom supplier to an Asia dominated by China. The war in Ukraine has not just seen the Russian military humbled, but also forced Moscow into giving the Chinese preference in trade at below market rates, losing key global arms markets and long-term defense industry sales and capability, and losing autonomy from China by decreasing its own engagement with other partners.

So far, China has only mildly cashed in on its senior status in the partnership and has refrained from publicly humiliating Russia by demanding concessions, which is partly why the partnership has remained fruitful. However, if Russia’s ultimate objective is to “get up from the knees,” as Putin’s supporters often claim, it will find that doing so on Chinese shoulders is not the way to get there.

Thomas Low is pursuing a masters in international security at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He has previously written for National Defense magazine and the American Conservative.

P.W Singer is senior fellow at New America and co-founder of Useful Fiction LLC.

defenseone.com · by Thomas Low

5. The big Taiwan question, as China issues warnings and holds military drills: Is a Chinese invasion imminent?

All warfare is based on deception. What is Xi's something else in mind? I think compromised the "peaceful" coercion line of effort due to his actions in Hong Kong. I thank that has hardened Taiwan's resistance to Chinese subversion.

Excerpts:

Ultimately, political rather than military considerations may drive Xi’s calculus. He has said in the past that the Taiwan problem must not be “passed on from generation to generation” and described reunification as a necessary component of a larger political project called the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” which is due to be completed by 2049, the People’s Republic’s 100th anniversary. But many experts believe Xi hopes to complete reunification as part of his own legacy, which suggests a faster timeline. (Xi will be 94 in 2049, and while he seems to be in no hurry to step down, chances are he won’t be in power by then.) “The truth is there is no real national security interest at stake for China [in Taiwan],” Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, told Grid. “What’s at stake is Xi’s pride.”

Meanwhile, the overall trend lines don’t look favorable for “peaceful reunification.” China may look at the experience of the last decade and conclude that “soft power” has run its course when it comes to Taiwan. Xi held a historic meeting with Taiwan’s then-President Ma Ying-jeou in 2015, but just a year later, Taiwanese voters replaced him with the more staunchly pro-autonomy Tsai Ing-wen. The Taiwanese and Chinese economies are deeply intertwined — China accounts for more than 40 percent of Taiwan’s exports, and hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese live on the mainland — but polls show that Taiwan’s citizens, particularly younger ones, are only becoming more anti-Chinese in their outlook and more staunchly “Taiwanese” in their personal identity. As one Taiwanese political scientist recently told the New York Times, “The attractiveness of the carrots in China’s Taiwan policy — economic inducements — has now fallen to its lowest point since the end of the Cold War.”

Finally, a turn to military measures could be prompted by external events. China’s 2005 Anti-Secession Law specified three conditions under which China would employ “nonpeaceful means” to achieve reunification. These include Taiwanese authorities formally pursuing secession from China, “incidents entailing Taiwan’s secession from China” or a situation in which “possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted.” Chinese military officers have warned in the past that a Taiwanese independence referendum could be considered cause for war. (While some members of Tsai’s party support full independence, she has stopped short of calling for this.)

The big Taiwan question, as China issues warnings and holds military drills: Is a Chinese invasion imminent?

Xi Jinping may have something else in mind.

Joshua Keating, Global Security Reporter, and Lili Pike, China Reporter

August 11, 2022

grid.news

It’s not war … yet.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit to Taiwan and China’s furious response have provoked what is without question the most serious security crisis in the Taiwan Strait since the 1990s. And it’s not over. But if this week’s military drills have been unprecedented in their scale and proximity to the island, China’s leaders appear to have refrained from steps that would signal the prelude to a real invasion — or any action that might provoke a Taiwanese response. (On Twitter, former CIA analyst John Culver suggested such measures might have included overflying the island with manned aircraft, mobilizing amphibious transport ships or sending ships into Taiwan’s territorial waters, though there’s some dispute as to whether that last one actually did take place.)

But is it only a matter of time? On Tuesday, Taiwan’s foreign minister told reporters that “China has used the drills in its military playbook to prepare for invasion of Taiwan.”

Not everyone is so sure. On Monday, when asked if it was the Pentagon’s assessment that China would invade in the next two years, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl responded succinctly, “No.”

Is a war over Taiwan inevitable? Even Chinese President Xi Jinping himself may not know. “I do not see any evidence that a decision has been made to use force against Taiwan,” Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund, told Grid. “I see substantial evidence to the contrary: that China has not made a decision but that it has not ruled it out.”

So what, exactly, are the factors weighing on that decision? When is it likely to come? And if China chooses not to invade, what might it do instead to accomplish its aims in Taiwan?

Why China may act sooner rather than later

The Chinese Communist Party of 2022 is very different from the organization Mao Zedong led when the People’s Republic of China was born. But on a few core issues, it has remained remarkably consistent. One of those is Taiwan. Ever since 1949, when nationalist forces fleeing the Chinese civil war set up a government on the island, China’s leaders have held fast to the goal of realizing “the complete reunification of the motherland.”

What has changed is that China has only recently reached the point where it could plausibly achieve that reunification by force. Now, in the midst of what some are calling the “fourth Taiwan Strait crisis” in response to Pelosi’s trip, many analysts have drawn comparisons to the “third crisis,” during which China conducted military drills and missile tests around Taiwan in response to a visit by President Lee Teng-hui to the United States. The difference then was that few believed China would actually try to invade Taiwan. China simply didn’t have the military might.

Since then, the country has embarked on one of the largest and fastest military buildups in history. China’s People’s Liberation Army has ground forces of around 1.04 million troops, more than 400,000 of them stationed in the Taiwan Strait area, compared with Taiwan’s 88,000 active-duty ground forces. It holds overwhelming advantages in ships, aircraft and artillery as well. As Grid has reported, a Taiwan war would likely be massive and bloody. And if the U.S. did not directly intervene (more on that later), Taiwan’s own military leaders estimate they could hold out for only about two weeks against a Chinese invasion.

Ultimately, political rather than military considerations may drive Xi’s calculus. He has said in the past that the Taiwan problem must not be “passed on from generation to generation” and described reunification as a necessary component of a larger political project called the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” which is due to be completed by 2049, the People’s Republic’s 100th anniversary. But many experts believe Xi hopes to complete reunification as part of his own legacy, which suggests a faster timeline. (Xi will be 94 in 2049, and while he seems to be in no hurry to step down, chances are he won’t be in power by then.) “The truth is there is no real national security interest at stake for China [in Taiwan],” Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, told Grid. “What’s at stake is Xi’s pride.”

Meanwhile, the overall trend lines don’t look favorable for “peaceful reunification.” China may look at the experience of the last decade and conclude that “soft power” has run its course when it comes to Taiwan. Xi held a historic meeting with Taiwan’s then-President Ma Ying-jeou in 2015, but just a year later, Taiwanese voters replaced him with the more staunchly pro-autonomy Tsai Ing-wen. The Taiwanese and Chinese economies are deeply intertwined — China accounts for more than 40 percent of Taiwan’s exports, and hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese live on the mainland — but polls show that Taiwan’s citizens, particularly younger ones, are only becoming more anti-Chinese in their outlook and more staunchly “Taiwanese” in their personal identity. As one Taiwanese political scientist recently told the New York Times, “The attractiveness of the carrots in China’s Taiwan policy — economic inducements — has now fallen to its lowest point since the end of the Cold War.”

Finally, a turn to military measures could be prompted by external events. China’s 2005 Anti-Secession Law specified three conditions under which China would employ “nonpeaceful means” to achieve reunification. These include Taiwanese authorities formally pursuing secession from China, “incidents entailing Taiwan’s secession from China” or a situation in which “possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted.” Chinese military officers have warned in the past that a Taiwanese independence referendum could be considered cause for war. (While some members of Tsai’s party support full independence, she has stopped short of calling for this.)

It’s also conceivable that U.S. actions might be a trigger; former Trump administration Cabinet members Mark Esper and Mike Pompeo have both made speeches in Taiwan in the past year calling on the U.S. to abandon the “One China policy and formally recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty.” Such a declaration by a current U.S. official (for now, the Biden administration has maintained that there have been no changes to the status quo in U.S.-Taiwan relations) could be considered by Beijing as the sort of thing that rules out “possibilities for peaceful reunification.”

As China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put it recently after talks between Xi and President Joe Biden, “Those who play with fire will perish by it.”

Why Beijing might wait

It’s not exactly the most novel insight, but the main reason why China would be reluctant to use military force is that war is inherently dangerous and unpredictable.

For all its manpower and firepower, the People’s Liberation Army hasn’t fought a war since 1979 — and that was a disastrous invasion of Vietnam. Amphibious invasions are among the most logistically complex operations in warfare, and the PLA would take heavy casualties during a crossing of the Taiwan Strait and a landing on Taiwan’s shores. Even if Taiwan’s government were to fall quickly, China could find itself fighting a long and protracted insurgency in mountainous and heavily urbanized terrain.

Then there’s the biggest question: What the U.S. would do? Unlike with Ukraine, the U.S. government has not ruled out the possibility that it would intervene directly to defend Taiwan. (It also hasn’t affirmed its willingness to respond militarily — a stance known as “strategic ambiguity.”) Biden has on three occasions said that he believes the U.S. has a commitment to defend Taiwan if it were attacked. The White House has walked back these remarks each time, but as Johns Hopkins University professor Hal Brands has written, “Once is a gaffe. Three times is a policy.”

From what we know of China’s own military planning, it assumes a strong possibility of U.S. intervention and has included scenarios in which China launches a preemptive attack on U.S. bases in the Pacific. Hubris or no, the Chinese probably believe they can handle Taiwan’s military on its own. A shooting war with a nuclear-armed superpower rival is an altogether more sobering scenario.

For all the risks such a war would entail for the people Taiwan, China and planet Earth, we also shouldn’t lose sight of the risks it would pose to Xi himself. “Xi has a credibility issue when it comes to Taiwan,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center. “But if he fights a war for Taiwan and he loses, he has a survival problem.”

The Ukraine factor

Almost since the Russians invaded Ukraine, that war has invited comparison to a potential conflict with Taiwan. The similarities are clear: a major world power claiming historical rights to nearby territory, warning the outside world against interfering and threatening to use force to make good on its claim.

Ukraine has of course also shown the power of a smaller neighbor to resist and punch back — and the willingness of the U.S. and its allies to support that resistance.

Still, the often-made analogies are only so useful. As Sun told Grid, “Taiwan doesn’t have a Poland,” meaning a friendly neighboring country from which it can be resupplied and one which is also — because of its NATO status — off-limits to Russian fire. China’s naval drills this week illustrated its ability to quickly blockade the waters around Taiwan. And Xi would not have to tolerate train-loads of HIMARS and ammunition pouring in the way Russian President Vladimir Putin has. Outside powers would not have the luxury of choosing a middle ground between full-scale military intervention and leaving Taiwan to its fate.

Events in Ukraine and elsewhere have led to new enthusiasm in the U.S. and other countries for providing Taiwan with military aid. Even if there’s little chance of achieving parity with Beijing’s forces, the thinking goes, Taiwan can acquire the kind of “asymmetric” capabilities that would make the prospect of war too unpalatable for China’s leaders to contemplate. But this aid could have the unintended consequence of making China feel a greater sense of urgency about the Taiwan issue.

As Glaser noted, the more relevant Ukraine comparison may not be 2022 but 2014, when Ukraine, with substantial U.S. aid and assistance, responded to Russia’s smaller-scale invasion with a major effort to train and professionalize its military into the force that is now, at least holding the Russian invasion at bay. “The Chinese do really seem to be concerned about the United States really fortifying Taiwan’s defense and really enabling Taiwan to defend itself,” she said. U.S. arms sales to Taiwan have already been rising steadily over the past decade. If the fourth strait crisis spurs both Washington and Taipei to get more serious about training and equipping for an invasion, it could be seen as an argument for acting sooner rather than later.

China’s other option: “peaceful” coercion

For China’s leaders, it’s not necessarily a binary choice between going to war and the status quo. Even if China doesn’t formally abandon “peaceful reunification” as its framework, it has other options for ratcheting up pressure on Taiwan. “In the Chinese lexicon, coercion is not ‘unpeaceful,’” Sun said.

What could this look like? We may already be getting a preview in response to the Pelosi crisis. In response to the speaker’s visit, China has slapped bans on imports of hundreds of Taiwanese products, mainly food items. (It has so far stopped short of bans on industrial goods and tech products like Taiwan’s all-important semiconductors, which may highlight one area where Taiwan has leverage.)

China has already spent years working to pressure and cajole the few remaining countries that still have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan to switch their allegiance to Beijing. (Only 14 such countries, mainly islands in the Pacific and Caribbean, still have such ties with Taiwan.) Private actors ranging from Delta Air Lines to the wrestler John Cena have been forced to issue groveling apologies to their Chinese customers for implying that Taiwan is a country. The sanctions China slapped on Pelosi and her family this week probably won’t have much impact on her life, but China has demonstrated repeatedly that it can impose serious costs on smaller countries in response to perceived slights on the Taiwan issue.

More recently, China has imposed steep fines on companies like the Far Eastern Group, a major conglomerate that does a significant amount of business in China, over donations to pro-autonomy politicians and parties in Taiwan.

Such pressure is likely to escalate. Schell told Grid he foresees a strategy of incremental escalation by China — so-called salami tactics, as in small slices of escalation — to shift the status quo over Taiwan in its favor. “What I fear is that China will not do a frontal assault on Taiwan, but they will begin to do one thing after another that never quite gives the United States or Japan or the Quad Alliance any casus belli,” he said.

An example could involve China declaring all of the Taiwan Strait as its territorial waters. Under international law, countries have sovereignty over the seas 12 nautical miles off their coasts. China has generally respected that limit in Taiwan’s case, but of course, it doesn’t actually consider Taiwan to be a country. In a statement this week, China’s foreign ministry said that China’s recent military drills were being held “in waters off its own territory”

“They may just say no plane can go to Taiwan that isn’t guided by Chinese air traffic control, no ship can go to any Taiwanese port without going through Chinese customs, because Taiwan is part of China,” Schell said. “And that way they could prevent any shipment of arms from getting into Taiwan. It very difficult for the United States or anyone else know exactly what the proper level of response is to something like that.”

Taiwan depends on imports, mostly liquefied gas, for 88 percent of its power. If China tried to interfere with these imports, it could cripple the island’s economy.

The cyber domain also gives China ample opportunity to ratchet up the pressure. Taiwan’s government already faces millions of minor cyberattacks a day. During Pelosi’s visit, the websites of the president’s office and foreign ministry were forced offline by hackers. Jason Hsu, a former Taiwanese legislator now at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, told Grid he believes China’s hackers will “definitely make attempts to destabilize or weaken Taiwan or divide Taiwan. They might not launch a full-scale attack on the industrial network, but they might do something on its peripheral network in order to cause a disturbance or dysfunction.”

Will any of this win hearts and minds in Taiwan? Absolutely not. But the thinking in Beijing may be that an overstretched and declining United States won’t be around to protect Taiwan forever. Sooner or later, this thinking goes, an isolated and demoralized Taiwan will be forced to come to terms with the mainland.

“Salami” tactics

In recent days, the phrase “salami slicing” has been used to describe the actions of both sides in this conflict. From the perspective of Taipei and Washington, China’s exercises and aggressive rhetoric are slicing away at the territorial status quo and Taiwan’s de facto independence. From Beijing’s perspective, actions like a visit to Taiwan from a woman who is second in line to the U.S. presidency, and is one of the most powerful officials in the president’s own party, are evidence that the U.S. is slicing away at its long-standing “One China policy” and getting ever closer to formally backing Taiwan’s independence.

There’s still room left for Washington to amp up its support for Taiwan’s defense and for China to continue its military buildup, its naval exercises and its political pressure on the island’s leaders. But sooner or later, the salami might be gone, cut away from both sides. And all that will be left is the knives.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

grid.news

6. The Other Ukrainian Army

Three words. Resistance Operating Concept (thanks to a former Commander of SOCEUR for implementing the concept in Europe almost a decade ago). https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=838149

My friends at NED (National Endowment for Democracy) will not like this comment about the comments below, but NED is an "unconventional warfare" organization.

Special Forces would do well to study their activities.

The Other Ukrainian Army

Imperiled by Russian invaders, private citizens are stepping forward to do what Ukraine’s government cannot.

By Anne Applebaum

Photographs by Jedrzej Nowicki

AUGUST 10, 2022

About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

The Atlantic · by Anne Applebaum · August 10, 2022

History has turning points, moments when events shift and the future seems suddenly clear. But history also has in-between points, days and weeks when everything seems impermanent and nobody knows what will happen next. Odesa in the summer of 2022 is like that—a city suspended between great events. The panic that swept the city in February, when it seemed the Russian invaders might win quickly, already feels like a long time ago. Now the city is hot, half empty, and bracing itself for what comes next.

Some are preparing for the worst. Odesa endured a 10-week German and Romanian siege during the Second World War, then a three-year occupation; the current mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, told me that the city is now filling warehouses with food and medicine, in case history repeats itself. On July 11, Ukrainian security services caught a Russian spy scouting potential targets in the city. On July 23, Russian bombs hit the Odesa docks, despite an agreement reached just the previous day to restart grain exports. The beautiful waterfront, where the Potemkin Stairs lead down to the Black Sea, remains blocked by a maze of concrete barriers and barbed wire. Russian-occupied Kherson, where you can be interrogated just for speaking Ukrainian, is just a few hours’ drive away.

Graeme Wood: The torment of Odesa

In the meantime, pedestrians stroll past the Italian facades in Odesa’s historic center and drink coffee beneath umbrellas. The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov recently wrote that “I used to pay a lot of attention to time, using it as effectively as possible.” Now, instead, “I pay attention to the war.” In Odesa, people also pay attention to the war, obsessive attention; some of those I met have installed apps on their phones that echo the air-raid sirens. But then they switch off the sound when their phones start to howl. Fear becomes normalized, until eventually it becomes another part of the background noise. My hotel had an air-raid shelter, a windowless room, but no one went there during air raids. “You’ll be lucky or unlucky,” the porter told me. No point in trying to escape fate.

Odesa’s city garden.

Those who can’t endure life in suspended animation are abroad, wondering if they should come back; some who remain wonder if they should leave. Companies have shut down—I was told about one that closed in the first week of the invasion; the owners fired everyone and moved to Spain—and investments are on hold. None of this is accidental. The Russian strategy toward Ukraine is designed to demoralize and demotivate.

It works. Except when it doesn’t.

For the languor of Odesa is the backdrop, not the story: Not everyone there is afflicted with apathy, anxiety, or the fear of losing. On the contrary, even in this strange moment, when time doesn’t seem worth measuring, some people are intensely busy. Across the city, students, accountants, hairdressers, and every other conceivable profession have joined what can only be described as an unprecedented social movement. They call themselves volonteri—volunteers—and their organizations, their crowdfunding campaigns, and their activism help explain why the Ukrainian army has fought so hard and so well, why a decade-long Russian attempt to co-opt the Ukrainian state mostly failed, even (or maybe especially) in Russian-speaking Odesa.

In a paralyzed landscape, in a stalled economy, in a city where no one can plan anything, the volonteri are creating the future. They aren’t afraid of loss, siege, or occupation, because they think they are going to win.

Out of almost nothing—out of a beat-up apartment building at the back of an empty courtyard—Anna Bondarenko has already created a community, a refuge from the war. The offices of her Ukrainian Volunteer Service (UVS) are in old rooms with high ceilings; the largest, lined with desks, has the words A good deed has great power painted on one of the walls. Other rooms contain a kitchen—often, the team eats meals together—and some bunk beds for those who need them. Bondarenko told me that at age 15, she spent a year as an exchange student at an American high school, where she found herself for the first time having to explain where Ukraine is, and what it is, and, though she came from a Russian-speaking family, she discovered that she liked the idea of being Ukrainian. She also encountered the concept of community service. She volunteered at her host family’s local church, at a national park, at an animal shelter. She remembers entering a contest, trying to accumulate 150 hours of community service in order to get a certificate signed by Barack Obama. (Hers, alas, was signed by someone else.)

Elliot Ackerman: Ukraine’s three-to-one advantage

She came home wanting to continue volunteering and signed up to work on a couple of festivals, including one marking Ukraine’s independence day. But in between festivals, she and her friends couldn’t find organizations that inspired them. Eventually, she set up the UVS, an organization designed to solve that problem, matching people who want to volunteer with other people who need help.The team created a clever website, made contact with a few like-minded people around the country, and organized training weekends for people who wanted to be volunteers or promote volunteering. They raised a little bit of money (including a small grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, whose board I serve on).

Then the war started. Demand exploded.

No one on Bondarenko’s UVS team is over the age of 30, and some are under 20. Bondarenko, at 26, is one of the oldest people in the room. Nevertheless, since the early hours of the morning of February 24, UVS has fielded thousands of requests, creating a set of websites, chat sites, and chatbots that eventually matched more than 100,000 people—accountants, drivers, medics—with more than 900 organizations across the country. Ukrainians find UVS via Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok; when you type I want to volunteer into a Ukrainian Google search, UVS is the first organization to come up. Bondarenko’s team has sent volunteers to help distribute food packages to people who lost their homes, clean up rubble after bombing raids, and, for those willing to take real risks, to drive cars or buses into war zones and pull people out. People wrote to them for advice: How should we make Molotov cocktails? How should we evacuate? And the volunteers tried to find experts who could give them answers.

Sometimes they rescue their own colleagues. Lisa is a UVS team member from Melitopol, a Ukrainian city occupied during the first part of the war. I am withholding Lisa’s surname because her parents remain in a Russian-controlled village in southern Ukraine, but I can tell you that Lisa has long reddish hair, white fingernail polish, and a sheaf of wheat, a Ukrainian patriotic symbol, tattooed on her forearm. When she was still in occupied Melitopol, Russian patrols would stop her and ask her, as they ask everyone, to show them her tattoos. She kept the wheat sheaf hidden beneath long-sleeved shirts, but every time this happened, she was terrified. Still, she was responsible for distributing food in a part of the city cut off from the center, and so she stayed until someone from a partner organization called Bondarenko to warn her that Lisa was on a list to be arrested or kidnapped. UVS helped Lisa leave within hours.

Lisa now coordinates volunteers in the occupied territories using encrypted-messaging apps and Telegram channels. So does Stefan Vorontsov, a UVS coordinator from Nova Kakhovka, another town behind Russian lines. He, like Lisa, remained for more than a month after the invasion, trying to be useful. He and his colleagues scraped together some funds, bought food and medicine, and distributed it to people who had lost houses and jobs. The volunteers in the town tried to protect themselves by wearing red crosses on their arms, but doing so had the opposite effect: The symbols attracted the attention of Russian soldiers, who stopped anyone wearing them for questioning and sometimes arrest. By the time Vorontsov escaped Nova Kakhovka, volunteers had learned to wipe their phones clean every day before leaving the house and to have carefully prepared answers for the Russian soldiers who stopped them constantly. I spoke with Vorontsov by video link; he is now living in Georgia. “People are leaving all the time,” he told me. “Pretty soon there will be no one left to help.”

The main reception and humanitarian aid point for internally displaced people in Odesa.

In one sense, the Russian suspicion of people like Vorontsov and Lisa is well founded. Although most of the volunteers on the ground are engaged in purely humanitarian work, there really is a link between participation in public life—any kind of participation in public life—and Ukrainian patriotism. This link is not new. Whatever it was that motivated people to contribute their time to their communities before the war, whether in the name of music, art, or animal shelters, the same impulse pushes them toward an idea, perhaps an ideal, of democratic Ukraine, and makes them want to help the war effort now. Serhiy Lukachko, who also works out of the UVS office, runs a website called My City, which was once dedicated to supporting cultural events and other projects in Odesa. Now he and a colleague have put their fundraising talents to the aid of a Ukrainian army brigade. Through crowdfunding, they purchase body armor, extra uniforms, and the four-wheel-drive SUVs that are in such high demand at the front. “We talk once a week,” Lukachko told me. “They give me a checklist.”

It could be a gloomy place, this building full of very young people, some of whom are still going through the trauma of displacement and all of whom have friends or relatives in grave danger. Lisa has an arranged time to speak for a few seconds with her parents every day, just to make sure they are ok. Bondarenko has a boyfriend in the army. Later, over dinner at a Crimean Tartar restaurant, Bondarenko told me that she has already lost friends to the war. The first time she learned of such a death, she spent the evening weeping. The second time it happened, she resolved to mourn everybody at the end, when the war is over, “after we have won.”

Anne Applebaum: Russia’s war against Ukraine has turned into terrorism

Right now, she is busy. So is everyone else in her immediate vicinity, and that energy creates its own momentum, becomes its own inspiration. Nobody in the world of Odesa community organizations is competing for funding anymore. Nobody is jockeying for position or worrying about prestige. “Everybody just kind of tries to help each other,” Bondarenko said, “and it feels really different.” And that is what she wants Odesa, and Ukraine, to be like in the future.

Bondarenko and her team were inspired by American practices of community service—well-designed websites, clever social-media posts—but other cultural influences are at work in Odesa too. One of them is toloka, an old word used in Ukrainian, Russian, and certain Baltic languages to describe spontaneous community projects. When someone’s house burns down, the village gets together to rebuild it. That’s toloka. When a man dies, the village helps the widow harvest her crops. That’s toloka too. Kurkov, the Ukrainian novelist, has defined toloka as “community work for the common good,” and it helps explain why so many people have given up so much to pitch in.

Dmytro Milyutin

Dmytro Milyutin’s shop filled with supplies.

Dmytro Milyutin, for example, lives in a world that bears no resemblance to an old-fashioned Ukrainian village. He runs a parfumerie, a shop in central Odesa where he sells famous perfumes as well as oddities, bottles containing the scent of smoke or of apple pie. He designs fragrances for individuals and says he considers himself a connoisseur “not just of scents but of emotions.” But since the war began, he has sold a fifth of his perfume collection and taken out a loan to provide sophisticated military clothing to Ukrainian soldiers fighting near Odesa. The Ukrainian army distributes basic uniforms, but not the pocketed vests specially designed to carry guns and first-aid kits, or the light backpacks that American soldiers take for granted. Milyutin got a local fashion designer to put aside his dressmaking business and start sewing together canvas and velcro strips to make things easier for soldiers on the move. He too keeps in touch directly with commanders.

While Milyutin and I speak, two women in heels and full makeup come in to buy perfume. They spray different scents onto little sticks and wave them in front of their nose as Milyutin keeps talking about the design of the backpacks that are gathered on the floor beneath the bottles. The ladies don’t mind the backpacks, because that kind of thing, like the air-raid sirens, is normal now too.

Around the corner from Milyutin’s shop, Olexander Babich’s office also now contains piles of sleeping bags, ground mats, binoculars, and night-vision goggles, bought using donations, now being sorted for distribution. Babich is a well-known historian and the author of Odessa 1941–1944, a book about daily life under the fascist occupation, about how people survived, and, he writes, about “how people befriended the enemy, or opposed them.” When the war began, he drove his family across the border, came home, and began to prepare to oppose the new enemy. He and some historians from Kherson, now living in his apartment, track down, import, and distribute the equipment that is now stacked up against the bookshelves. They go to shooting ranges themselves, too, just to keep in practice. In a very real sense, they are already supporting Ukrainian soldiers the way an old-fashioned resistance movement would, except tha they use the internet to raise money and purchase equipment.

Alexander Babych

Nor are they alone. In a half-abandoned building in a different part of town, Natalia Topolova introduced me to a group of women that, funded by a patriotic florist, weave special camouflage blankets and suits for snipers. These “spider ladies,” as they call themselves, come when they can—after work, when children are in school—to sew strips of multicolored cloth onto fabric and nets. At a street café, two Odesa engineers explained to me how they had worked, again, with officers they know, in order to identify exactly the right optical technology that Ukrainian soldiers needed to make their weapons work better. Then they raised money and started importing it from America and Japan.

In his elegant gallery in the city center, Mikhail Reva, a renowned Ukrainian sculptor who designed several notable monuments around Odesa, has also been seized by the spirit of toloka. His Reva Foundation, originally created to fund artistic education and urban design in Ukraine, has been redirected to purchase first-aid kits for soldiers. The various international contacts Reva has accumulated over years—a friend in San Diego who used to live in Odesa, other artists and designers around the world—have also helped him pay for a training program designed to teach soldiers how to use the first-aid kits, especially the tourniquets that can stop someone from dying in the field. He has drawn not just on Ukrainian civil society to support the Ukrainian army, but civil society in many countries.

Read: Liberation without victory

“House of The Sun,” a bronze sculpture by Mikhail Reva, located at Langeron Beach on the Black Sea coast.

The scale of these efforts surprises outsiders, but it shouldn’t. Too often, in America and Europe, our definition of civil society is cramped and narrow. We use the term to mean “human-rights groups,” or confuse it with nonprofits, as if civil society consists solely of organizations with HR departments and neat mission statements. But civil society can also have an anarchic, spontaneous character, coming into being in response to an emergency or a crisis. It can look like the Odesa schoolroom temporarily packed to the ceiling with canned food, paper towels, childrens’ diapers, bags of pasta, where Natalia Bogachenko, a former businesswoman, runs a distribution point for humanitarian aid (“controlled chaos,” she calls it). It can look like the two chic Kyiv restaurants from which Slava Balbek started a food kitchen for the territorial army during the first days of the war, eventually organizing 25 restaurants and two bakeries into a cooperative that cooked thousands of meals every day.

Balbek is best known as an architect, the founder of the most successful design company in Ukraine; he has motifs from a Kazimir Malevich painting tattooed on his arm, adding a different twist to the Ukrainian tattoo. But although Balbek is normally surrounded by artists and architects, although he has designed hotels and offices in China and California, he told me that the cooks, bakers, and volunteers in those strange, panicky days produced a special kind of creative energy, pulling together something from nothing, innovating and adjusting. “Oh, we only have eggs to cook with, they would say: Let’s make breakfast all day today!” In the end, he said, “your fellow volunteers become like a second family.” And you never forget them.

There is a darker side to this story. If the Ukrainian army were better equipped, after all, or if Ukraine were a wealthier or better-run country, or if so many Ukrainians had not wasted so much time over the past 30 years creating corrupt schemes or battling them, then maybe this enormous social movement would not be necessary. The volunteers emerged precisely because Ukrainian soldiers don’t have first-aid kits, Ukrainian snipers don’t have the right uniforms and the Ukrainian state doesn’t have the capability to distribute these things either. Many of the volunteers succeed because prominent or entrepreneurial people can break bureaucratic import rules, can raise money more nimbly than the state, and can then deliver equipment directly to officers in the field or to refugees in a war zone. “Without volunteers, it would be impossible to continue this war,” says Milyutin, the connoisseur of exotic scents.But that too is worrying, since the adrenalin required to sustain this level of activity is now running low. Even volunteers need to pay their rent.

Natalia Topolova, who makes special camouflage blankets and suits for snipers.

But even if it was inspired by the deficits of the Ukrainian state, many hope this wave of activism will wind up reshaping that state, just as popular activism during the Orange Revolution in 2004–05 and the Euromaidan protests in 2013–14 also changed Ukraine. Precisely because Odesa is a Russian-speaking city with a cosmopolitan history, precisely because Odesa has a living memory of occupation, the volunteer movement here will jolt many of the city’s inhabitants abruptly in the direction of “Ukrainianness,” as well as in the direction of the things that term nos represents: democracy, openness, and European identity.

Anne Applebaum: Ukraine must win

In Odesa, this process has begun. Bogachenko, the activist who runs the refugee-aid center, told me that she speaks Russian but has no doubt about who she is: “Greek, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian—if you have a Ukrainian passport, you are Ukrainian.” Reva, the sculptor, went to art school in Russia (in what was then Soviet Leningrad) but describes today’s war as a contest between good and evil, in which choosing sides is not remotely hard. The Russians, he says, among them many former friends and colleagues, “want to destroy everything and make us slaves.” Trukhanov, the mayor, who has been accused of secretly holding a Russian passport and maintaining deep Russian connections, spent a good part of our conversation denying vociferously that this is the case, even though I didn’t ask him about it. He has now made a clear choice, for Ukraine and against Russia, and he wants everyone to know it.

Natalia Bogachenko, who runs a collection point for humanitarian aid.

The life experiences of these Ukrainians have already created a wide gap between them and their Russian neighbors. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, likes to talk about how Russians and Ukrainians are the same nation, the same people. But Ukraine’s civic and military mobilization around the war is the best possible illustration of how much and how quickly nations and people can diverge. For although a few online efforts to raise money for the military in Russia are under way, there is nothing on the scale of what is happening in Ukraine, no mass civic mobilization, no teams of volunteers, no equivalent to the Kalush Orchestra—the Ukrainian band that won the Eurovision Song Contest this year, auctioned off its trophy for $900,000, and used the money to buy three PD-2 drones for the army.

And no wonder: Following in the steps of the Soviet leaders who preceded him, Putin has systematically destroyed whatever civic spirit emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse, squeezing everything spontaneous and everything self-organized out of Russian society, silencing not just independent newspapers and television but also historical societies, environmentalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Lenin was deeply suspicious of any group or organization, however apolitical or mundane, that was not directly dependent on the Communist Party. Putin has inherited a similar paranoia.

In order to prevent people from organizing themselves—in order to convince people that there is no point in doing anything, or changing anything—the Russian state and its propaganda machine have for two decades promoted fear, apathy, and cynicism. Every night, television news mocks the West and regularly threatens nuclear war, even promising the “annihilation” of Britain or New York. The result is that Russians don’t protest in large numbers against the war, but they also don’t spontaneously organize huge campaigns in support of it either. The somewhat mysterious “Z” campaign (Why Z? No one has really explained) is visible on social media and television, but not much pro-war fervor or Z activism is evident in the streets.

On the contrary, the only real grassroots activists in Russia right now are the anonymous teams of brave people, all around the country, who are quietly helping the Ukrainian refugees forcibly deported to distant parts of Russia return home. A few weeks ago, I met an exiled Russian activist who described the chain of connections she had used to help a Ukrainian woman with a small baby and no passports or visas—they had been lost in the chaos—escape the far east of Russia and cross the country’s western border into Estonia. But the activist’s efforts put her in the dissident minority. She had left Russia even before the invasion; her colleagues on this modern underground railroad work in secret.

In Ukraine, she would be a leader of an established and respected organization. In Russia, she risks arrest as an enemy of the people. That paradox alone explains how the two countries have become so different.

I began this article with the ambivalence that hangs in the sultry air of Odesa, and I should end with a reminder that this sentiment has not gone away. Participation in the volunteer movement, though widespread, is not universal. Ukraine is not a nation of saints. Not everyone with a Ukrainian passport is fighting for the country, or even planning to remain in the country. Not everyone is active, brave, or optimistic. A New York acquaintance describes a Ukrainian working on Wall Street whose reaction to the war was: I need to get my family out, and then I am never going back there again. On the train from Warsaw to Kyiv, I met a woman returning home from exile whose skepticism about Ukraine’s leaders led her in the direction of various conspiracy theories: How come my apartment was damaged but the houses of the rich were spared?

But what matters is what comes next, and voices like those will not be the decisive ones in postwar Ukraine. That role will go to those who stayed, those who volunteered, those who built the ad hoc organizations that became real ones, who made the effort to link bakers and taxi drivers and medics to the war effort. The volonteri will create Ukraine’s postwar culture, rebuild the cities and run the country in the future. They will resist Russian influence, Russian corruption, and Russian occupation because the modern Russian state threatens not just their lives and property but their very identity. They have defined themselves against a Russian autocracy that suppresses spontaneity and creativity, and they will go on doing so long after the war is over.

Odessa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, covered in sandbags.

Odesa remains a city suspended between great events. As I write this, I don’t know what will happen next. All I can tell is that the activists and the volunteers, in Odesa and across the country, believe that the next great event will be not another calamity, but a Ukrainian victory.

The Atlantic · by Anne Applebaum · August 10, 2022

7. Russia Can’t Fight a War and Still Arm the World

Excerpts:

Given these limitations, the United States should avoid trying to dissuade hedging Arab partners from engaging with China or other arms exporters by expediting U.S. weapons transfers or easing restrictions on such weapons. That will require pushing back against the demands of U.S. military leaders, ambassadors, and others who have urged the United States to speed up arms sales to Middle Eastern partners to preempt other possible sellers and preserve or extend U.S. influence. Such calls for expedited transfers seem to hinge on the assumption that rushing weapons to partners engenders reciprocity and gratitude in the form of pro-U.S. policies, but there is little empirical evidence that this is the case. Washington need not fear that applying the appropriate due diligence to arms sales will erode its influence in Arab capitals.

There may be specific instances where it makes sense for the United States to sell new arms to regional partners. But any U.S. arms transfers should be part of a holistic approach that places greater priority on political reforms and economic development within recipient countries. One country that could benefit from such a comprehensive strategy is Egypt, which the United States appears to be working to wean off Russian arms. In May, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of CH-47F Chinook helicopters to Cairo, and it seems likely to greenlight the sale of F-15 aircraft as well. But using such transfers to compete with Russia or China sends unhelpful political signals to a regime engaged in political repression and human rights abuses and facing a daunting economic crisis. The United States should therefore continue to condition military aid to Egypt on a willingness to enact much-needed economic, political, and judicial reforms, such as ending the widespread imprisonment of rights activists and critics of the regime. Only through a more deliberate and restrained approach to arms sales can Washington hope to balance security priorities with the broader political and economic needs of the region.

Every month that the war in Ukraine drags on, the costs to Russia’s defense industrial base are likely to grow. Even an isolated and diminished Russia will probably remain a player in the Middle East, as evidenced by the desire of Arab states to hedge their bets and avoid alienating President Vladimir Putin. But any erosion of Moscow’s once-prominent profile as an arms seller could have unforeseen ripple effects in a conflict-prone region that is awash in weapons and hungry for more. This shakeup will create opportunities and risks for the United States, both of which will necessitate a measured response. Just because there might be new demands for weapons in the Middle East doesn’t mean that Washington should meet them.

Russia Can’t Fight a War and Still Arm the World

How the Country’s Shrinking Weapons Exports Could Change the Middle East

By Jennifer Kavanagh and Frederic Wehrey

August 12, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Jennifer Kavanagh and Frederic Wehrey · August 12, 2022

Now in its sixth month, Russia’s assault on Ukraine has become an unrelenting war of attrition. The Russian military has suffered as many as 80,000 casualties, according to Pentagon estimates, and it has lost hundreds of planes, tanks, and armored vehicles. The longer the war continues, the more challenging the situation will be for Russia’s defense industrial base, which is being targeted by unprecedented Western sanctions and export controls. Although their full impact may not be evident now, these strains are likely to have long-term implications for Russia’s ability to project power abroad, especially in the Middle East. Moscow has long competed with the United States and Europe as a major supplier of advanced weapons and spare parts to Arab governments. But the war in Ukraine may reduce its capacity to reliably deliver these goods for the next few years and possibly longer, depending on how long the conflict lasts.

Any dent in Russian arms sales in the Middle East will likely be greeted by the Biden administration as a welcome development, given its tendency to view the region through the lens of great-power competition and fragile regional security balances. The United States sees Russian arms sales as a driver of conflict in the region and a tool with which Moscow extends its political and military influence. According to this logic, fewer Russian arms sales could mean less military sway for Moscow and greater regional stability. But a reduction of Russia’s share of the Middle East arms market might also present second- and third-order challenges for U.S. interests, including the potential emergence of supply gaps that could prompt other sellers, such as China and Turkey, to capitalize on Russia’s troubles. At the same time, Moscow’s growing need for cash may encourage it to adopt ever more irresponsible defense export policies even as its overall share of arms sales in the region shrinks.

To manage these risks, the Biden administration should not rush to fill any real or anticipated gap left by declining Russian arms sales, even if other countries stand to gain a greater share of the market. As it seeks to draw down its military presence in the Middle East, Washington will need to get more comfortable with multipolarity and begin to see itself as one player among many. The United States needs to avoid overindulging Arab autocrats with arms or security guarantees that might trigger instability or by turning a blind eye to their domestic human rights abuses. When the Biden administration deems new arms sales necessary, these sales should be integrated into a comprehensive strategy that fills specific and legitimate gaps in the defense capability of U.S. partners and, more important, prioritizes economic and political reform to address the mounting internal challenges that many countries in the region face.

RUSSIAN ARMS, INC.

Over the past decade, Russia has reasserted its role as a major player in the Middle East. It has done so by exploiting instability and regional divides, often engaging with and offering arms to both sides of long-standing rivalries—for instance, between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Arms sales and military assistance advance both economic and geopolitical goals for Moscow. When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was near collapse, for example, Russia provided a lifeline of weapons and military support in exchange for rights to air bases and ports for Russian forces and contracts for oil and gas exploration. In Libya, Russia again used military intervention to advance its broader strategic interests, sending mercenaries, regular military personnel, and advanced weaponry to support militia leader Khalifa Haftar in his 2019 bid to topple the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. Although that effort failed, it left Russian forces positioned at air bases and around oil facilities across the country.

Since 2012, Russia has accounted for roughly 16 percent of all arms sales to countries in the Middle East and North Africa, second only to the United States, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Its largest regional clients over the last five years have been Algeria (which purchases 70 percent of its arms imports from Russia), Egypt, and Iraq. Middle Eastern buyers are attracted to Russia’s military wares because of their low cost and Moscow’s willingness to sell them to anyone who can pay. Russia’s most famous export may be the AK-47, a cheap assault-style weapon developed in the Soviet Union that has flooded war zones for 70 years and is now manufactured around the world. But these days, Moscow’s most internationally sought-after military merchandise is more advanced: the S-400 air defense system and Su-35 fighter aircraft, for instance.

Buyers are attracted to Russia’s military wares because of their low cost and Moscow’s willingness to sell them to anyone.

Russian arms sales to the Middle East had begun to fall even before the war broke out in Ukraine, dipping to just 10 percent of sales in the region between 2019 and 2021, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. One reason for the drop may be the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, a 2017 law that imposes financial penalties on any country that makes a “significant transaction” with Russian arms manufacturers. But the United States has been inconsistent in its enforcement of the law, and demand for Russian arms remains strong, even among allies of the United States. Egypt, for example, reached a major deal to buy Russian aircraft in 2019 when it could not get comparable technology elsewhere, and the United States did not invoke the sanctions act. India has also continued to buy Russian weapons without incurring sanctions.

SOLD OUT

Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has faced a much more serious challenge to its role as a top regional arms seller. According to top Biden administration and U.S. intelligence officials, the country’s defense industrial base has been damaged by attrition and sanctions alike. In testimony before the U.S. Senate in May, for example, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo noted that Russia was using semiconductors meant for refrigerators and dishwashers in military equipment because of shortages of specialized semiconductors. Despite such official pronouncements, it is important not to overstate the efficacy of sanctions. Experts disagree on the severity of their effect, something that is difficult to gauge because of Russia’s lack of transparency. Moscow is also clearly trying to circumvent these restrictions through a variety of means, reportedly including soliciting help from Chinese companies. Still, any disruptions in supplies of advanced components and crucial parts will exacerbate the pre-existing limitations of Russian arms producers, including outdated manufacturing practices, high levels of debt, and old equipment. And with Russian troops bogged down in Ukraine, more and more of Russia’s available production capacity must go to its war effort.

These challenges won’t render Russia entirely unable to produce and sell arms abroad, but they could impede its ability to deliver and maintain specific weapons systems—especially long-range missiles, tanks, and air defense platforms, which are in high demand from Russian forces in Ukraine and arms buyers in the Middle East.

Evidence of the disruption of Russian arms sales is likely to become apparent only over time, but already there are indications that producers are falling behind on orders. Indian defense officials have told the press that they expect short-term delays in the delivery of everything from missile systems to fighter jets. Meanwhile, U.S. defense and intelligence officials believe that Russia will struggle to deliver arms on time to countries in Africa, including Arab governments such as Algeria and Egypt.

Already, there are indications that Russian producers are falling behind on orders.

A declining Russian role in the region’s lucrative arms trade would have profound effects for Russia’s position in the Middle East. Not only would Moscow lose much-needed revenue if it cannot meet Middle Eastern demand for weapons but its ability to exert political influence in the region could diminish without arms sales as an entry point. Although Russia has sought other avenues to build its influence, such as engaging with non-state actors, peddling propaganda and disinformation, and pursuing deals in the energy, agricultural, infrastructure, and tourism sectors, these efforts have had mixed results and pale in comparison with Moscow’s role as an arms provider.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION

A drop in Russian arms sales could have a strategic upside for the United States. Washington has long viewed Russian military activities in the Middle East as a source of instability, particularly in Syria and Libya. And Russia’s malign role in conflicts in these countries suggests that such concerns are not misplaced, even if they are sometimes overstated.

But reduced Russian influence via arms sales could also generate new challenges for the United States. For one thing, it could create a void for another U.S. competitor, such as China, to fill. China has been seeking to expand its arms exports and thereby its role in the Middle East, and like Russia, it offers cheap weapons without preconditions. Alternately, a regional supplier such as Turkey could step in to intensify the marketing of its own systems. In addition, Arab states could seize on Washington’s fear of encroachment by new arms sellers to try to extract concessions from the United States, as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have already sought to do to avoid scrutiny of their human rights records.

The Biden administration is already plying autocratic Arab partners with weapons to deter and counter Iran and, implicitly, to reward them for making peace with Israel or to induce them to pump more oil. It should not add filling the void left by declining Russian arms sales as yet another impetus. China may have ambitions to become a major weapons supplier to the Middle East, and it has certainly carved out a niche by providing low-cost capabilities such as drones. Yet buyers have raised concerns about the quality of these weapons, and it is not clear that Chinese producers are fully up to the task of competing with other suppliers to offer the high-end systems that Middle Eastern customers increasingly demand. Moreover, the volume of Chinese arms flows to the region remains relatively small, making up less than five percent of total imports to the Middle East between 2016 and 2021, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Given these limitations, the United States should avoid trying to dissuade hedging Arab partners from engaging with China or other arms exporters by expediting U.S. weapons transfers or easing restrictions on such weapons. That will require pushing back against the demands of U.S. military leaders, ambassadors, and others who have urged the United States to speed up arms sales to Middle Eastern partners to preempt other possible sellers and preserve or extend U.S. influence. Such calls for expedited transfers seem to hinge on the assumption that rushing weapons to partners engenders reciprocity and gratitude in the form of pro-U.S. policies, but there is little empirical evidence that this is the case. Washington need not fear that applying the appropriate due diligence to arms sales will erode its influence in Arab capitals.

There may be specific instances where it makes sense for the United States to sell new arms to regional partners. But any U.S. arms transfers should be part of a holistic approach that places greater priority on political reforms and economic development within recipient countries. One country that could benefit from such a comprehensive strategy is Egypt, which the United States appears to be working to wean off Russian arms. In May, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of CH-47F Chinook helicopters to Cairo, and it seems likely to greenlight the sale of F-15 aircraft as well. But using such transfers to compete with Russia or China sends unhelpful political signals to a regime engaged in political repression and human rights abuses and facing a daunting economic crisis. The United States should therefore continue to condition military aid to Egypt on a willingness to enact much-needed economic, political, and judicial reforms, such as ending the widespread imprisonment of rights activists and critics of the regime. Only through a more deliberate and restrained approach to arms sales can Washington hope to balance security priorities with the broader political and economic needs of the region.

Every month that the war in Ukraine drags on, the costs to Russia’s defense industrial base are likely to grow. Even an isolated and diminished Russia will probably remain a player in the Middle East, as evidenced by the desire of Arab states to hedge their bets and avoid alienating President Vladimir Putin. But any erosion of Moscow’s once-prominent profile as an arms seller could have unforeseen ripple effects in a conflict-prone region that is awash in weapons and hungry for more. This shakeup will create opportunities and risks for the United States, both of which will necessitate a measured response. Just because there might be new demands for weapons in the Middle East doesn’t mean that Washington should meet them.

JENNIFER KAVANAGH is a Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
FREDERIC WEHREY is a Senior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Foreign Affairs · by Jennifer Kavanagh and Frederic Wehrey · August 12, 2022

8. On Taiwan, China meets its ‘gray-zone’ warfare match

Excerpts:

Beijing is unintentionally telegraphing that the kind of actions it took during August against Taiwan and the US might also work against China, and for the same reason: a fear in the mind of the targeted adversary that the situation might escalate into war. The presumption is that the adversary fears war more than it values the gains from the gray-zone activity.

US actions in the South China Sea and Japanese actions in the East China Sea in response to aggressive Chinese activities have so far been cautious and predictable. A demand that Beijing cease a certain kind of behavior, combined with a show of willingness to escalate, could convince the Chinese government that its gains are no longer cost-free.

Speaking of escalation, a prominent Chinese commentator suggested the Chinese People’s Liberation Army should shoot down US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plane as she flew to Taiwan on August 3, 2022. Credit: CTV

Importantly, China itself does not appear eager to get into a real fight. Its “aggressive” moves are invariably below its opponents’ red lines. Beijing’s strategy for achieving its hoped-for annexation of Taiwan has thus far been an unmitigated failure.

Even if this latest gambit succeeds in discouraging Taipei and Washington from deepening their bilateral engagement, one clear counterproductive outcome from Beijing’s standpoint has been to push countries such as Japan, Australia and some in Western Europe closer to the position that their own interests would be endangered by a Chinese war against Taiwan.

Beijing has fared better when confining its activity to the gray zone.

On Taiwan, China meets its ‘gray-zone’ warfare match

China’s approach might work for its adversaries as well since Beijing likewise isn’t immune to the fear of escalation into war

asiatimes.com · by Denny Roy · August 10, 2022

China, a world leader in the practice of gray-zone warfare, has suffered through what amounts to a US government gray-zone campaign involving Taiwan during the Trump and Biden administrations.

In the aftermath of the visit to Taiwan by US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, we are seeing through specific Chinese actions how Beijing addresses the more general problem. China is attempting to halt an adversary’s gray-zone activity by a disproportionate display of readiness to escalate to actual war.

“Gray-zone” refers to hostile activities below the threshold that would normally trigger military retaliation from the targeted country. Many of the best examples of it involve China.

A classic case is China’s building military bases on artificial islands in international waters of the South China Sea. During then-incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s Senate confirmation hearing in 2017, his instinct was to “send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.”

That, of course, never became US policy. Beijing correctly anticipated the US would not go to war over the South China Sea bases.

In other instances of gray-zone warfare, China has:

used swarms of ostensibly civilian fishing boats to occupy disputed features in the South China Sea;
fought naval skirmishes by ramming or threatening to ram opponents’ ships, as an alternative to gunfire;
harassed aircraft by releasing chaff into their engines or shining lasers at their pilots, and
taken sand from Taiwan-held islands close to the Chinese coast.

With Taiwan, however, the usual US and Chinese roles were reversed.

The opening for an American gray-zone campaign begins with a gray area in the original US-China agreement regarding Washington’s relationship with Taiwan.

The foundational documents are the Three Joint Communiques of 1972, 1979 and 1982, wherein the US government affirms it has “no intention of … pursuing a policy of `two Chinas’ or `one China, one Taiwan,’” and pledges to maintain only “unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan.”

That clearly precludes official US-Taiwan diplomatic relations, a promise Washington has dutifully kept since 1979. There are, however, innumerable possible interactions, mostly small, between US and Taiwan, or Republic of China, officials. Beijing’s view is that the ban on these interactions must be total. The US side allows for limited interactions, arguing that these do not change the United States’ overall “One China” policy.

The two sides also disagree on the parameters of US arms sales to Taiwan. The 1982 communique says the US “intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan.” Chinese officials complain Washington has violated this commitment since arms sales have not only continued but increased in value since 1982.

The US government counters that its promise to halt arms sales is predicated on Beijing honoring the principle of peaceful settlement of Taiwan’s political status that is enshrined in the communiques.

In recent years the US government has taken many steps that appear to signal increased US support for the Taipei government. These include:

proposed Taiwan-friendly legislation introduced in Congress;
US acknowledgment of a small, but growing number of US soldiers working in Taiwan;
many high-level US government officials visiting Taiwan;
discussions of changing the name of Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington to sound more like an official embassy, and
Biden saying publicly, on three occasions, that the US would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of an attack by China.

US President Joe Biden said the US had a ‘commitment to do that’ when asked if the US would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack. Credit: AFP photo.

Chinese media have complained that “the US side has significantly eased restrictions on official exchanges with Taiwan, US-Taiwan military interactions have become more frequent and overt and the United States even helps Taiwan expand its so-called ‘international space.’”

Chinese commentators have repeatedly criticized several specific US actions. One is the US government’s basing its Taiwan policy partly on documents beyond the three communiques. Beijing did not agree to these documents and objects to their content. They are:

the Taiwan Relations Act, a US law that commits Washington to help Taiwan maintain a “sufficient self-defense capability” and
the Six Assurances, a list of policy guidelines stating in essence that Washington will not sell out Taiwan as a means of improving relations with China, and particularly noting that the US does not recognize China’s sovereignty over Taiwan.

A second specific Chinese criticism stems from an incident in May 2022. The US State Department changed the wording in a section of its website describing US policy toward Taiwan. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted strongly to the removal of a sentence saying the US does not support Taiwan independence. The sentence reappeared a few days later, but the Chinese likely saw the incident as a trial balloon.

A third specific Chinese complaint responds to what Beijing perceives as increased US-Taiwan military cooperation. In addition to continued arms sales, the Chinese point with displeasure to “Washington’s frequent arms sales to the island . . . and blatant defense cooperation between the two sides.”

Chinese media also took issue with two US military transport aircraft landing in Taiwan within a few weeks during the summer of 2021. One was a C-146A delivering a package to the American Institute in Taiwan (Washington’s unofficial embassy). The other was a C-17 that brought a shipment of vaccines escorted by three US senators.

As the Chinese government has realized, the US could take an endless number of actions that marginally strengthened US-Taiwan cooperation but that were not large enough to justify a strong response from Beijing such as recalling its ambassador from Washington.

The situation was reminiscent of gray-zone warfare. At the same time, Washington continually restated that America still followed a “One China” policy, which provided top cover for the micro-aggressions beneath.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Defense spokespersons as well as Chinese analysts quoted in Chinese media have described recent US policy toward Taiwan as “salami-slicing” or “hollowing out of the One-China principle.” (Washington actually has a “One-China” policy, which Beijing consistently misstated.)

Such metaphors capture the Chinese government’s sense of frustration at the lack of an effective Chinese response to an American policy that has been accumulating small unilateral gains for the US seemingly at will.

When the news broke of Pelosi’s plans, several prominent Republican politicians also expressed interest in visiting Taiwan, indicating to observers in China that both major US political parties now see a pro-Taiwan stance as politically advantageous.

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (C-L) and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wan at the Taiwan Presidential Palace, August 3, 2022. Image: AAP / EPA / Taiwan Presidential Palace Handout / The Conversation

Facing the likelihood that this American gray-zone campaign will continue indefinitely and gradually expand, Beijing chose the Pelosi visit to make a stand. Pelosi’s status as the third-in-line to the US presidency made her visit look like an escalation by the US.

Her visit came during the same week as the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), seemingly a symbolic insult. And Chinese President Xi Jinping, who hopes to win a third term as paramount leader later this year, needed to show he could manage the Taiwan portfolio.

Beijing’s response was a grand statement across multiple domains for maximum impact. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it “extreme, disproportionate and escalatory,” but this was by design, as the apparent goal was to make the cost too high for Washington and Taipei to consider doing anything similar in the future.

The most prominent part of the response was military: intimidation through training maneuvers near Taiwan plus a reminder that China can effectively blockade Taiwan’s ports or international airport through announced missile exercises.

Accompanying the military signaling were cyber attacks and a disinformation campaign. An additional element of the retaliation was economic punishment. Beijing halted the import of certain kinds of fruit and fish from Taiwan and cut off the sale of natural sand (an essential construction material) to Taiwan.

As is typical when it practices economic coercion, Beijing claimed the bans were not politically motivated.

The Chinese government announced unspecified sanctions against Pelosi and her family, but far more serious is Beijing’s suspension of cooperation with the US on crisis management mechanisms and combating climate change. Beijing again demonstrates its willingness to exploit any issue Washington cares about as leverage in narrow political disputes, even to the detriment of global well-being.

Finally, Beijing carried out an international strategic communications blitz arguing that China’s actions are correct and that Taiwan and the US are in the wrong.

This episode has implications for how Washington and its security partners will deal with Chinese gray-zone activities in areas such as the East China Sea and South China Sea.

Beijing is unintentionally telegraphing that the kind of actions it took during August against Taiwan and the US might also work against China, and for the same reason: a fear in the mind of the targeted adversary that the situation might escalate into war. The presumption is that the adversary fears war more than it values the gains from the gray-zone activity.

US actions in the South China Sea and Japanese actions in the East China Sea in response to aggressive Chinese activities have so far been cautious and predictable. A demand that Beijing cease a certain kind of behavior, combined with a show of willingness to escalate, could convince the Chinese government that its gains are no longer cost-free.

Speaking of escalation, a prominent Chinese commentator suggested the Chinese People’s Liberation Army should shoot down US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plane as she flew to Taiwan on August 3, 2022. Credit: CTV

Importantly, China itself does not appear eager to get into a real fight. Its “aggressive” moves are invariably below its opponents’ red lines. Beijing’s strategy for achieving its hoped-for annexation of Taiwan has thus far been an unmitigated failure.

Even if this latest gambit succeeds in discouraging Taipei and Washington from deepening their bilateral engagement, one clear counterproductive outcome from Beijing’s standpoint has been to push countries such as Japan, Australia and some in Western Europe closer to the position that their own interests would be endangered by a Chinese war against Taiwan.

Beijing has fared better when confining its activity to the gray zone.

Denny Roy (RoyD@EastWestCenter.org) is a senior fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu. He specializes in strategic and international security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. Follow him on Twitter: @Denny_Roy808.

asiatimes.com · by Denny Roy · August 10, 2022

9. FDD | Time for Change at the UN’s Human Rights Division

Conclusion:

Congress and the Biden administration should encourage Guterres to select a replacement for Bachelet who would end the UN human rights division’s whitewashing of China and unjust criticism of Israel. The United States contributes 22 percent of the division’s budget. Washington should leverage these funds to ensure change.

FDD | Time for Change at the UN’s Human Rights Division

Orde Kittrie

Senior Fellow

David May

Senior Research Analyst

fdd.org · by Orde Kittrie Senior Fellow · August 11, 2022

UN Secretary-General António Guterres is due to appoint a new UN high commissioner for human rights to replace Michele Bachelet, whose term expires on August 31. The new commissioner will have an opportunity to change the UN human rights division’s longstanding practice of whitewashing human right abuses by China and other authoritarian regimes while unjustly criticizing Israel.

The high commissioner is the top UN human rights official, opining on human rights worldwide while directly supervising a large staff, a $350 million annual budget, and some two dozen offices around the world. Her office also serves as the secretariat for the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), responsible both for providing recommendations to the council and for helping implement its decisions.

Bachelet’s term began in 2018 with a commitment to investigate what Secretary of State Antony Blinken has since termed China’s “genocide” of its Uighur minority in Xinjiang province. During a May 2022 trip to China, however, Bachelet repeated Beijing’s false claims that it had ended its Uighur surveillance and re-education program. Bachelet has yet to publicly release a report that her office has written on these atrocities. Amidst widespread criticism of her trip to China, Bachelet announced she would not seek a second term.

Bachelet has also faced criticism for firing Emma Reilly, a whistleblower working for her office who alleged that Bachelet and previous high commissioners wrongfully handed the Chinese government the names of Uighur dissidents, reportedly leading to their arrest, torture, or, in one case, death. Numerous whistleblower organizations have credibly asserted that Bachelet’s office unjustifiably overturned a UN ethics panel finding in favor of Reilly and then wrongly terminated her.

Bachelet’s record on Israel is also problematic. In February 2020, Bachelet supported the global anti-Israel boycott campaign by publishing a list of 112 companies operating in the West Bank. Most of the companies appeared on the list simply for engaging in generic business activities in the disputed territory.

In addition, Bachelet has presided over a series of prejudiced commissioners and rapporteurs who unfairly excoriated Israel. These include the UN special rapporteur for Palestinian rights and all three members of the ongoing UN commission of inquiry into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of these members was Miloon Kothari, whose recent comments criticizing the “Jewish lobby” and questioning Israel’s UN membership were denounced as antisemitic by the United States and more than a dozen other countries. Bachelet has remained silent on Kothari’s statements.

The rumored top three contenders to replace Bachelet are UN bureaucrats without extensive records on either China or Israel. However, one of the contenders, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ilze Brands Kehris, criticized Israel for defending itself during the Great March of Return, a 2018-2019 Hamas-led campaign that saw thousands of Gazans (including women and children) rioting at the border with Israel. Hamas designed the march to overwhelm Israel’s border defenses and thereby enable armed militants to enter the country.

Yet rather than condemn Hamas, Kehris criticized Israel’s use of force to defend its border and said she found it “deeply disturbing that the Israel Defense Forces continue to view the Great March of Return protests as events that cannot be detached from the ongoing armed conflict with armed groups in Gaza.” This assertion is consistent with the UNHRC’s record of dismissing Israeli security concerns and ignoring Palestinian forces’ extensive use of human shields.

Congress and the Biden administration should encourage Guterres to select a replacement for Bachelet who would end the UN human rights division’s whitewashing of China and unjust criticism of Israel. The United States contributes 22 percent of the division’s budget. Washington should leverage these funds to ensure change.

Orde Kittrie is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where David May is a senior research analyst. They both contribute to FDD’s China Program and Israel Program. For more analysis from the authors and the China and Israel programs, please subscribe HERE. Follow the authors on Twitter @ordefk and @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.

fdd.org · by Orde Kittrie Senior Fellow · August 11, 2022

10. Time for Israel to pivot away from Beijing - opinion

Excerpts:

Washington can help by enhancing US-Israel high-tech defense and academy ties and cooperation. For example, the congressionally mandated Operational Technology Working Group, recently created between the Pentagon and the Israeli Ministry of Defense, is a good model of what active cooperation can yield. The working group is designed to ensure our “war fighters never confront adversaries armed with more advanced weapons.”

It leverages Israeli battlefield experience and rapid development timelines with American scale and military power. Imagine Start-Up Nation meeting Scale-Up Nation in the military technology field. These initiatives will only succeed if there is the certainty that these technologies will not leak to China.

As Israel decouples from China, there will be even greater opportunities for greater cooperation between close allies. Free market ingenuity will outpace anything that China’s state-run authoritarian model can produce. With Beijing backing Israel’s most dangerous enemies in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel sees clearly now that it must support its best friend and to keep a distance from its best friend’s biggest rival.

Time for Israel to pivot away from Beijing - opinion

As Israel decouples from China, there will be even greater opportunities for greater cooperation between close allies. Israel must support the US and keep a distance from China.

By JACOB NAGEL, MARK DUBOWITZ Published: AUGUST 9, 2022 21:54

Updated: AUGUST 9, 2022 21:55

Jerusalem Post

The recent tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China over Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan could further deteriorate into open conflict. Israel cannot take a direct role in this conflict, but Jerusalem should send a clear message: Israel stands unequivocally with America.

This is also the right time to reevaluate Israel’s relations with Taiwan. There is no reason to stick a finger into the eye of the Communist Chinese dragon. This is unnecessary as Jerusalem confronts its near enemies, most notably the Islamic Republic of Iran. But warmer relations between the democratic Jewish state and a democratic Chinese state, both under assault by dangerous dictatorships, is smart policy.

Washington rightly expects its allies to line up in this new Cold War. And make no mistake: Sino-American competition will be as intense as the Cold War between Moscow and Washington. Israel chose wisely during those years (most of its enemies did not) – and should choose wisely again.

The crises between the US and China over Taiwan in 1995 and 1996, when China conducted missile tests in the waters around Taiwan and president Clinton sent US battle groups into the Taiwan Straits, precipitated a greater sensitivity to Israeli cooperation with China in the following decade. Israeli sales of sensitive military technology to Beijing, including Harpy loitering drones and Falcon early warning aircraft, sparked serious political crises between Washington and Jerusalem. Tensions only subsided when Israel implemented new export control bodies and mechanisms at the Defense Ministry that restricted the sale of military technologies to the People’s Republic.

Jerusalem and Beijing

A Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft flies over the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, one of mainland China's closest points to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan island, Fujian province, China August 5, 2022. (credit: REUTERS/ALY SONG)

Today, the growing relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Communist China are a major concern for both Jerusalem and Washington. The Chinese are planning to invest $400 billion (NIS 1.3 trillion) over the next 25 years in the Iranian economy in exchange for heavily discounted Iranian oil, and deeper military cooperation, undercutting US efforts to sanction and isolate Tehran.

This flow of funds will help Iran to enhance its conventional defense industry, with access to sophisticated Chinese weaponry and support for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. It will enable the funding of the terrorist activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including the support of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. For Israel, this deal should be another alarming wake-up call: Beijing is not a friend. It is time to pivot away from Beijing.

The dangers are equally great for Washington. Chinese leader Xi Jinping seeks to replace the US as the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific, and eventually the entire world. China is a serial proliferator of nuclear and missile technology to Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.

Xi is militarizing the South China Sea, stealing intellectual property on a massive scale, and committing shocking human rights abuses. He and his cronies also lied about the COVID-19 virus, suppressing vital information that could have contained a devastating global human and economic disaster.

As Beijing demonstrated after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit, when it launched a wide-scale military drill and fired precision missiles in the Taiwan Strait, the People’s Liberation Army will use military force to threaten American allies. Taiwan is now in the crosshairs.

There will be complications

Decoupling from Beijing for Israel won’t be simple. China is one of Israel’s largest trading partners and sources of foreign investment. Beijing has its eye on adding Israel’s critical infrastructure to its Belt and Road Initiative. This includes the Haifa port, the port of Ashdod, underground tunnels and control systems in the northern Carmel mountains, and Tel Aviv’s subway system. The strategic importance of this infrastructure is clear; some of it runs alongside key military installations, major businesses, food suppliers and other essential Israeli military and civilian services.

China also has recognized Israel’s high tech sector and its world-class academic research institutions as an essential source of technology. Beijing’s relatively small investments are strategic in nature and designed to leverage Israel’s prominence in artificial intelligence, hypersonic technologies, edge computing, autonomous vehicles, robotics and big data. These are all technologies recognized by the US Defense Department as essential to its own military modernization efforts, even if they also have civilian applications.

It will be painful, but Israel must reassess these ties. American military, political and economic leadership is critical for Israeli security. Sino-Israeli technology cooperation erodes American leadership. Israeli professors must recognize that joint research with Chinese partners, especially with those connected to the Chinese government or military, will damage their ability to work with the US.

Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs should also grasp that Chinese cooperation will severely limit their access to American capital and markets. And Israelis from all sectors must abandon the delusion that there is a bright line between civilian and military projects and technologies in China.

Israeli academics and technology entrepreneurs, instead, should deepen their ties with Taiwan. While its economy is small compared to China’s, it is no economic mouse. Taiwan’s economy clocks in at about $800 billion (NIS 2,645 trillion) in GDP and is ranked 22nd in the world. It is ranked also as one of the freest economies in Asia, with a strong rule of law, intellectual property protections and a commitment to free markets. In contrast, while China’s economy seduced Israeli companies with its size and growth rates, they soon found their businesses and technologies stolen, and with little recourse in Chinese ministries and courts.

The US-Israel-China triangle

In the final analysis, Israel has no choice but to side with America. This must be reflected in official policy and actions. Jerusalem does not need to encumber its private sector with unnecessary laws or regulations, or to issue public declarations that will infuriate Beijing. But Israel’s informal system, comprised of a small and tight network of senior bureaucrats and security officials, can be very effective in quietly limiting Chinese ties. These are sensitive security issues and must override narrow agendas.

Washington can help by enhancing US-Israel high-tech defense and academy ties and cooperation. For example, the congressionally mandated Operational Technology Working Group, recently created between the Pentagon and the Israeli Ministry of Defense, is a good model of what active cooperation can yield. The working group is designed to ensure our “war fighters never confront adversaries armed with more advanced weapons.”

It leverages Israeli battlefield experience and rapid development timelines with American scale and military power. Imagine Start-Up Nation meeting Scale-Up Nation in the military technology field. These initiatives will only succeed if there is the certainty that these technologies will not leak to China.

As Israel decouples from China, there will be even greater opportunities for greater cooperation between close allies. Free market ingenuity will outpace anything that China’s state-run authoritarian model can produce. With Beijing backing Israel’s most dangerous enemies in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel sees clearly now that it must support its best friend and to keep a distance from its best friend’s biggest rival.

Brigadier General (res.) Jacob Nagel is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a visiting professor at the Technion aerospace faculty. He previously served as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser and head of the National Security Council (acting). Mark Dubowitz is a former venture capitalist and high tech executive, and currently serves as FDD’s chief executive, where he focuses on Iran and China.

Jerusalem Post

11. Five Minutes from Disaster (Iran)

Excerpts:

That brings us back to Ulyanov and his “five minutes or five seconds from the finish line” comment. In this deal, Iran will most certainly reach its finish line, entering a strategic zone of immunity against the West in which the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism will grow economically stronger and cross the nuclear threshold. Russia, too, will reach its finish line, acquiring additional military support for its Ukraine operations while establishing a much-needed sanctions evasion hub ahead of cutting energy supplies to Europe this winter.

America’s finish line entails both the end of U.S. efforts to prevent Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and a catastrophic loss of leverage over Moscow in a must-win showdown to defend an American-led international order. And that puts us five minutes from disaster.

Five Minutes from Disaster

The U.S. is offering Iran the deal of the millennium, and yet the Islamic Republic—and Russia—want more concessions.

https://thedispatch.com/p/five-minutes-from-disaster

Richard Goldberg

Aug 10

Vladimir Putin meets with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran in July. (Photo by Mohammadreza Abbasi, ATPImages / Getty Images.)

“We stand five minutes or five seconds from the finish line,” declared Russian envoy Mikhail Ulyanov on Sunday to reporters camped outside renewed Iran nuclear negotiations in Vienna. But if reports emerging from the latest round of talks are accurate, Iran and Russia may stand five minutes from their strategic finish line, with the United States and its allies five minutes from disaster.

Just five months ago, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, questions mounted in Washington concerning why a man tapped by Moscow to negotiate a nuclear deal favorable to both Russia and Iran was at the center of negotiations with the United States and its Western European allies. Five months later, with Russian atrocities in Ukraine mounting, Ulyanov’s re-emergence at the center of the Vienna talks should reactivate alarm bells among American policymakers and Ukraine supporters around the world.

Late last year, with Tehran racing forward with its nuclear program despite the Biden administration’s pullback from maximum pressure and offer to rejoin the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley enlisted Moscow’s assistance in brokering terms that might be more amenable to the mullahs. Under a new deal, Iran would receive $275 billion of sanctions relief in the first year and $1 trillion by 2030, including the lifting of U.S. terrorism sanctions imposed on the top financiers of a group President Joe Biden recently reaffirmed as a terrorist organization: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Tehran would face no changes in the old deal’s sunset clauses—that is, expiration dates on key restrictions—and would be allowed to keep its newly deployed arsenal of advanced uranium centrifuges in storage, guaranteeing the regime the ability to cross the nuclear threshold at any time of its choosing. As with the 2015 agreement, Iran would face no restrictions on its development of nuclear-capable missiles, its proliferation and sponsorship of terrorism throughout the Middle East, and its abuse of the Iranian people. And worst of all, Iran would win all these concessions while actively plotting to assassinate former U.S. officials like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Pompeo adviser Brian Hook, and trying to kidnap and kill Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad on U.S. soil.

Moscow, meanwhile, would receive billions of dollars to construct additional nuclear power plants in Iran, and potentially more for storage of nuclear material. The fate of U.S. sanctions blocking the transfer of Russian arms to Iran remains unknown, despite U.S. Defense Department reports attesting to Tehran’s interest in buying fighter aircraft, main battle tanks, air defense systems, and coastal defense systems from Moscow.

That’s where the deal stood in March. The Iranian-Russian strategic relationship has grown since then. Following a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Tehran last month, Iran reportedly started transferring armed drones for Russian use against Ukraine. On Tuesday, Putin launched an Iranian satellite into orbit reportedly on the condition that Moscow can task it to support Russian operations in Ukraine.

With American and European sanctions on Russia escalating, particularly with respect to Russian energy sales, Putin may finally see net value in the U.S. lifting of sanctions on Iran’s financial and commercial sectors. While the return of Iranian crude to the global market could lead to a modest reduction in oil prices, thereby reducing Putin’s revenue, Russia may be able to head off U.S. secondary sanctions by routing key transactions through Tehran. After all, what would the Biden administration do if Iran allowed Russia to use its major banks and companies to bypass Western sanctions? Tehran would threaten to restart uranium enrichment if Washington reimposed sanctions on entities given sanctions immunity under a nuclear deal—providing Putin with a way out of the tightening economic noose he faces.

Although Washington is offering Tehran the deal of the millennium, Iran and Russia masterfully played for even more concessions. Iran announced it would not accept any deal unless the United States removed the IRGC from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—a designation that forces visa denials for all IRGC affiliates and criminal penalties for those providing the group with material support. Following a backlash from Congress and Gold Star families, Biden rejected Iran’s demand. Last month, ahead of nuclear talks in Doha, Tehran floated a compromise: remove U.S. terrorism sanctions from the IRGC’s largest business conglomerate, Khatam al-Anbiya. Unlike the IRGC designation, the American side did not publicly reject this direct sanctions relief request for the IRGC. The issue didn’t reappear last weekend in Vienna, though its status remains unknown.

Possibly pocketing yet another victory, Iran came to Austria with a new ultimatum: It would not accept any deal unless the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shuts down its nearly four-year-old investigation into secret nuclear sites and materials never disclosed by Iran to the agency. Tehran, of course, was supposed to come clean about its past work on nuclear weapons as a pre-condition for the JCPOA in 2015, but the deal established an artificial deadline for a perfunctory IAEA report to clear the JCPOA’s path forward—turning a blind eye to Iranian deception. In 2018, however, Israel discovered Iran was hiding a nuclear weapons archive—a library of the regime’s work to build nuclear weapons with memos indicating Iran planned to return to weaponization in the future.

In 2019, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on nuclear weapons scientists still working for a secret nuclear-military organization then-headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the founder of Iran’s nuclear weapons program who was killed in Iran the following year. By 2021, the world would learn that U.N. inspectors had discovered four undeclared nuclear-related sites inside Iran with three sites testing positive for the presence of uranium. Commercial satellite imagery of at least two of those sites showed Iran moving equipment into containers and conducting sanitization work to cover its tracks.

In an earth-shattering report to the IAEA Board of Governors at the end of May, Director General Rafael Grossi lifted the veil on his investigation, all but concluding Iran was in breach of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to declare nuclear material and activities to the agency. In June, the U.S. and key allies supported a censure resolution urging Iran to fully cooperate with the IAEA investigation and answer all outstanding questions. According to Grossi, Iran’s answers to date are not “technically credible.”

To shut down this probe—turning a blind eye to Tehran’s violation of the NPT—would guarantee that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons remains unchanged. It would also render any nuclear deal complete folly. Such an accord may purport to provide robust verification of Iran’s nuclear program, but would lack the ability to verify the clandestine aspects of the regime’s activities.

This result would make Russia happy as well. Moscow has long played the role of antagonist inside key arms control-related UN agencies, including the IAEA and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Undermining the independence and integrity of international agreements like the NPT or the Chemical Weapons Convention serves Moscow’s agenda—giving Putin a freer hand to breach his own international commitments. This is why Russia has ardently defended Iran at the IAEA—voting against censure resolutions and pushing back on investigations—while defending Syria at the OPCW.

Advocates of the Biden administration’s approach will argue that any deal is better than no deal at all. Iran’s nuclear program is so far advanced that the agreement’s concessions—including a trillion dollars in sanctions relief to fund terrorism and longer-range missiles, acceptance of clandestine nuclear activities inside Iran, huge financial windfalls for Putin, and tacit approval of plots to kill Americans—are worth a few years to delay a nuclear crisis that might force military action. According to this reasoning, while the sunset provisions of the old deal may not change, those sunsets don’t fully expire until 2031—so there’s still time.

That’s not true, however. From 2010 to 2012, Congress enacted a series of laws imposing sanctions on Iran’s central bank and a number of economic sectors in Iran. Since the JCPOA was never submitted as a treaty and these laws were never repealed, the up-front sanctions relief provided to Iran was built on the President issuing national security waivers to Congress—continuously suspending various sanctions laws every few months by sending notifications to Capitol Hill. To get Iran to agree to that arrangement, the deal also required the United States to “seek such legislative action as may be appropriate” to repeal the underlying statutes by October 2023.

With 175 House Republicans already pledging to fight a new Iran deal, and with Republicans expected to control the House next year, that outcome is all but impossible. Iran could view a failure to comply as a breach of U.S. commitments, prompting renewed threats of enrichment. In other words, Iran would get this deal and then come back in just over a year to shake down the West for even more. The crisis may not wait until 2031—it may arrive around the time President Biden must declare whether he’s seeking re-election.

That brings us back to Ulyanov and his “five minutes or five seconds from the finish line” comment. In this deal, Iran will most certainly reach its finish line, entering a strategic zone of immunity against the West in which the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism will grow economically stronger and cross the nuclear threshold. Russia, too, will reach its finish line, acquiring additional military support for its Ukraine operations while establishing a much-needed sanctions evasion hub ahead of cutting energy supplies to Europe this winter.

America’s finish line entails both the end of U.S. efforts to prevent Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and a catastrophic loss of leverage over Moscow in a must-win showdown to defend an American-led international order. And that puts us five minutes from disaster.

Richard Goldberg is a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served on Capitol Hill, on the U.S. National Security Council, as the governor of Illinois’s chief of staff and as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer.

12. Recruitment is now a real threat to a frail force facing formidable foes

The "frail force facing formidable foes" gets a grade of "F" in recruiting.

Conclusion:

Most of all, though, more attention is warranted at senior levels. Decisionmakers must elevate this recruiting crisis to the top of their inbox and be prepared to tackle it thoughtfully over the next several years, through whatever means necessary.

Recruitment is now a real threat to a frail force facing formidable foes - Breaking Defense

"Under-manned units over-operate, resulting in an unrested and less specialized force. And the only real solution to this issue is to add fresh bodies to the force," writes Mackenzie Eaglen of AEI.

By MACKENZIE EAGLEN

on August 12, 2022 at 12:15 PM

breakingdefense.com · by Mackenzie Eaglen · August 12, 2022

Navy recruits call their families in the Golden 13 Recruit In-Processing Center at Recruit Training Command (RTC) during Night of Arrival here, Jan. 8. The phone call home lets family members know the new recruits have made it safely to RTC. (U.S. Navy photo/Scott A. Thornbloom)

Challenges to military recruitment aren’t new, but over the last year military leaders have begun to really sound the alarm bells. In this op-ed, Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute makes the case that the issue has now grown to be an existential one, and argues that changes are going to have to happen for end-strength to remain at acceptable levels.

Citing challenges across American society, military leaders say they’re confronting a historic recruiting crisis and running out of time and available and interested talent. Reasons range from regular citizens’ “knowledge gap” due to a lack of interaction with those in uniform, to an “identity gap” that prevents outsiders from seeing themselves as fitting in, to an all-important “trust gap” where young people are “disillusioned” with the armed forces.

Combining internal Pentagon survey data and the Military Officers Association of America’s approaches forecasts a dreary future for the armed forces. Of the 32 million Americans age-eligible for uniformed service, only 23 percent are initially qualified to serve. Once academic eligibility is accounted for, that drops to just over 10 percent (3.53 million). But wait, it gets worse!

Decades beyond mandatory conscription, the key question now is how many youth are even interested in military service. Only nine percent of eligible young people in the US demonstrated the propensity to serve, according to the survey data, leaving around 321,000 — a brutally low 1.01 percent — of the total age-eligible population both qualified and inclined to join the military.

Broadly, this trend is not new, although the reasons behind it are varied and shifting. Nor is this problem isolated to one service. Each branch has suffered recruitment and retention failures, which are only exacerbated by the inadequate fiscal year 2023 defense budget request and other general factors influencing most Americans, including inflation and COVID-19. The chart below shows active-duty troop levels by military service from FY74 (first year after the draft ended) to today.

A chart showing force levels for the US military. (Mackenzie Eaglen. Source: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), National Defense Budget Estimates for Fiscal Year 2023)

This isn’t just an interesting data point. US manpower levels are down significantly, at a time when modern administrations have only expanded the military’s mission and operations, while deploying record ratios of Navy ships, thinly spreading Army brigades, and undertraining its pilots.

For the Army, current overall manpower levels are the second lowest in post-draft history, and four of the top five lowest years have been since 2000. Every year since 2007 makes up the 15 years of lowest number of active-duty Sailors, with today’s Navy down over 30,000 troops from 2000. The Air Force will face its fifth lowest end-strength year, adding to an existing decline where 10 of the 12 lowest years for the Air Force have been since 2010. To round it out, the Marines have been steadily declining since 2018, with 2022 among the 10 lowest years for the Corps.

Actively serving personnel have to pick up the extra work, extend their deployments, and train for new missions while waiting for new recruits to fill the gaps — recruits that simply may not arrive. In other words, under-manned units over-operate resulting in an unrested and less specialized force. And the only real solution to this issue is to add fresh bodies to the force. If you can’t do that through recruitment, you end up facing an existential crisis.

How Did We Get Here?

The term “death spiral” gets tossed around with acquisition programs, but it holds true in recruitment challenges as well. When the military shrinks, so too does the population in contact with, which shrinks support of those in uniform — and shrinks the drive to put on a uniform for oneself. This past year, the annual Reagan National Defense Survey reported that the number of Americans who have a “great deal of trust and confidence in the military” fell by 25 points in just three years, and 11 points in only 8 months. This collapse can be credited to the tragic failure in Afghanistan and the broader long wars in the Middle East, politicization of the military, sexual violence and harassment cases, and a score of other issues across the force — but regardless of reason, it is absolutely having an impact on recruiting new members of the armed forces.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, commander of recruiting, said it clearly in June: “Bottom line, up front, we are in a week-to-week dogfight. We are growing hopeful that we may be able to barely make this year’s mission, but it is uncertain.” As our enemies build record-breaking standing forces [PDF] that intimidate and pressure our allies and partners, not only do these public recruitment failures and declines signal weakness…they actually weaken the US military’s ability to maintain a strong and consistent forward presence and respond with adequately trained and led warfighters.

The struggles to meet active duty end-strength levels are coming at a time that challenges confronting the nation are more numerous and more difficult. They demand not just a maintained force, but a larger one to keep people and national interests protected. This means reforming military culture that disincentivizes enlistment, adequately providing a quality life and pay for service members, focusing more attention on enlisted troops across the armed services, and rebuilding a closer relationship of trust and support with the American public.

In a memo last week, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville noted this is “not a recruiter problem. This is an Army problem.”

Indeed, it is also a national problem given that, as they wrote, the United States military “exists for one purpose: to protect the nation by fighting and winning our nation’s wars,” and “our readiness depends on a quality all-volunteer force.”

While triaging to meet the moment with lavish bonuses and other benefits — along with reduced standards and various waivers, and even giving new recruits a greater say in where they will be stationed in some cases — leaders must realize recruiting will not suddenly get any easier next year. Relying on healthy retention and the Reserves will not be enough to keep force levels healthy for the next five years and not over-work and over-burden those who are in uniform as a result.

Leaders should consider granting more exemptions for the military’s vaccine mandate for COVID-19, rather than booting out capable and willing service members. To maintain force level stability, the armed services cannot afford to lose out on the 36 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 who have not been fully vaccinated and could qualify for a waiver. For those already in uniform being asked to do more amidst the recruiting crisis, the secretary of defense should encourage more religious waivers for the vaccine and pause any further forcible discharges related to the mandate until clearer guidance is provided on exemptions, as required by Congress.

As Tom Spoehr of Heritage notes, the President and key Administration officials should repeatedly emphasize the virtues and benefits of military service in their public speaking, among other innovative suggestions. Congress must start holding hearings, asking questions and doing a deep dive on solutions with the executive branch. More funds will help, along with additional pilot programs and targeted updates to standards, streamlining of paperwork, and partnering with America’s schools, communities and industries much earlier than adulthood.

Most of all, though, more attention is warranted at senior levels. Decisionmakers must elevate this recruiting crisis to the top of their inbox and be prepared to tackle it thoughtfully over the next several years, through whatever means necessary.

breakingdefense.com · by Mackenzie Eaglen · August 12, 2022

13. How Things Could Have Gone Wrong – and Still Can – in the Taiwan Strait

The fundamental Murphy's law is always handing over our head - what can go wrong will go wrong.

How Things Could Have Gone Wrong – and Still Can – in the Taiwan Strait

China’s military drills are over, but the risk of escalation remains.

thediplomat.com · by Todd Hall · August 12, 2022

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) announced on August 10 that its joint military operations around Taiwan are now completed. This appears to mark a close to a significant display of force in the waters around the island that eclipsed — in terms of both proximity to Taiwan and the number of ballistic missiles fired — the measures Beijing took during the last Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995-96. Beijing has made no secret of the fact that the exercises were a direct response to a visit by the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to the island on August 2-3, despite China’s explicit warnings not to go.

These exercises were only one part of a larger, coordinated display of outrage (what I have elsewhere called Beijing’s “diplomacy of anger”) that has included not just saber rattling, but also rhetorical barrages, a downgrading of contacts, sanctions on various individuals, punitive economic measures, and calls for the U.S. side to correct its mistakes. There are various possible reasons for why Beijing has responded so vehemently to Pelosi’s visit, including perceptions that Washington is seeking to hollow out previous commitments, concerns about external reputation and domestic politics, or even Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s own views.

Regardless, the situation in Taiwan Strait has become more tense in the past week than it has been in decades. It still remains to be seen what further measures may be forthcoming; the PLA has stated that it will “continue to carry out military training for war preparedness, and organize normalized combat-readiness security patrol in the Taiwan Strait to defend China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

As developments in the Taiwan Strait were unfolding over the past week, various commentators repeatedly warned about the risk of miscalculation or accident. An errant missile, a collision on the sea or in the air, a feigned attack that elicits an all-to-real reaction – all were conceivable scenarios that could have led to immediate loss of life and escalation in their aftermath. Fortunately, none of those occurred. That said, a scenario just as plausible – but that has received less attention – is one in which events spiraled into violence not because of a mistake or miscalculation, but because the participants perceived no other choice.

To elaborate, for both Beijing and Washington, the issue of Taiwan is one that can quickly implicate larger stakes.

Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.

For China, letting perceived provocations by the United States go unanswered would belie its claims to now be in a position of much greater strength than in the past, reveal that actors can defy it without significant consequence, and raise questions about the substance behind its bluster, both domestically and abroad. Very likely, these considerations were already informing Beijing’s calculations when it chose how to respond to Pelosi’s visit last week. But hypothetically speaking, it is very likely that had Washington then countered with a major deployment of military assets around Taiwan, that would have even further stoked Beijing’s concerns. Such a move would have been reminiscent of Washington’s behavior during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995-96), when it dispatched two aircraft carriers to the waters near Taiwan – an action that at the time confronted Beijing with U.S. military superiority and its own relative weakness. This time around, Beijing might have felt compelled to take more forceful countermeasures in order to demonstrate that it would no longer allow others to push it around, that the China of today is not so easily cowed or humiliated, especially when its perceived core interests are at stake.

For Washington, how it responds to developments involving Taiwan also implicates potentially larger stakes: the perceived strength of its commitments in the region, its willingness to defend its right to “fly, to sail and to operate wherever international law allows,” or the possibility it would look weak should it leave unchallenged perceived attempts by Beijing to alter the status quo.

Indeed, in the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis over 25 years ago it was reputational issues that motivated Washington to send aircraft carriers. As Robert Ross, a professor of political science at Boston College, noted in his excellent research article on that episode, Washington saw itself as having to react so as to demonstrate it had not “lost interest in that area of the world” or allow doubt to be cast on its “security commitments to regional allies.” Given the backdrop of a shifting balance of power – in the strait, in the region, and globally – such concerns are even more salient today.

So, in short, the danger also existed – and continues to exist – that both sides might walk open-eyed into a situation where the perception of larger (and for the most part intangible) stakes like reputation, status, and issues of principle would drive them to believe they have no option but to respond, thereby further escalating tensions and provoking each other all the more. As I have written elsewhere, such action-reaction dynamics can generate a spiral of increasingly inflated stakes that, in turn, work to propel ever more risky or confrontational behavior on the ground.

At present, the U.S. government has said that it “will not take the bait” to escalate the crisis. All the same, Washington has already suggested it will transit the Taiwan Strait in the coming weeks to uphold freedom of navigation. We can only hope that one thing does not, in this case, lead to another.

thediplomat.com · by Todd Hall · August 12, 2022

14. Observations on Iran’s Plot to Kill John Bolton

Excerpts:

The IRGC’s willingness to escalate suggests that Iran is putting revenge ahead of other goals, including restoring the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. Negotiations today seem stalled, but much of the plotting occurred when hopes were higher for success. Iran’s machinations suggests that, at best, it is bracketing the nuclear negotiations, continuing its support for terrorism, and contemplating an escalation of violence even as it negotiates. At worse, it suggests Iran largely sees negotiations as an empty exercise and is unwilling to sacrifice other goals to achieve success. If, against the odds, a deal is signed, there is little reason to expect that Iran would become more cautious in its use of terrorism.

Finally, the Biden administration should prepare plans for a response to a future assassination attempt, if it has not done so already. Bolton was one of several senior officials involved in the Soleimani killing, and other plots against him or others could be underway. Even as the United States tries to disrupt the plots and deter Iran from such dangerous escalations in the future, the Biden administration should be prepared to respond in case one of them succeeds. If that nightmare scenario happens, the administration would need to teach Iran the price of targeting U.S. figures is too high while avoiding a spiral of retaliation—a difficult balance even in the best of times.

Observations on Iran’s Plot to Kill John Bolton

By Daniel Byman Wednesday, August 10, 2022, 5:03 PM

lawfareblog.com · August 10, 2022

Today the U.S. Department of Justice released a criminal complaint against Shahram Poursafi, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, alleging that he attempted to orchestrate the murder of former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, because of Bolton’s involvement in the January 2020 killing of Qods Force commander and terrorism mastermind Qasem Soleimani. The plot, despite failing, is disturbing, and its implications deserve careful consideration by the Biden administration.

Let’s start with the good news. Based on what the Justice Department has provided so far, this suspect’s, and perhaps the IRGC’s, ability to conduct operations in the United States appeared limited. Shortly after Poursafi began his effort to recruit someone to kill Bolton, the United States introduced a confidential human source into the equation, suggesting the U.S. government was tracking the plot at a relatively early stage. The assistance Poursafi provided to the would-be assassin (a map application with Bolton’s work address and some basic advice for communicating in code) was minimal—it’s not like Poursafi was directing an entrenched logistics and operations network on U.S. soil. Poursafi’s reluctance to pay in advance also suggests that the IRGC recognized there was a good chance they were being scammed and were otherwise cautious before investing too much in the plot.

Now for the bad—or at least troubling—news. It is possible, of course, that Iran has more extensive capabilities for acting in the United States that it simply chose to reserve for another contingency, such as a response to U.S. military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran’s capabilities, and that of its close ally the Lebanese Hezbollah, are far greater outside the United States, and Iran has a network in numerous countries that it could use to strike U.S. facilities and personnel.

More troubling is that the legacy of the Soleimani killing endures. Hopes that Iran would settle for a quick, symbolic response such as firing rockets at U.S. forces in Iraq appear misplaced. This is not surprising. I, along with many Iran experts, worried that the killing of such a high-profile figure would lead to an enduring grievance in Iran. Over two years later, this remains true.

The foiled plot demonstrates the regime’s willingness to escalate, undermining hopes that Tehran is eager to prevent the security situation in the region from getting out of hand. Had the IRGC succeeded through better planning or just dumb luck, the killing of Bolton would have toppled what little stability the U.S.-Iran relationship has today. No U.S. president could stand by while a senior government official was assassinated, even if from the Iranian point of view this was simply a tit-for-tat response to a similar U.S. action. The Biden administration probably would have responded with some form of military strikes on the IRGC or otherwise felt compelled to make a clear, and violent, point that U.S. officials cannot be targeted. This strike, to be credible, would have to be extensive and hard-hitting, and that in turn could provoke another Iranian strike in response.

The IRGC’s willingness to escalate suggests that Iran is putting revenge ahead of other goals, including restoring the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. Negotiations today seem stalled, but much of the plotting occurred when hopes were higher for success. Iran’s machinations suggests that, at best, it is bracketing the nuclear negotiations, continuing its support for terrorism, and contemplating an escalation of violence even as it negotiates. At worse, it suggests Iran largely sees negotiations as an empty exercise and is unwilling to sacrifice other goals to achieve success. If, against the odds, a deal is signed, there is little reason to expect that Iran would become more cautious in its use of terrorism.

Finally, the Biden administration should prepare plans for a response to a future assassination attempt, if it has not done so already. Bolton was one of several senior officials involved in the Soleimani killing, and other plots against him or others could be underway. Even as the United States tries to disrupt the plots and deter Iran from such dangerous escalations in the future, the Biden administration should be prepared to respond in case one of them succeeds. If that nightmare scenario happens, the administration would need to teach Iran the price of targeting U.S. figures is too high while avoiding a spiral of retaliation—a difficult balance even in the best of times.

lawfareblog.com · August 10, 2022

15. Did Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip Close the Thucydides Trap?

More fodder for class discussions at the war colleges.

Seriously, a useful overview of the major issues and effects in the INDOPACIFIC region.

Excerpts:

The new bipolar order will be increasingly fragile, with the risk of a war breaking out increasing as Xi inches toward achieving his “Chinese Dream” of restoring China’s great power status by 2049. India and the South and East China seas could also be impacted by the domino effect of this burgeoning crisis when small flare-ups are likely to be conflated. It will also push China to further collaborate with authoritarian and relatively weak states (e.g., Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan) but also developing states across regions that have no stake in the U.S.-led Western normative fight between democracies and autocracies but are concerned with their immediate national interests. Xi’s speech at the recent BRICS summit is a reminder of the new reality that the United States has more to lose.

In Northeast Asia, China’s growing camaraderie with an isolated North Korea coupled with enhanced American alliances with Japan and South Korea portends an even trickier situation given Kim Jong Un’s impending seventh nuclear test. The absence of President Yoon Suk-yeol and his foreign minister during Pelosi’s visit to South Korea, which was noted by China, is a signal to avoid any unnecessary diplomatic controversy with Beijing. Japan’s defiant trajectory, of course, has already been set as an Indo-Pacific anchor state that has indicated military support for Taiwan’s defense though, considering the potential for volatility, it has largely refused to comment on Pelosi’s stopover in Taiwan.

China’s calculation with India, the United States Indo-Pacific partner, despite the ongoing Himalayan conflict, has become more predictable because of Beijing’s need to expand its outreach in China-led multilateral forums like the SCO and India’s centrality as a buffer with the West and formally non-aligned power. However, a simple misstep would be enough to derail this fragile détente—the border talks have just reached a political “four-point consensus” though without any further disengagement. Hence, India will have to deftly manage Chinese advances for cross-regional cooperation.

Regardless of the furor, whether Pelosi’s visit should be criticized as a grave miscalculation or praised as a valiant attempt at displaying solidarity (or dominance in China’s view) seems moot in the grand scheme of things. What matters now is how the various regional stakeholders will maneuver diplomatic entente to de-escalate tensions between China and the United States and avoid making the Indo-Pacific the scapegoat of hegemonic gambling.

Did Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip Close the Thucydides Trap?

The Chinese standpoint is clear: The status quo that gave cross-Strait relations a semblance of stability has been ruptured.

The National Interest · by Jagannath Panda · August 11, 2022

Chinese state media has declared the U.S. House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan a “salvo of war.” This, they say will precipitate a change in China’s United States policy—“strategic and comprehensive countermeasures” is the buzzword. Even before her arrival, China was categorical about the serious ramifications of this trip as it constituted “gross interference in its internal affairs.” Even U.S. president Joe Biden publicly acknowledged it as “not a good idea.” That Pelosi’s stopover would invite trouble was written on the wall. How can a politically symbolic action be without grave consequences? But perhaps the more important question is, how much worse will things get?

The Chinese standpoint is clear: The status quo that gave cross-Strait relations a semblance of stability has been ruptured. The downward slope that the Thucydides Trap dynamic entails is certainly getting steeper. Will this then force the United States to finally review its Taiwan policy or initiate conciliatory actions? Has Taiwan become a victim of token symbolism or was the Nancy Pelosi-Tsai Ing-wen image an evocative democratic totem? And what consequences will Pelosi’s visit engender in the long term for Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific security architecture?

Toward an Inescapable Trap?

Times have certainly changed since 1997 when the then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich made a trip to Taiwan. Today, the balance of power between the United States and China has shifted towards the latter. While China was forced to tolerate Gingrich’s visit in 1997 to preserve its valuable economic relationship with the United States, the fact that he was not a member of President Bill Clinton’s party or administration made it more palatable. This was not the case with Pelosi’s trip.

Between 2018 and 2022, the U.S.-China trade war has metamorphosed into a new Cold War exacerbated by China’s support of Russia in the Ukraine war and U.S. efforts to coalesce like-minded partners in the Indo-Pacific with groupings like AUKUS and the China-focused Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, composed of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. In Europe, the United States’ confrontational policy against China has influenced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to label China a “systemic challenge.” It also pushed for a greater focus on the Indo-Pacific during the NATO summit by bringing in Japan and South Korea as observers. Hence, Beijing is feeling contained from multiple directions.

As a retaliatory measure, Beijing has stepped up its diplomatic maneuvers and is gearing to revitalize its own multilateral forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) by leading emerging and developing states as a counter-weight to the U.S. coalition. Apart from that, China is an economic and military rival to the United States that is willing to flex its might. Since Pelosi’s arrival in Taipei, there have already been immediate consequences: Beijing has (temporarily) banned the import of about 100 Taiwanese food items including citrus fruits and fish; suspended the export of natural sand to Taiwan; and carried out its vow to respond by surrounding the island with live-fire air-and-sea military exercises and “Taiwan lockdown drills” which are reminiscent of the third Taiwan Crisis on a larger scale. Apart from that, Taiwanese government agencies were targets of an unprecedented number of presumably Chinese-initiated cyberattacks, with some of the screens showing messages asking Pelosi to leave.

The United States upped the ante with a G7 statement criticizing China for using Pelosi’s visit as a “pretext” to cause military escalation. Beijing obviously viewed this statement as a way to shame it on the world stage, linking it to the historical subjugation of China by the “Eight-Power Allied Forces.” China has not only canceled its bilateral meeting with Japan and announced eight “countermeasures” (canceled or suspended dialogue) against the United States but also sanctioned Pelosi and her family.

Arguably, this is just the beginning of China’s retaliation and it is set to engulf the entire Indo-Pacific.

Eroding Historicity?

China has consistently accused the United States of violating the One China Principle which stipulates that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. China has also criticized the United States for undermining the spirit of the 1972, 1979, and 1982 U.S.-China joint communiques that form the foundation of their bilateral relationship. On the other hand, the United States pursues the One China Policy, yet it has maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity over whether it would intervene directly if Taiwan was attacked.

Pelosi’s visit has weaponized Chinese claims that the United States is gradually chipping away at China’s sovereignty by providing tacit support to the so-called “secessionist forces” (referring mainly to the ruling pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, which is seen in Beijing as “ultra-nationalist”). In fact, for China, Taiwan’s attempts to promote “incremental independence” by seeking the United States' support and its refusal to abide by the 1992 Consensus, which is another contested term, are an erosion of the foundational tenets to ensuring cross-Strait stability. The Consensus, a debatable and controversial political understanding between the CCP and the Kuomintang Party (Chinese Nationalist Party, KMT), was promulgated by the KMT as “One China, respective interpretations” although China steadfastly remarks time and again that “no room” for misinterpretation exists.

The current Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, while acknowledging the meeting as a historical fact, does not recognize the Consensus as such. The United States has been somewhat non-committal about it, yet there is a contention that the securitization of the term has amounted to a “discursive practice,” eventually inflecting Chinese animosity toward Taiwan. So, although the United States and China were not aligned in their approach to the Consensus, both accorded it a security status for maintaining peace and stability in the Strait. Yet, it is argued that although the promotion of pro-independence values is directly linked to instability, the rejection of the Consensus per se does not challenge the status quo. The Chinese narrative, which links the two, seems to indicate otherwise.

Nevertheless, today Washington finds itself caught in a challenging position between wanting to support the Taiwanese pro-democratic government without sparking a flare-up in tensions with China. White House National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby said that nothing about the visit “would change the status quo” and has tried to de-escalate tensions by reiterating that the United States does not support Taiwanese independence.

For Pelosi, the visit was essential to promote solidarity with Taiwan in the battle between autocracy and democracy—a move that has earned her support from many China hawks in the U.S. Congress. The meeting between Pelosi and Tsai—the first woman House speaker and first Taiwanese woman president—was also an impressive reminder of the stakes beyond blinkered foreign policy, as well as a contrast to the “entrenched patriarchy” in the upper echelons of the CCP.

Higher goals notwithstanding, it is not only the central understanding between the United States and China that is being eroded. The 1992 Consensus has been politicized by both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The Consensus was originally made between the KMT and the CCP to recognize only “one China”, with the implicit mutual understanding that they both had different interpretations—in 2006 the KMT admitted to inventing the term to alleviate tensions. Taiwan now largely denies the Consensus and rejects the “One Country, Two Systems” model. Beijing’s increasingly enraged responses to interferences in Taiwan have revealed its changing perspective on the 1992 Consensus as the CCP now aims to de-legitimize the elected government in Taipei altogether. Furthermore, under the assertive leadership of President Xi Jinping, achieving reunification is more essential than ever and the CCP has vowed to use force if necessary.

Long-Term Damage

Pelosi’s visit took place during an already highly sensitive time for China with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) anniversary on August 1 and Xi Jinping’s bid for a norm-breaking third term only months away at the 20th National Congress in November. Xi’s tough stance on Taiwan has become a keystone of his presidency and the need to strongly respond to Pelosi’s “provocation,” so as to maintain credibility, becomes both an incentive and a compulsion.

Therefore, a more belligerent China should be expected in the Indo-Pacific. The CCP will feel China has to react firmly to Pelosi’s visit so that it does not appear weak or humiliated by the fact it could not force the United States to comply with its warnings over Taiwan. Like in Taiwan, Beijing is likely to ramp up military intimidation over other contested hotspots in the Indo-Pacific to induce a level of respect in regional powers for its core national interests and territorial claims.

The new bipolar order will be increasingly fragile, with the risk of a war breaking out increasing as Xi inches toward achieving his “Chinese Dream” of restoring China’s great power status by 2049. India and the South and East China seas could also be impacted by the domino effect of this burgeoning crisis when small flare-ups are likely to be conflated. It will also push China to further collaborate with authoritarian and relatively weak states (e.g., Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan) but also developing states across regions that have no stake in the U.S.-led Western normative fight between democracies and autocracies but are concerned with their immediate national interests. Xi’s speech at the recent BRICS summit is a reminder of the new reality that the United States has more to lose.

In Northeast Asia, China’s growing camaraderie with an isolated North Korea coupled with enhanced American alliances with Japan and South Korea portends an even trickier situation given Kim Jong Un’s impending seventh nuclear test. The absence of President Yoon Suk-yeol and his foreign minister during Pelosi’s visit to South Korea, which was noted by China, is a signal to avoid any unnecessary diplomatic controversy with Beijing. Japan’s defiant trajectory, of course, has already been set as an Indo-Pacific anchor state that has indicated military support for Taiwan’s defense though, considering the potential for volatility, it has largely refused to comment on Pelosi’s stopover in Taiwan.

China’s calculation with India, the United States Indo-Pacific partner, despite the ongoing Himalayan conflict, has become more predictable because of Beijing’s need to expand its outreach in China-led multilateral forums like the SCO and India’s centrality as a buffer with the West and formally non-aligned power. However, a simple misstep would be enough to derail this fragile détente—the border talks have just reached a political “four-point consensus” though without any further disengagement. Hence, India will have to deftly manage Chinese advances for cross-regional cooperation.

Regardless of the furor, whether Pelosi’s visit should be criticized as a grave miscalculation or praised as a valiant attempt at displaying solidarity (or dominance in China’s view) seems moot in the grand scheme of things. What matters now is how the various regional stakeholders will maneuver diplomatic entente to de-escalate tensions between China and the United States and avoid making the Indo-Pacific the scapegoat of hegemonic gambling.

Dr. Jagannath Panda is a Contributing Editor at the National Interest. Dr. Panda is the Head of Stockholm Centre for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs (SCSA-IPA) at the ISDP; and a Senior Fellow at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. He is also the Director for Europe-Asia Research Cooperation at the YCAPS, Japan.

Image: Flickr.

The National Interest · by Jagannath Panda · August 11, 2022

16. US foreign arms sales spike to nearly $20B in the dog days of summer

Conclusion:

Nevertheless, the Biden administration has shown no signs that it wants to slow down sales to questionable recipients. Just yesterday, the State Department signed off on a deal that will send $74 million worth of Javelin missiles to Brazil, a backsliding democracy with a right-wing populist leader. With that, total arms sales for the last month jumped past $20 billion.

US foreign arms sales spike to nearly $20B in the dog days of summer - Responsible Statecraft

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Connor Echols · August 10, 2022

QiOSK

US foreign arms sales spike to nearly $20B in the dog days of summer

Between July 15 and August 2, Washington signed off on billions of dollars worth of military deals, over a third of which went to autocracies.

August 10, 2022

Written by

Connor Echols

US foreign arms sales spike to nearly $20B in the dog days of summer

Much of the Beltway has been on vacation in recent weeks, doing anything they can to get away from the sweltering DC sun. But while wonks cooled down, U.S. arms sales to foreign countries heated up, with the State Department approving almost $20 billion worth of deals in little more than two weeks — that is, more than $1 billion in military sales per day.

One third of those sales went to Middle East autocracies, highlighting the contradictions of President Joe Biden’s avowed commitment to democracy promotion. As Lauren Woods of the Center for International Policy noted in War on the Rocks, these deals were likely years in the making, with Biden ultimately giving them “the green light to continue.”

“[A]lthough initially signaling a slowdown, this administration now resembles every other recent administration in terms of volume and value of arms sales,” Woods wrote, noting that the United States is by far the world’s leading exporter of weapons. “And this is true for countries with poor human rights records as well.”

The top recipients of recent deals were Germany, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the Netherlands, all of whom purchased more than $1 billion worth of military equipment. Other notable buyers include Kuwait, Taiwan, and Norway, whose purchases helped bring total foreign arms sales this year to nearly $60 billion. But the largest beneficiaries were American defense primes.

As Bill Hartung of the Quincy Institute argued in Forbes, “the tenor of defense industry leaders has been to posture as defenders of democracy” given their role in providing arms to Ukraine. But “they fail to mention sales to repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and the Philippines that have killed thousands of their own citizens while —– in the case of Saudi Arabia and the UAE —– spearheading an invasion in Yemen that has resulted in nearly 400,000 direct and indirect deaths.”

And it’s no accident that these deals continue to line the pockets of defense industry titans. “You can count on the arms industry to do everything in its power to keep the weapons gravy train running,” wrote Hartung, “making use of millions in annual campaign contributions, 700 paid lobbyists, and millions in contributions to sympathetic think tanks that frequently take industry-friendly positions.”

The spate of arms sale approvals began on July 15, but the most controversial ones came on August 2, when the State Department signed off on deals to send a new round of missiles to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. In Responsible Statecraft, Daniel Larison castigated these weapons transfers as immoral.

“Any military support that helps Saudi Arabia and the UAE to continue their interventionist policies in Yemen is an unacceptable enabling of an unjust war and should be rejected by Congress,” Larison wrote.

The moves also come amid a push to slow military support for Egypt, a long-time American partner in the Middle East with a dismal human rights record. Washington already agreed to send Cairo more than $2 billion worth of weapons earlier this year, but civil society groups argue that Biden still has the opportunity to hold up $300 million in direct military support.

“The consistent pattern of human rights abuses committed by the Egyptian government, and evidence that U.S. military equipment has been used in such violations, should require the administration to suspend all arms transfers to Egypt in order to comply with longstanding U.S. law,” the groups, which included the Project on Middle East Democracy, Freedom House, and Democracy for the Arab World Now, wrote in an open letter. “Short of that, it is necessary to withhold the full $300 million.”

Nevertheless, the Biden administration has shown no signs that it wants to slow down sales to questionable recipients. Just yesterday, the State Department signed off on a deal that will send $74 million worth of Javelin missiles to Brazil, a backsliding democracy with a right-wing populist leader. With that, total arms sales for the last month jumped past $20 billion.

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Connor Echols · August 10, 2022

17. Will the Crimea explosions escalate the Ukraine war?

Excerpts:

The extensive damage to Saky could have an impact on Moscow’s ability to defend Kherson, widely seen as the gateway to the Crimea, which was captured by Russian forces in the early days of the war, and whose recapture now appears to be one of Kyiv’s main priorities.

But while the Ukrainians believe the tide of the conflict is beginning to turn in their favour, Moscow seems in no mood to give up on its quest to defeat Ukraine, especially on the sensitive issue of Crimea.

Only weeks ago, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, now serving as deputy national security adviser, promised to unleash “judgment day” if Ukraine ever attacked Crimea. So if Kyiv really did carry out the Saky attack, it should prepare itself for a significant Russian response.

Will the Crimea explosions escalate the Ukraine war?

If an increasingly confident Kyiv is indeed responsible for the blasts, it will mark a huge setback for Moscow

thenationalnews.com · by Con Coughlin

By any standard, the series of blasts that struck a key Russian air base in the Crimean peninsula on Tuesday represents a significant escalation in the Ukraine conflict, one that raises questions about Mosow’s ability to defend key bases.

At a time when many Russians remain oblivious to the deadly carnage being wrought by the six-month-long conflict, the image of thick plumes of smoke rising from Russia’s Novofedorivka air base near the Black Sea resort of Saky was witnessed by crowds of holiday makers sunning themselves on the nearby beaches.

While the precise cause of the blasts has still to be confirmed, there is mounting speculation that the base was subjected to a skillfully executed Ukrainian attack, while the Kremlin insists that it was the result of a munitions dump exploding.

Either way, once the dust had settled, satellite images showed that the base had been severely hit, with large areas of the airfield suffering extensive damage and a significant number of Russian warplanes knocked out of action.

The fact that a major Russian air base, used to provide vital air cover for its forces, has suffered such extensive damage inevitably raises suspicions that the attack was the work of the Ukrainian military.

An infrared overview of Saki air base in Novofedorivka, Crimea, on Wednesday. Reuters

A Ukrainian attack inside Crimea demonstrates a growing sense of confidence among Ukrainian commanders

Kyiv was not slow to exploit the propaganda benefits of the incident, with its air force claiming that at least nine warplanes had been destroyed. "Saky! Minus nine aircraft of the invaders," the Air Force Command wrote on Facebook. Crimea’s Health Department said that one person was killed and six others injured in the explosions.

And while Ukrainian officials have been reluctant to claim responsibility, fearing that it might provoke a significant Russian response, Kyiv has made it abundantly clear that it regards Russian bases in Crimea, which Moscow occupied and annexed in 2014, as being legitimate targets.

In his nightly address just hours after the explosions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insisted his country’s ultimate ambition was to retake the peninsula. “This Russian war against Ukraine and against all of free Europe began with Crimea and must end with Crimea – its liberation,” he said. "We will never give it up … the Black Sea region cannot be safe while Crimea is occupied."

While Kyiv might be reluctant to confirm its role in the devastation, all the indications suggest it was the result of a carefully executed operation by its military. Initial reports claimed the damage had been caused by a series of long-range missile strikes carried out after Kyiv had taken delivery of its latest batch of sophisticated western weaponry.

An anonymous government official also told The Washington Post that the attack had been carried out by an elite team of special forces operating deep behind enemy lines. The official declined to share details on how the raid was conducted.

Moscow’s insistence that the explosions at the base were the result of an accident was quickly dismissed by western leaders. “That air force base has been used by [the] Russian air force to bomb Ukrainian targets,” British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said. “It’s absolutely legitimate for Ukraine to take lethal force, if necessary, but take force in order to regain not only its territory, but also to push back its invader.”

Mr Wallace was speaking as Britain announced it was increasing its military aid to Ukraine by sending it more of its M270 multiple-launch rocket systems. This month, the US announced it was sending an extra $1 billion worth of military equipment, including America’s High Mobility Rocket System (Himars), which have a longer range than Russian missile systems, and have enabled the Ukrainians to thwart Russia’s attempts to seize control of territory to the south and east of the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during the donor conference for Ukraine at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen on Thursday. AP Photo

Has Al Zawahiri's killing exposed the Taliban's double standards?

Can the EU save the Iran nuclear deal?

Can the growing Russia-Iran alliance endure?

With the help of this sophisticated weaponry, the Ukrainian military has not only frustrated the Russian advance in the Donbas region, but also put itself in a position to launch an offensive to recapture the strategically important city of Kherson on the Dnipro River.

Moreover, if it transpires that Ukraine did carry out the Saky attack, it would represent a significant intensification in Kyiv's war-fighting capabilities.

To date, it has confined its efforts primarily to defending Ukrainian territory, hitting Russian positions close to its border with the aim of disrupting Moscow's war effort. By contrast, the Russians have regularly launched cruise missiles deep inside Ukraine – including on Kyiv – in a bid to disrupt its military operations and weaken its morale.

An Ukrainian attack inside Crimea, however, is an entirely different proposition. It demonstrates both a growing sense of confidence among Ukrainian commanders, as well as a willingness to extend the fighting deep into Russian-controlled territory.

The extensive damage to Saky could have an impact on Moscow’s ability to defend Kherson, widely seen as the gateway to the Crimea, which was captured by Russian forces in the early days of the war, and whose recapture now appears to be one of Kyiv’s main priorities.

But while the Ukrainians believe the tide of the conflict is beginning to turn in their favour, Moscow seems in no mood to give up on its quest to defeat Ukraine, especially on the sensitive issue of Crimea.

Only weeks ago, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, now serving as deputy national security adviser, promised to unleash “judgment day” if Ukraine ever attacked Crimea. So if Kyiv really did carry out the Saky attack, it should prepare itself for a significant Russian response.

Published: August 11, 2022, 2:30 PM

thenationalnews.com · by Con Coughlin

18. China and Russia Can't Be Ignored by the West Anymore

China and Russia Can't Be Ignored by the West Anymore

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · August 11, 2022

Over at the Wall Street Journal this week current 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, my former U.S. Naval War College colleague and current dean at the George C. Marshall Center, Andrew Michta, blames a “crisis of disbelief” for keeping the West from mounting a concerted effort to face down aggression in Ukraine and deter it in the Pacific. The West, he says, boasts substantial material advantages over malefactors like China and Russia. But it has squandered its advantages by failing to take the challenge from its antagonists seriously.

You can have all the latent military might in the world yet come up short because you don’t resolve to translate it into working forces bestriding the field. Materially outmatched yet impassioned competitors can come out on top because they make full use of meager resources. That may be the West’s predicament today.

Andrew’s ruminations on disbelief conjure a number of thoughts from the masters of diplomacy and strategy. An odd couple, the French soldier David Galula and the American statesman-scholar Henry Kissinger, spotlight the nature of the challenge. Galula, a veteran of the French-Algerian War of 1954-1962 and an authority on counterinsurgent warfare, observes that an incumbent political regime finds it hard to meet the challenge of a “cold revolutionary war.” By that he means that political leaders, by and large, are reluctant to crush movements that might turn out to be legitimate, loyal opposition. Constitutional restraints and public sentiment fetter what they can do. And so forth.

In other words, an insurgent movement in the making enjoys the initiative before it takes up arms. It can organize, amass manpower and resources, and chip away at the incumbent regime’s legitimacy through propaganda and other political means. Meanwhile the regime stands idle unless and until it obtains incontrovertible proof that its opponent means to topple the government by force. Galula’s cold revolutionary war within a nation-state has much in common with China’s (and, until the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s) “gray-zone” strategy, which subverts the regional or world order while abjuring the overt use of firepower. Small wonder China’s Asian neighbors and the keepers of the international order haven’t yet sorted out an effective counterstrategy.

They don’t want to unduly provoke Beijing, much as Galula’s incumbent regime exercises forbearance despite a potentially mortal challenge to its authority.

Henry Kissinger makes much the same point Galula does, presenting one of his customary grand observations about the nature of politics. He opines that a society’s overseers suffer from a blind spot toward revolutionaries. They simply cannot bring themselves to believe anyone would want to sweep away a political order the overseers regard as legitimate. I call this the “Oh, you’re serious?” effect. Michta’s culture of disbelief seems not to be confined to the West in the twenty-first century. It’s a universal problem plaguing guardians of any established order.

The Xi Jinpings and Vladimir Putins of the world delight in the psychological dynamics of strategic competition, but Kissinger has a tart warning for them as well. If custodians of the established order have a blind spot, revolutionaries have one of their own: they assume they can overthrow the status quo while retaining its best features. Seldom is that the case. Xi’s Chinese Communist Party is trying to do away with a liberal order of trade and commerce that allowed China to enrich itself and to rise to diplomatic and military eminence. That seems perverse and self-defeating—but, it seems, Beijing has succumbed to its own culture of disbelief.

If Kissinger is right, disbelief eggs on aggressors, encouraging ever more reckless attacks on the system, while sowing paralysis among the liberal order’s defenders. Human nature being what it is, it could take a massive shock to jolt defenders out of their false consciousness.

You’d think the Ukraine war would have applied a shock of sufficient voltage, but Michta doubts it. He reports that Eastern European NATO powers such as the Baltics and Poland take the Russia challenge seriously. As they should; they’re on the frontlines, and they know from grim experience what direct or indirect rule from Moscow is like. They have taken the lead in supporting Ukraine, joined by offshore NATO powers—chiefly Great Britain and the United States. Continental European powers not on the frontlines have dawdled by contrast.

Disbelief stubbornly persists when aggression remains well over the horizon, and thus abstract from daily life.

Michta attributes Europe’s culture of disbelief—and its baneful effects on martial fortitude—to “decades of post-Cold War globalist dogma.” He doesn’t mention political scientist Francis Fukuyama by name, but he alludes to the virulent form of “end-of-history” thinking that swept the West following the Cold War. Fukuyama, of course, published an influential article and book leveling a modest claim, namely that all forms of rule had now been tested and that experience had vindicated liberal democracy as the best. History had ended in that limited sense. But the larger culture seized on the idea that armed strife had come to an end with the Soviet Union’s demise. War was no more; globalized trade and commerce were the future.

History really had ended.

Gauzy, triumphalist memories of the Cold War’s denouement are now an entrenched culture—Michta’s culture of disbelief. If he has it right, not even a full-blown invasion of a European nation has been enough to dispel the “Oh, you’re serious?” effect postulated by Galula and Kissinger. Nor has the bile spewing out of Beijing following Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan, nor the Chinese ballistic missiles raining into waters near that beleaguered island.

If one outright invasion and threats of another aren’t enough to rouse the West, what will?

A 1945 Contributing Editor writing in his own capacity, Dr. James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.” The views voiced here are his alone. Holmes also blogs at the Naval Diplomat.

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · August 11, 2022

19. The New ‘Monuments Officers’ Prepare to Protect Art Amid War

The New ‘Monuments Officers’ Prepare to Protect Art Amid War

The New York Times · by Matt Stevens · August 11, 2022

A group of art experts have had intensive training to become part of the U.S. Army Reserve. It will be their job to help save cultural heritage in war zones.

Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

The Army’s Monuments Officers in training. They will work in a military capacity to identify and preserve cultural treasures around the world that are threatened by conflict, just like the Monuments Men of World War II.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times

Aug. 11, 2022Updated 1:21 p.m. ET

FORT BELVOIR, Va. — The Army Reserve officers worked with brisk efficiency.

For much of the afternoon, they had meticulously documented and carefully packed cultural treasures from the Smithsonia museum in Pinelandia — a country that could soon be under siege. Their mission — to evacuate important items from the museum — was going well.

But then an aloof, lunch-preoccupied security guard accidentally put his foot through a precious painting propped against a table.

The room went silent. Then the museum’s collection manager had a conniption. The officers had a problem.

“A failure of our forces to secure the artifacts while we were handling them,” Capt. Blake Ruehrwein, 40, of Rehoboth, Mass., said afterward.

Thankfully for the officers, it was all only a training exercise set in a fictional museum and country. The mishap, which appeared at least somewhat intentional, would help them learn to deal with crisis and keep their heads on a swivel, instructors later said.

In reality, the trainees are 21 cultural professionals from with special expertise in everything from African history to spatial computing. A handful are international cultural property protection officers here for the training and networking. The other 15 are part of a cadre of academics and arts curators who are being turned into Army Monuments Officers.

Intensive training includes courses in first-aid and forensic documentation, emergency preparedness and war-zone conservation basics — how to dry out, handle and salvage damaged items.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times

Their charge? Working in a military capacity to identify and preserve cultural treasures around the world that are threatened by conflict, just like the Monuments Men of World War II who recovered millions of artifacts looted by the Nazis.

The Smithsonia they were protecting was actually a wing of the National Museum of the United States Army. The cultural treasures to preserve were items bought from thrift-stores and garage sales.

“Make no mistake,” said Corine Wegener, the director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, a partner in the 10-day training program. “These are all soldiers.”

At a graduation ceremony on Friday, after a yearslong bureaucratic delay, the class members are expected to cap off their formal appointment as part of the first new class of modern-day monuments men and women in a generation.

The ceremony comes after intensive training that includes courses in first-aid and forensic documentation, emergency preparedness and the nuts and bolts of war-zone conservation — how to dry out, handle and salvage damaged items.

“I’m both exhausted and energized,” said Capt. Jessica Wagner, 34, of St. Louis, Mich., who specializes, not coincidentally, in heritage preservation and repatriation of cultural property.

Captain Jessica Wagner has worked in education and public outreach for the several cultural institutions, including most recently the U.S. Naval War College Museum. She and the others are going to be part of the Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times

On Wednesday, in the Smithsonia, with the pressure on and the clock ticking, officers developed a detailed cataloging system to log the items. One officer carefully placed foam inside a ceramic item to cushion it, then wrapped it in tissue paper and capped it. Lacking additional paper, he used a box cutter to shape a piece of cardboard that he could wrap around the object.

Across the room, an anxious collection manager shouted at another officer trying to secure a painting: “We can't put tape on this!”

Once they are in the field, the officers will not be directly hunting down missing works of art, but will instead serve as a set of scholarly liaisons for military commanders and the local authorities. They may advise against an airstrike on a certain site, for instance, or suggest an attempt to forestall looting in an area where ground fighting has begun.

“The capability that these new Monument Men and Women are bringing is a better understanding of the environment so commanders can apply resources in the right directions,” said Col. Scott DeJesse, an Army Reserve officer who is one of the leaders of the effort.

“If you want to build stronger partnerships, this is how you do it,” he added. “Through trust, through showing we care about you.”

The specialists are to be part of the Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, which has its headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C. As reservists, they will not be deployed full time, but will be attached to military units as needed. That could entail working in war zones where team members could come under fire. Hence the training.

The officers had limited time — and limited packing supplies — during a training exercise in which they had to log, pack and evacuate items from a museum.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times

“The risks of putting myself in harm’s way to safeguard cultural heritage are worth it,” said Captain Ruehrwein, an Air Force veteran who works in education and outreach at the Naval War College Museum in Newport, R.I. “I believe so strongly in the importance and value of the arts for everyone.”

The efforts recall those of the Monuments Men — 345 people (mostly men but also several dozen women) who applied their art expertise overseas from 1943 to 1951. Together, they tracked down millions of artworks, books and other valuables stolen by the Germans in wartime. Their stories were recorded and relayed in the work of Robert M. Edsel and eventually formed the basis for a 2014 George Clooney movie, “The Monuments Men.”

In 2019, the Smithsonian Institution and the Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command agreed to join forces to protect cultural property in conflict zones and develop a training program for Army Reserve Civil Affairs Soldiers.

Training was supposed to begin in 2020, but the pandemic played a part in a hiring delay and bureaucracy slowed the process. During World War II, the Monuments Men were soldiers who had already enlisted and happened to have the needed specialized skills. In this iteration of the program, the military, for the first time, directly commissioned civilian cultural heritage specialists into its ranks.

Another new class of specialists could soon follow this one, Ms. Wegener said.

It has been almost 20 years since Ms. Wegener worked as an arts, monuments and archives officer in Baghdad as part of a very small team. She knew the military needed more highly trained experts in civil affairs. And thankfully, she said, officials agreed.

“This, to me, is my dream come true,” she said. “You don’t have to wait for something bad to happen. You now have this network that we created — and that they’re creating for themselves getting to know each other and training together. We’re helping provide this capability in the world.”

Some of those training in the program. “The risks of putting myself in harm’s way to safeguard cultural heritage are worth it,” said Captain Ruehrwein, an Air Force veteran who is part of the class.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times

Six of the 21 people in the current class of Army Monuments Officers, including Captain Ruehrwein and Captain Wagner, are new directly appointed officers. Nine other participants were already in the Army Reserve when they enrolled in the training, and have either transferred to command or are in the process; the final six are international cultural property protection officers within their national militaries.

Captain Wagner has worked in education and public outreach for the several cultural institutions, including most recently the U.S. Naval War College Museum. Years ago, in graduate school, she said she spent time researching those in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Unit from World War II for her dissertation.

“Would I be willing to do that?” she recalled asking herself.

In an email this week, after a day of training, she acknowledged that being in uniform still “feels a little out-of-body for me.” Building military habits like saluting, using courtesy titles and taking off hats indoors has sometimes felt foreign. And Captain Wagner and her peers will also eventually need to pass one of the Army’s physical diagnostic tests.

But in this group, Captain Wagner said, she has found her “people.”

“If you would have asked me five years ago if I would ever be in the U.S. Army, wearing a uniform, sitting in the Smithsonian Castle, surrounded by military soldiers from around the world, discussing how to best protect cultural heritage in conflict, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she said. “But here we are.”

Graham Bowley contributed reporting.

The New York Times · by Matt Stevens · August 11, 2022

20. U.S. Secretly Bolstered Security at Federal Buildings Against Possible Iranian Attacks After Soleimani Killing

U.S. Secretly Bolstered Security at Federal Buildings Against Possible Iranian Attacks After Soleimani Killing

Government concerns about retaliation by Tehran go beyond alleged campaign to assassinate former U.S. officials

By Ian TalleyFollow

Aug. 12, 2022 1:26 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-secretly-bolstered-security-at-federal-buildings-against-possible-iranian-attacks-after-soleimani-killing-11660325178?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1

WASHINGTON—Longstanding U.S. worries about the threat that Iran and its agents pose on U.S. soil intensified in the hours after the 2020 assassination of a prominent Iranian military commander, when the Department of Homeland Security bolstered security at thousands of federal buildings against the possibility of retaliation, according to current and former senior U.S. officials.

That effort, code-named Operation Resilience according to one of the officials, was premised in large part on the concern that Iran would use its proxy Hezbollah to attack the U.S. homeland in response to the killing in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad. The slain commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, headed Iran’s Quds Force, an elite unit responsible for Iran’s shadow wars and military expansion.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department charged an Iranian national with plotting to assassinate former U.S. officials, including John Bolton, who served as President Trump’s national security adviser, validating long-running concerns among security and intelligence officials about the risk of domestic attacks by Iran. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was also identified as a target.

Former national security adviser John Bolton, speaking outside the White House in 2019, has advocated regime change in Tehran.

PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Operation Resilience, whose existence hasn’t been previously made public, demonstrates that the U.S. government’s concerns about potential Iranian attacks against domestic targets are much broader in scope than the targeting of prominent individuals. One of the former senior officials said that, in addition to securing federal buildings, precautionary measures put into place under the operation also included preparation for cyberattacks and ordering other departments such as the Coast Guard and Border Patrol to enhance security against a retaliation threat.

NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP

The 10-Point.

A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal.

PREVIEW

In charging documents against Shahram Poursafi, the man accused of planning Mr. Bolton’s assassination, the Federal Bureau of Investigation cited a top Iranian military official’s vow to use proxies to exact revenge upon U.S. homeland targets.

Iranian forces and U.S. allied forces have skirmished in proxy wars that Tehran has been waging for years in the Middle East as it aspires to become the regional dominant power. But U.S. national security officials and Western analysts say Iran’s ability to direct Hezbollah’s operations in the U.S. poses a direct threat to the homeland and influences Washington’s diplomatic calculus as it determines how to engage Tehran.

The Lebanon-based group Hezbollah is designated by the U.S. and dozens of other nations as a terrorist organization.

While the alleged conspiracy against Mr. Bolton hasn’t been tied to Hezbollah, U.S. security officials say Iran has used both its own agents and Hezbollah’s to plot attacks against U.S. officials, buildings and other terrorist targets.

The FBI said Mr. Poursafi is a member of Iran’s sanctioned elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mr. Poursafi allegedly planned to have Mr. Bolton assassinated in the parking garage at his Washington office or at his Maryland home.

Mojtaba Babaei, a spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations, said allegations against the government and Hezbollah, “are baseless and unfounded allegations with no evidence to support them.”

Hezbollah and the DHS didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Relations with Iran have remained on edge since 2018, when the Trump administration pulled out of the nuclear accord with Tehran and reimposed crippling economic sanctions. Those tensions remain high despite the Biden administration’s efforts to persuade Tehran to rejoin the pact with an offer of easing the pressure campaign. U.S. negotiators say they are closing in on a deal and European officials, trying to secure an agreement before Tehran achieves a critical milestone in the development of its nuclear program, have offered fresh concessions.

Current and former senior security officials say Hezbollah has tapped into Lebanese and Syrian-diaspora criminal networks to become one the biggest money-laundering, drug-trafficking and arms-trafficking organizations in the Western Hemisphere. Hezbollah primarily uses those networks to fund its operations and help Iran evade sanctions, raising hundreds of millions of dollars a year, those people say.

Hezbollah forces participate in fighting in Syria in 2017.

PHOTO: OMAR SANADIKI/REUTERS

“Some Hezbollah supporters cache weapons and raise funds, often via charitable donations, remittances, and sometimes through illicit means, such as drug trafficking and money laundering,” Craig Faller, who was head of the U.S. Southern Command during the Soleimani assassination, told lawmakers at the time.

The DHS, along with the Treasury Department, FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have sought to disrupt and dismantle the networks as a priority. Despite their efforts, Hezbollah’s criminal networks are still operational, especially as Iran-friendly governments in South America have facilitated their activities, according to current and former U.S. officials.

“The vast networks Hezbollah runs in Latin America not only pose a threat to U.S. financial integrity because of their central role in money laundering and terror finance, they also serve as logistical support for terror plots,” said Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Current and former officials say Hezbollah networks help facilitate Iran’s efforts to hit U.S. domestic targets. Ali Kourani, a Lebanese immigrant, was sentenced in 2019 to 40 years in prison after being convicted on terrorism charges, including plotting on behalf of Hezbollah an attack on military and intelligence targets in New York as well as an airport.

In May, naturalized U.S. citizen Alexei Saab was convicted on charges he received military training from Hezbollah, after federal prosecutors said he scouted targets in New York including the U.N. headquarters, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, and the Empire State Building.

Two Iranian men in 2019 pleaded guilty to charges stemming from an alleged plot to assassinate Washington-based Iranian dissidents at the National Council for Resistance for Iran, a group Mr. Bolton has supported as an alternative to the current clerical regime in Tehran.

Vivian Salama and Michelle Hackman contributed to this article.

Write to Ian Talley at ian.talley@wsj.com

21. Xi Jinping’s Reach Exceeds His Grasp

Xi Jinping’s Reach Exceeds His Grasp

He wants nothing less than to see China to see his country become the pre-eminent global power during his lifetime.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinpings-reach-exceeds-his-grasp-china-beijing-power-ideological-principles-great-leap-forward-policy-change-cultural-revolution-11660309895?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

By Kevin Rudd

Aug. 12, 2022 1:43 pm ET

The Chinese Communist Party will convene in November for its most consequential Party Congress in 40 years. For the party, politics is about securing and sustaining its hold on power. For Xi Jinping, the Party Congress is also about personal power. His goals are to secure reappointment as general secretary and a record third term as president and to make China the pre-eminent regional and global power during his lifetime.

At the 12th Party Congress in 1982, Deng Xiaoping set China’s political and ideological course for the next 35 years. Economic development through market reform and a foreign policy built around engagement with the world (including deeper relations with Washington) were the core ideological principles that defined China during the following decades. They also defined an unofficial social contract between the party and the Chinese people to rebuild its political legitimacy after the wanton destruction of the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and, later, the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The Deng era has passed. We are in the new era of Mr. Xi, the first decade of whose rule saw profound ideological moves to the Leninist left in politics, the Marxist left in economics, and the nationalist right in foreign policy. Each of these ideological shifts has manifested itself in real policy change.

In March, Beijing set its annual economic growth target at 5.5%—the lowest in decades, but still highly ambitious given the circumstances. While in China the paramount leader can never be wrong, the prospects of delivering 5.5% growth seem remote. The proximate cause for this recent slowdown is the draconian “zero Covid” lockdown policy that cratered economic activity in many major cities for months at a time. Shanghai’s economic output shrank 13.7% in the second quarter of 2022. But Covid isn’t the whole story. China’s economy has deeper policy and structural problems that have emerged over several years.

NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP

Morning Editorial Report

All the day's Opinion headlines.

PREVIEW

China’s market-based reform program stalled in 2015 and has generally been in reverse since 2017, with the notable exception of the financial sector. The party has reasserted control over a previously rampant private sector, eroding business confidence and private fixed capital investment. This intervention has taken many forms. Communist Party committees have taken management roles at private firms. The party has forced companies into mixed equity arrangements with state-owned enterprises. A “rectification” campaign has reaffirmed that the courts exist to serve the party, including in commercial cases.

Under the rubric of competition policy, the government has cracked down on tech platforms. There has been a separate crackdown on the “fictitious” economy, including the property sector (manufacturing is considered the “real” economy). The “common prosperity” agenda targets rising income inequality. The mercantilist “dual circulation economy” model aims at maximizing global dependence on the Chinese market while minimizing its dependence on others. These are now summed up by the “new development concept,” which has also restored the primacy of state industrial policy over private innovation.

Then there are even deeper structural challenges. China faces demographic crisis. Its official fertility rate of 1.15 children per woman is the world’s second lowest. The Chinese population will peak this year, increasing the strain on China’s working-age population, which itself peaked in 2014. China’s age-dependency ratio, a measure of the burden on the working-age population, is 42% and rising. And beyond population and workforce participation, productivity growth has been bumping along at barely 1% for the past decade—a bad set of numbers in any economy.

With growth rates cooling, China may not escape the so-called middle-income trap common to many developing economies. China may never surpass the economic power of the U.S.—once assumed to be inevitable—or do so only narrowly. This may be why Mr. Xi has reportedly pushed officials to ensure that annual growth remains above that of the U.S. Without a fundamental and enduring course correction, China risks killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Under normal circumstances, these conditions would put the country’s leadership under extreme pressure ahead of a Party Congress. But Mr. Xi’s decadelong consolidation of personal political power is near complete. It is now beyond doubt that he will be reappointed as general secretary this fall. The real questions swirl over the makeup of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the full 25-member Politburo, and the principal members of Mr. Xi’s economic team. Most critically, will these appointees be sufficiently independent to contest Mr. Xi’s generalized assault on market principles, private enterprise in general, and the tech, finance and property sectors in particular?

Some of the five main candidates for premier are more pro-market than others, but I see little evidence that any would succeed much in fundamentally pushing back the statist tide. Nor is there evidence to date that Mr. Xi is likely to redirect economic policy back toward the private sector and more open international engagement, particularly given his darkening assessment of the international threat environment and hardened ideological wiring. While a total collapse in growth would prompt some level of policy reappraisal (albeit through desperation rather than design), Mr. Xi is more likely to be muddling through, rather than profoundly changing course.

Nancy Pelosi’s theatrics handed China’s military a convenient excuse to conduct what amounted to its first large-scale blockade of Taiwan and a simulated attack on its offshore islands. For good measure, China lobbed five Dongfeng missiles into Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone without engendering a military response. Beijing is more confident than ever that it can pull off an actual future military operation against Taiwan.

Taiwan’s national security hasn’t been enhanced by Mrs. Pelosi’s visit. It has been undermined. As for stabilizing the wider U.S.-China relationship, we seem to be back at square one. Indeed, as the risks of war have increased, the security “stabilization” machinery of the U.S.-China relationship was unilaterally canceled by Beijing just when it was needed most. China shut down four separate military-to-military channels on Aug. 5. The other six bilateral channels (including on climate collaboration) have been suspended indefinitely.

China believes that the U.S.’s longtime One China policy is evolving into a One China, One Taiwan policy. That’s not an accurate reading of the American view on Taiwan, but it explains why China is now signaling more clearly than ever its willingness to attack. I have long argued that the geopolitical disaster of a war between the U.S. and China need not be inevitable. That remains my view—if both sides adopt some basic strategic guardrails. But for the foreseeable future, it’s time for all of us to fasten our seat belts.

Mr. Rudd is global president of the Asia Society and author of “The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the U.S. and Xi Jinping’s China.” He served as Australia’s prime minister, 2007-10 and 2013.

22. Rhythm of War: A Thunderous Blast, and Then a Coffee Break

Rhythm of War: A Thunderous Blast, and Then a Coffee Break

The New York Times · by Andrew E. Kramer · August 11, 2022

Russian Invasion of Ukraine

A Ukrainian artillery unit firing from a frontline position near the town of Bakhmut on Wednesday.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Aug. 11, 2022

BAKHMUT, Ukraine — Ukrainian soldiers scurried around the howitzer in a field one recent morning. In a flurry of activity, one man lugged a 106-pound explosive shell from a truck to the gun. Another, using a wooden pole, shoved it into the breach.

“Loaded!” the soldier shouted, then knelt on the ground and covered his ears with his hands.

The gun fired with a thunderous boom. A cloud of smoke wafted up. Leaves fluttered down from nearby trees. The shell sailed off toward the Russians with a metallic shriek.

It is a scene repeated thousands of times daily along the frontline in Ukraine: artillery duels and long-range strikes from both sides on targets ranging from infantry to fuel depots to tanks.

And what followed the salvo fired on Wednesday morning in eastern Ukraine was also indicative of the rhythm of this war: a coffee break.

This is a war fought in a cycle of opposites — bursts of chaos from outgoing or incoming shelling, and then long lulls in which soldiers undertake the most routine activities. Fighters who minutes before unleashed destructive weapons with a thunderous roar settled in a grove of oak trees around a picnic table of wooden ammunition boxes, boiling water on a camp stove and pouring cups of instant coffee.

They rested in an oak forest, overlooking a field of tall green grass and purple flowering thistles. Elsewhere, soldiers used a lull to smoke or get a haircut.

A Ukrainian soldier getting a haircut at a forward base in the frontline town of Bakhmut.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

On a recent visit, soldiers from the 58th Brigade fighting in and around the city of Bakhmut, where the artillery war is raging, were both attacking and under attack from artillery.

All about on the rolling, grassy hills west of Bakhmut, puffs of brown smoke rose from incoming Russian strikes, aimed at Ukraine’s artillery positions.

The pivotal importance of long-range fire was one reason the United States and other allies rushed NATO-caliber howitzers to Ukraine. Its military is close to depleting the entire stock of Soviet-legacy shells in its own arsenal and from allied countries in Eastern Europe, and it is now shifting to more abundant NATO ammunition.

Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine War

On the Ground: A series of explosions that Ukraine took credit for rocked a key Russian air base in Kremlin-occupied Crimea. Russia played down the extent of the damage, but the evidence available told a different story.
Heavy Losses: The staggeringly high rate of Russian casualties in the war means that Moscow may not be able to achieve one of his key objectives: seizing the entire eastern region of Ukraine.
Nuclear Shelter: The Russian military is using а nuclear power station in southern Ukraine as a fortress, as fighting intensifies in the region. The risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident has led the United Nations to sound the alarm and plead for access to the site to assess the situation.
Starting Over: Ukrainians forced from their hometowns by Russia’s invasion find some solace, and success setting up businesses in new cities.

Russia has vast supplies of artillery ammunition but indications are surfacing that it is dipping into older reserves that more frequently do not detonate on impact.

The Soviet-legacy howitzer the Ukrainian team fires, a model called the D-20 that is nicknamed the “fishing lure,” has held up well, said the commander, Lieutenant Oleksandr Shakin. American-provided long-range weaponry such as the M777 howitzer and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, have extended the reach of Ukraine’s army, but the bulk of the arsenal is still Soviet-era guns.

A Ukrainian artillery crew at work near Bakhmut.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

The cannon they fired was made in 1979, he said, and most of the shells were from the 1980s. Still, Lt. Shakin said, “They have not let me down yet.’’

Typically, he said, he fires around 20 shells a day from each gun, conserving Ukraine’s dwindling supply of 152 millimeter ammunition.

“We have a lot of motivation,” said Captain Kostyantin Viter, an artillery officer. “In front of us are our infantry and we have to cover them. Behind us are our families.”

Inside the city of Bakhmut on Wednesday, at a position where soldiers of the 58th Brigade are garrisoned in an abandoned municipal building, the whistles of their colleagues’ shells could be heard sailing overhead — aimed at Russian forces to the east of town.

A barricaded and mostly deserted street in central Bakhmut.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

The soldiers stood in a courtyard, smoking and listening to the whizzing of shells overhead and thuds of explosions in the distance.

The buzzing of electric clippers filled the air, too, as one soldier gave another a haircut. A few trucks were parked in the yard and a dozen or so soldiers milled about.

Half an hour or so on, a new noise joined the background of distant booms: the clang of nearby explosions. What had been a languid summer morning became a scene of chaos.

Soldiers dashed for cover or dove to the ground. After a dozen or so booms, it was over. An acrid smoke wafted over the courtyard, and shards of glass lay about. “Is everybody alive?” a soldier shouted.

A Ukrainian soldier running for cover inside a forward base as Russian rockets strike.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

All of the soldiers who had been in the yard escaped unhurt. But the Russian rocket strike killed seven civilians and wounded six others in the neighborhood near the soldiers’ base, the authorities reported later.

The New York Times · by Andrew E. Kramer · August 11, 2022

23. Alleged Tornado Cash developer arrested in Amsterdam

Alleged Tornado Cash developer arrested in Amsterdam

The crackdown on crypto mixers is escalating

By James Vincent Aug 12, 2022, 7:40am EDT 5 comments

The Verge · by James Vincent · August 12, 2022

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A 29-year-old man has been arrested in Amsterdam for his suspected involvement in the development of Tornado Cash — a crypto mixer service that was banned earlier this month by the US Department of the Treasury for its role in laundering money from large-scale hacking operations, including those linked to state-sponsored North Korean cybergangs.

News of the arrest was announced by the Netherlands’ Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), which investigates financial crime in the country. FIOD said the individual is “suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering,” and that “multiple arrests are not ruled out” as investigations into Tornado Cash continue. The suspect is due to appear before an examining judge today.

The arrest in Amsterdam marks an escalation in global authorities’ crackdown against Tornado Cash and other crypto mixers. Such services operate by pooling together contributors’ funds and then redistributing them, making it harder for law enforcement to track the digital breadcrumbs that accompany cryptocurrency transactions.

The argument made by institutions like the US Department of the Treasury (DOT) is that these companies have failed to address their use as illegal money laundering services. Earlier this year, the DOT added another crypto mixer, Blender.io, to its sanctions list after the service was also found to be used by North Korean hacking groups.

The response from advocates is that crypto mixers offer an additional layer of privacy when carrying out transactions, and so fulfill an important aspect of cryptocurrency idealism.

In response to the sanctions against Tornado Cash, for example, crypto advocacy group Coin Center said the US government was unfairly targeting a “a tool that is neutral in character and that can be put to good or bad uses like any other technology.”

“It is not any specific bad actor who is being sanctioned, but instead it is all Americans who may wish to use this automated tool in order to protect their own privacy,” wrote Coin Center’s Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh in a blogpost.

On Twitter, one user suggested that making donations to Ukraine was an example of a financial transaction you might wish to hide from authorities, for the safety of both the sender and the recipient. In response to this post, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder Ethereum, said he had used Tornado Cash “to donate to this exact cause.”

I'll out myself as someone who has used TC to donate to this exact cause.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 9, 2022

The Verge · by James Vincent · August 12, 2022

24. China’s growing reach is transforming a Pacific island chain

Excerpts:

The security pact between the Solomon Islands and China is one of several Beijing has been pushing to Pacific island nations in recent years, according to a senior U.S. official in Washington who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

That Beijing’s breakthrough came in Honiara was no coincidence: In Sogavare, the Chinese found a canny politician with a grudge against Australia — a key U.S. ally in the region — a combative streak and what some experts say is an ambivalence toward democracy.

...

The risks are evident in Honiara’s Chinatown, half of which remains in ruins from the November riot. One business owner of Chinese descent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared further violence, said he dodged rocks thrown at him and begged rioters not to burn his property. On the second day of the riots, he heard the screams of three people trapped inside a burning building.

One of them was George Tagini, a father of four from a shack along a trash-strewn stretch of Honiara’s beach. His family said he wasn’t a looter, as news articles claimed, but a security guard trying to stop the rioting. His body was so badly burned that relatives could not identify him.

“People were burning and looting because of some disagreement over the government recognizing China,” said Tagini’s uncle, Danny Konge. “But George didn’t care about that. He just cared about his job.”

China’s growing reach is transforming a Pacific island chain

The Washington Post Michael E. Miller

August 11, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

HONIARA, Solomon Islands — The half-built stadium is hard to miss in a country of crumbling infrastructure. Cranes swing massive pieces of steel. Welding sparks rain down from the rafters. Trucks hauling concrete rumble late into the night. Above it all soar two flags, one belonging to this underdeveloped island nation and the other to the country building and paying for the $50 million project: China.

“For Shared Future,” read signs in English and Chinese.

That future has its critics, however.

As China rapidly extends its reach in the Pacific, its growing influence is unmistakable in the Solomon Islands, a country with which it established diplomatic ties only in 2019. The relationship between the world’s most populous country and this Pacific archipelago of 700,000 people was thrust into the spotlight this year when word leaked that they had struck a secret security agreement. The United States and its allies fear the pact could pave the way for the establishment of a Chinese military base in the strategically valuable island chain where several thousand American soldiers died during World War II’s Guadalcanal campaign.

The Solomon Islands and China have denied plans for a base. But China is changing this country in other ways. Some are flashy, such as the sports stadium that will serve as the centerpiece of next year’s Pacific Games. Others are subtler yet potentially more profound, including growing Chinese influence over local policing and politics and a plan for Huawei to build more than 150 telecommunications towers that critics fear could enable Chinese surveillance. Many of the deals remain shrouded in mystery, months or years after they were struck.

Perhaps most problematic is Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare’s plan to delay next year’s election, which he says is to avoid conflicts with the games. His opponents claim it’s a power grab that could spark riots like the ones that roiled the capital last year and give Sogavare an excuse to call in Chinese troops.

In a country divided over China, the stadium is the ultimate Rorschach test. It was once going to be a gift from Taiwan, which Honiara previously recognized over Beijing. Now, it’s being built by a Chinese state-owned company with a grant from the Chinese government. Some say it is sorely needed. But others worry what will happen when the games have finished.

“This gift has strings attached, but for what? Our resources? Influence? A base?” said opposition lawmaker Peter Kenilorea Jr. “Sooner or later, they will come and collect, and I worry that by then we’ll be so dependent on China we will not be able to extract ourselves.”

The United States and Australia are both increasing their aid and diplomatic engagement with Pacific nations, including the Solomon Islands, where the Biden administration announced in February it would reopen the long-closed U.S. Embassy. Some Solomon Islanders feel the efforts by China’s rivals are too little, too late. But cracks also are showing in China’s promises.

“We are starting to see how China does things,” said Robert Maenalamo, 41, as he waited outside the stadium for a paycheck he said was more than two weeks late. Like many of the construction workers, he hailed from the province of Malaita, whose opposition to China has strained relations with Sogavare’s government.

Maenalamo said he’d just finished a shift pouring concrete. He needed the job to send his children to school, but he also felt the stadium was a Chinese attempt to “manipulate” the Solomon Islands. His village in Malaita was so worried about the project that it asked him to report back on what he found.

The Chinese, he said, “have got their own plans for this country.”

Secretive deals

The security pact between the Solomon Islands and China is one of several Beijing has been pushing to Pacific island nations in recent years, according to a senior U.S. official in Washington who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

That Beijing’s breakthrough came in Honiara was no coincidence: In Sogavare, the Chinese found a canny politician with a grudge against Australia — a key U.S. ally in the region — a combative streak and what some experts say is an ambivalence toward democracy.

“Every time he’s been in power, he’s tended to take an autocratic turn,” said Graeme Smith, an expert on China and the Pacific at the Australian National University. “This represented an opportunity Beijing couldn’t pass up.”

Sogavare declined requests for an interview. In speeches, he says his country is a “friend to all and enemy to none” that is simply “diversifying” its foreign relationships. But he has accused Australian forces of failing to protect Chinese-built infrastructure during the November riots, a charge Australia has denied.

“He’s got a lot of resentment, a lot of built-up scar tissue about Australia,” Smith said.

The son of missionaries from the Solomon Islands, Sogavare, 67, was born in Papua New Guinea at a time of increasing calls for independence from Australia. Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii, recalled Sogavare’s coming to his Catholic school in Honiara, not to talk politics but to perform karate.

“I used to see people break bricks on his stomach,” he said of Sogavare, who is a black belt. “He sometimes runs the government like he’s in the dojo.”

Sogavare’s four stints as prime minister have been tumultuous. He first came to power in 2000 after his predecessor was toppled in a coup but lasted only a year. His second stint also ended quickly, after a spat with Australia in which Sogavare expelled Canberra’s top diplomat and Australian peacekeepers raided his office. A third spell was cut short in 2017, when members of Parliament accused him of trying to push through legislation they did not support.

His current term began in controversy. He ran for reelection to Parliament in 2019 as an independent, only to emerge from days of bitter backroom negotiations as prime minister. Five months later, Sogavare — who two years earlier had urged the United Nations General Assembly to recognize Taiwan — announced that the Solomon Islands would recognize China.

The decision’s timing and lack of debate sparked allegations that Beijing had played a role in his return to office, something Sogavare and China have denied.

Sogavare’s former press secretary Douglas Marau, who now works for the opposition, said the diplomatic switch was “the talk of the corridors” in Parliament when Sogavare was selected as prime minister. “The amount of money circulating at the time of the formation of government, only god knows where it came from,” he said.

Around the same time, Kenilorea said “Chinese interests” approached him via an intermediary with an offer of $1 million and land near Honiara if he would “say nice things about China.”

In November, hundreds of protesters from Malaita gathered outside Parliament and demanded to see Sogavare, in part over his backing for Beijing. Soon, rioters were looting and torching buildings, especially Chinese-owned shops.

As the violence continued into a second day, Australia agreed to Sogavare’s request to send troops, around 100 of whom landed on the third day and helped restore order.

“Had they arrived 24 hours later, Sogavare likely wouldn’t be in office,” said a diplomat in the Pacific region who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Sogavare claims he turned to China because Australia refused to protect Chinese buildings. But many of his opponents suspect the security agreement was already in the works.

Opposition leader Matthew Wale told The Washington Post that he approached the Australians three months before the riots and warned them Sogavare was working on a security deal with China. Australian officials have denied it.

Kenilorea also said he warned Australia’s top diplomatic representative in the Solomons, High Commissioner Lachlan Strahan, around the same time that Sogavare was aiming to bring in Chinese “boots on the ground” to supplant Australia as peacekeeper.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) did not respond to a question about Kenilorea’s claim. But it said in a statement: “Australia has been aware of China’s interest in greater engagement in the security sector in Solomon Islands for some time.”

The United States caught wind of the China-Solomons security discussions a few weeks after the riots and saw strong indications that the two countries were working on an official agreement in February, a month before the leak, according to the diplomat in the Pacific. But when the draft emerged in late March, the wording was a shock. “China may, according to its own needs and with the consent of the Solomon Islands, make ship visits to, carry out logistics replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in the Solomon Islands,” it said.

Sogavare says he cannot release the final version without China’s permission, even as he dismisses international alarm. “Let me assure you all again, there is no military base,” he said last month.

But opposition leaders and some experts say China could use commercial facilities to establish a de facto base.

“When people hear ‘base’ they think big land mass with big infrastructure,” said Marau. “But it might be something smaller.”

An Australian expert on the Solomon Islands said China already has access to a privately owned deep-water port just outside Honiara. Clive Moore, the expert, said that it was at this port this year that customs officials found a shipment of guns after seizing a shipping container addressed to the Chinese Embassy and carried on a logging vessel. Police later declared that the weapons were replicas donated by China for training.

Moore also speculated that the Gold Ridge mine, which is two hours from Honiara and is majority-owned by a Chinese company, could be used as a discreet military garrison. But Walter Naezon, the director of Gold Ridge Mining, insisted that the site was “purely private.”

In 2019, a Chinese company with links to the Chinese government tried to lease an island with a deep-water port. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation recently reported that a Chinese state-owned company is negotiating to buy a deep-water port and airstrip on a different island.

Sogavare has said the security pact is needed because of “internal” threats. On independence day last month, he praised China and warned of “forces of evil” in his country.

Many of his fears appear to center on Malaita, the most populous province, whose government refuses to recognize China. The provincial premier, Daniel Suidani, denied having any connection to the protests that turned violent last year. But he admitted that when Sogavare’s office asked him to tell the protesters to go home, he refused.

“I said it was too late,” he told The Post in his office in the small town of Auki, four hours by ferry from Honiara. Suidani said the security pact appeared aimed at his province. “There are businesses and buildings here in Auki owned by Chinese,” he said. “Definitely [Chinese security forces] will end up here.”

Suidani said community policing exercises in Malaita had been falsely portrayed as a scheme to overthrow the prime minister. But one Malaitan political figure told The Post about plotting to oust Sogavare in late 2019.

“I was trying to see what would be the options to get Sogavare out, including some nasty things,” the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of arrest. Pressed on what that meant, he said: “Assassination.”

The political figure, who did not provide evidence to corroborate the claim, said he discussed the idea with others for two months before abandoning it. He also claimed he was working as an informant for Australia at the time and asked Australian officials how they would respond to an assassination but that they refused to discuss the scenario.

The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force did not respond to a request for comment on potential plots against the prime minister. Australia’s DFAT declined to answer questions about the individual.

“Australian assistance directly supports the security and stability of the democratically elected government of the Solomon Islands and its citizens,” it said in a statement. “We unconditionally condemn any form of politically motivated violence.”

Projecting China’s system

The neighborhood next to Honiara’s hospital looks like a cyclone hit it. Most homes have been reduced to foundations. Children play with medical devices among the ruins. The aging hospital was largely built by Taiwan. But this neighborhood is being cleared for a new hospital wing, and the area’s residents have been relocated. As with the stadium, the benefactor is Beijing.

“People say China is just doing it as a PR campaign to fool people,” said a hospital worker smoking a cigarette where his home once stood. “But they are doing impactful things.”

He said the Solomon Islands was grateful for decades of aid from the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, which remains the country’s biggest provider of aid.

“But we don’t see any of it, smell any of it, taste any of it,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job.

Yet some worry that China is not just building the country but is transforming it.

“As China projects its power, it’s also projecting its system,” said Kabutaulaka, the University of Hawaii political scientist. “The idea that people can protest or disagree with the government, that is not the way Beijing does things.”

For years, Taiwan helped bankroll a fund for all 50 members of Parliament to use on projects in their districts. China took over after the switch, annually providing about $8.5 million, or $170,000 per district, according to Samson Viulu, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Rural Development, which oversees the fund. China’s contribution dropped to less than $50,000 per district this year. And next year, it will be replaced by a separate program that will give the Chinese Embassy “final approval” over who gets roughly $12.5 million, he said.

The change, which has not been previously reported, is to implement “checks and balances” that were absent during the relationship with Taiwan, according to Viulu. He said the Chinese Embassy had promised him it would not play politics with the fund.

China could control the country’s airwaves, too. The government is in discussions for the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to build 161 mobile phone towers across the Solomon Islands, said Peter Shanel Agovaka, the communications minister. The project would cost between $60 million and $70 million and be financed mostly with a loan from China.

Kenilorea said he feared the country could become trapped by debt. But he also worried that the phone towers could be used to eavesdrop, especially on the opposition. The United States, Australia and many other countries have banned Huawei equipment from their national networks over spying concerns.

“I’m very concerned about us becoming a surveillance state,” Kenilorea said.

Shanel dismissed the idea, saying Huawei had reassured him “there is nothing to be afraid of.”

The government has become more secretive under Sogavare, Kabutaulaka said. It has signed a dozen memorandums of understanding with Beijing since the diplomatic switch, including for airport upgrades and offshore mining, but none has been publicly released, and senior officials often are in the dark about the details.

Sogavare recently announced that the national television and radio broadcaster, SIBC, would come under more direct government control, raising fears of censorship. And there are increasing worries over the police, who were once trained by Australia but are now being instructed by China — an arrangement Sogavare said he would like to become “permanent.”

“Look at how the Chinese treat their own people,” said Ruth Liloqula, the chief executive of the nonprofit Transparency Solomon Islands. “We don’t want that style of policing here.”

The biggest worry for many here is what will happen if Sogavare goes through with his plan to amend the constitution and defer next year’s election. He says he will delay it until 2024, but critics say nothing is stopping him from deferring it further.

“It’s about staying in power,” said Kenilorea.

Suidani said he expected that people would protest and that demonstrations could again devolve into riots. That could provide Sogavare an opportunity to invoke the security agreement and bring in Chinese security forces.

“They would make the situation much worse,” Moore said. “The Chinese are more likely to shoot first and ask questions later.”

The risks are evident in Honiara’s Chinatown, half of which remains in ruins from the November riot. One business owner of Chinese descent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared further violence, said he dodged rocks thrown at him and begged rioters not to burn his property. On the second day of the riots, he heard the screams of three people trapped inside a burning building.

One of them was George Tagini, a father of four from a shack along a trash-strewn stretch of Honiara’s beach. His family said he wasn’t a looter, as news articles claimed, but a security guard trying to stop the rioting. His body was so badly burned that relatives could not identify him.

“People were burning and looting because of some disagreement over the government recognizing China,” said Tagini’s uncle, Danny Konge. “But George didn’t care about that. He just cared about his job.”

Ellen Nakashima in Washington and Christian Shepherd in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Michael E. Miller · August 11, 2022

25. How does use of ‘ninja missile’ change counterterrorism?

It means that you can now actually bring a knife to a gun fight and win.

How does use of ‘ninja missile’ change counterterrorism?

militarytimes.com · by Aug 10, 12:54 PM · August 10, 2022

Beyond the immediate tactical and strategic victory of assassinating a longstanding terrorist foe, the U.S. strike against al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri late last month also marked an important milestone in the history of U.S. counterterrorism technology.

Reports suggest the strike against Zawahiri was the latest, and by far the most high-profile, in a growing number of drone strikes employing the Hellfire AGM-114 R9X “ninja missile,” which, rather than delivering an explosive payload, releases six knives moments before impact to slash and crush the target. A result of the U.S. government’s desire to limit civilian casualties in counterterrorism strikes, the R9X has previously been used to assassinate terrorist leaders in Syria and Yemen.

One former U.S. government official expressed confidence that the R9X would solve the “right seat, left seat” problem—enabling U.S. counterterrorism strikes to eliminate targets in immediate proximity to noncombatants. Precisely that prospect was exploited in the Zawahiri strike; a White House briefing confirmed that tactical decisions had been made to ensure no other lives would be threatened, despite their presence in the building.

The R9X payload thus almost has more in common with the long-range sniper than its explosive Hellfire counterparts — indeed, it is the combination of the former’s precision with the latter’s range and access that makes the R9X a potentially revolutionary development in U.S. military technology. The great irony of the long-time terrorist’s death is that the former surgeon’s killing was akin to a skilled doctor removing a tumor with a scalpel.

For almost two decades now, drones have been the primary weapon involved in U.S. counterterrorism operations, with the American military steadily escalating its employment of drone strikes in insurgent sanctuaries throughout the Middle East and Asia. And it has proven an effective tool. Simply put, the unmanned aerial vehicle has become the ultimate, lethal weapon for identifying and eliminating the world’s most dangerous terrorists, in some of the most rugged and inaccessible terrain on the planet. Studies have found that drone strikes are statistically directly linked to a diminishing in the rate and lethality of terrorist attacks orchestrated by the group targeted.

Contrary to popular opinion, drone strikes have also been relatively effective at limiting collateral damage compared to other strike options—reducing deaths among both civilians on the ground as well as U.S. servicemembers who might otherwise take part in a ground raid. Needless to say, a more precise missile will only serve to keep lowering civilian casualties.

Perhaps the most illustrative comparative case displaying the special potential this missile holds concerns Qasim al-Raymi, the former emir of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (and therefore a deputy of sorts to Zawahiri). Al-Raymi was the target of the Yakla raid, in the first few days of the Trump administration, which not only failed to assassinate him, but resulted in the deaths of nine children as well as Navy SEAL William Owens. Al-Raymi would be killed three years later in a drone strike (it is unconfirmed if it used an R9X, although it was during a period when it was being used often) with no reporting of civilian casualties. Al-Raymi’s eventual demise, in other words, was the perfect illustration of the dangers and merits of both approaches.

The more precise missile will almost certainly significantly alter terrorist behavior—even beyond what the drone itself already achieved. In the drone era, targeted terrorists have adapted, most notably by using the drone’s own criticisms against it—often surrounding themselves with family and civilians as “human shields” to deter a strike, as Zawahiri did with his Haqqani-provided family home in the upscale Sherpur neighborhood of Kabul. The R9X missile eviscerates the target’s ability to protect himself and will necessitate a new defense strategy, that may rely on a possible target never stepping more than a few feet away from those shields, and certainly not outdoors.

The R9X may also degrade one of the extremists’ greatest propaganda tools: portraying drone strikes as indicative of American arrogance and impunity. Biden and his administration have been particularly eager to raise the standards for the U.S. drone program, and as America works to wind down the war on terror, these more limited strikes targeting documented terrorist masterminds will be hard to question—a stark contrast from Israel’s less surgical approach. The drone program has usually been criticized for its lack of transparency and for the civilian casualties it causes. Importantly, both those drawbacks were explicitly considered and addressed in the Zawahiri case, possibly pointing to a new mentality in U.S. counterterrorism assassinations, that will damage a terrorist organization’s ability to point fingers and claim wrongdoing.

As with any new development, the R9X is not without drawbacks—chief among them that it does not solve longstanding issues over the legal and ethical concerns over drone strikes, nor will it perfectly address the blowback associated with these strikes. Most importantly, the strike against Zawahiri, and broader use of the R9X, seem unlikely to address the longer-term, structural issues that allowed al-Qaeda to rise to prominence and ensure its lingering relevance. I argued in an article for the Jamestown Foundation in April 2021 that the R9X ninja missile marked “a powerful step forward for the U.S. counter-terrorism arsenal, breaching a new frontier in targeting and precision. But until a bolder, braver, more transformative strategic shift is pursued, victory in the so-called War on Terror will remain elusive.” The Zawahiri strike will provide a clear test case of that proposition.

Jacob Ware is the research associate for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he studies terrorism and countering violent extremism, as well as an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.

26. Here are the veterans who will benefit from Congress’ sweeping toxic exposure bill

Hard to believe we had legislators vote against this bill.

Here are the veterans who will benefit from Congress’ sweeping toxic exposure bill

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · June 18, 2022

As many as one in five veterans living in America today could see new health care coverage and disability benefits under the toxic exposure legislation advanced by the Senate Thursday, but some veterans will see help sooner than others.

The package — which was advanced by the Senate in a bipartisan 84-14 vote and heads now to the House for final congressional approval — would cost almost $280 billion over the next decade and radically transform how the Department of Veterans Affairs analyzes and compensates victims of military chemical and radiation exposure incidents.

President Joe Biden has said he will sign the bill into law if it comes to his desk, and Veterans Affairs officials have already begun preparing staffing and implementation plans in anticipation of the new requirements.

Despite cost, veterans’ toxic exposure bill gains bipartisan backing

Most Senate Republicans voted for plans to move the legislation despite an estimated cost of more than $278 billion over the next 10 years.

“America’s veterans and their loved ones will be better off as a result of this work today,” said Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Jon Tester, D-Mont., just moments before the vote. “This will make the country a better place ... Today will show that we can put party politics aside and honor America’s bravest.”

The burn pit provisions of the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act have received the most attention in recent months, in part because of the recency of those injuries.

Tens of thousands of veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed rare respiratory conditions and cancers in the years following their deployments, believed caused by poisonous smoke from massive burn pits used to dispose of a host of military waste.

But because scientific monitoring was not done at many sites, conclusively linking the smoke to veterans’ ailments has been a difficult task.

The PACT Act codifies recent changes in how the Department of Veterans Affairs approaches those kinds of health claims, lowering standards for proof and offering presumptive status for some rare illnesses believed caused by the burn pits.

Advocates said those fundamental changes could have wide-ranging and positive impact on veterans for years to come, developing a more patient-friendly approach to how VA approaches any toxic exposure incidents.

But they also say the direct benefits for groups that have been excluded in the past are more urgent. Those individuals include not only troops who recently separated but some who served more than five decades ago.

Here are highlights from those provisions:

The benefit: Presumptive status for disability benefits for 23 conditions related to burn pit exposure.

Who gets it: Most veterans who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars era are expected to be covered under the provision, although specifics of how to implement that still must be written by VA officials.

Individuals would receive disability benefits if they contract any type of the following cancers: head, neck, respiratory system, gastrointestinal system, reproductive system, lymphatic system, kidney, brain, skin or pancreas.

Individuals would also receive disability benefits if they contract any type of the following ailments: asthma, chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, constrictive bronchiolitis, emphysema, granulomatous disease, interstitial lung disease, pleuritis, pulmonary fibrosis, sarcoidosis, chronic sinusitis, chronic rhinitis or glioblastoma.

Most of the illnesses other than cancer would be eligible for benefits within the next year. The cancer benefits would be phased in from 2024 to 2025, except for individuals facing severe medical issues.

Deal on toxic exposure bill includes more VA staff, dozens of new VA medical clinics

The sweeping bill could be one of the most expensive and most impactful veterans policy measures approved by Congress in years.

The benefit: Ten years of health care coverage from VA upon separation from the military. Currently, all separating troops get five years of coverage.

Who gets it: All veterans who left the ranks in summer 2017 or later will have their eligibility automatically extended. Veterans who left between summer 2014 and summer 2017 will be able to apply for additional years of health care coverage, ending at 10 years after the date they separated.

The benefit: Presumptive status for disability benefits related to Agent Orange exposure for veterans suffering from hypertension or monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS).

Who gets it: All veterans currently eligible for disability benefits related to Agent Orange exposure. For MGUS, the presumptive status goes into effect as soon as the bill is signed into law.

Veterans suffering from hypertension will be phased in. Those who age 85 and older, or those suffering extreme health or financial problems. will receive immediate benefits status. For others, the presumptive status will start on Oct. 1, 2026.

The benefit: Presumptive status for disability benefits related to Agent Orange exposure for veterans who served in areas previously not recognized for the chemical defoliant use.

Who gets it: For veterans 85 or older who qualify, the benefit goes into effect immediately. For younger veterans, the provisions will trigger on Oct. 1, 2022. The eligible groups include:

Individuals who served in Thailand (or any Royal Thai base) from Jan. 9, 1962, to June 30, 1976;

Individuals who served in Laos between Dec. 1, 1965, and Sept. 30, 1969;

Individuals who served in Cambodia’s Kompon Cham province between April 16, 1969, and April 30, 1969;

Individuals who served in Guam or American Samoa (or their territorial waters) between Jan. 9, 1962, and July 31, 1980;

Individuals who served on the Johnston Atoll between Jan. 1, 1972, and Sept. 30, 1977.

The benefit: Presumptive status for disability benefits for Persian Gulf War veterans.

Who gets it: All veterans who served in the first Gulf War. The provisions remove rules regarding eligibility expiration.

The benefit: Presumptive status for disability benefits related to radiation exposure for veterans who served at the Enewetak Atoll.

Who gets it: Individuals who served at the site from Jan. 1, 1977, to Dec. 31, 1980.

The benefit: Presumptive status for disability benefits related to radiation exposure for veterans who served in Palomares, Spain.

Who gets it: Individuals who served at the site from Jan. 17, 1966, to March 31, 1967.

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

27. The Army is making its first uniform bra. Vets say it’s long overdue.

Of course this will be attacked as wokeness. But someday actions like this will not be questioned and such developments will be a matter of routine.

The Army is making its first uniform bra. Vets say it’s long overdue.

The Army Tactical Brassiere will be presented to the Army Uniform Board for approval in the fall

By Janay Kingsberry

August 11, 2022 at 1:22 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Janay Kingsberry · August 11, 2022

When Sarah Hoyt arrived at Fort Jackson, S.C., for basic training in 2002, the Army confiscated all of her personal belongings. That included sports bras she had packed for the 10 weeks of strenuous physical activity that stretched ahead of her, she said.

If she wanted new ones, she had to visit a reception station, which sold just one brand and one style, said Hoyt, now 41 and an Army veteran living at Camp Humphreys, South Korea.

“If racerbacks were uncomfortable for you, too bad. If you needed more support, too bad. If the store was out of your size, too bad,” she said.

So for the first few days of the training program, Hoyt pushed through the discomfort of too-small bras as she cycled through sit-ups, push-ups and two-mile runs. “I was very uncomfortable, to put it mildly,” she said. “They did a good job of putting the girls down, but it was so tight.”

Now 20 years later, the Army is poised to offer its first official uniform bra in an effort to address challenges like the ones Hoyt faced, as well as equip female soldiers with better options for combat and training use.

“The overall goal is to produce garments that not only protect the user, but reduce the cognitive burden on the female Soldier caused by discomfort and ill fit,” clothing designer and project lead Ashley Cushon told Army AL&T magazine. “Achieving this will improve the Soldier’s overall readiness and performance levels, allowing them to focus on their mission.”

Four prototypes of the bra, known as the Army Tactical Brassiere (ATB), are in development at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center in Natick, Mass., and final concepts will be presented to the Army Uniform Board for approval in the fall. The designs all offer flame-retardant protection and vary in other features, which include pullover and front-closure styles, structured and contoured seams, adjustable straps, padded cups, mesh venting and an inner dog-tag pocket.

“If the ATB becomes an official Program of Record as a result of the upcoming Army Uniform Board, we would see that as a win for female Soldiers across the Army, who would then likely be issued the ATB upon initial entry to the Army,” David Accetta, a public affairs officer for Devcom Soldier Center, wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

The project joins a wave of recent efforts to recognize the diversity of service members and improve uniform standards for women, who made up 16.5 percent of the enlisted forces in 2018. Last year, the Army and the Air Force released new rules that allow more flexibility for service members who wear locs, twists, braids and ponytails. And last month, the Navy measured hundreds of sailors in Norfolk, Va., in its ongoing effort to create better-fitting uniforms for female personnel.

Madelynn Conner, a 24-year-old intelligence officer stationed in Vicenza, Italy, said she and colleagues appreciate the Army’s latest initiative. “We are very grateful that the Army is moving in this direction and being more accommodating towards its female soldiers, who bring so much to the fight,” she said. “I personally hope to see similar developments for items such as the frame for our rucks, allowing them to adjust more appropriately to our bodies.”

Across social media, veterans have also expressed their excitement.

“I needed these in 1997 in Basic Training,” one user commented on Facebook. “Glad the Army is finally taking a woman’s needs seriously.”

Others have criticized the move.

“I can think of a million better ways for the Army to spend this time, money, and energy,” a user tweeted. “Who asked for this.”

According to Accetta, hundreds of female soldiers were surveyed to provide insight on the type of functionality and preferences the Design, Pattern and Prototype team at Devcom Soldier Center should consider during initial design.

Early on in the process, the team also hired Jené Luciani-Sena, author of “The Bra Book,” to offer consultation on what makes a good bra.

Based on images of the four concepts Devcom Soldier Center released to the public, “it looks like they’re on the right track,” Luciani-Sena said, adding that the Army is focused on developing bras for functionality first. “However, I do know based on my conversations with them that they do want the women to feel good in them, too, and they are being cognizant of that.”

Although she was initially excited about the development of the bras, Hoyt admits she’s worried the Army hasn’t made significant progress in size inclusivity — largely because of her own experiences with “Army bras” in the past.

In 2004, she was issued three sports bras for her deployment to Iraq. The sizes came only in small, medium, large and extra large, Hoyt said.

Now she’s concerned the ATB will use similarly restrictive measurements. “To attempt to shoehorn women’s body parts into such rigid size categories is planning to fail,” she said. Devcom Soldier Center did not immediately have information about size ranges the bra will offer, but the team reviewed data collected from a 2012 Army Anthropometric survey, which “provided significant data on the relative size of our Soldiers,” Accetta said.

“There are definitely some unique issues that we face when it comes to bras,” said Connor, the officer in Italy. “Things that we would like to see in a good tactical bra include breathability — since we spend a lot of time in the field and oftentimes go weeks without a shower — good support without the suffocation … and bras that do not cut into our skin or cause chafing and blisters.”

Devcom’s early findings on ATB performance among more than 200 participants show acceptability ratings from 46 to 78 percent. The highest-ranking attributes were coverage and support. Meanwhile, comfort was listed as the lowest.

Luciani-Sena stresses that there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to making the perfect bra.

“I can tell you what I think is good from an expert standpoint,” Sena said. “But it’s going to be so personal to you — what you like and what you feel is good for you.”

For Hoyt, it’s pullover bras with crossback straps. And “the absolute best are the ones with the front crossover for extra support,” she added.

Looking back at her time at basic training, Hoyt recalls the gratitude she felt when her mom mailed her comfortable sports bras to wear for the remainder of the program.

“I ripped the package open in front of the entire platoon and both [of my] male drill sergeants,” Hoyt said. “I was so happy.”

Now she hopes others can find that same relief: “We know what we like and what works best for our unique bodies.”

The Washington Post · by Janay Kingsberry · August 11, 2022

28. Scandals in US adviser brigade alarm leaders behind closed doors

No stones will be thrown from this glass house. We have all had our share of indiscipline on deployments.

But for SOF I am reminded of the wise words of the late LTG Sam WIllson which can apply to more than SOF:

20. INTEGRITY, HONESTY, AND LOYALTY.

A. Need to take a moral bath.

B. Special Operations are very decentralized in execution and conducive to improprieties.

Improprieties, because of the political sensitivity of SO mission, cause long term mistrust within the command structure that take hard work and many years to overcome.

https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2014/03/20-characteristics-of-special.html

Scandals in US adviser brigade alarm leaders behind closed doors

Alcohol, adultery, drugs risk mission in Latin America

armytimes.com · by Kyle Rempfer · August 10, 2022

Advisers at 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade were busy this past year on a new mission mentoring foreign forces in Latin America — but not always in ways Army brass wanted.

The 800-soldier unit racked up at least 60 misconduct offenses, including incidents with alcohol, drugs and adultery; a battalion commander was fired; members of one advising team are facing punishment for their behavior in Colombia; and another team’s actions in Honduras are under investigation, according to internal records and interviews conducted by Army Times.

Advisers deployed to Central and South America were also told to behave amid a rise in sexually transmitted diseases among married and single troops, and reports of advisers drinking against regulation, violating curfew and using dating apps concerned 1st SFAB leaders, according to emails sent in late 2021.

It’s an eye-popping amount of bad behavior from just one of the six SFABs created five years ago as a key initiative of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

SFABs were championed as a novel way to build professional foreign militaries using top-notch U.S. soldiers. But it is U.S. professionalism that now concerns leaders at Security Force Assistance Command. And it comes at a time when bad behavior in Latin America could be especially risky, as left-wing parties — historically more suspicious of the U.S. military — sweep national elections in the region and China makes inroads.

The problems at 1st SFAB prompted the command to order all units to send detailed data on punishments meted out against advisers.

“Advisor misconduct remains the largest strategic and organizational risk for the SFAC,” a tasking order sent in July stated. “Recent media attention of Advisor misconduct requires proactive reporting of accurate misconduct statistics to HQDA (the Department of the Army’s Pentagon headquarters).”

The allegations corroborated through investigations include 21 offenses involving alcohol, six drug-use incidents, seven cases of adultery and six instances of counterproductive leadership, according to a 1st SFAB legal brief chronicling April 2021 through April 2022.

Given how spread out units were in places like Colombia, not every incident may have been reported or properly investigated.

“I would actually say those numbers are conservative,” said one SFAB officer. “The majority of the brigade does the right thing, but you do have a lot of teams that go over there that have some sort of issue.”

A legal update compiled and briefed internally at 1st SFAB before being leaked to Army Times.

The crux of the problem, advisers told Army Times, boils down to immaturity among some of the small, 12-soldier advising teams that began fanning out across foreign countries to mentor local forces in 2020.

When 1st SFAB was founded in 2017, early missions to Afghanistan and Africa were mostly positive. But as the unit shifted to solely focus on Latin America missions, like counter-drug operations, the quality of soldiers selected to join dropped, four advisers said. That’s possibly due to the larger manpower woes across the Army, as well as the slow trickling out of experienced veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“When you bring in one bad apple, that can create 15 bad apples,” said one adviser.

Colombia, where much of the known misconduct occurred, may be a particularly sensitive situation. The longtime U.S. ally recently elected its first leftist president — Gustavo Petro, a former mayor of Bogotá and a guerrilla fighter in his youth.

“You’ve got a new president coming in who is not anti-American but certainly has less enthusiasm for this really tight mil-to-mil relationship,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America. “And if you want to give them a reason to say, ‘Hey, let’s put this on hold,’ this sort of behavior does that.”

‘Extremely embarrassing’

Officials declined to make leadership, including SFAC commander Maj. Gen. Donn Hill or 1st SFAB commander Col. Chris Landers, available for interviews.

SFAC spokeswoman Lt. Col. Melody Faulkenberry said the command “is taking steps to investigate all allegations of misconduct.”

Faulkenberry confirmed some investigations are underway at 1st SFAB, but declined to say their purpose or scope. She also declined to confirm how many of the offenses detailed in the legal brief occurred among 1st SFAB advisers who were deployed, rather than at home on Fort Benning, in Georgia.

But there has certainly been some trouble overseas.

An advising team sent to Honduras remains under investigation after members violated no-drinking orders and got into an argument with other forces in-country, a senior adviser said. Another advising team in Tolemaida, Colombia, was accused by an Army spouse early this year of visiting prostitutes, staying out all night and partying, according to unit records.

The spouse shared a picture of several advisers in a Colombian family’s home without commanders’ permission, prompting a formal investigation that determined the team was leaving base without approval and drinking.

Emails also show that 1st SFAB leaders were aware of reports that advisers across the brigade had been misbehaving.

In an email to 1st SFAB team leaders this fall, a senior enlisted soldier warned that he had been hearing of undisciplined acts “across the formation.”

“We have all now been in country for about two months and I am hearing that we have advisors that have broken the GO#1 no drinking policy without approval,” Command Sgt. Maj. Christopher J. Williams wrote Oct. 24, 2021. “(W)e have advisors that have violated curfew policy, we have married advisors that have TINDER accounts, advisors that have been hitting on hotel staff and we have teams that are not following all rules and guidelines.”

Advisors with 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade meet simulated international forces during the Advisor Forge training exercise Fort Benning, GA, August 13, 2019. The exercise helps prepare Advisors for international relations and communications during worldwide employment opportunities. (U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Daniel J. Alkana/ 22 Mobile Public Affairs Detachment.)

Williams also warned in the emails that there had been a rise in STDs among married and unmarried troops since his soldiers started missions in Central and South America, “and it is in mostly advisors that have been deployed.”

Then there was an incident in which a Colombian officer asked Williams to ensure his troops did not use drugs at a hotel or a nearby military base.

“‘I am not judging your Soldiers, but could you make sure that if your Soldiers want to smoke marijuana or do hallucinogen drugs please ask them not to do them on Canton Norte or in the Hotel,’” the Colombian said, according to Williams’ email.

“That was extremely embarrassing that a (Colombian) would ask that I ensure we don’t do illegal drugs when illegal drugs are forbidden in the Army,” Williams wrote in his email.

Several troops who spoke with Army Times said they were aware of rumors that advisers had used drugs, including cocaine, overseas. Faulkenberry said the SFAC is aware of the allegations, but “has no credible evidence of such activities occurring.”

The issues Williams was trying to tackle existed before his battalion rotated into Latin America and were brigade-wide, several advisers said.

“Williams was trying,” an adviser who served with him said. “But it was really hard to crack down because we were so spread out throughout the country.”

The Colombian Artillery School welcomes 1st SFAB advisers ahead of a training exchange. (1st SFAB/Facebook)

Colombia has long been an anchor for U.S. policy in Latin America. This spring, the White House designated Colombia a major non-NATO ally, a label that “lays the groundwork for us to work together even more closely,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the time.

Petro’s recent election as Colombia’s first leftist leader likely won’t herald any seismic shifts in that relationship. But even prior to his ascension, Colombian lawmakers questioned the purpose of SFAB deployments.

In 2020, the Colombian Defense Ministry had to answer to the Colombian Congress about who would supervise the SFAB teams and what operations they’d be carrying out.

“The senator who had asked for that (Iván Cepeda) is a leader of the incoming governing party,” said Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America. “So, Iván is on this and he’s a very big critic of the SFAB. He’s about to become more powerful.”

Colombia has hosted misbehaving Americans before. In 2015, the Justice Department reported that DEA agents in the country had “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by drug cartels. And the Secret Service, along with some U.S. military personnel, suffered a similar scandal in Colombia in 2012.

“We’re getting a reputation here,” said Isacson. “This is a military that the United States claims they want to help professionalize, and they’re doing it with all these examples of really unprofessional behavior.”

Drug warriors

Milley and other Army leaders championed SFABs as a way to provide professional advisers to train and mentor foreign partners so regular infantry, armor and aviation units could perform traditional duties elsewhere. The effort raised some eyebrows, since training foreign forces has typically been a role relegated to Army Green Berets, who have also had their share of scandals in Latin America.

“Special Forces is very good at training tactical-type units. They’re very good at accompanying tactical-type units,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said in 2020. “But SFABs build a professional military force, which is different. How do you do logistics. How do you maintain vehicles. How do you build a professional military.”

After a maiden deployment advising Afghan forces in 2018, the SFABs began preparing to go elsewhere in the world. By 2020, each SFAB was assigned to a different U.S. combatant command with distinct geographic areas of responsibility. Soldiers from 1st SFAB were tasked to U.S. Southern Command.

From the start, 1st SFAB had a counter-drug mission.

Advisers were dispatched to locations designated by Colombia as “priority areas,” SOUTHCOM officials said at the time, and helped with logistics, intelligence capabilities and information sharing.

SFAB advisers in SOUTHCOM have received praised for their counter-drug work, said Faulkenberry, the SFAC spokeswoman. She pointed to the establishment of a new Colombian military unit that synchronizes counter-drug efforts across the country.

“Early last year, former Colombian President Iván Duque specifically acknowledged the value of our military partnership and thanked 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade Advisors for their contributions following the Colombian Counter Narcotics Trans-National Threats Division activation ceremony,” Faulkenberry said.

Four 1st SFAB teams and a battalion command post were focused on increasing coca eradication, according to a U.S. Combined Arms Center report from April 2021.

“The biggest challenge faced by Colombian partners was the flow of intelligence and receipt of targeting-related products. Specifically, units lacked updated imagery of their (area of operations), making planning efforts difficult,” the report reads.

Advisers coached Colombian troops to stop using old Google imagery for planning missions and helped them access updated imagery. They also taught Colombians to “conduct historical analysis of cocaine yields, adjust eradication goals by unit and area, and allocate forces appropriately for the next calendar year,” the report reads.

Maj. Marcos Traverzo, (far left) logistics advisor/company commander with 1st SFAB, conducts remote briefing during the unit’s January validation exercise at the Ronald O. Harrison National Guard Readiness Center, Miramar, Florida ahead of their upcoming six-month SOUTHCOM deployment. (Army)

“Moreover, other South and Central American countries took notice, submitting their own requests for advisor teams,” the report added. “The increase in advisor capabilities across South and Central America allows 1st SFAB to focus advising efforts in both the source and transit zones of narcotics operations.”

However, not all was well.

“Due to a political environment questioning the legality of our presence and pending Colombian congressional approval, adviser teams were told to cease activities within weeks of arrival to the outstations,” the 1st SFAB report reads. “Teams constantly competed with negative social media posts, tweets, and articles. They remained focused even after receiving threats by known in-country bad actors.”

Despite 1st SFAB’s efforts, cocaine production in Colombia was near record levels in 2021. And Colombia’s new leftist president has promised to rethink drug policy to promote development rather than coca eradication.

“The new defense minister who is about to come in is one of Latin America’s best known anti-corruption crusaders,” Isacson said. “This is going to be the big fight of the next year. … So, you’re really focusing on breaking links with organized crime, doing a lot of counterintelligence about your own people, fighting corruption on your forces.”

‘Big boy rules’

Three advisers with whom Army Times spoke said their early time with 1st SFAB was positive.

“What drew me in was the big boy rules — not needing to be told how to do something or when to do it, which, in the end, bit 1st SFAB in the ass,” one adviser said.

Small teams spread out over a large area, far from the command flagpole, can be difficult to manage. And although SFABs are supposed to be comprised of experienced soldiers, lower-ranking troops could still attend the Military Advisory Training Academy at Fort Benning and automatically promote to sergeant under certain circumstances.

“Many of the NCOs in the SFAB are young. They’re wild still,” one adviser said. “Your senior NCOs in the SFAB, it’s a smaller number than you’d think.”

Advisers are also under General Order #1 while deployed to SOUTHCOM, meaning drinking, except under specific circumstances, is off-limits.

Soldiers must first complete SFAB Assessment & Selection before becoming an Advisors and being assigned to an SFAB. Candidates endured SFAB Assessment & Selection on May 10-14, 2021 in Fort Benning, GA. (U.S. Army Photos by Sgt. 1st Class Christopher E Walters)

“People are going to say they were trying to build camaraderie by going out drinking, but 90% of the partner forces want to go home at the end of the day,” an adviser said. “As a U.S. soldier in South America, you’re going to want to go out and explore, but your partner forces, they live there. It’s nothing new to them.”

Accusations of married troops using Tinder accounts and dating overseas also abounded at the unit, according to sworn statements compiled as part of an ongoing investigation and the emails.

“It can compromise a mission,” an adviser said. “You don’t know where these women are from or who they know, if they even support us. It can cause a lot of problems internally that shouldn’t be there.”

The division-level SFAC has been probing 1st SFAB, Faulkenberry confirmed. But she declined to share the exact nature of the investigations.

“We cannot comment on open investigations, however, earlier in the year the SFAC completed an investigation into a battalion commander’s leadership which resulted in their relief due to loss of trust and confidence in their ability to command,” Faulkenberry said.

She declined to say which battalion commander was relieved and why, other than it was for counterproductive leadership. Sources in the unit said it was 1st SFAB’s 2nd Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Joshua W. Brown, who declined a request for comment. His battalion owned the advising team that was removed from Colombia.

Advisers said the command needs to do a better job vetting personnel to ensure they’re mature enough to head overseas. Some changes to how the SFAC assesses and selects advisers were already implemented this spring, according to Faulkenberry.

“In March 2022, we increased the length of our Assessment and Selection course and added performance elements to more comprehensively assess Advisor candidates,” Faulkenberry said in her statement. “Some of the additions include proficiency exams, ethical assessments, physical tests, peer reviews, board interviews and cadre observational feedback.”

FORT BENNING, Ga. - Soldiers from the 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade conduct a small team live-fire exercise demonstration July 09, 2019, at Duke Range on post. SFABs are brigades whose mission is to train, advise and assist the armed forces of foreign militaries. (Patrick Albright/Army)

SFABs are, at the end of the day, a small part of the larger effort by America to keep its influence up among its southern neighbors. But there’s some anxiety within SOUTHCOM that its influence is slipping, or at least facing competition.

China has made economic investment overseas a priority through its Belt and Road Initiative. Latin America, though not the primary theater of the approaching U.S.-China showdown, is nevertheless an important area to watch.

“China is playing chess; they have a long term view,” SOUTHCOM boss Gen. Laura Richardson said July 20. “They are setting the theater. … When I show a map of the region where 21 of 31 countries have signed on to the Belt and Road Initiative, it covers almost the entire region.”

Colombia is not a member of the Belt and Road Initiative, but it has flirted with joining, and Chinese firms have already scored big contracts in the country, including a regional railway and 5G infrastructure projects.

After the coronavirus pandemic devastated regional economies, that type of investment, rather than military training, is particularly useful. Then there’s Colombia’s recent swing to the left, which echoes similar electoral outcomes in Peru, Chile and Honduras — and potentially Brazil soon.

“You have leaders coming in who might not be as interested in that sort of high profile level of (U.S. military) cooperation,” Isacson said. “Even if they’re happy to have exercises and exchanges and small courses and stuff, 100 (SFAB) guys in your country for four months is super high profile and it can be controversial if your ruling coalition includes people who are on the left or people who are historically suspicious of U.S. meddling.”

Several of the advisers Army Times spoke with were pleased to see the SFAC taking a hard look at all the brigades by requesting data and carrying out investigations. Others worried that the desire to preserve the SFAB mission would come first, and any problems found by internal investigations would be papered over.

“I think you need an outside agency, to be honest,” one adviser said. “Is anything major going to happen? No. Remember, this is a premier unit. It’s got to keep going.”

About Kyle Rempfer

Kyle Rempfer is an editor and reporter whose investigations have covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq.

armytimes.com · by Kyle Rempfer · August 10, 2022

29. 'Founded on a culture of excellence': New Fort Bragg commander to oversee training of special operation forces

'Founded on a culture of excellence': New Fort Bragg commander to oversee training of special operation forces

fayobserver.com · by Rachael Riley

| The Fayetteville Observer

FORT BRAGG — A new commander will oversee the training and development of special operations soldiers at Fort Bragg.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Roberson turned over command of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School to Brig. Gen. Guillaume ”Will” Beaurpere during a command change ceremony Thursday at Fort Bragg.

Beaurpere arrives from his most recent assignment as deputy commander of general operations for the Army Space and Missile Defense Command.

Roberson, who led the command since August 2019, won’t travel far for his next assignment. He becomes the new deputy commander for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg.

Fort Bragg's JFK: Roberson takes command of Fort Bragg's JFK center and school

Training and More Continues: Army Special Forces school, training continues at Fort Bragg despite coronavirus pandemic

During his time as commander of the Special Warfare Center and School, Roberson produced more than 2,769 Special Forces soldiers, 1,497 psychological operation soldiers, and 1,921 Civil Affairs soldiers for the operating force, said Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOC’s commander who oversaw the Thursday’s command change.

The Special Warfare Center and School oversees the Special Forces assessment and selection course, training for Special Forces and special operation forces and foreign language training with more than 100 courses for civil affairs, psychological operations, Special Forces, allied and sister service students.

Under the command are the school, Special Forces Warrant Officer Institute, the Noncommissioned Officers Academy, the 1st Special Warfare Training Group, 2nd Special Warfare Training Group and the Special Warfare Medical Group.

Braga said that during Roberson’s three years in command he and his team trained more than 54,000 servicemembers and 187 international students.

Roberson helped modernize the Special Forces qualifications course, developed new courses, and addressed operational requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, Braga said.

Construction Underway: Special Forces human performance facility construction underway at Fort Bragg

“This organization remained nimble to the needs as a nation throughout because of this command team’s leadership,” Braga said.

Roberson said the job was rewarding and the best part was being able to shape the future of Army special operation forces.

“What we teach people here in this institution is what they will replicate in combat,” Roberson said.

Roberson said the special warfare center and school get the best soldiers the nation has to offer, and that is why he and his team constantly reviewed what courses to offer them.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘What am I getting or will get out of this training? Is it worth getting rid of or should I get something new,’” he said.

The training could mean introducing a new irregular warfare course or maritime operations course, Roberson said.

It’s also meant using technology in innovative ways through developing drone or robotics courses, he said.

The school’s cadre, Roberson said, was innovative in determining which courses could be remote during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He credited USASOC’s flight detachment for coordinating getting candidates to selection and raining in the midst of the pandemic.

New commander

Roberson said the past three years have been a “great ride,” but he’s “got to get off of the ride.”

He said he is confident in Beaurpere, who he served with in Baghdad.

“(He’s) a great leader, great person, very analytical, critical thinker, common sense &mldr; I am not worried a bit,” Roberson said.

Beaurpere has previously commanded the Special Operations Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, was executive officer to the USASOC commanding general, and served as military assistant to the secretary of the Army.

He said the last time he and his family were at Fort Bragg was more than 22 years ago when he went through the Special Forces qualifications course.

During the past two weeks of the command’s transition, Beaurpere said, it’s evident it’s an “elite institution.”

“This is a unit founded on a culture of excellence thanks to my predecessors,” he said.

He told the soldiers he is honored to be in their ranks.

“I pledge my commitment to support our no-fail mission for the Army,” he said. “Our ARSOF regiments cannot win without the exquisite force we generate class after class. Our people are the best at their trade. Our culture is one of excellence. Our purpose is to forge the next generation of ARSOF warriors.”

Braga said Beaurpere has the right command team and closed his remarks by quoting former president John F. Kennedy, who authorized the creation of the Green Berets.

“A full spectrum of military, paramilitary, and civil action must be blended to produce success,'" Braga said quoting Kenndy. "The enemy uses economic and political warfare, propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government, and suppress the rights of the individual by terror, by subversion and by force of arms..’”

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.

fayobserver.com · by Rachael Riley

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website