Quotes of the Day:

"The guy who takes a chance, who walks the line between the known and the unknown, who is unafraid of failure, will succeed." 

– Gordon Parks

“Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.” 

– Lao Tzu

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." 

–  Robert Frost

1. Ukraine’s Russia Incursion Faces Dilemma After Quick Gains

2. In Syria’s Hinterlands, the U.S. Wages a Hidden Campaign Against a Resurgent Islamic State

3. Iran Emerges as the Most Aggressive Foreign Threat to U.S. Election

4. Kremlin Downplays Ukrainian Operation Inside Russian Territory

5. Philippines to file protest with China over South China Sea air incident

6. Australia, US, UK sign nuclear transfer deal for AUKUS subs

7. AUKUS partners demonstrated 'real-time' AI tests at US Army's Project Convergence

8. Good news, bad news in Japan’s military reawakening

9. The Hacking of Presidential Campaigns Begins, With the Usual Fog of Motives

10. Kursk invasion looks like WWII's Battle of the Bulge

11. Kursk shows it never pays to underestimate Ukraine

12.  What's Behind U.S. Navy's Worst Warship Production in 25 Years?

13. The Gloves Are Off. Ukraine Strikes Deep Inside Russia.

14. US announces $125 million military aid package for Ukraine

15. Biden, Harris and Trump should issue a joint statement on the risks of World War III

16. U.S. Funding $32M Upgrade to Air Base in the Philippines

17. Three Visions for NATO Air and Missile Defense

18. The Undoing of Israel: The Dark Futures That Await After the War in Gaza

19. How Everything Became National Security

1. Ukraine’s Russia Incursion Faces Dilemma After Quick Gains

Excerpts:

Beyond the tactical military wins, Ukraine has shown it has the audacity and the skill to secretly plan and launch a complex offensive operation. After a failed counteroffensive last summer, Ukraine has spent a year in brutal trench warfare against grinding Russian offensives that have raised questions at home and abroad how Ukraine can hold off its larger neighbor.

“They completely changed the strategic narrative with this assault,” said John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who is now a professor of warfighting at the U.S. Army War College.

Nagl said he found the military logic of the operation questionable given the enormous pressure on Ukraine’s own defensive lines elsewhere. He said Ukraine may be focused on sending a message to the U.S., its most important backer, ahead of presidential elections in November.

“The Ukrainians want attention to this incursion. They’re saying the Ukrainians still have fight in them,” he said.

The U.S. has said it wasn’t informed about the operation before it was launched, as is typical for a tactical move. The Biden administration has urged against Ukrainian military strikes in Russia, but U.S. officials have said this incursion is consistent with U.S. rules allowing Ukraine to use U.S.-provided weapons to defend itself, given the Russian assault in Kharkiv province.

Ukraine’s Russia Incursion Faces Dilemma After Quick Gains

Following a year of brutal defensive warfare, Ukraine’s new operation has quickly taken territory in Russia’s Kursk province. But Kyiv’s forces are still outgunned and outnumbered in most places.

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraines-russia-incursion-faces-dilemma-after-quick-gains-b098ffd0?mod=wknd_pos1

By James MarsonFollow

 and Daniel MichaelsFollow

Updated Aug. 12, 2024 12:52 am ET

Ukraine’s surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk province has quickly gobbled up territory, embarrassing Russian President Vladimir Putin and boosting Ukrainian morale after a year of war largely spent in bloody defensive battles.

The dilemma for Ukraine’s leadership is whether the quest for further gains is worth wagering significantly more troops and military equipment that are sorely needed on the eastern front in Ukraine where Kyiv’s forces are struggling to contain Russian advances.

In just a few days, Ukraine has advanced at least 20 miles from the border, demonstrating to its enemy, its own citizens and its allies that it is still in the fight and can spring damaging surprises on its larger neighbor.

In his first comments on the invasion late Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the operation as “our actions to push the war onto the aggressor’s territory.”

Ukraine, he said, “is guaranteeing exactly the kind of pressure that is needed: pressure on the aggressor.”

Vladimir Putin held a video call with Alexei Smirnov, acting governor of the Kursk Oblast, on Thursday. Photo: gavriil grigorov/Kremlin

The operation is a high-stakes move given Ukraine’s shortage of manpower and military equipment on the eastern front, where Russia is pressing forward.

“Maybe I’m in the same position now as the private who doesn’t understand why he has to hold a trench,” said a Ukrainian battalion commander fighting near the eastern logistical hub of Pokrovsk, where Russia has accelerated its advance in recent weeks. “But 1,000 men are very badly needed here.”

The ultimate goal of the Kursk operation remains unclear. Ukraine has given sparing comment, but the early successes are visible in videos shared online of Ukrainian troops raising their flag in several towns and villages near the border, clips of smoldering Russian military vehicles and the often angry posts of nationalist Russian war bloggers close to the military.

Russian reports indicate that Ukraine’s rapid advance was achieved by using electronic-warfare equipment to knock out Russian communications and help Ukrainian forces to maraud into Russian territory on fast-moving armored vehicles supported by strike drones and air-defense systems.

A Russian strike on a supermarket in the eastern Ukrainian town of Kostyantynivka on Friday killed at least 10 people and injured 35, Ukraine’s interior minister said. Photo: roman pilipey/AFP/Getty Images

Ukraine has gained a foothold that it is using to send out reconnaissance teams to probe for further weaknesses to exploit and to bring forward artillery systems that can strike deep into Russia’s rear. Videos posted online showed a column of Russian military vehicles smashed by an apparent Ukrainian strike Friday near the town of Rylsk before they could reach the battlefield.

Russian officials have repeatedly announced that they are repelling Ukrainian forces from the border area, but on Sunday the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged it was striking Ukrainian units in villages some 20 miles inside Russia.

“It’s a blow to Putin,” said a Ukrainian officer fighting in the eastern Chasiv Yar area. “Of course I like seeing that we hit their column. If it continues for days, I’ll say it was very useful.”

Ukrainian incursion into Russian territory

Ukrainian forces in Kursk

Russian forces

Belarus

KURSK REGION

Russia

Kursk

Direction of

Ukrainian attack

Kyiv

Vovchansk

Kharkiv

Ukraine

Chasiv Yar

Dnipro

Pokrovsk

Mariupol

Mol.

Kherson

Odesa

Sea of Azov

CRIMEA

Black Sea

100 miles

100 km

Note: advances and forces as of Aug. 11

Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project (advances);

Russian Defense Ministry (targeted locations)

Andrew Barnett and Camille Bressange/WSJ

The current U.S. assessment is that one of Ukraine’s reasons for launching the incursion was to disrupt Russian supply lines to the northern front in Kharkiv, where Moscow’s troops launched an incursion of their own in May, a U.S. official said. Ukraine has taken dozens of prisoners, whom it can trade for its own detainees held in Russia.

Beyond the tactical military wins, Ukraine has shown it has the audacity and the skill to secretly plan and launch a complex offensive operation. After a failed counteroffensive last summer, Ukraine has spent a year in brutal trench warfare against grinding Russian offensives that have raised questions at home and abroad how Ukraine can hold off its larger neighbor.

“They completely changed the strategic narrative with this assault,” said John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who is now a professor of warfighting at the U.S. Army War College.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky stands in front of a pair of F16 jet fighters this month after giving an award to a Ukrainian fighter pilot. Photo: sergei supinsky/AFP/Getty Images

Nagl said he found the military logic of the operation questionable given the enormous pressure on Ukraine’s own defensive lines elsewhere. He said Ukraine may be focused on sending a message to the U.S., its most important backer, ahead of presidential elections in November.

“The Ukrainians want attention to this incursion. They’re saying the Ukrainians still have fight in them,” he said.

The U.S. has said it wasn’t informed about the operation before it was launched, as is typical for a tactical move. The Biden administration has urged against Ukrainian military strikes in Russia, but U.S. officials have said this incursion is consistent with U.S. rules allowing Ukraine to use U.S.-provided weapons to defend itself, given the Russian assault in Kharkiv province.

Fears of escalation haven’t grown much inside the White House, aides said. The expectation is regional fighting will resemble battles inside Ukraine, giving Moscow space to not overreact. Still, some U.S. officials expressed concern that killing Russian forces on their turf could prompt Putin to authorize a fierce retribution, namely a large barrage of missiles targeting Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.

Zelensky said late Saturday that Russia had used a North Korean missile to strike near Kyiv, killing a man and his 4-year-old son.

The next phase of the Kursk incursion depends on what reserves each side has available and how it deploys them, said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst.

A Ukrainian national guard serviceman at the front line near Kharkiv, Ukraine, in June. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

Ukraine will need to deploy additional manpower and military resources to maintain momentum, while Russia will want to counterattack swiftly and bring to bear its superior firepower, including massive glide bombs, if a static front line develops.

The main issue with the operation, Gady said, was that it doesn’t change the fundamentals on the front lines in the east of Ukraine, where Russian troops are advancing, albeit slowly, against outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainian forces.

“The operation in Kursk demands considerable resources, especially in infantry personnel, which might be more urgently needed elsewhere,” he said.

In eastern Ukraine, officers from brigades that were desperate for more men questioned the wisdom of committing forces to an attack in Russia, despite hopes it could draw Russian forces away from that battlefront.

“We don’t feel any changes, at least so far,” said the Ukrainian officer near Chasiv Yar. “The Russians are not going to move any troops from the east to Kursk. They have reserves.”

Ian Lovett, Nancy A. Youssef and Alexander Ward contributed to this article.

Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com and Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com

2. In Syria’s Hinterlands, the U.S. Wages a Hidden Campaign Against a Resurgent Islamic State

Excerpts:

Security officials say that as boys reach fighting age, Islamic State smuggles them out of the camp for military training in the desert.

Local authorities have had a difficult time figuring out what to do with the families, who are often not wanted in their home countries but are deemed too dangerous to be released among the general public.

“Attention has shifted elsewhere,” the U.S. Special Forces officer said. “But now is not the time to take our eyes off of northeast Syria.”

In Syria’s Hinterlands, the U.S. Wages a Hidden Campaign Against a Resurgent Islamic State

Defeated by American-led forces half a decade ago, the terrorist group is rebounding amid the chaos of the Middle East

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/in-syrias-hinterlands-the-u-s-wages-a-hidden-campaign-against-a-resurgent-islamic-state-f22c44df?mod=hp_lead_pos8

By Michael M. PhillipsFollow

Updated Aug. 12, 2024 12:54 am ET

U.S. SPECIAL FORCES BASE, Northeastern Syria—American commandos are scrambling to contain a resurgence of Islamic State where the militant group once imposed its violent religious fervor on vast territories and millions of people.

Islamic State is mustering forces in Syria’s Badiya desert, training young recruits to become suicide bombers, directing attacks on allied troops and preparing to resurrect its dream of ruling an Islamist caliphate, according to officers from the U.S. and the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led troops whom the U.S. helped to defeat the militant group five years ago.

Militant fighters have doubled their pace of attacks in Syria and Iraq this year. They have targeted security checkpoints, detonated car bombs and plotted to free thousands of comrades jailed since the SDF and a U.S.-headed Western coalition recaptured the last Islamic State-held town.

In a little-publicized campaign, American aircraft conduct airstrikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces who conduct raids on suspected Islamic State cells. While they usually stay a safe distance from the fighting, elite U.S. troops sometimes conduct missions on their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders.

Gen. Rohilat Afrin, co-commander of the Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. Photo: PHOTO: Michael M. Phillips for WSJ

“This year has been the worst year since we defeated Islamic State,” said Gen. Rohilat Afrin, co-commander of the SDF.

“No matter how much you knock them down, they’ll try to get up again,” she said in an interview at a U.S. commando base in northeastern Syria.

Elsewhere in the world, Islamic State affiliates have carried out high-casualty terrorist attacks, including twin bombings in Kerman, Iran, and a massacre at a Moscow concert venue. But the group’s focus has been on the region it used to control.

Islamic State’s latest comeback effort represents a different challenge than the one it posed in its heyday, when hundreds of militants would charge through isolated villages and crowded cities in tanks and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns. Now the group operates in smaller cells armed with rifles and booby traps.

And today’s response from the U.S., France and their Western allies is complicated by uncertainty—fueled by diplomatic negotiations and the coming American elections—about what role the coalition will play in the region in the months and years ahead. 

During the first six months of the year, Islamic State claimed responsibility for 153 attacks in Syria and Iraq. It is building its ranks by surreptitiously indoctrinating youngsters in camps that hold thousands of wives and children of detained Islamic State fighters.

“What we’re seeing is the movement of men, weapons and equipment,” said an American Special Forces officer stationed in Syria.

U.S.-aligned SDF personnel report having captured 233 suspected Islamic State fighters in 28 operations in the first seven months of the year. American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria, and one in Iraq, so far this year. The U.S., which now has 900 military and civilian defense personnel in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq, carried out four strikes against Islamic State all of last year. American forces have assisted in nearly 50 other airstrikes conducted by the Iraqi air force since the beginning of last year, according to Pentagon data.

SDF ground forces usually hunt down Islamic State cells in villages and towns around northeastern Syria. In one July raid, SDF commandos backed by American Special Forces hit eight compounds housing suspected Islamic State militants. 

National Guard members tested weapons and checked for booby traps during a recent deployment in northeastern Syria, while an SDF soldier, wearing sunglasses, joined U.S. forces on patrol.

Michael M. Phillips for WSJ

The operation took six weeks to plan, with U.S. drones and Apache attack helicopters providing aerial surveillance to help commandos spot patterns of people entering and leaving key buildings.

SDF troops built models of the suspect compounds to plan their assault and held full-scale rehearsals. In the early hours of the day of the raid, more than 100 SDF soldiers staggered their movements to arrive simultaneously at their assigned targets spread out over a 10-mile stretch of villages, so that no Islamic State fighters could warn others that the net was closing around them.

The SDF arrested a dozen people without firing a shot, according to the U.S. Special Forces officer. Once the compounds were secured by the Syrian troops, American commandos entered the houses and seized cellphones in the hopes of using their call histories to locate other Islamic State militants.

“We do know this absolutely disrupted planned attacks on coalition and SDF personnel,” the U.S. officer said.

In Iraq, Shiite Muslim leaders have ties to Tehran and are pressing U.S. troops to leave the country, which serves as a logistical base for Pentagon operations in Syria. U.S.-Iraq talks in Washington last month ended without a withdrawal decision but still alarmed American allies in the region.

“We’ll see chaos like we’ve never seen before,” said Brig. Gen. Ali al-Hassan, spokesman for northeast Syria’s U.S.-allied internal-security force. “Any withdrawal will cause the immediate activation of sleeper cells.”

SDF officers recall that in 2018 then-President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of all 2,000 American troops in Syria at the time. Defense officials protested, and Trump was persuaded to leave almost half of them in place.

Decisions about whether the U.S. will remain in the fight are made even more complex by the crazy-quilt conflicts in Syria.

Mourners buried bodies last October at a displacement camp in Syria’s northwest, after a strike by Russian forces aiding the Assad regime. Photo: AAREF WATAD/AFP/Getty Images

While the U.S. and SDF take on Islamic State in Syria’s breakaway northeastern region, which Kurds call Rojava, NATO member Turkey carries out airstrikes against the SDF, because it sees the independence-minded Kurds as terrorists.

Russian forces help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad battle both the SDF and Islamic State. 

Militias armed by Iran, meanwhile, routinely launch explosive drones at U.S. bases in the region. A January attack on a U.S. position in Jordan killed three Americans and wounded dozens. Earlier this month, an Iran-backed militia fired rockets at Iraq’s Al Asad air base, wounding five American servicemembers and two contractors, according to U.S. military officials.

For months this year, Iran-backed attacks forced U.S. troops to reinforce their half-dozen positions in Syria and distracted from the fight against Islamic State.

Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim group, emerged from the al Qaeda branch that fought American forces after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The U.S. withdrew from Iraq in 2011, as the Arab Spring was unleashing political and military instability around the Middle East.

Oilfields burned south of Mosul, Iraq, during a major push to root out Islamic State in late 2016. Photo: Goran Tomasevic/REUTERS

Taking advantage of the moment, Islamic State seized some 38,000 square miles of territory in Syria and Iraq, an area slightly smaller than Virginia, declared it a caliphate and governed as many as 12 million people. 

Some 30,000 foreigners from countries including the U.K., France and Tunisia, attracted by the promise of life lived under strict Islamist precepts, flocked to Syria and Iraq to fight on the caliphate’s behalf.

Islamic State authorities minted coins and imposed taxes. They also crucified the bodies of those they executed, the United Nations reported, and sold women from the Yazidi religious minority as slaves outside a military post they had seized from Syrian government forces in the town of al-Shaddadi, according to Gen. Rohilat. Limbs were chopped off, lashings delivered.

“They were very hard on the people,” recalled a business owner in the Syrian village of Tarqia, a few dusty streets of mud-brick compounds, pistachio trees and sunflower patches. Islamic State enforcers would beat anyone who failed to attend mosque, he said.

Of the 250 families originally living in Tarqia, just 100 remain today, he said. The rest journeyed to Turkey or Europe in search of a better life, he said.

In 2014, then-President Barack Obama assembled an international coalition to help Iraqi and Kurdish-led forces reassert control over territories in Iraq and Syria. In 2017, Iraqi government forces and Kurdish fighters recaptured the Iraqi city of Mosul after a fierce battle, and SDF troops retook Raqqa in Syria, once Islamic State’s capital. 

In 2019, the Syrian town of Baghouz, Islamic State’s last stronghold, fell to the SDF, and the physical caliphate was no more.

An SDF fighter stands guard as families of suspected Islamic State militants await transfer to the al-Hol camp in Syria’s northeast. Photo: Baderkhan Ahmad/AP

“It was a threat to the entire world, and we defeated it,” recalls Gen. Mahmud Barkhwadan, SDF operational commander in northeast Syria.

Some 9,000 Islamic State fighters remain in jails across northeastern Syria, however, and the group has made no secret of its intention to free its comrades so they can return to the battlefield.

Twice this year, insurgents have tried to stage breakouts from detention facilities. In one case, an Islamic State suicide bomber tried to breach the gate of a Raqqa jail in a three-wheeled auto rickshaw filled with explosives.

“I can’t imagine what would happen if they actually started a prison breakout,” said al-Hassan, the internal-security force spokesman.

There are also some 43,000 Syrian, Iraqi and other displaced people living in camps in northeastern Syria, including many wives and children of jailed Islamic State fighters whom the SDF and U.S. see as potential recruits for the next generation of militants.

At the al-Hol camp, children draw in coloring books with images of hand grenades, AK-47 rifles and explosive suicide vests. U.S. soldiers have obtained photos of Islamic State-themed children’s birthday parties, the militants’ black-and-white flag hung on the wall amid the balloons. 

“They’re trying to brainwash them as kids, so when they grow up they’ll be willing to kill without hesitation,” Gen. Rohilat said.

A coloring book found at al-Hol depicts a suicide vest, a grenade and a rifle.

Michael M. Phillips for WSJ

Security officials say that as boys reach fighting age, Islamic State smuggles them out of the camp for military training in the desert.

Local authorities have had a difficult time figuring out what to do with the families, who are often not wanted in their home countries but are deemed too dangerous to be released among the general public.

“Attention has shifted elsewhere,” the U.S. Special Forces officer said. “But now is not the time to take our eyes off of northeast Syria.”

Write to Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com

3. Iran Emerges as the Most Aggressive Foreign Threat to U.S. Election

Excerpts:

“Hack-and-leak is the white whale of influence operations,” said Thomas Rid, a disinformation expert and professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, explaining that they can be highly effective, dominate news cycles and be hard to counteract. 

But Rid cautioned against giving the Iranians too much credit. “The Iranian surfacing attempt was old school—trying to trick a journalist into covering a seeded story—but it was also incompetent,” he said.

Iranian hackers have become the masters of what are known as spear-phishing campaigns. These are targeted cyberattacks, typically conducted via email or a messaging app, designed to trick the victim into divulging their online credentials. “They’re pretty sophisticated and they’re very persistent,” said Steven Adair, president of the cybersecurity firm Volexity.

The hackers will pretend to be someone they aren’t—a professor or a journalist, for example—and engage in email correspondence that can last for months. Then comes the spear-phish: often it will be a shared document that asks the victim to log into a fake phishing site designed to look like Microsoft’s or Google’s.

“You’ve just emailed with someone for two months or several weeks, so your guard is a little down,” Adair said. Once they gain access to online accounts, the Iranian hackers typically steal their victims’ data, Adair said, but he has never seen them attempt to leak the information afterward.

Iran Emerges as the Most Aggressive Foreign Threat to U.S. Election

Hack of Trump campaign has led some to accuse Tehran just weeks after U.S. officials believed Russia posed bigger threat

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/iran-emerges-as-the-most-aggressive-foreign-threat-to-u-s-election-b61161ad?mod=hp_lead_pos9

By Dustin Volz

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, Alexander Ward

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 and Robert McMillan

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Aug. 12, 2024 5:00 am ET

Iran has demonstrated the most eagerness to disrupt the election so far. Photo: Rouzbeh Fouladi/Zuma Press

WASHINGTON—In July, U.S. intelligence officials gave a rare briefing to media reporters on foreign threats to the election and warned, as they have in previous cycles, that Russia was the “pre-eminent threat” to the November vote.

Iran, the officials said, posed a lesser threat, aiming to be a chaos agent in the election by exacerbating social tensions.

Just weeks later, however, intelligence officials organized another briefing and delivered a different message. Their assessment on Iran had changed: Tehran wasn’t just hoping to spread chaos, they said, but aiming to harm Donald Trump’s candidacy, as it haphazardly sought to do four years ago. Iran was also attempting to directly engage Americans in its influence operations and even provide funding to support Gaza protests on college campuses, officials said, while relying on “vast webs of online personas and propaganda mills to spread disinformation.”

Now, the threat posed by Tehran appears even more severe, though lacking in much sophistication. On Saturday, the Trump campaign said it had been hacked by “foreign sources hostile to the United States” in a breach the campaign linked to Iran. An anonymous source that called itself “Robert” had shared apparently stolen internal Trump campaign files with reporters at several media organizations, hoping to see the material published.

The White House was unaware of the hack-and-leak campaign, first learning of it from Politico’s Saturday report which detailed the breach, two administration officials said. The Biden administration still hasn’t made a formal determination of responsibility. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has only confirmed it is aware of public reports but has declined to comment further. The White House isn’t always immediately informed when intelligence or law-enforcement investigations into such matters begin.

Donald Trump has personally tapped Iran as the culprit in the breach of his campaign. Photo: Natalie Behring/AFP/Getty Images

News of the hack and the attempt to launder the purloined goods through reporters—if confirmed to be the handiwork of hackers tied to Iran—is the latest sign of the U.S. adversary’s deep and committed interest in meddling in the 2024 election, former officials and security experts said. It came just a day after Microsoft published threat research detailing a litany of efforts by Iran to target the election, including attempts to hack into an unnamed presidential campaign beginning in June by a group connected to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Trump campaign pointed to that research to bolster its case for blaming Iran.

Clint Watts, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, said cyber groups connected to Iran had in recent weeks expanded its election influence efforts on several fronts. The tactics observed included launching covert news sites driven by artificial intelligence to target voters and separate efforts to prepare to incite violence against political figures and cast doubt on the integrity of the election.

“First, they’ve laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and begun to activate these campaigns in an apparent effort to stir up controversy or sway voters—especially in swing states,” Watts said in a blog post. “Second, they’ve launched operations that Microsoft assesses are designed to gain intelligence on political campaigns and help enable them to influence the elections in the future.”

In an election season already rocked by an assassination attempt against Trump and President Biden’s late decision not to seek re-election, Iran has added to the list of surprises by becoming the most active and serious foreign adversary trying to disrupt the contest. In addition to the cyber-enabled election influence operations, Iran was connected to another plot to assassinate Trump, according to federal prosecutors and other officials. U.S. officials have also previously renewed security protection of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—and other officials—because of fears Iran could try to kill him following his role in the assassination of Iran’s Qassem Soleimani.

Iranian hackers have become the masters of what are known as spear-phishing campaigns. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/Zuma Press

The Kremlin is still widely seen as more adept at covert propaganda than Tehran, and possesses more resources and technological expertise. Russia was committed to waging a “whole-of-government” influence campaign on the election, U.S. intelligence officials said in their July media briefings, motivated to again try to push voters against supporting the Democratic Party and to favor Trump. The Kremlin’s calculus hinges chiefly on a view that Democrats would continue to resolutely support Ukraine, intelligence officials said.

But so far, Iran has demonstrated the most eagerness to disrupt the election, despite being mired in regional confrontations that could ignite a broader war in the Middle East.

“The regime is already trying to assassinate Trump and former senior members of his administration, so I don’t think anyone should be surprised it would hack the campaign to try to influence the election,” said Rich Goldberg, a former Trump National Security Council official now at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank.

Sean Savett, a spokesman for the National Security Council, deferred comment on the matter to the Justice Department, but added: “The Biden-Harris Administration strongly condemns any foreign government or entity who attempts to interfere in our electoral process or seeks to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”

The Trump campaign didn’t return a request for comment about how Iran gained access to its materials or if the Republican nominee’s team informed law enforcement. Trump, meanwhile, has personally tapped Iran as the culprit, posting on Truth Social over the weekend that “one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government—Never a nice thing to do!”

The upended expectations are reminiscent of the 2020 election, when U.S. intelligence officials viewed Russia as the most serious foreign threat, based on its success in 2016 and a number of warning signs that hackers have been targeting campaigns and American political groups. 

But in the final weeks of that campaign, officials expressed private surprise that Moscow, by some measures, had been relatively quiet, while Iran had stepped up its interference ambitions instead. Its actions were so concerning it prompted top intelligence officials to deliver an unprecedented public warning at the height of the election cycle that Iran was behind a series of threatening emails sent to intimidate American voters.

Cybersecurity experts and former U.S. officials said Iran was attempting now to essentially re-create the successes of Russia’s 2016 interference operations, albeit crudely. 

“Hack-and-leak is the white whale of influence operations,” said Thomas Rid, a disinformation expert and professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, explaining that they can be highly effective, dominate news cycles and be hard to counteract. 

But Rid cautioned against giving the Iranians too much credit. “The Iranian surfacing attempt was old school—trying to trick a journalist into covering a seeded story—but it was also incompetent,” he said.

Iranian hackers have become the masters of what are known as spear-phishing campaigns. These are targeted cyberattacks, typically conducted via email or a messaging app, designed to trick the victim into divulging their online credentials. “They’re pretty sophisticated and they’re very persistent,” said Steven Adair, president of the cybersecurity firm Volexity.

The hackers will pretend to be someone they aren’t—a professor or a journalist, for example—and engage in email correspondence that can last for months. Then comes the spear-phish: often it will be a shared document that asks the victim to log into a fake phishing site designed to look like Microsoft’s or Google’s.

“You’ve just emailed with someone for two months or several weeks, so your guard is a little down,” Adair said. Once they gain access to online accounts, the Iranian hackers typically steal their victims’ data, Adair said, but he has never seen them attempt to leak the information afterward.

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com, Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com and Robert McMillan at robert.mcmillan@wsj.com

4. Kremlin Downplays Ukrainian Operation Inside Russian Territory

Excerpts:

The Kremlin has downplayed the incursion and responded with a “counter-terrorism” operation, clamping down on Russians’ phone communications and placing other restrictions on people in Kursk. Residents of the region on Thursday recorded a video accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military staff of underreacting to—and, indeed, lying about—Ukraine’s counter-invasion and putting civilians at risk.

Barros says the understated response belies Putin’s concern that Russians will begin to understand what a quagmire his war in Ukraine has become. To react more aggressively “could potentially lead the average Russian to think,” Barros suggested, “how is it that over the course of the last couple of years, we went from ‘We’re going to seize Kyiv in a matter of days,’ and ‘It’s a cakewalk,’ to, ‘We have German armored vehicles rolling around in Russia for the first time since 1945?’”

​I saw a great meme on the Ukraine invasion and Putin's fictional response:

Putin is slumped in a chair saying, "Oh spirit of great Stalin, German tanks are advancing in Kursk, how to stop them?"

Response: "That's an easy one. Ask USA for more lend lease help and reinforce the front with Ukrainians."

​

Kremlin Downplays Ukrainian Operation Inside Russian Territory

thedispatch.com · by Mary Trimble

Ukraine Flips the Script

Ukrainian troops sit on a self-propelled artillery 2S7 Pion while being carried by a military truck, in the Sumy region, near the border with Russia, on August 11, 2024. (Photo by ROMAN PILIPEY/AFP via Getty Images)

Nine hundred days ago, Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Last week, Kyiv turned the tables.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian troops launched a surprise offensive into Russia’s Kursk oblast—the largest Ukrainian attack on Russian soil since the Kremlin’s invasion began in February 2022. After more than six days of fighting with an underwhelming Russian response, Ukrainian soldiers can be seen in social media video footage taking down Russian flags in some towns in the Kursk region and replacing them with Ukraine’s blue and yellow bands.

The Ukrainian offensive could mark a new stage in a war that has thus far kept Kyiv largely on its back foot. But the gambit is not without risks, and the strategic goal of the offensive—both on the battlefield and on the international stage—is not yet clear.

Ukraine has weathered incremental—but steady—losses over the past few months, particularly in its eastern Donetsk oblast. “The main problem is really a shortage of manpower,” John Hardie, deputy director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Russia program, told TMD. “Units don’t have enough infantry to hold positions, and the Russians have an advantage in manpower that allows them to conduct very frequent assaults.” Those assaults, he said, have yielded small but consistent gains for the Russians.

Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukraine have continued in recent months, including a strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv in early July. The first delivery of U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to the country late last month could be used to bolster Ukrainian air defenses by shooting down incoming Russian missiles and drones.

Meanwhile, it has been a difficult summer for Ukraine on the frontlines. Russia opened a new front in May near Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine. Though the United States and Ukraine declared that offensive a failure for the Russians, it still came at the expense of weeks of brutal fighting by Ukrainians.

Map via Joe Schueller.

Though Kyiv has secured some marginal victories—in Crimea, or stalling the Kharkiv offensive—the year has nevertheless mostly seen Ukraine take a defensive posture. “The Russian military has had the entirety of the initiative across the theater,” said George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who leads its geospatial intelligence and Russia teams. “The Russian command had the flexibility to choose the time, location, density, and scale of when to conduct attacks against Ukraine for ground operations, and fundamentally put the Ukrainian command on the back foot: They could not dictate the tempo of battle. They could not choose where to fight, and they were always forced to respond.”

Last week, though, that changed.

Ukrainian troops have periodically raided Russian territory over the last two-and-a-half years, but those missions were small in scope and typically focused on gathering information rather than capturing and holding territory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said there had been 2,000 such raids from the Sumy region of Ukraine in the northeast into the Kursk oblast in Russia this summer alone.

On Tuesday, Russian military bloggers surfaced the first reports of a Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region. The border between the two countries—not an active frontline of the war, per se—was poorly defended by ill-trained conscripted Russian troops: men serving their obligatory one-year terms in the military who, by law, are not generally sent to the frontlines. As invading Ukrainian soldiers encountered them, they easily captured some conscripts.

As the assault continued over subsequent days, the Ukrainian government was mum. The operation had proceeded under a veil of secrecy—surprising, given the digital nature of this war. Still, it became clear without any public pronouncement from Ukraine that this wasn’t just a raid. “The level of resources, the scale, the intensity, and the fact that the Ukrainians have maintained a larger presence within Russia over time, indicates that what we’re looking at here is not an undertaking at the tactical level,” Barros told TMD. “This is an operational level undertaking, and this is a campaign.”

It’s not evident how many Ukrainian troops are involved in the operation, though the Russian military put the number at anywhere from 300 to 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers involved in the initial attack—a figure that has likely grown in the days since. Open-source intelligence indicates Ukraine has probably committed battalions—in the hundreds of soldiers—from several brigades, which could each number as many as 2,000 troops. Videos have shown Ukrainians riding through Russian territory with U.S.-supplied Stryker armored personnel carriers and their German equivalents and transporting Howitzer artillery weapons into Russian territory.

It’s also not clear how much land the Ukrainian military formally controls at this point, though the furthest point of advance into Russia by Ukrainian troops—according to ISW’s Barros, who has mapped the conflict every day since the beginning of the war—is in the neighborhood of 650 square kilometers, or about 250 square miles, which is an area slightly larger than Chicago.

Map via Joe Schueller.

That’s significantly more territory than the Russians have succeeded in capturing in recent months. It’s roughly three times as much territory as Russia captured in all of Ukraine during the entire month of July; four times as much as Moscow took in June; and double what it captured in May, a banner month of gains for the Kremlin, according to Barros.

And Ukrainians could be ready to hold their ground. Ukrainian forces are reportedly digging trenches, an indication they’re preparing to defend the Russian land they’ve taken.

So why did Ukraine mount this new offensive? It’s still unclear, but there are plenty of possibilities. On the battlefield, it could force Russia to divert some of its forces from other parts of the frontline—like Donetsk or Kharkiv—potentially putting Ukrainian forces in a stronger position there to push back the Kremlin’s forces and recapture lost territory. Meanwhile, it could also force Russia to more fulsomely defend the international border that isn’t a part of the frontline as a potential battleground, further stretching its resources.

If that’s the aim, though, then the operation isn’t without its risks. “It could work out really well and shift momentum back in Ukraine’s favor and maybe force Russia to divert some units from elsewhere,” Hardie told TMD. “Or, in the worst-case scenario, Russia could defeat the offensive without really meaningfully weakening its attacks in Donetsk oblast and attrit what little reserves Ukraine had.”

There are other, perhaps more political, motivations as well. Bringing the fight to Russia could be a boon for Ukrainian morale, which has been worn down by a dearth of manpower; months of “shell hunger” amid stalled U.S. aid; and brutal Russian aerial attacks on civilian infrastructure, homes, hospitals, and stores, including a missile barrage targeting Kyiv Sunday that killed a 4-year-old boy.

This advance could also goose Western support for Ukraine after more than a year of bad news. The U.S., for its part, has been vocally supportive of Kyiv’s incursion. “We don’t feel like this is escalatory in any way,” Defense Department spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Thursday. “Ukraine is doing what it needs to do to be successful on the battlefield.” It’s a far cry from the tone the Biden administration has struck over Ukraine’s request to use U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory—behavior it has mostly forbidden.

On Saturday, President Zelensky broke his silence about the operation. “Ukraine is proving that it can indeed restore justice and is ensuring the exact kind of pressure that is needed—pressure on the aggressor,” he said. The statement, though vague, hints at yet another possible aim: capturing Russian territory as leverage to regain seized Ukrainian territory in future peace talks, though such a goal is still just speculation.

Russia’s response has been slow and fairly chaotic. On Sunday, the sixth day of fighting, Russia claimed to have slowed Ukraine’s offensive with several battalions sent to defend Kursk—including nearby conscript units. Federal authorities declared a state of emergency in Kursk as thousands of Russians fled. It’s the first time Russian civilians will have felt the effects of the Kremlin’s so-called “special military operation”—the euphemistic phrase the Russian government uses to describe its invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent war—at a large scale.

The Kremlin has downplayed the incursion and responded with a “counter-terrorism” operation, clamping down on Russians’ phone communications and placing other restrictions on people in Kursk. Residents of the region on Thursday recorded a video accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military staff of underreacting to—and, indeed, lying about—Ukraine’s counter-invasion and putting civilians at risk.

Barros says the understated response belies Putin’s concern that Russians will begin to understand what a quagmire his war in Ukraine has become. To react more aggressively “could potentially lead the average Russian to think,” Barros suggested, “how is it that over the course of the last couple of years, we went from ‘We’re going to seize Kyiv in a matter of days,’ and ‘It’s a cakewalk,’ to, ‘We have German armored vehicles rolling around in Russia for the first time since 1945?’”

5. Philippines to file protest with China over South China Sea air incident

Philippines to file protest with China over South China Sea air incident​

12 Aug 2024 12:19PM

(Updated: 12 Aug 2024 12:25PM)

channelnewsasia.com

East Asia

Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner Jr speaks to the media during a press briefing at Western Command in Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Philippines, Aug 10, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Eloisa Lopez)

12 Aug 2024 12:19PM (Updated: 12 Aug 2024 12:25PM)

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MANILA: The Philippines will file a diplomatic protest with China over a recent incident involving Air Force planes in airspace over a South China Sea shoal, Manila's Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo said on Monday (Aug 12).

The Southeast Asian nation will continue maritime patrols in South China Sea despite the "dangerous and provocative" actions of China's Air Force last week, military chief Romeo Brawner told reporters.

The Philippines' military has complained of dangerous actions by two Chinese aircraft that dropped flares in the path of a Philippine Air Force aircraft conducting a routine patrol over the Scarborough Shoal on Aug 8.

Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said he hoped China would comply with international law and on the need to de-escalate tensions.

On Sunday, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos said China's actions were "unjustified, illegal and reckless".

China's embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Saturday, Southern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army said the Philippine aircraft had illegally intruded despite repeated warnings.

Source: Reuters/ec

channelnewsasia.com

6. Australia, US, UK sign nuclear transfer deal for AUKUS subs

Australia, US, UK sign nuclear transfer deal for AUKUS subs

12 Aug 2024 01:19PM

(Updated: 12 Aug 2024 01:41PM)

channelnewsasia.com

SYDNEY: Australia said on Monday (Aug 12) it had signed a deal to allow the exchange of nuclear secrets and material with the United States and Britain, a key step toward equipping its navy with nuclear-powered submarines.

It binds the three countries to security arrangements for the transfer of sensitive US and UK nuclear material and know-how as part of the tripartite 2021 AUKUS security accord.

AUKUS, which envisages building an Australian nuclear-powered submarine fleet and jointly developing advanced warfighting capabilities, is seen as a strategic answer to Chinese military ambitions in the Pacific region.

"This agreement is an important step towards Australia's acquisition of conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy," said Richard Marles, Australia's defence minister and deputy prime minister.

Australia's acquisition of a nuclear-powered submarine fleet would set the "highest non-proliferation standards", he said, stressing that the country did not seek nuclear weapons.

The latest deal - signed in Washington last week and tabled in the Australian parliament on Monday - includes a provision for Australia to indemnify its partners against any liability for nuclear risks from material sent to the country.

Nuclear material for the future submarines' propulsion would be transferred from the US or Britain in "complete, welded power units", it says.

But Australia would be responsible for the storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste from the nuclear power units that are transferred under the deal.

"Submarines are an essential part of Australia's naval capability, providing a strategic advantage in terms of surveillance and protection of our maritime approaches," the transfer deal says.

China's foreign minister Wang Yi warned in a visit to Australia in April that AUKUS raised "serious nuclear proliferation risks", claiming it ran counter to a South Pacific treaty banning nuclear weapons in the region.

Source: AFP/nc(kg)

channelnewsasia.com

7. AUKUS partners demonstrated 'real-time' AI tests at US Army's Project Convergence

AUKUS partners demonstrated 'real-time' AI tests at US Army's Project Convergence - Breaking Defense

The UK military's science arm said that "once proven," AI and autonomous capabilities “will be incorporated onto national platforms, providing the military with operational advantage through a quicker response to current and future threats.

By  Tim Martin

breakingdefense.com · by Tim Martin · August 9, 2024

AUKUS allies have trialled AI enabled drones to reduce enemy target identification time (US DoD)

BELFAST — Australia, the UK and the US, the three AUKUS partners, successfully trialled artificial intelligence (AI) enabled uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) and other autonomous capabilities with an eye to cutting identification time of enemy targets.

The trial, which falls under the wider AUKUS Resilient and Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Technologies (RAAIT) line of work, was hailed by the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) today, as “the first use of autonomy and AI sensing systems in a real-time military environment.” DSTL is the UK’s military technology experimentation arm.

Though the announcement came today, DSTL said the trial came as apart of the US-hosted multinational Project Convergence Capstone 4 technology experimentation exercise, which took place in the spring. The trial included “several drones” from each of the three AUKUS countries “operating together in the same airspace to achieve a common outcome, whilst being augmented by an AUKUS AI team, which retrained and deployed AI onto the platforms,” according to DSTL.

The deployment of AI-capable drones makes it possible for human operators to “locate, disable and destroy targets on the ground,” it added.

DSTL said that the “seamless exchange of data and control” across the technologies from the partner nations showed the progress they have jointly made in adopting AI and autonomous systems.

The development of AI and other advanced technologies including hypersonic missiles and quantum computing sits under AUKUS Pillar II, separate to the main focus of the trilateral security pact or Pillar I, based around a new class of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.

DSTL also noted that “once proven” AI and autonomous capabilities “will be incorporated onto national platforms, providing the military with operational advantage through a quicker response to current and future threats,” though no specific timeframe was put forward.

The latest AI trial builds off similar demonstrations, in particular, AI swarm testing completed out of Wiltshire, southwest England, last year. During that test a collection of AUKUS “AI-enabled assets” successfully operated together as a swarm for the first time to detect and track targets.

breakingdefense.com · by Tim Martin · August 9, 2024

8. Good news, bad news in Japan’s military reawakening

The key question.

Excerpts:

So how will the Japan-US partnership progress from here? There is no reason Tokyo and Washington can’t turn the relationship into one where their combined resource and combat power can throw their weight around and make life difficult for any adversaries.

But that requires leadership, imagination, initiative and will on both sides – at top and mid-levels too. Unfortunately, Japan seems set for only incremental improvements – good in their own right but not fast enough or sufficient to really improve Japan-US combat power as needed to take on China, North Korea and Russia.

Clearly both sides finally want to do more but they also need a sense of urgency to steamroll bureaucratic obstacles and political lethargy. And there’s a feeling, not unfounded, on the US side that it’s overworked and can’t afford to do more.

Things are much better than they were a decade ago but aren’t close to where they need to be. There is much lost time to make up. Is there enough time? Maybe, maybe not. And Beijing has a say in the matter.

Good news, bad news in Japan’s military reawakening - Asia Times

Tokyo finally moving toward more credible defense posture after decades of dependence on US but it may be too little, too late

asiatimes.com · by Grant Newsham · August 8, 2024

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has done what no American president ever could. He got Japan to get serious about defense after decades of pathological overdependence on US forces.

But here’s the problem: Being serious about defense and actually being able to defend oneself are different things. Japan already has a large and powerful defense force – on paper at least. Its military power has been rated #7 in the world.

And in recent years Japan has undertaken to double defense spending, buy and develop long-range missiles, signed defense agreements with several foreign countries, is poised to establish a Joint Operations Command and is pushing the Americans to operationalize their US Forces Japan headquarters.

And the Japan Self Defense Force (JSDF) is doing more and increasingly complex exercises with the Americans, the Australians and others.

That’s the good news. But here’s the not-so-good news: the JSDF still isn’t a real fighting force. It’s not prepared to fight a war in terms of organization, logistics, command and control, hardware and weaponry, combat-casualty replacement, reserve forces, or even psychologically.

It has some good niche capabilities, particularly in the Maritime Self Defense Force (MSDF). Submarines, anti-submarine warfare, maritime and aerial surveillance, mine warfare and naval surface combatants are all good – as are Japan’s space capabilities and missile defense.

But the JSDF’s inability to conduct joint operations – combining all three services – is a huge problem. Without this, the JSDF isn’t the sum of its parts. But they understand the problem and are finally trying to fix it. It will take time to get it right.

The quality of JSDF personnel is generally excellent but they suffer from decades of poor treatment in terms of pay and housing and benefits, and a general lack of respect from Japan’s political class and so-called elite classes.

The JSDF is about half the size it needs to be to cover the many missions it must handle. MSDF and Air Self Defense Force (ASDF) in particular should be doubled in size.

The Ground Self Defense Force (GSDF) is about the right size (about 140,000) but needs to be totally revamped to become a warfighting outfit rather than something more like a National Guard.

Recruitment is a huge problem and has been for years. The JSDF typically misses targets by about 20% but last year missed by a whopping 50%. Yes, 50%.

The problem is partly the shrinking Japanese population, but even more, it’s the aforementioned poor terms of service and lack of respect for the JSDF. With some political leadership and support, there’s no reason JSDF can’t attract enough recruits rather than make excuses.

If you want to see how US forces and Japanese forces work well together operationally and in most other respects, go down to Yokosuka Naval and visit the US 7th Fleet and the Japanese Navy at nearby Funakoshi. This shows what can be done.

But aside from this bright spot, it’s a disgrace that US and Japanese forces still do not operate very well together – if at all.

Other than the two navies and missile defense, can they do real-world short-notice operations? No. Or at least not without huge efforts to jury rig some half-baked response.

Successive US commanders and civilian leaders – and “alliance managers” – in Japan, Hawaii, and Washington DC should be ashamed of themselves for having accomplished so little in 60 years when it comes to the two nations’ militaries being able to operate together.

The exceptions – and there are a number of them – know who they are.

The Japanese weren’t all that helpful either, and until about 10 years ago any Japanese officer who suggested a more useful operational alliance with US forces was going to have plenty of trouble – and likely be fired.

Japan’s political leadership and bureaucracy (including inside MOD) are largely to blame for slowing things down or even putting up barriers. And they often still do.

But isn’t Japan a pacifist country, legally preventing it from developing a “real” military? Japan is not a pacifist country. It’s got a real military – despite imperfections – and it’s glad to have the Americans exterminate any enemies for them.

As for the constitution that supposedly ties Japan’s hands, Tokyo has always done whatever it feels it must do. The constitution has been reinterpreted many times. Japanese diplomats and officials use the constitution as an excuse to avoid doing anything they don’t want to do. That works very well on the Americans.

Are things really this bad? Yes.

For instance, where is the joint Japan-US headquarters in Japan where US and Japanese officers sit together and conduct necessary operations and activities for the defense of Japan and surrounding areas? Answer: It doesn’t exist.

And after decades of US officials insisting the “relationship has never been stronger.” Once again, a disgrace.

But what about the Alliance Coordination Mechanism both nations created in 2015? That is not a “place”, rather it’s just an agreement to get together and “talk.” In other words, wing it if something happens, including if China attacks Taiwan.

Japan decided to double defense spending before the Japanese yen weakened precipitously. Double it now and you’ve not really doubled it.

An even bigger problem is that the Japanese really don’t know what to spend the extra money on. The US expects Japan to figure it out on its own.

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Instead, it should send some good war planners to Japan and explain the practical requirements for fighting a war – and focus spending on these areas. Also, spend money on JSDF personnel so it’s a more attractive profession. People are as important as hardware.

So how will the Japan-US partnership progress from here? There is no reason Tokyo and Washington can’t turn the relationship into one where their combined resource and combat power can throw their weight around and make life difficult for any adversaries.

But that requires leadership, imagination, initiative and will on both sides – at top and mid-levels too. Unfortunately, Japan seems set for only incremental improvements – good in their own right but not fast enough or sufficient to really improve Japan-US combat power as needed to take on China, North Korea and Russia.

Clearly both sides finally want to do more but they also need a sense of urgency to steamroll bureaucratic obstacles and political lethargy. And there’s a feeling, not unfounded, on the US side that it’s overworked and can’t afford to do more.

Things are much better than they were a decade ago but aren’t close to where they need to be. There is much lost time to make up. Is there enough time? Maybe, maybe not. And Beijing has a say in the matter.

Grant Newsham is a retired US Marine officer and former US diplomat with a long history in Japan-US security relations. He is the author of the book “When China Attacks: A Warning To America.”

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asiatimes.com · by Grant Newsham · August 8, 2024

9. The Hacking of Presidential Campaigns Begins, With the Usual Fog of Motives

What can we do to inoculate the American people against these types of activities to ensure the effects of malign actors and their malign activities do not affect the decision making of the American people in the voting booth?

It is my belief that we must recognize the strategies of the malign actors and develop a deep understanding of those strategies. Then we must EXPOSE those strategies so nothing the malign actors do comes as a surprise and that they are not able to achieve their desired effects. Then we must attack those strategies of malign actors with a superior political warfare strategy.

And of course by political warfare I am not talking about partisan politics within the US. I am talking about employing effective political warfare against the malign actors who are conducting their version of political warfare against us.

Political Warfare

George Kennan:

“Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz's doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP--the Marshall Plan), and "white" propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of "friendly" foreign elements, "black" psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm

Paul Smith:

 "Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations." Smith, Paul A., On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989), p. 3. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a233501.pdf

​And then we must always keep in mind that the below from the 2017 NSS is the best defense that we all must conduct and participate in:

​From the 2017 NSS:

"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

The Hacking of Presidential Campaigns Begins, With the Usual Fog of Motives

Donald J. Trump said Iranians hacked his campaign but only obtained “publicly available” data. Microsoft said a “high-ranking official” at a presidential campaign was a hacking target.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/us/politics/trump-campaign-hacking-iran.html

Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign blamed “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a breach of campaign documents.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By David E. Sanger and Michael Gold

David E. Sanger reported from Wellington, New Zealand. Michael Gold reported from Bozeman, Mont.

• Aug. 11, 2024

For the third presidential election in a row, the foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest. But this time, it’s the Iranians, not the Russians, making the first significant move.

On Friday, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.

By Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump was declaring that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information.” He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalization, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.

The facts were murkier, and it is unclear what, if anything, the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to achieve.

Mr. Trump’s campaign was already blaming “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a leak of internal documents that Politico reported on Saturday that it had received, though it is unclear whether those documents indeed emerged from the Iranian efforts or were part of an unrelated leak from inside the campaign.

The New York Times received what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico.

Either way, the events of the past few days may well portend a more intense period of foreign interference in a race whose sudden turns, and changes of candidates, could have thrown the hackers off their plans.

Russia has so far played a relatively minor role, investigators and cybersecurity experts say, focusing instead on seeking to undermine both the Olympics, from which it was barred from fielding its own team, and support for Ukraine. And while American intelligence officials say they have little doubt that Russia wants to see Mr. Trump return to office, Chinese hackers, they say, seem uncertain how to play the election; they have reason to dislike both Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

There is little doubt, investigators say, that the Iranians want to see Mr. Trump defeated. As president, he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposed economic sanctions on Iran and then, in January 2020, ordered the killing in Iraq of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, a clandestine wing of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for foreign operations.

Four years later, the Revolutionary Guard Corps appears still determined to avenge Suleimani’s death, and just last week the Justice Department announced it had charged a Pakistani man who had recently visited Iran, accusing him of trying to hire a hit man to assassinate political figures in the U.S., most likely including Mr. Trump. (There is no evidence that Iran was involved in the July 13 attempt on Mr. Trump’s life in Butler, Pa.)

Mr. Trump often casts his actions against Iran as evidence of his strength, despite the fact that his exit from the Iran deal gave Tehran an opening to rebuild a nuclear program that had been hobbled by the 2015 agreement. Still, the combination of the hack and the hit men looking for Mr. Trump and his former aides gave the former president an obvious foil, and he was using it over the weekend to make the case that the Iranians would prefer a continuation of the Biden-Harris administration.

Microsoft stopped short of saying that the hacking effort it detected was focused on Mr. Trump’s campaign, though the campaign itself said that was the case. In an interview, Tom Burt, the head of the company’s customer security and trust team, said that in June, “the Iranian team associated with Iranian intelligence” operations of the Revolutionary Guards successfully breached the email account of a former campaign adviser, whom the company did not name. From that account, he said, the Iranians sent a spear phishing email to an official of a presidential campaign.

While it would have appeared to the recipient to have come from the former campaign adviser, Mr. Burt refused to say whether the targeted campaign was also Mr. Trump’s. By long-established practice, Microsoft says, it can reveal such details only with the permission of the victim of an attack.

In many ways, the effort was similar in technique to what Iran attempted when it sought to interfere in the 2020 presidential campaign. This time, however, the Iranian effort looks to have been more sophisticated — namely, through the hacking of a trusted intermediary — suggesting the hackers learned something from what the Russians accomplished in past campaigns, notably in 2016.

But Mr. Burt said the company could not determine if the effort was successful in penetrating the campaign it targeted.

The documents sent to Politico, as it described them, and to The Times included research about and assessments of potential vice-presidential nominees, including Senator JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump ultimately selected. Like many such vetting documents, they contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump.

In a statement on Saturday, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, preemptively chastised outlets that reported on any information that was improperly obtained.

“Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” he wrote.

The 2016 election that Mr. Trump won was marked by similar “hack and leak” efforts after Russian hackers broke into the email accounts of top Democratic officials. Leaked emails showed the internal workings of the party and of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and also revealed criticisms of Mrs. Clinton by aides, and a trove of them was published by WikiLeaks in the final weeks of the presidential race.

Seeking an edge then, Mr. Trump’s campaign seized on the emails — many of them from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. “We love Wikileaks,” Mr. Trump declared at the time.

David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger

Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections. More about Michael Gold

10. Kursk invasion looks like WWII's Battle of the Bulge

But is there a Russian general who will respond to a surrender demand with the word, "Nuts?"

Kursk invasion looks like WWII's Battle of the Bulge - Asia Times

As in the case of Germany in 1944, Ukraine has gambled and the operation carries both strategic and political risk

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · August 12, 2024

Some Weapons and Strategy readers say that there is a strong resemblance between the current Kursk battle and the Battle of the Bulge, which raged in December 1944 and January 1945. It is a topic worth exploring.

American engineers emerge from the woods and move out of defensive positions after fighting in the vicinity of Bastogne, Belgium. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Battle of the Bulge was an attempt by the Nazi forces to break the Allied advance into Germany. Hitler was facing two main allied forces: in the north, the British and Canadians; in the south, the Americans.

The Nazi war plan was to split the Allied armies and drive westward, hoping to capture Antwerp. Antwerp port was the main supply line for the Allied armies. Had the gamble been successful, the Allies would have been in a serious predicament and probably would have been open to making a deal with Hitler.

If the US and UK negotiated with Hitler, the Russians would have been left on their own. The Germans could have shifted their forces on the western front to defend Berlin.

Hitler was counting on splitting the US and UK from Russia, not only on the battlefield but ideologically. Hitler was on to something: After Yalta in February 1945 and Potsdam in July 1945, it was clear that the US (Roosevelt at Yalta, Truman at Potsdam) and the UK (Churchill at Yalta and Churchill and Clement Atlee at Potsdam) had to yield to Stalin, agreeing to Russia’s territorial ambitions in eastern Europe.

Churchill Speaking in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946

A year after, at Fulton, Missouri, US President Harry Truman hosted Winston Churchill, then out of power, at Westminster College. In that speech, popularly known as the Iron Curtain speech, Churchill said:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere. And all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in many cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone — Greece with its immortal glories — is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation.

Had the Nazis been successful in the Battle of the Bulge, Churchill would never have given his speech. While the Cold War, as we understand it today, may have happened anyway, the dynamics and territories involved could well have been different. The US was already an atomic power and the Russians, despite their huge losses and the devastation to Russian territory, might have been compelled to rethink the territorial strategy Stalin pursued at Yalta and Potsdam.

The Bulge involved very large forces. At the start of the battle, Nazi forces outnumbered the Allies in manpower (500,000 versus 229,000) and in hardware (557 tanks versus 488). By the end of the battle, the ratios shifted as the Allies brought up more forces and equipment, so that Allied forces numbered 700,000 and the Wehrmacht was down to 383,000. The Allies had 2,428 tanks in the field (not counting tank destroyers); the Nazis only 216 (and were short on fuel).

Bernard Silver (bottom left) and his tank destroyer crew in France before the Bulge. He was the author’s wife’s father.

At the start of the Battle of the Bulge, Allied forces in the field were mainly second-echelon troops that were not as experienced as the well-trained troops that the US would throw into the battle as it progressed. (An Allied “secret weapon” would turn out to be the audacious George Patton.) German forces, on the other hand, were well-trained, highly disciplined, and resolute and tough fighters.

There is a similarity here between the current Kursk battle and the Bulge. Russia did not have its regular army at Kursk. Inexperienced territorial forces defended the area. On the other hand, the Ukrainian brigades were among the best troops in Ukraine.

The rapid advance into Russia around Kursk and the capture of hamlets and villages is clear evidence of the lack of preparedness on the Russian side and its exploitation by the Ukrainian armed forces.

In the case of the Bulge, the Germans were aided by bad weather that made aerial reconnaissance impossible for some time. The Allies could not use their airpower against clustered enemy forces. That, of course, changed when the weather cleared – and it made a difference, especially in the relief of Bastogne and the destruction of German supply lines.

The senior officers of the 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne, January 18, 1945.

The weather in Kursk appears to be fine. The Ukrainians have taken advantage of it to launch countless drones and to pursue missile and long-range artillery attacks. The Russians were late in using their drones and artillery, mainly because regular Russian forces were not at the front.

It is also noteworthy that Russian surveillance of Ukraine missed Ukrainian preparations for the assault (as did the Allies before the Bulge attack started). How this happened is not yet clear in the case of Kursk.

It is, however, perfectly clear that the Allies did not grasp German preparations for the Bulge. In both cases, whatever they may or may not have seen clashed with their preconceptions of enemy capabilities and intentions.

The Allies never expected the Germans to do much more than to try and defend their homeland, which meant the Allies never expected an offensive and certainly not one as bold as the Germans launched. Nor did the Allies think that the Germans would ever drive toward Antwerp.

The Russians, likewise, were well along on their systematic program to reduce the size and fighting ability of Ukraine’s army. Steady advances in Donetsk, albeit slow, were starting to break the back of Ukraine’s resistance – or so the Russians believed. They were half right and half wrong.

The Russians were correct that they were extracting huge costs on Ukraine’s army. In parallel, the Russians were wrecking Ukraine’s critical infrastructure including electrical power – sending a political message to Ukraine’s leadership and populace.

But the Russians missed that Ukraine still had some of its toughest brigades, which it could use in special operations. The Ukrainians chose to use them in Kursk rather than watch them get slaughtered in Chasov Yar or Niu York.

(A key Russian mistake was failure to focus on destroying Ukraine’s elite brigades. Instead, the Russians fixated on territorial gains and let the Ukrainians decide on what units would fight where.)

A power substation burning in Ukraine.

The Kursk offensive is quite tiny when compared with the massed armies in the Battle of the Bulge. At the start of Kursk the Ukrainians committed perhaps 1,000 troops and a modest complement of armor and artillery. Ukraine also used air defenses, including mobile patriot batteries, electronic warfare assets and a large number of drones.

Likewise, on the Russian side, there were only territorial units that did not have armor and lacked modern anti-tank weapons. As this is written the Russians have brought up Chechens and Wagnerites (now part of the regular Russian army). There are reports that larger forces are also on their way to Kursk, drawn from reserves and not from units fighting elsewhere in Ukraine.

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As of August 11, most of the incursion has been “stabilized” meaning that, for the most part, Ukrainian assaults are being countered successfully.

The current battle scene in Kursk does not resemble the Bulge. The Nazi aim was to break the US and British armies, to split them, and drive to the sea. The Ukrainian aim is to hold Russian territory for as long as possible. In both cases the aim was negotiations, but the Nazis hoped to defeat the Allies while the Ukrainians have no such hope regarding the Russians.

We do not yet know if Ukraine will be able to sustain the Kursk attack. If the country throws in more forces it will not have the advantage it enjoyed in the first phase of the battle. So the Ukrainian gamble is just that and carries strategic and political risk. In that sense, the Battle of the Bulge and Kursk share a common theme.

Stephen Bryen is senior correspondent at Asia Times. He served as staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.

This article was first published on his Weapons and Strategy Substack and is republished with permission.

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asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · August 12, 2024

11. Kursk shows it never pays to underestimate Ukraine

Russia forgot Sun Tzu's admonition: "Never assume the enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."

Kursk shows it never pays to underestimate Ukraine - Asia Times

Ukraine’s daring counter-invasion may well be Russia’s worst battlefield humiliation of the war

asiatimes.com · by Bill Emmott · August 11, 2024

The Kursk submarine disaster on August 12, 2000, was the worst military humiliation of Vladimir Putin’s early years as president of Russia, with all 118 sailors killed when an accidental explosion sank the nuclear-powered vessel.

Almost exactly 24 years later, Ukraine’s daring decision to cross its borders and invade the region (and site of a famous World War Two battle) after which that submarine was named is giving Putin another military humiliation.

It is too soon to judge whether Ukraine’s Kursk invasion will succeed in its strategic objectives, especially as it is not yet clear what those objectives are. But it is already clear that this invasion, along with two associated attacks on Russian airfields and ammunition stores at Lipetsk and Morozovsk, both hundreds of kilometers from the Ukrainian front line, represents a major blow to the Russian military.

Ever since Russia attempted its full invasion on February 24, 2022, and then quickly had to pull back to the Donbas area of Eastern Ukraine, which it had already largely controlled since 2014, it has been hard to make firm assessments about which side in the war has the advantage. This is because, once the Russian invasion failed, this became a war with many front lines and no obvious measures of success or failure.

Survival as an independent, sovereign state was the first test for Ukraine, a test that the country passed magnificently in 2022 and has shown few signs of failing ever since. However, after initial success in pushing Russian forces back during the autumn of 2022, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in 2023 failed to regain much more territory.

And then, in the spring of 2024, Russia began its own new offensive seeking to regain land it had lost the previous year and, most probably, to wear down the morale of Ukraine’s military and – crucially – its society.

Bit by bit, kilometer by kilometer, Russia’s larger military forces have been pushing Ukraine’s smaller ones backward, albeit at a high cost in terms of casualties. Whereas in February 2022 Russia attempted its full invasion with an army estimated at 150,000 troops, it is now thought to have in eastern Ukraine more than 500,000 troops – equipped with more ammunition than the Ukrainian forces even after the US Congress voted in April to send more military aid.

However, this is not just a land war with a long front line. While it has been losing ground very slowly in the northern part of that front line, Ukraine has been achieving significant successes in the Black Sea around Russian-occupied Crimea, sinking enough Russian vessels and destroying enough ammunition stores to force the Russian navy to retreat east to Russia’s own port of Novorossiysk.

This enabled Ukraine in 2023 and 2024 to reopen its grain exports through the Black Sea, which are a vital support to the country’s economy as well as helping lower global food prices.

Faced with shortages of both manpower and weapons and constrained by the American and German governments’ rules about how the most advanced weapons can be used, Ukraine has had to focus for much of this year on trying to attack and weaken Russia’s supply lines and logistical stores. Those attacks have been quite successful but not successful enough to force the Russians to retreat.

So, having weakened Russia’s control over Crimea and eroded its supply lines, and having reopened the western side of the Black Sea for grain exports, Ukraine is now trying a new tactic to try to weaken Russia’s relentless but slow-moving land offensive.

The most impressive feature of the Kursk invasion is how Ukrainian forces managed to take the Russians completely by surprise, despite what must have been a long period of planning and moving armored forces into position.

This success belies the common notion of a Ukrainian military prone to leaking information and continuing to suffer from corruption. As at many previous points in this war, Ukraine’s forces look a lot more professional and well-organized than do their Russian opponents.

The Kursk invasion was such a surprise, even to American and European allies, that it remains unclear how powerful a force has been sent across the border. Initial assumptions that this must be some kind of small special forces raid have proved wrong, as the incursion is better equipped and larger than had been thought.

As of August 9, this Kursk incursion had seized more territory (an estimated 350 square kilometers) in three days than Russia’s attritional offensive in the northern Donbas toward Kharkiv has managed in more than three months.

Much will depend on whether Ukraine’s forces intend to hold on to this new territory for long – in which case they will have to build defenses and supply lines – or whether they will be content simply to have hurt Russia and to have made a point.

We can see already that this surprise invasion has pushed Russia off balance. It has also shown how exposed Russia will always be to attacks from a nimble, well-equipped, well-organized opponent. The imperialist occupier is always vulnerable to counter-attacks, especially when it shares a long land border with the country it is occupying.

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Depending on the cost in terms of casualties and lost equipment, the Kursk operation has already succeeded in one potential objective, that of diverting Russian forces and attention away from the main frontline battle.

This makes it reasonable to speculate about whether more surprises might be planned – perhaps in the southern part of the frontline where the wide Dnipro River has until now formed a barrier against Ukrainian incursions, or even elsewhere along the northern border.

Again, depending on how this new Battle of Kursk plays out, Ukraine has also so far succeeded in disrupting the image that pro-Russian propagandists have been cultivating of how a weak, outnumbered Ukrainian force was facing slow but inevitable defeat.

For the time being, it is Russia that looks to be facing fast and inevitably repeated humiliations. The lesson is simple: it never pays to underestimate Ukraine.

Formerly editor-in-chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott is currently chairman of the Japan Society of the UK, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the International Trade Institute.

This is the English original of an article originally published in Italian in La Stampa and in English on the Substack Bill Emmott’s Global View. It is republished here with kind permission.

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asiatimes.com · by Bill Emmott · August 11, 2024

12. What's Behind U.S. Navy's Worst Warship Production in 25 Years?

Excerpts:

Throughout its history, the Navy has had to adapt to varying perils, whether it be the Cold War of past decades or current threats including war in the Middle East, growing competition from Chinese and Russian navies, piracy off the coast of Somalia and persistent attacks on commercial ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

And that’s not all. The consolidation of shipyards and funding uncertainties have disrupted the cadence of ship construction and stymied long-term investments and planning, says Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a national trade association.

“We’ve been dealing with inconsistent shipbuilding plans for years,” Paxton said. “When we finally start ramping up, the Navy is shocked that we lost members of our workforce.”

The Navy insists it’s taking the shipbuilding problems seriously.

“The Navy’s role in defending our nation and promoting peace has never been more expansive or mattered more,” said Lt. Kyle Hanton, a spokesperson for Del Toro’s office. “We continue to work with our industry partners to identify creative solutions to solving our common challenges.”

What's Behind U.S. Navy's Worst Warship Production in 25 Years?

By David Sharp

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/12/whats_behind_us_navys_worst_warship_production_in_25_years_1050933.html?

The Navy’s ability to build lower-cost warships that can shoot down Houthi rebel missiles in the Red Sea depends in part on a 25-year-old laborer who previously made parts for garbage trucks.

Lucas Andreini, a welder at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wisconsin, is among thousands of young workers who’ve received employer-sponsored training nationwide as shipyards struggle to hire and retain employees.

The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.

Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”

Marinette Marine is under contract to build six guided-missile frigates — the Navy’s newest surface warships — with options to build four more. But it only has enough workers to produce one frigate a year, according to Labs.

Where have all the workers gone?

One of the industry’s chief problems is the struggle to hire and retain laborers for the challenging work of building new ships as graying veterans retire, taking decades of experience with them.

Shipyards across the country have created training academies and partnered with technical colleges to provide workers with the skills they need to construct high-tech warships. Submarine builders and the Navy formed an alliance to promote manufacturing careers, and shipyards are offering perks to retain workers once they’re hired.

Andreini trained for his job at Marinette through a program at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. Prior to that, he spent several years as a production line welder, making components for garbage trucks. He said some of his buddies are held back by the stigma that shipbuilding is a “crappy work environment, and it’s unsafe.”

But that’s not the reality, he said. His health benefits are better than at his previous job, he’ll be getting a pension for the first time, and there’s an opportunity to acquire skills even more advanced than what he received during his initial training.

Plus, Andreini says, he feels like he’s serving his country.

“It makes me happy to be able to do my part, and possibly make sure sailors and some of my friends in the service come home safely,” said Andreini, whose father was in the Navy in Vietnam.

Alonie Lake, also a welder, fellow graduate of the technical college’s program and a single mom, is happy for a job with long-term stability — something Marinette’s backlog of Navy contracts virtually guarantees.

Lake, 32, said she thinks a lot of younger people are interested in jobs in the trades “and the satisfaction of working with their hands to create tangible results.”

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro recently underscored the importance of training programs during commencement ceremonies at a community college in Maine. The college has partnered with nearby Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to teach workers the skills needed to repair nuclear submarines.

“It is incumbent upon all of us to consider how we can best lend our talents and, in the case of the graduates, their newly developed skills, to build up our great nation for all Americans, and defend against the threats and challenges of today,” he said.

Once workers are hired, will they stay?

The Navy is trying to help shipyards ensure that once new workers are trained and hired, they stick around in a tight labor market.

In Wisconsin, part of $100 million in Navy funding that’s being provided to Marinette Marine is being used for retention bonuses at the shipyard, whose past employee retention was described by Del Toro as “atrocious.”

The shipyard, which employs more than 2,000 workers, is providing bonuses of up to $10,000 to keep workers, said spokesperson Eric Dent. “The workforce shortage is definitely a problem and it’s a problem across the board for all shipyards,” he said.

Retention is a concern even for shipyards that have met their goals, including Huntington Ingalls Industries, which makes destroyers and amphibious warships in Mississippi and aircraft carriers and submarines in Virginia.

The company is creating training partnerships with colleges and public schools at all grade levels. Enhancements in Mississippi include more than a million square feet (92,900 square meters) of covered work area, cooldown and hydration stations, and a second dining area with a Chick-fil-A. Huntington Ingalls also collaborated with the Navy and the city of Newport News, Virginia, to build a new parking garage for workers and sailors.

A problem decades in the making

Much of the blame for U.S. shipbuilding’s current woes lies with the Navy, which frequently changes requirements, requests upgrades and tweaks designs after shipbuilders have begun construction.

That’s seen in cost overruns, technological challenges and delays in the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford; the spiking of a gun system for a stealth destroyer program after its rocket-assisted projectiles became too costly; and the early retirement of some of the Navy’s lightly armored littoral combat ships, which were prone to breaking down.

The Navy vowed to learn from those past lessons with the new frigates they are building at Marinette Marine. The frigates are prized because they’re less costly to produce than larger destroyers but have similar weapon systems.

The Navy chose a ship design already in use by navies in France and Italy instead of starting from scratch. The idea was that 15% of the vessel would be updated to meet U.S. Navy specifications, while 85% would remain unchanged, reducing costs and speeding construction.

Instead, the opposite happened: The Navy redesigned 85% of the ship, resulting in cost increases and construction delays, said Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute. Construction of the first-in-class Constellation warship, which began in August 2022, is now three years behind schedule, with delivery pushed back to 2029.

The final design still isn’t completed.

Shifting threats and changing plans

Complicating matters further is something out of the Navy’s control: the changing nature of global threats.

Throughout its history, the Navy has had to adapt to varying perils, whether it be the Cold War of past decades or current threats including war in the Middle East, growing competition from Chinese and Russian navies, piracy off the coast of Somalia and persistent attacks on commercial ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

And that’s not all. The consolidation of shipyards and funding uncertainties have disrupted the cadence of ship construction and stymied long-term investments and planning, says Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a national trade association.

“We’ve been dealing with inconsistent shipbuilding plans for years,” Paxton said. “When we finally start ramping up, the Navy is shocked that we lost members of our workforce.”

The Navy insists it’s taking the shipbuilding problems seriously.

“The Navy’s role in defending our nation and promoting peace has never been more expansive or mattered more,” said Lt. Kyle Hanton, a spokesperson for Del Toro’s office. “We continue to work with our industry partners to identify creative solutions to solving our common challenges.”

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

13. The Gloves Are Off. Ukraine Strikes Deep Inside Russia.

Excerpts:

How has Putin responded?

His first reaction was to place several expensive (U.S.$13 million) Pantsir-S1 air defense systems around his spacious mansion north of Moscow, about 930 miles from Ukraine.

Secondly, and not for the first time in this war, he has threatened a tactical (short-range) nuclear strike in the area. On June 11 he said, “If, God forbid, it comes to strikes, everyone should realize that Russia has an early warning system for missile attacks. The U.S. has it. Europe does not. They are more or less defenseless in this sense.” He called the August 7 land assault a “provocation”.

Finally, he has tried to appear more conciliarity. He agreed to the recent exchange of Western and Russian prisoners. He has even agreed to ceasefire talks with Ukraine (with stringent conditions).

The strikes inside Russia are upsetting his political base. This, and the loss of a major part of his workforce to the war adding to the economic strains on the Russian economy, are behind his circumspect response to date. Regardless, his long-term goal of subjugation of all of Ukraine is unlikely to change.

The Gloves Are Off. Ukraine Strikes Deep Inside Russia.

By Patrick Drennan

August 12, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/12/the_gloves_are_off_ukraine_strikes_deep_inside_russia_1050936.html?

This photo released by the acting Governor of Kursk region Alexei Smirnov telegram channel on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024, shows a damaged house after shelling by the Ukrainian side in the city of Sudzha, Kursk region that borders Ukraine. Russian officials said Wednesday they were fighting off Ukrainian cross-border raids in a southwestern border province for a second day, as Kyiv officials remained quiet about the scope of the operation. (Governor of Kursk region telegram channel via AP)

On August 7, Ukrainian forces launched an infantry assault nine miles across the Russian border. It was aimed at the Sudzha gas hub - the only point of entry for Russian gas into the EU (it also supplies Ukraine). This diversionary attack has two purposes. Firstly, to attack Russian energy infrastructure, and secondly, and most importantly, to draw in thousands of Russian troops, equipment, and planes so they can be destroyed piecemeal by Ukrainian drones and missiles.

President Joe Biden, with agreement from other NATO members, has supplied billions of dollars of advanced weapons to Ukraine on the stipulation that they are not used on targets inside Russian territory. Mostly the Ukrainians have accepted these terms. Of course, that excludes the Ukrainian territory that is occupied by the Russians, including Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.

To date Biden has exercised caution. As he has repeatedly stated the weapons supplied are to be used to defend Ukraine, not to attack Russian citizens. The White House seemed to have been caught off-guard by the August 7 land assault but were supportive. As Biden’s presidency ends in a few months, will he abandon this cautious approach and remove these limits?

After the May 10 assault on the large city of Kharkiv, 18 miles from the Russian border, Biden slightly relaxed the restrictions. It seems to have worked as the assault has stalled.

Several members of the American Congress have suggested to President Biden that they allow the Ukrainians to use American supplied ATACM missiles beyond the given range. Two months ago, Republican Congressman Michael McCaul challenged the Biden administration to remove the restrictions. They remain hesitant.

Nevertheless, every day the Ukrainian military is striking deeper into Russian territory.

According to Ukrainian President Zelensky, Ukraine can home-manufacture one million drones in 2024. Some of these drones can fly extremely long distances - although the further they fly the lighter their payload.

On August 7, Ukraine struck Lipetsk military air base, more than 217 miles from Ukraine's border.

On August 3, Ukrainian drones destroyed ammunition depots at the Morozovsk military airfield, 111 miles from the Ukrainian border.

On July 27, Ukraine launched drones at Murmansk Airfield and claimed to have destroyed a TU-22M3 strategic bomber, and several helicopters. Russia has not confirmed the losses. The extraordinary issue here is that the airfield is over 1100 miles from Ukraine.

On the same night, Ukrainian forces conducted a drone strike against a Russian oil depot in Polevaya, Kursk Oblast, 450 miles away.

On July 9, the Ukrainian destroyed an ammunition base in the Voronezh Oblast, about 350 miles from the Ukrainian border. Once again, they used their locally manufactured drones.

On April 2, a Ukrainian drone struck Taneco, Russia's third-largest oil refinery, about 800 miles from the front lines.

Attacks on military infrastructure enter an ethical ‘grey zone.’ While Russian military bases and equipment seem legitimate targets in wartime, what of bridges, airports, railways, and power stations that also have civilian uses?

Ukraine and their NATO allies seem to have accepted oil refineries as legitimate targets. There is some chatter on social media that technicians in Russia are looking to quit their jobs at these refineries.

Regardless of accepted ethical norms, Russia repeatedly attacks civilians and on July 31, launched 89 Russian drones on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

The Russians are manufacturing their own drones with cooperation from Iran. However, there are serious doubts about their capability and effectiveness, compared to the Ukrainian drones. The Institute for the Study of War reports that some Russian forces are reportedly trying to capture, repurpose, and utilize Ukrainian drones.

Will the recently supplied F-16 fighter jets make a difference?

The F-16 fighters supplied by the U.S. and allies such as Denmark and The Netherlands, are supplied on the proviso that they only operate 25 miles away from the Russian border. Of course, this is also a practical restriction as they are vulnerable to the very effective s300 ground-to-air missile systems.

The F-16’s will mainly be used to intercept the heavy ballistic missiles which are destroying Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Nevertheless, recent demonstrations of jet-launched inexpensive missiles at the recent American-led  RIMPAC Pacific exercises, should worry the Russians. It demonstrates that the F-16 planes in Ukraine could launch hard-to-detect missiles directly at targets deep inside Russia.

How has Putin responded?

His first reaction was to place several expensive (U.S.$13 million) Pantsir-S1 air defense systems around his spacious mansion north of Moscow, about 930 miles from Ukraine.

Secondly, and not for the first time in this war, he has threatened a tactical (short-range) nuclear strike in the area. On June 11 he said, “If, God forbid, it comes to strikes, everyone should realize that Russia has an early warning system for missile attacks. The U.S. has it. Europe does not. They are more or less defenseless in this sense.” He called the August 7 land assault a “provocation”.

Finally, he has tried to appear more conciliarity. He agreed to the recent exchange of Western and Russian prisoners. He has even agreed to ceasefire talks with Ukraine (with stringent conditions).

The strikes inside Russia are upsetting his political base. This, and the loss of a major part of his workforce to the war adding to the economic strains on the Russian economy, are behind his circumspect response to date. Regardless, his long-term goal of subjugation of all of Ukraine is unlikely to change.

Patrick Drennan is a journalist based in New Zealand, with a degree in American history and economics.

​14. US announces $125 million military aid package for Ukraine

Reinforce and sustain success? (but I am sure this decision was made before the Ukrainian invasion of Russia).

US announces $125 million military aid package for Ukraine

By  TARA COPP

Updated 5:21 PM EDT, August 9, 2024

AP · August 9, 2024

President Joe Biden walks down the steps of Air Force One at Delaware Air National Guard Base in New Castle, Del., Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, on his way to attend an event to thank his campaign staff. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

TARA COPP

Copp covers the Pentagon and national security for the Associated Press. She has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

twittermailto

AP · August 9, 2024

15. Biden, Harris and Trump should issue a joint statement on the risks of World War III

Conclusion:

A joint statement endorsing these eight principles by the presidential and vice-presidential candidates would assure American voters of their seriousness — and go a long way toward deterring further adventurism by the West’s adversaries.

Biden, Harris and Trump should issue a joint statement on the risks of World War III

by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor - 08/11/24 11:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4821349-biden-and-trump-should-issue-a-joint-statement-on-the-risks-of-world-war-iii/

In an election year of unprecedented shocks, a historic positive event could help alleviate the fraught international situation: a joint bipartisan statement by the candidates on America’s fundamental national security principles. An affirmation that “politics stops at the water’s edge” could not come at a more opportune time. 

Both President Biden and former President Trump have repeatedly referred to the imminent danger of the U.S. slipping into World War III. Foreign policy experts and other commentators have also picked up on the Armageddon theme.

Biden and Trump have sent contradictory messages on what could cause the ultimate human catastrophe. The Biden-Harris administration has consistently refused to provide Ukraine with the needed weapons systems and the authority to reverse Russia’s invasion, for fear that this could provoke Vladimir Putin to escalate further, leading to global war. Trump, on the other hand, accuses Biden of already doing too much and recklessly getting America involved in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia. 

Still, for all their rhetorical differences, Biden and Trump seem to have a common bottom line: Ukraine must concede some of its sovereign territory to Russia for the fighting to stop. The only questions are how much seized land Putin should be allowed to keep, and how quickly the deal can be made.

Biden says it is up to Ukraine to decide those issues, but, significantly, he has never endorsed Ukraine’s desire to regain all its territory — as he said he would defend “every square inch” of NATO territory. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has taken such a maximalist position on his country’s sovereignty.

Trump, on the other hand, repeatedly claims he can resolve the war within 24 hours, which he apparently estimates is how long Zelensky will take to submit to a U.S. ultimatum that he permanently surrender up to one-fifth of Ukraine or else lose all American aid.

Meanwhile, a different calculus is underway among Russia’s declared strategic partners China and North Korea; its undeclared partner, Iran; and Iran’s Middle East proxies. All are supporting Russia’s invasion materially and strategically while separately pursuing their own aggressive regional agendas. And supposed NATO ally Hungary is increasingly siding with Russia, which sees NATO as its enemy.

The opportunistically coordinated attacks from this anti-Western menagerie require a concerted American effort both internationally and domestically.

In the international realm, the alliance and partnership relationships built by the Trump and Biden national security teams in Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East must be broadened and strengthened during Biden’s remaining months in office, and by his successors.

As Trump brusquely but effectively argued during his term in office, several NATO members need to step up their contribution to support the common defense against the existential danger in their own backyard. The coordinated assault on Western values and interests requires all NATO hands on deck.

On the domestic front, the American election presents both danger and opportunity. With America’s deep political divisions well-advertised to the world, our adversaries seek to exacerbate and exploit the fissures to enable their aggressive moves against the distracted U.S. and its allies and partners.To the extent that they agree on the advisability of preventing that outcome, the contending political tickets, along with Biden while he remains in office, need to publicly agree on some fundamentals of American national security policy.

First, the U.S. will defend its territory, and its citizens and assets, anywhere in the world. That includes closing its Southern border against the flood of illegal migrants from other nations. 

Second, the U.S. will use its military power if necessary to defend its treaty allies in NATO and in the Indo-Pacific region: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and Thailand.

Third, the U.S. will use its military power if necessary to defend its strategic partner Taiwan against military or economic attack from China.

Fourth, the U.S. will provide Ukraine the essential arms and authority for use against military targets in Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine to facilitate its self-defense and the removal of all Russian forces from its territory.

Fifth, the U.S. will continue to provide Israel the essential arms needed for its self-defense while urging it to continue exerting every reasonable effort to avoid civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, recognizing that Hamas and other Islamic terrorists regularly use civilian populations as human shields and critical and cultural infrastructure as havens for fighters and weapons. 

Sixth, the next president must end the serious perceptual problem that has paralyzed the foreign policy of the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris administrations — the fear of escalation by adversaries if America stands too resolutely by its allies and strategic partners or enforces its own declared red lines. American policy must ensure that professed enemies fear the consequences of spiraling escalation at least as much as our political leaders do. 

Seventh, the U.S. will provide the necessary budgetary resources to meet its national security obligations and to prevent adversaries from dividing and distracting America with multiple security challenges.

Eighth, as critical as military preparedness is to defense and deterrence, the response to the multi-dimensional challenge from the authoritarian assault on Western values and interests must also encompass the economic, informational and ideological domains. 

A joint statement endorsing these eight principles by the presidential and vice-presidential candidates would assure American voters of their seriousness — and go a long way toward deterring further adventurism by the West’s adversaries.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute.

16. U.S. Funding $32M Upgrade to Air Base in the Philippines

U.S. Funding $32M Upgrade to Air Base in the Philippines - USNI News​

Aaron-Matthew Lariosa

August 9, 2024 9:23 AM - Updated: August 10, 2024 5:57 AM

news.usni.org · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · August 9, 2024

Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons assigned to the 13th Fighter Squadron take off to participate in a maritime strike during Exercise Balikatan 24 at Basa Air Base, Philippines May 8, 2024. US Marine Corps Photo

The Pentagon awarded a $32 million contract to upgrade an airfield in the Philippines as part of a broader U.S. program to upgrade and improve Manila’s military bases.

Funded under the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a plan to counter China throughout the Indo-Pacific through the construction of infrastructure and investment into regional partners, Basa Air Base is set to receive a 625,000-square-foot parking apron capable of hosting up to 20 aircraft. The contract stated that the project aimed to strengthen the infrastructure at the base, which was deemed to be insufficient for training activities between the U.S. and Philippine forces.

According to the award, Acciona CMS Philippines LLC prevailed over four other proposals for the construction of a parking apron, shoulders, and taxiway at Basa. Funding for the project comes from the Air Force’s fiscal year 2021 and 2024 military construction budgets, coming in at $3.5 million and $29.4 million respectively. The award further added that the airfield upgrade is set to be completed by July 2026.

This project is the latest in a long line of investments by the U.S. into the Philippine Air Force’s primary airfield. Traditionally home to the country’s fighter squadrons, Basa has been earmarked for numerous projects through the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA). The 2014 defense treaty permits the U.S. to access Philippine military bases for rotational troop deployments and the construction of facilities at Manila’s discretion. Originally covering five military bases across the Philippine archipelago, the agreement was expanded to nine in 2023. Of the $82 million invested into EDCA sites between 2014 and 2023, $66 million has been used for projects at Basa. These projects include a humanitarian assistance warehouse, runway renovation and command facilities.

USNI News previously reported that the Marine Corps deployed unarmed MQ-9A Reaper drones to Basa to “provide reconnaissance and surveillance in support of the development of intelligence sharing” between U.S. and Philippine forces. While the number of drones deployed to Basa was not specified, it should be noted that containers used to transport the drones can be seen behind the base’s air defense alert command hangars via open-source imagery.

Senior U.S. officials announced an additional $128 million in EDCA funding on top of a “once-in-a-generation investment” of $500 million in foreign military financing dedicated to the modernization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and Philippine Coast Guard during last month’s 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue in Manila. According to a statement, the new funding covers projects across seven of the nine total EDCA sites.

Both countries have claimed that EDCA aids Philippine military modernization through the construction of new infrastructure and more training activities with U.S. forces. Investment into the bases has also stepped up in recent years amid increasing tensions between Manila and Beijing over disputes in the South China Sea, particularly around Second Thomas Shoal and the resupply of its Philippine Marine garrison.

Related

news.usni.org · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · August 9, 2024

17. Three Visions for NATO Air and Missile Defense

Excerpts:

These recommendations can improve NATO air and missile defense coordination at the margin. They are simple in theory, but political obstacles will probably delay implementation from weeks to years. NATO’s Chair of the Military Committee and the Integrated Air and Missile Defence Policy Committee should nevertheless lead these efforts. Over the longer term, national political leaders and defense ministers should wrestle with the tensions and tradeoffs over their vision for air and missile defense.

Policymakers may choose to support greater NATO involvement in allied air defense development and deployment plans, which would require significant reforms but offers the most extensive military benefits. They could back European procurement initiatives that enable Europe to satisfy key NATO air defense requirements while also possibly improving the regional defense industrial base. Policymakers might maintain the federated status quo due to its simplicity but seek greater cooperation at the margins. They could also pursue a mixed vision — supporting, for example, NATO technical standards and France’s vision to expand European production and procurement of air defenses. NATO and national political leaders should consider these visions and their respective tradeoffs and, to the extent possible, collectively push in favor of one path for allied air and missile defense.

Three Visions for NATO Air and Missile Defense - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Shaan Shaikh · August 12, 2024

For two years, Russia has launched constant air and missile attacks against Ukraine, featuring thousands of ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles, unguided rockets and bombs, and one-way attack drones. So it’s no surprise that at the recent 75th anniversary of NATO, the allies paid close attention to their air and missile defense capabilities.

NATO member states have made some progress in addressing their own air defense weaknesses. The allies, for example, now recognize their low capacity in low-altitude sensors and missile interceptors and are investing in their defense industrial base and in off-the-shelf technologies. The alliance has also expanded its focus from defeating enemy aircraft and cruise missiles to defending against a wider spectrum of threats, including ballistic missiles and small drones.

Yet cracks and shortfalls remain. Notable policymakers, scholars, and military officers continue to critique the broader framework in which allies research, develop, acquire, and deploy air and missile defenses on a largely ad hoc, country-first basis. States may coordinate across these functions as they see fit, and often do consider the benefits of common or interoperable platforms before moving to buy them. Yet critics say — more rightly than not — that the current federated approach prioritizes domestic politics and economic interests over allied cooperation and interoperability. NATO allies, they argue, should do more to integrate their air defenses into a stronger, collective architecture.

Three visions for NATO air and missile defense emerge from these critiques and ensuing debates. One aspires for greater NATO involvement in allied air defense development and deployment plans. It requires the most political and financial support but offers significant military benefits. Another aims for Europe to expand air defense procurement of common systems to quickly boost defenses, create economies of scale, and improve allied interoperability. A third vision predicts that a federated approach to air defense will continue for years to come, but suggests that NATO can do more at the margins to encourage air and missile defense coordination.

These visions are distinct but not mutually exclusive, each with their respective strengths and weaknesses. NATO and national political leaders should consider these paths to improve allied air defense capabilities and reduce costs. At the same time, they should also encourage greater allied air defense cooperation in the near term by publishing their goals, studying lessons learned, and clarifying priorities.

Become a Member

Establishing NATO Standards and Plans

To follow this debate, one must first appreciate that “integration” is the favorite word of air defenders. Their mission requires operators, sensors, interceptors, and command and control facilities spread across various geographies to coordinate closely to be effective. When a radar detects a foreign object, air defenders must forward tracking data to a command and control node where staff develop and distribute a common air picture. This connectivity helps all air defenders better evaluate incoming threats and their potential targets. Air defenders must also coordinate on how to most efficiently employ defensive counterair or limited and costly missile interceptors to mitigate incoming threats. More integration and interoperability — for both data sharing and tactical procedures — simplify operational requirements and facilitate cooperation in training, maintenance, and logistics.

The desire for greater air and missile defense integration has led to proposals that NATO take a more active role in allied air defense development and deployment plans. In this vision, NATO may promote technical standards for air defense software, similar to agreed upon standards for 5.56×45 millimeter ammunition. In theory, nonproprietary software that permits cross-platform communications could allow any sensor to work with any interceptor — French SAMP/T radars, for example, could direct U.S. Patriot missile engagements. NATO could similarly share standards for tactics, techniques, and procedures to support seamless interactions among air defenders themselves. NATO might also expand air defense deployments in the Baltics or across the eastern front on a permanent or rotational basis. Some of these suggestions reinforce the current NATO Integrated Air and Missile Defense mission, while others go beyond it.

A 2021 RUSI report entitled The Future of NATO’s Air and Missile Defence presents the clearest sketch of this vision. It argues that NATO air defense must “go through a process of rationalisation and integration, resulting in an Alliance-wide capability that addresses the spectrum of potential antagonists’ threats.” A recent NATO report alludes to similar reform, asserting that NATO must integrate its defenses into a “new architecture” that is “fit for purpose for the rapidly evolving environment facing NATO.” Neither report lays out precisely who is responsible for designing this new air defense architecture; the RUSI report, however, repeatedly points to the centralized NATO Ballistic Missile Defense program as a model to emulate.

Of the three visions for air and missile defense, the NATO-led approach is the most expansive. Wide compliance on technical standards would fuel air defense cooperation and interoperability. Joint deployments could strengthen defenses where they are most needed. Yet implementing this vision would require major shifts in how NATO allies approach air and missile defense.

The potential drawbacks are clear. First, a NATO-designed architecture could be politically unpopular. Buying air and missile defense to protect domestic citizens is generally acceptable. Buying and deploying defenses to better protect the wider European continent is probably less so, as suggested by the growing reluctance to provide military aid to Ukraine. Nationalism still matters. There is a reason the first stated priority of U.S. missile defense is always to defend the homeland (even when that’s not what gets funded in practice).

Second, establishing NATO standards for air and missile defense is hard. It is unclear how long such a process would take at the negotiating table, or if the desired level of interoperability would require developing air defenses or sensors from scratch. As one NATO official said last year, “Having a standard is one thing, meeting a standard is something altogether different.” There is also the matter of transitioning operators from non-interoperable legacy defenses to new platforms and procedures.

Third, NATO’s cooperative initiatives typically require large U.S. contributions. When advocates for a NATO-designed architecture argue that the NATO ballistic missile defense system is a model to emulate, they sometimes omit that the United States has, between 2011 and 2023, spent approximately $2.3 billion to field the European Phased Adaptive Approach. This initiative forms the backbone of NATO ballistic missile defense. First announced in 2009, the European Phased Adaptive Approach includes a U.S. AN/TPY-2 radar in Turkey, four Aegis ships operating in the Mediterranean and homeported in Spain, a command and control node in Germany, and Aegis Ashore sites in Romania and Poland. This is a significant undertaking by one country. The program supports U.S. security interests in Europe, but at a time when a popular American political movement is criticizing U.S. spending on behalf of its allies, moving further in this direction is politically precarious.

In sum, a NATO-designed architecture offers significant benefits for allied air and missile defense. Yet advocates may underestimate the political difficulties of having member states shift resources from national to continental defense, or reformatting defense production lines to follow NATO standards. The NATO ballistic missile defense system commonly used as a model for cooperative defense is a program for which the American taxpayer is footing most of the bill. A similar funding approach is unlikely to work here.

Boosting European Procurement

European leaders have made alternative proposals centered on increasing the size and strength of Europe’s air and missile defenses. Their key objective: Buy more, buy the same. There are multiple variants of this vision, with differences across political ambitions, timelines, platform interoperability, and Europe’s salience. All are intended to support NATO air and missile defense requirements — not to replace NATO’s role. The two most frequently discussed positions are the German-led European Sky Shield Initiative and the yet-unnamed French perspective on E.U.-centric air defense.

Launched in 2022, the European Sky Shield Initiative offers a new vehicle for European governments to buy off-the-shelf air and missile defenses at a time when their current inventory is small and weak. It also enables cost savings by creating economies of scale through multinational acquisitions of common defenses, namely the German IRIS-T, U.S. Patriot, and Israeli Arrow-3. Under the European Sky Shield Initiative, as the Swiss government explains, “Each participating country can define where and to what extent it participates.” The framework is thus open to all but required of none. It has pushed significant investments including a joint plan for Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, and Spain to buy up to 1,000 Patriot missiles.

French President Emmanuel Macron offers an alternative vision for European procurement. He argues that Europe should not rely on non-European products like the Patriot or Arrow-3 because they are “less manageable” and “subject to timetables, priorities, and sometimes even authorizations from third countries.” Rather, France calls for Europe to develop and procure its own defenses to support the European defense industrial base. This fits within wider political plans for Europe to reestablish its industrial capacity and regain “strategic autonomy” over its foreign policy.

Whether it’s through the German-led European Sky Shield Initiative, the French alternative, or otherwise, boosting European procurement can support NATO air and missile defense objectives. These programs, however, may continue to prioritize national political and economic interests over allied cooperation and interoperability. This is demonstrated in Germany’s acquisition plan. Berlin chose the Arrow-3 over Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, despite the latter already being integrated with their Patriot defenses and the broader NATO air and missile defense architecture. It is rumored that this decision was made to reinforce political ties with Israel. Germany likewise chose the IRIS-T over the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, picking a platform produced by a small domestic company over one with similar capabilities but greater interoperability with 13 national operators.

France’s localized approach could enable greater interoperability, benefit a wider swath of European defense industries, and better support European cooperation over the long term. The chief concern, however, is that it would slow down European investments in air and missile defenses until the allies can agree upon a framework for joint development and acquisition. Other European cooperative projects like the Franco-German Future Combat Air System have faced delays due to disputes over the division of labor and technology sharing. Supposing negotiations and planning are successful, Europe would need to greatly expand its production capacity to satisfy regional air defense requirements solely through indigenously produced defenses. Assuming that is possible, it is still not guaranteed that Europe’s combined efforts will produce air and missile defenses that cover the wide spectrum of modern aerial threats.

Maintaining the Federated Status Quo

The third vision maintains the status quo. NATO air and missile defense currently operates under a federated, state-led approach in which the allies research, develop, acquire, and deploy air and missile defenses of their choosing. They can cooperate across these efforts, but national leaders remain the sovereign decisionmakers on all related choices.

A MITRE report aptly describes the state-led vision, saying that “While some past approaches have attempted to address [integrated air and missile defense] by eliminating the diversity and creating a single system that captured all requirements from all nations, a more efficient system is to embrace the existing diversity and aim to federate and integrate across the variety of national systems.” The MITRE report argues that a federated approach can be effective so long as NATO allies can share data to create a common air picture, coordinate their responses to incoming threats, and perform computer simulations to inform their understanding of the threat landscape and identify air defense gaps.

The federated approach is politically simple and stable. Unlike the NATO-designed framework, it is less vulnerable to rising U.S. and European political populism. The United States does not subsidize European air defense as it currently does with ballistic missile defense. The allies do not need to restructure their air defense production lines to satisfy common technical standards, or buy common defenses to fulfill their unique security requirements. The federated approach recognizes the dominance of domestic politics over optimized defense production plans, the brittleness of cooperative development programs, and varied willingness to confront Russia.

Additionally, ad hoc coordination can be made to work, even under stressful conditions and with a wide range of systems. Consider the mishmash of alliances and systems involved in stymying the recent Iranian attack on Israel, in which U.S., U.K., Israeli, French, Jordanian, and other partners jointly defeated Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Or Ukraine’s ability to piece together NATO and Soviet-era systems into an adequate air defense out of necessity. Training and audits can offset some of the technical barriers and allow allies to find and fix gaps in joint operations. To be sure, this approach is suboptimal compared with allies employing integrated or common defenses. But it can work.

The downside with the federated approach is obvious: Cooperation is difficult. Unlike the NATO-designed architecture or European procurement initiatives, there is no agreed upon framework for developing or acquiring common air defense systems. NATO members might also forsake potential cost savings from pre-scheduled bulk buys while production lines are flowing. NATO defense plans and allied interoperability take a back seat to national politics and economic priorities, which enables poor decision-making. Turkey’s acquisition of the Russian S-400, for example, was counterproductive to NATO goals.

Recommendations

The debate over these visions may not be resolved for some time. Yet as NATO considers its options, its window for air and missile defense modernization is time limited. Russia’s air and missile threat is clear, and NATO allies presently have the political resolve and defense budgets available to significantly improve their defenses. The following recommendations are ways that NATO can facilitate coordination among its members today, and thereby support a more robust defensive architecture over the near term.

Publish goals and benchmarks

NATO’s broad goals for air defense should be published, clear, and tractable, and the metrics for evaluating their progress should likewise be open to the public. Leaked reports that NATO only has 5 percent of its required air defenses spread quickly and raise eyebrows, but are generally unhelpful without information on how those requirements were developed. The conflict scenario and campaign plan under consideration remain unknown, as does whether the 5 percent figure refers to the number of interceptor missiles, launchers, or otherwise.

In the tug-of-war between revealing capabilities to deter Russia and concealing them to win a future war, NATO is overcommitting to the latter, and thereby risks Russian President Vladimir Putin underestimating the alliance’s strength and resolve. Its failure to lay out specific benchmarks also makes it difficult to maintain a collective strategy or hold allies accountable. We are left playing the “Who’s paying 2 percent of gross domestic product?” game.

Study and implement lessons from modern warfare

There is more to be learned in this space. The Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies has published relevant takeaways from the Russian-Ukrainian war and other modern conflicts, as have various other think tanks. Yet there are dozens more lessons that deserve in-depth examination, either directly by NATO or via their sponsorship of studies and conferences. Researchers should be specific in their policy recommendations and, where possible, encourage small-scale investment and experimentation, which might then lead to larger investments and policy change.

Ukraine’s Sky Fortress acoustic sensor system provides a good model for NATO learning. The nearly 10,000 ground-based elevated sensor network exemplifies Kyiv’s low-cost, get-the-job-done approach, and has received wide media attention. Some NATO members are now considering deploying a similarly wide thicket of elevated sensors that can detect aerial threats and direct more sophisticated sensors to look in the right direction. These might be acoustic or electro-optical/infrared — the sensor type is open so long as they are small, cheap, distributed, and effective against Russian aerial threats.

Clarify priorities

NATO should clearly lay out its priorities. Their reports tend to list current and emerging aerial threats and possible mitigation efforts in no particular order of importance. Given overlapping requirements among allies to counter Russian drones and cruise missiles, NATO should increase emphasis on joint development and acquisition for counter-unmanned aerial systems and cruise missile defenses. NATO may continue encouraging joint scientific research on countering hypersonics, but it should deprioritize procurement efforts despite apparent European interest. While U.S. policymakers may choose to procure counter-hypersonic defenses in the near future to mitigate Chinese threats, it does not make sense for Europeans with shallow pockets to join these plans.

These recommendations can improve NATO air and missile defense coordination at the margin. They are simple in theory, but political obstacles will probably delay implementation from weeks to years. NATO’s Chair of the Military Committee and the Integrated Air and Missile Defence Policy Committee should nevertheless lead these efforts. Over the longer term, national political leaders and defense ministers should wrestle with the tensions and tradeoffs over their vision for air and missile defense.

Policymakers may choose to support greater NATO involvement in allied air defense development and deployment plans, which would require significant reforms but offers the most extensive military benefits. They could back European procurement initiatives that enable Europe to satisfy key NATO air defense requirements while also possibly improving the regional defense industrial base. Policymakers might maintain the federated status quo due to its simplicity but seek greater cooperation at the margins. They could also pursue a mixed vision — supporting, for example, NATO technical standards and France’s vision to expand European production and procurement of air defenses. NATO and national political leaders should consider these visions and their respective tradeoffs and, to the extent possible, collectively push in favor of one path for allied air and missile defense.

Become a Member

Shaan Shaikh is a fellow in the International Security Program and the deputy director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Image: Sgt. Mariah Gonzalez

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Shaan Shaikh · August 12, 2024

18.  The Undoing of Israel: The Dark Futures That Await After the War in Gaza

Excerpts:

Israel should set up an independent constitutional commission to address the country’s political instability and provide a firm foundation for the future of Israeli democracy. The commission would need to draft a constitution that would not be as easy to change as the Basic Laws—the 14 laws that together comprise the closest thing Israel has to a constitution—and would have to adhere to the original humanist values of the state’s founding. Such a commission has been held in the past, and its revival would require significant cooperation among what remains of the political center, the political left, and Israeli Arab political parties. Interestingly, Yoav Gallant, the current Israeli defense minister, has called for Israel’s Declaration of Independence to be the first text in such a constitutional document.

Israel also needs to better enforce the rule of law both inside Israel and in the West Bank, which means that the state can no longer tolerate violence by settlers toward Palestinians. Moreover, the military occupation over the Palestinians needs to end, and a binding peace process needs to be initiated involving neutral third-party negotiators. At a minimum, Israel should commit to addressing the ICJ’s recent opinion regarding its occupation of Palestinian territories.

To better guarantee domestic stability, Israel needs to legitimize its place in the Middle East, building on the gains made in the Abraham Accords and strengthening ties with Saudi Arabia and other regimes in the region. To safeguard its relations with G-7 countries and the broader international community, Israel should reiterate its commitment to international law, including by making military operations more transparent, ensuring accountability for any violations of international law, and ratifying the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in 2002.

The steps described above would face potentially insurmountable opposition in Israel, but such opposition would only reaffirm our fears for Israel’s future. To be sure, Israel does face real and dangerous enemies, which, like Hamas, are guilty of human rights abuses. But the trajectory Israel is on is not a winning one. On its current course, the state may morph into something that would destroy the humanist Jewish vision that inspired many of its founders and supporters around the world. It is not too late for Israel to save itself from its own demise and find another way forward.

The Undoing of Israel

The Dark Futures That Await After the War in Gaza

By Ilan Z. Baron and Ilai Z. Saltzman

August 12, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Ilan Z. Baron and Ilai Z. Saltzman · August 12, 2024

At Israel’s creation, in May 1948, its founders envisioned a country defined by humanist values and one that upheld international law. The Declaration of Independence, Israel’s founding document, insisted that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex” and that it would “be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” But from the very beginning, this vision was never fulfilled—after all, for nearly two decades after the signing of the declaration, Palestinians in Israel lived under martial law. Israeli society has never been able to resolve the contradiction between the universalist appeal of the declaration’s ideals and the narrower urgency of the founding of Israel as a Jewish state to protect the Jewish people.

Over the decades, this intrinsic contradiction has surfaced again and again, creating political upheavals that have shaped and reshaped Israeli society and politics—without ever resolving the contradiction. But now the war in Gaza and the judicial crisis that preceded it have made it harder than ever to go on this way, pushing Israel to a breaking point.

The country is on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path. Unless it changes course, the humanist ideals of its founding will disappear altogether as Israel careens into a darker future, one in which illiberal values define both state and society. Israel is on track to become increasingly authoritarian in its treatment not just of Palestinians but of its own citizens. It could fast lose many of the friends it still has and become a pariah. And isolated from the world, it could be consumed by turmoil at home as widening fissures threaten to break up the country itself. Such is the perilous state of affairs in Israel that these futures are not at all outlandish—but neither are they inevitable. Israel still has the capacity to pull itself back from the brink. The cost of not doing so may be too great to bear.

THE END OF ZIONISM

Hamas’s bloody October 7 attack hit Israel at a time when it was already facing tremendous domestic instability. The country’s electoral system, which relies on proportional representation, had in recent decades allowed the entry of ever more fringe and extreme political parties into the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Since 1996, there have been 11 different governments, an average of a new government every two and a half years—six of them led by the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. And between 2019 and 2022, Israel had to hold five general elections. Small political parties have played key roles in forming—and toppling—governments, wielding disproportionate influence. After the last election, in November 2022, Netanyahu formed a government with the backing of political parties and leaders from the far right, bringing to power forces in Israeli politics that had long lurked on the margins.

In 2023, Netanyahu and his far-right allies then pushed for a judicial reform bill that sought to substantially reduce the Supreme Court’s oversight of the government. Netanyahu hoped that the proposed reform would protect him from an ongoing criminal case against him. His ultra-Orthodox allies wanted the reform to prevent the drafting of thousands of yeshiva students, who have long been exempt from military service. And the religious Zionists designed the reform to block the Supreme Court’s ability to limit the construction of settlements.

Israel is on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path.

The proposed judicial reform sparked massive protests across the country, revealing a society deeply fractured between those who wanted Israel to remain a democracy with an independent judiciary and those who wanted a government that could do more or less whatever it pleased. Demonstrators brought cities to a standstill, military reservists threatened not to serve if the bill passed, and investors hinted that they would take their money out of the country. A version of the bill still passed the Knesset in July 2023 but was struck down by the Supreme Court at the beginning of this year. At present, the governing coalition is attempting to revive some elements of the judicial reform even as the war in Gaza rages.

The judicial reform protest certainly revealed concerns within Israel about the character of the country’s democracy, but it did not raise questions about Israel’s responsibility toward Palestinians living under occupation. Indeed, many Israelis see their country’s treatment of Palestinians as separate from its functioning as a democracy. Israelis have long tolerated, if not sanctioned, violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians. In a contravention of international law, Israel subjects Palestinians living under its rule in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to what is in effect martial law. Successive Israeli governments have overseen the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, imperiling the future creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. The war in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed around 40,000 people, according to conservative estimates, has revealed a country that appears unable or unwilling to uphold the aspirational vision in its independence declaration.

As many progressives within Israel have long acknowledged, the brutality of the military occupation and the imperatives of being an occupying military power have a corrupting effect on all of Israeli society. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli scientist and philosopher, observed “the national pride and euphoria” that followed the Six-Day War, in 1967, and saw a darker turn ahead. That celebration of country, he warned in 1968, would only “bring us from proud, rising nationalism to extreme, messianic ultranationalism.” And such extreme passions, Leibowitz claimed, would be the undoing of the Israeli project, leading to “brutality” and ultimately “the end of Zionism.” That end is now closer than many Israelis care to admit.

SPARTA WITH A YARMULKE

On its current path, Israel is veering in a deeply illiberal direction. Its current hard-right turn, pushed by politicians as well as by many of their constituents, could see Israel become a kind of ethnonationalist theocracy, run by a Jewish judicial and legislative council and right-wing religious extremists, nothing less than a Jewish version of Iran’s theocratic state. Israel’s demographic and sociopolitical changes, including a rapid increase of the ultra-Orthodox population, the rightward tilt of young Israeli Jews, and a decline in the number of Israeli Jews who identify as secular, have produced a more devout body politic that perceives the continued existence of Israel as part of an irreconcilable struggle between Judaism and Islam.

Ultra-Orthodox nationalist politicians who overtly call for a state in which religion plays a more definitive role include Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Avi Maoz—all key players in Netanyahu’s coalition government. They represent a relatively new but increasingly influential segment of the religious Zionist movement known as the Hardal, which believes that God promised the entire biblical land of Israel to the Jews, rejects Western culture and values, and fundamentally opposes the accepted norms of Israeli liberalism, such as LGBTQ rights, some separation between synagogue and state, and gender equality. Figures associated with the Hardal currently serve as ministers in the Israeli government, occupy powerful positions in the Knesset, and are prominent leaders of yeshivas and pre-military preparatory academies known as mechinot. Political and demographic trends suggest that the far right in Israel will remain electorally influential, even dominant, for the foreseeable future.

But many Israelis who are not especially religious are also beginning to subscribe to this increasingly extreme ethnonationalist ideology. Since the October 7 attacks, the Israeli right wing has grown even more radical. For them, and many others in Israel, Hamas’s massacre proved that there can be no compromise with the Palestinians or their supporters. These conservatives see Israel as existing in an eternal state of war, with peace unthinkable—a state, to borrow the phrase of Israeli historian David Ochana, akin to “Sparta with a yarmulke.”

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men protesting in Jerusalem, June 2024

Ronen Zvulun / Reuters

That stance could harden into a broad consensus among Israeli Jews and produce a fully illiberal Israel, in which the war in Gaza leads to the complete erosion of democratic norms and institutions that were weakened by Netanyahu and his allies. The war has already provided the government with an excuse to restrict civil liberties; the Knesset’s National Security Committee, for instance, recently promoted legislation that authorized the police to conduct searches without warrants. There has also been an increase in state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli peace activists are increasingly viewed as traitors. An Israel dominated by the far right would become more authoritarian, with civil liberties curtailed, particularly gender rights. The state would wield a deleterious influence on public education, with a rounded civic understanding of Israeli democracy replaced by a more baldly nationalist and illiberal one.

An illiberal Israel would also become a pariah state. Israel is already becoming increasingly isolated internationally, and multiple international organizations are seeking punitive legal and diplomatic measures against it. The genocide case at the ICJ and its recent opinion about the illegality of the occupation, the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, and numerous credible allegations of war crimes and human rights violations have dealt a blow to Israel’s global standing. Even with the support of key allies, the cumulative impact of negative public opinion, legal challenges, and diplomatic rebukes will increasingly marginalize Israel on the global stage.

An illiberal Israel would still receive economic support from a few countries, including the United States, but it would be politically and diplomatically isolated from much of the rest of the global community, including most G-7 countries. These countries would cease to coordinate with Israel on security matters, maintain trade agreements with Israel, and buy Israeli-made weapons. Israel would likely end up relying entirely on the United States and become vulnerable to shifts in the U.S. political landscape at a time when more and more Americans are questioning their country’s unconditional support for the Jewish state.

The social contract between state and society in Israel currently hangs in the balance. Should Netanyahu and his allies have their way, Israeli democracy will become hollow and procedural, with traditional liberal checks and balances fast eroding. That would place the country on an unsustainable path that would likely lead to capital flight and brain drain—and deepening internal strains.

A FRACTURED ISRAEL

As Israel becomes more authoritarian, that illiberal turn would not mask the growing fissures within Israeli society. The state would increasingly lose its monopoly over the legitimate use of force, and divisions could inflame to the point of civil war. The recent violent confrontation at the Sde Teiman detention facility, where soldiers suspected of abusing a Hamas terrorist were taken for questioning, could augur what lies ahead. Reserve soldiers, civilians, and even a far-right parliamentarian attacked the military police inside the base, incensed that military personnel were detained for their maltreatment of a Palestinian prisoner. In the future, such episodes may become more common. Other signs of the fragmentation already under way within Israel’s security apparatus include the growth of settler militias—groups that the state has been unwilling to suppress despite their violent attacks on Palestinians—and the fact that soldiers have tipped off vigilantes to illegally stop the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The rule of law in Israel could break down. Israel would remain a more or less functional economic state. It would protect private property. There would still be universities, hospitals, and some kind of public education system. The high-tech economy—the heart of Israel’s claim to be a “startup nation”—could still function for a time. But the state would operate without the rule of law, in keeping with the hollow democracy favored by the extreme right. Security would devolve into a fragmented system with no oversight and no unified command, with the monopoly over the legitimate use of force eroding. Different groups would claim the right to violence, including armed settler militias, civilians who align with the far right, and the existing security forces.

This future is not the province of dystopian science fiction. The conflict in Gaza has intensified political divisions within the country, particularly between right-wing groups advocating for extreme military and security measures that utterly disregard international humanitarian law and others calling for a more conciliatory approach toward the Palestinians. The war has also deepened divisions between secular and religious Jews. A major debate within Israel regarding whether ultra-Orthodox Jews should be obliged to serve in the military—as all other Israelis are—has stoked these tensions. The Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the government cannot avoid drafting ultra-Orthodox Jews and must refrain from funding yeshivas whose students are not enlisting as mandated by existing laws—a decision that has galvanized attempts to revive the judicial reform legislation.

This weakening of the central authority of the state could presage a more shocking unraveling. Beyond administering the economy, the government would be unable (and even unwilling) to fulfill any of its other traditional political responsibilities, including the provision of security and a stable legislative system of governance that guarantees accountability. The presence of competing security groups and lax parliamentary supervision would weaken Israel’s overall security deterrent and undermine any coherent system of governance in Israel’s security establishment. An Israel in this condition could well be at odds with itself. It could become a kind of balkanized entity with the religious and nationalist right-wing elements building up their own de facto state, most likely in the settlements of the West Bank. Or it could witness a rebellion of religious extremists and ultranationalists that would divide Israel in a violent civil war between an armed religious right wing and the existing state apparatus. Short of civil war, this situation would still prove unstable and the economy would collapse, leaving Israel a failed state.

A PATH AWAY FROM CHAOS

The weight of events and the prevailing political forces are pushing Israel in these dangerous directions. It is becoming a country that its founders would not recognize. But it does not need to go this way. To avoid these outcomes, Israel needs to restore political stability in the country by shoring up its constitutional foundations, strengthening the rule of law, reaching more productively for a lasting settlement to the conflict with Palestinians, and better ensconcing itself within the region.

Israel should set up an independent constitutional commission to address the country’s political instability and provide a firm foundation for the future of Israeli democracy. The commission would need to draft a constitution that would not be as easy to change as the Basic Laws—the 14 laws that together comprise the closest thing Israel has to a constitution—and would have to adhere to the original humanist values of the state’s founding. Such a commission has been held in the past, and its revival would require significant cooperation among what remains of the political center, the political left, and Israeli Arab political parties. Interestingly, Yoav Gallant, the current Israeli defense minister, has called for Israel’s Declaration of Independence to be the first text in such a constitutional document.

Protesters gathering outside Sde Teiman detention facility, near Beersheba, Israel, July 2024

Amir Cohen / Reuters

Israel also needs to better enforce the rule of law both inside Israel and in the West Bank, which means that the state can no longer tolerate violence by settlers toward Palestinians. Moreover, the military occupation over the Palestinians needs to end, and a binding peace process needs to be initiated involving neutral third-party negotiators. At a minimum, Israel should commit to addressing the ICJ’s recent opinion regarding its occupation of Palestinian territories.

To better guarantee domestic stability, Israel needs to legitimize its place in the Middle East, building on the gains made in the Abraham Accords and strengthening ties with Saudi Arabia and other regimes in the region. To safeguard its relations with G-7 countries and the broader international community, Israel should reiterate its commitment to international law, including by making military operations more transparent, ensuring accountability for any violations of international law, and ratifying the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in 2002.

The steps described above would face potentially insurmountable opposition in Israel, but such opposition would only reaffirm our fears for Israel’s future. To be sure, Israel does face real and dangerous enemies, which, like Hamas, are guilty of human rights abuses. But the trajectory Israel is on is not a winning one. On its current course, the state may morph into something that would destroy the humanist Jewish vision that inspired many of its founders and supporters around the world. It is not too late for Israel to save itself from its own demise and find another way forward.

• ILAN Z. BARON is Professor of International Politics and Political Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society, and Politics at Durham University.
• ILAI Z. SALTZMAN is Associate Research Professor of Israel Studies and Director of the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland.

Foreign Affairs · by Ilan Z. Baron and Ilai Z. Saltzman · August 12, 2024

19. How Everything Became National Security

Perhaps Professor Drezner is channelling Professor Rosa Brooks' 2017 book: How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

I do think this is an example the nature of our national security and foreign policy"

Korea was not a U.S. national security priority—until it was.

Substitute Korea with any country.

Excerpts:

Calibrating national security priorities has always been a challenge for U.S. officials. In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously delivered a National Press Club speech in which he specified which parts of the globe were within the U.S. “defense perimeter.” He did not include the Korean Peninsula. Nonetheless, when North Korea invaded South Korea less than six months later, the Truman administration deployed 300,000 troops. Korea was not a U.S. national security priority—until it was.

In the 70 years since, the definition of national security has been stretched almost beyond recognition. New technologies have multiplied the vectors through which external forces can threaten the United States. Furthermore, because security issues command greater staffs and budgets, policy entrepreneurs have strong incentives to frame their interests as matters of national security. The forces that push issues into the national security queue are far more powerful than the forces that lead policymakers to exclude them. Nevertheless, even with this expansion, the United States has been blindsided by events: 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, the October 7 attacks. Simply having a longer list of threats hasn’t really helped prepare for the unexpected.

National election campaigns take all the pathologies of the national security bureaucracy and make them worse. Presidential candidates routinely declare that the election is about the soul of the nation and that if the other side wins, Americans will no longer have a country to defend. Given how polarized the United States is now, this tendency seems only likely to grow in the run-up to the 2024 election. Still, both parties’ candidates should clarify which national security issues they believe are more pressing and which ones belong on the back burner, which demand proactive responses and which necessitate better preparation.

Americans may never completely agree about what is and is not a national security issue. But a process that lets policymakers agree on how to disagree would allow for an improved national security discourse—and, ideally, improved national security.

How Everything Became National Security

And National Security Became Everything

By Daniel W. Drezner

September/October 2024

Published on August 12, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel W. Drezner · August 12, 2024

In American politics, labeling something a matter of “national security” automatically elevates its importance. In the language of foreign policy observers, national security questions, such as regulating weapons of mass destruction, are matters of “high politics,” whereas other issues, such as human rights, are “low politics.”

Of course, not everyone agrees on which issues fall into the national security bucket. And the American definition of national security has fluctuated wildly over time. The term was used by both George Washington and Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary era without being precisely defined. At the start of the Cold War, the federal government greatly expanded the size of the bucket after the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, but that law never defined the term itself. As tensions with Moscow eased at the end of the 1960s, the scope of national security began to shrink a bit, but that ended when the 1973 oil embargo triggered new fears about energy security. In the 1980s, the definition widened until the Cold War ended.

In the years between the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks of 2001—an era in which the United States seemed to have few immediate rivals—even security scholars had difficulty defining the meaning of national security. Unsurprisingly, they could not reach a consensus. Since the subsequent “war on terror,” however, the national security bucket has grown into a trough. From climate change to ransomware to personal protective equipment to critical minerals to artificial intelligence, everything is national security now.

It is true that economic globalization and rapid technological change have increased the number of unconventional threats to the United States. Yet there appears also to be a ratchet effect at work, with the foreign policy establishment adding new things to the realm of national security without getting rid of old ones. Problems in world politics rarely die; at best, they tend to ebb very slowly. Newer crises command urgent attention. Issues on the back burner, if not addressed, inevitably migrate to the top of the queue. Policy entrepreneurs across the political spectrum want the administration, members of Congress, and other shapers of U.S. foreign policy to label their issue a national security priority, in the hope of gaining more attention and resources. American populists and nationalists tend to see everything as a national security threat and are not shy about saying so. For example, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has been regarded as a blueprint for a second Trump administration if Donald Trump wins this year’s election, calls for regulating both domestic big tech and foreign firms such as TikTok as potential national security threats. Given the continual presence of such political interests and structural incentives, it is easy for the foreign policy establishment’s list of national security issues to expand and rare for it to contract.

But if everything is defined as national security, nothing is a national security priority. Without a more considered discussion among policymakers about what is and what is not a matter of national security, Washington risks spreading its resources too thin across too broad an array of issues. This increases the likelihood of missing a genuine threat to the safety and security of the United States. Whoever is sworn in as president next January will need to think about first principles in order to rightsize the definition of national security. Otherwise, policymakers risk falling into a pattern of trying to do everything, ensuring that they will do nothing well.

A SEMANTIC JUNGLE

In theory, national security should be easy to define. For the United States, any malevolent transnational threat or rising power that directly challenges the sovereignty or survival of the United States constitutes a valid national security concern. Powerful foreign militaries obviously impinge on national security, but other threats do, as well. Ports, energy plants, and other vulnerable economic infrastructure can pose national security concerns; so can climate change, by, for example, threatening the economies of major coastal cities such as Miami and New York. Yet there are also important issues of public policy that fall outside these parameters. No matter how loudly some Americans yell about them, neither the promotion of transgender rights nor the banning of critical race theory is a matter of national security.

In practice, Americans have always had difficulty limiting their conception of national security. George Washington’s first State of the Union message to Congress offered a promising start. He barely mentioned the external threats to the fledgling republic. Instead, he outlined his theory of how the United States could deter any and all threats. He stressed the need to pay soldiers, officers, and diplomats a decent wage and supply them the materiel necessary to do their jobs. “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace,” he explained.

The sentiments Washington conveyed in that speech are familiar to many foreign policy experts; less well known is what he said in his second State of the Union address. In that message, Washington ticked off an expansive list of “aggravated provocations,” citing Native American tribes that had “renewed their violences with fresh alacrity and greater effect” and “the disturbed situation of Europe, and particularly the critical posture of the great maritime powers.” Nonetheless, once the United States spanned the continent and was separated from other major powers by two oceans, its geographic remoteness limited the threats it faced. The scholar Arnold Wolfers described this era, from 1820 to 1900, as “a time when the United States policy could afford to be concerned mainly with the protection of the foreign investments or markets of its nationals.”

Problems in world politics rarely die; at best, they tend to ebb very slowly.

As the United States began to assert itself as a major world power in the first half of the twentieth century, the foreign policy discourse alternated between a belief that the country had to send troops overseas to protect expanding U.S. interests and a conviction that an America First posture of isolationism would best preserve the peace. But it was only with the onset of the Cold War that the term “national security” became embedded in American political discourse. The National Security Act of 1947, which among other things created the Central Intelligence Agency and established the National Security Council, brought about the security architecture that exists today. Recognition of the overarching Soviet threat spurred the creation of a panoply of research centers, think tanks, and university programs dedicated to studying national security.

Wolfers presciently observed that when terms such as “national security” are popularized, “they may not mean the same thing to different people.” Indeed, he wrote, “they may not have any precise meaning at all.” During the 1950s and early 1960s, consensus on the Soviet threat allayed some of those concerns. But by the Vietnam War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was already warning the public that U.S. officials “have been lost in a semantic jungle” on national security questions, conflating national security with strictly military issues such as weapons procurement.

With the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it might have been expected that the national security basket would shrink along with the size of the military budget. Yet the opposite occurred. Consider the history of the National Security Strategy, the report on current threats that the president is supposed to deliver to Congress annually, although in practice it is usually released less often. A review of post-1990 reports reveals a steady expansion of qualifying concerns: energy security, nuclear proliferation, drug trafficking, and terrorism, among many others.

After 9/11, the trend only accelerated, with politicians and policymakers giving ever-greater emphasis to national security and the number of things that putatively affect it. Pandemic prevention emerged in the first decade of this century and has stayed there ever since. Over the past decade, the rise of China combined with the revanchist ambitions of Russia caused the first Trump administration and the Biden administration to refer to “great-power competition” in their National Security Strategy documents. The reasons for including these threats were sound. But when they were added, the documents never de-emphasized earlier concerns. The 2017 version includes a pledge to “devote greater resources to dismantle transnational criminal organizations.” The 2022 document argues that “global food security demands constant vigilance and action by all governments” and asserts that the United States will be “working across entire food systems to consider every step from cultivation to consumption.” And on and on.

The Pentagon building, Arlington, Virginia, October 2020

Carlos Barria / Reuters

A similar pattern appears in U.S. presidents’ State of the Union addresses. Since the end of the Cold War, presidents have routinely used the annual speech to identify new threats facing the United States or at least to expand their scope. Initially, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and rogue states were the central issues; eventually, other national security concerns, such as climate change and cybersecurity, crept in. Even when presidents acknowledged that U.S. national security was strong, they sought to convey a sense of urgency to the American people. “We face no imminent threat, but we do have an enemy,” President Bill Clinton argued in 1997. “The enemy of our time is inaction.” After 9/11, presidents and their security strategists described a nation surrounded by threats. “The frontiers of national security can be everywhere,” Philip Zelikow, one of the architects of President George W. Bush’s 2002 strategy, has explained, adding, “The division of security policy into domestic and foreign compartments is breaking down.”

Over the past decade, the definition of national security has expanded even more. What the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan referred to as “problems without passports”—that is, problems not delimited by borders, such as cybersecurity and climate change—have mushroomed. New technologies caused foreign policy thinkers to look in new places. Militaries used to focus only on the threats from land, sea, and air, but in this century, cyberspace and space have become complex terrains of conflict. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are now critical technologies and therefore a national security priority. The list of “critical minerals” also keeps expanding, as climate change and the transition from fossil fuels generate insatiable global demand for the rare-earth metals needed for batteries and other clean energy applications.

Successive U.S. administrations have also added threats emanating from or playing out inside the country. Domestic extremism made its first appearance in the National Security Strategy in 2010. The Trump administration declared a national emergency at the United States’ southern border, citing the growing inflow of narcotics, criminal gangs, and migrants. The Biden administration declared national emergencies related to critical supply chains, such as that for cobalt, with the aim of “near-shoring” key production technologies.

Viewed in isolation, each of these concerns could plausibly be identified as a national security priority. The problem is that by ceaselessly accumulating such paramount concerns, the executive branch has made the concept increasingly meaningless.

PROLIFERATING PRIORITIES

Once a national security threat has been established, an administration seldom deprioritizes it, but the collapse of the Soviet Union is an instructive exception. After the end of the Cold War, American policymakers no longer saw Moscow as an overriding concern, and Russia disappeared from national security strategy documents. Congress began excluding Russia from Cold War–era laws like the so-called Jackson-Vanik amendment, which restricted trade with nonmarket economies that failed to respect human rights.

Then Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, became a threat all over again. Washington’s short-lived downgrading of Moscow as a national security priority is unusual in that the U.S. bureaucracy actually adapted to this shift. As rare as it is for a threat to be removed from the National Security Strategy, it is even rarer for foreign policy officials to agree on that removal. Most transnational threats wax and wane over time but rarely fade away. The 1987 strategy treated terrorism as a major national security concern. That threat persisted into the 1990s and leaped to the top of the queue after the 9/11 attacks. After two decades of a “global war on terror,” however, it seemed as though U.S. officials had successfully downgraded the threat in documents and public discourse. Then Hamas’s horrific attacks on October 7, 2023, in Israel made it a priority again.

Technological innovation, such as the advent of new kinds of weapons, poses another challenge to strategists’ efforts to manage national security priorities. The proliferation of nuclear and ballistic missile technologies, for example, required a wholesale recalculation of which countries or groups posed major risks. As the barriers to acquiring technology for mass destruction have declined, the roster has come to include not only major powers (China, Russia) but also smaller states (Iran, North Korea) and even nonstate actors (the Islamic State, the Houthis).

But the challenge runs much deeper. With new technologies, new resources become critical and previously vital resources often lose their significance. A century ago, the location of coal and petroleum factored into how states prosecuted wars; today, it is cobalt and lithium that are labeled “critical minerals,” and some analysts are concerned that the race for them could start wars. Yet during such shifts, it can be hard to determine whether to prioritize new resources over the more established ones. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put severe stress on energy supply chains, forcing countries in Europe and Africa to scramble for access to oil, coal, and natural gas. At the same time, the pressures of climate change and the transition from carbon drive countries to race after the necessary components for green technologies. As a result, many Americans are calling on the federal government to prioritize the security of traditional energy sources such as oil and gas even as many others clamor for weaning the country from those sources.

Both parties must clarify which national security issues are most urgent.

New technologies also multiply the number of pathways that rivals and revisionists can use to threaten national security. Information and communication technologies can help empower a military and serve as powerful tools for propaganda and disinformation. Similarly, breakthroughs in biosciences can save lives on the battlefield but also heighten the risk of biological warfare. Mysteries surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena hint at advanced technologies that top U.S. officials cannot explain away easily. As Senator Marco Rubio of Florida put it recently, “Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat.”

Entrenched political dynamics in Washington also push more and more issues onto the national security platter. The Pentagon is much better funded than the State Department; it is easier to sell security than diplomacy to Congress and the American people. In a world of constrained budgets, policy entrepreneurs are willing to frame their pet issues as national security concerns to unlock resources from the Department of Defense. International relations scholars call this phenomenon “securitization.” At the turn of this century, U.S. officials began to describe HIV/AIDS as a national security issue, arguing that the disease sapped economies and threatened to topple governments in African countries. This argument may have been exaggerated, but it was a way to marshal resources to combat the global epidemic, including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, credited with saving millions of lives in Africa since it was launched by the George W. Bush administration.

Economic and technological concerns tend to have bipartisan appeal in national security debates. Since the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik space program in 1957, many U.S. policymakers have been in a panic about the United States’ losing its technological edge to another great power. In the early decades of the Cold War, Moscow was the principal concern. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was Japan. In this century, it has been China. This has inevitably led policymakers to focus on technologies perceived as critical to ensuring the country’s economic supremacy. In recent decades, their concern has been semiconductors. For the rest of this decade at least, they will obsess about artificial intelligence. All of these dynamics ensure an ever-increasing list of national security priorities.

MORE IS NOT BETTER

The more issues that are placed on the national security docket, the harder it may be for policymakers to focus on those that matter most. The Cold War led U.S. officials to view the world through a reductive lens, but it also enabled them to sort out what was truly important in foreign policy. The tendency of recent administrations to declare issue after issue a matter of national security, however, makes it easy for a multitude of potential threats to obscure the most imminent danger.

One way that national security doctrine can be narrowed and clarified is through the ebb and flow of power between the two major political parties. During the Cold War, presidential candidates often spoke of “missile gaps” or “windows of vulnerability” that became national security priorities. Republicans have tended to display more hawkish instincts, prioritizing threats from malevolent actors; Democrats are more likely to take diffuse threats such as climate change or pandemics seriously. These differences can lead to conflict on key national security questions. On energy security, for example, conservatives minimize the threat posed by climate change, whereas progressives highlight it; House Republicans warn that winding down U.S. production of coal, oil, and natural gas undermines national security, whereas progressives caution that it is the failure to do so that poses the real threat.

It might be expected that whenever power shifts from one party to the other, Washington’s national security focus would shift accordingly. But in practice, even when a presidential administration comes to power that is radically different from its predecessor, the list of national security priorities tends to expand rather than merely shift. For example, when the 2002 National Security Strategy was released, Zelikow stated that the George W. Bush administration was “surpassing the Clinton administration” because it had “consistently identified poverty, pandemic disease, biologic and genetic dangers, and environmental degradation as significant national security threats.” Although the Bush administration’s 2002 strategy infamously focused on the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, it also gave significant emphasis to the Clinton administration’s national security priorities.

More recently, the Trump administration’s emphasis on great-power competition, which took center stage in the 2017 National Security Strategy, could have been viewed as an aberration. The Biden administration’s 2022 strategy, however, did not shy away from identifying competition with China and Russia as a central challenge. Indeed, it stated explicitly that “the People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit.”

Trump delivering remarks on the National Security Strategy, Washington D.C., December 2017

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

One reason administrations are reluctant to deemphasize their predecessors’ national security concerns is simple political prudence. Most Americans do not seem to care when an administration hypes a national security threat that turns out to be overblown. Policymakers can always explain that they were just being cautious or that their very warnings helped neutralize the threat. On the other hand, people tend to remember when an administration downplays a national security concern that metastasizes into a full-blown crisis. There are many reasons why the Trump administration bungled its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but one of them was that it had disbanded the National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health, Security, and Biodefense in 2018. According to the Associated Press, the decision suggested that Trump “did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.” Presidents and policy principals often look at national security concerns the way that Michael Corleone of The Godfather films looked at organized crime: every time he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.

Another reason that older national security priorities are rarely discarded is bureaucratic politics. As long as an issue continues to be categorized in strategy documents as a matter of national security, a government agency can count on continued funding. For many Foreign Service and foreign area officers, it takes years to learn enough about a particular country or issue to be considered an expert. As a result, bureaucracies resist any attempt to downgrade an existing priority if such a move would affect their core missions or devalue their training.

Whether policymaking elites are optimistic or pessimistic about the future can also play into the willingness of an administration to de-emphasize a lesser threat. When elites believe that geopolitical developments are moving in a favorable direction for the United States, it is easier to depoliticize possible threats by suggesting long-term solutions. During the 1990s, for example, U.S. officials were confident that the liberal international order would entice Russia and China into becoming more like the United States, thereby eliminating the national security threats they had posed. This assumption allowed for strategic patience toward both countries for decades.

When policymakers believe the future will be less favorable to the United States, however, they may be tempted to amplify any potential national security threats. Suddenly, every issue is viewed as a possible tipping point that could hasten further decline in national power. Security becomes a totalizing issue as officials perceive anything and everything as an existential threat. At present, both public opinion polling and the discourse of elites suggest a deep pessimism about the strength of the United States in the future. The benefits of the rules-based international order have cratered in recent years. The world is experiencing the greatest number of conflicts since 1945. Countries are racing to erect barriers to trade and migration while restricting civil liberties. Many states are in a deep democratic recession, with populist and authoritarian leaders arguing that their mode of governance is superior. None of these trends benefit U.S. national security, and domestic divisions exacerbate the public’s fears about these threats. Given the current geopolitical situation, it would be foolhardy to expect policymakers to winnow their list of national security priorities.

RIGHTSIZING THREATS

Several factors have pushed a host of new issues into the national security bucket. Adding threat after threat dilutes the concept of national security, as recent iterations of the National Security Strategy make clear. The document is often little more than a box-checking exercise for executive branch agencies and is therefore of limited use in thinking about foreign policy. This has been obvious in recent years, as successive administrations have neglected issues that were mentioned in their own National Security Strategies. For example, Trump administration officials minimized the risk of pandemics, and Biden administration officials insisted that the Middle East was calm.

In fairness, most of the national security issues identified by these annual reports are real. Russia and China are rival great powers whose values diverge from those of the United States. The past decade has made abundantly clear just how drastically pandemics and climate change can threaten the American way of life. New technologies such as artificial intelligence may very well pose critical threats to national security in the years to come.

But if national security challenges cannot easily be downgraded or eliminated, at least they should be better categorized. Even foreign policy neophytes are aware that one can classify national security concerns by country (Iran, North Korea) and by theme (nonproliferation, cybersecurity). In thinking about how to allocate scarce time and resources, however, there are at least two ways to better organize this ever-growing list.

One improvement would be for U.S. officials to sort national security issues by timescale and degree of urgency. Some concerns, such as terrorism and Russian revanchism, pose immediate and pressing risks. Others, such as artificial intelligence and China’s rising power, are medium-term concerns. Still others, such as climate change, create challenges in the here and now but will have their greatest effect over the long term. The more explicit policymakers are about the anticipated timing of specific threats, the easier it will be for the government to properly allocate resources. This does not mean that the urgent should crowd out the important. Rather, it means formulating a reasoned basis for diverting some resources away from important but longer-term threats. Prioritizing urgency would also allow successive administrations to make clear which initiatives they intend to enact while in office.

Another way of clarifying the relative importance of a national security threat is to specify whether the issue demands proactive measures, defensive responses, or a mix of both. New viruses that risk causing pandemics cannot be addressed before they emerge and are difficult to contain once they do, so a preventive posture is called for. Public health officials need to be ready for contact tracing and testing; scientists need to be prepared for researching and synthesizing tests and vaccines. Attempting to completely eradicate diseases that have already moved from animals to humans, however, is a waste of time and resources. Thwarting terrorist cells, on the other hand, may require offensive measures such as covert action or the use of special forces. Coping with China’s rising economic and military power requires an array of offensive and defensive responses to better protect the United States without needlessly exacerbating tensions to the point of armed conflict.

If everything is defined as national security, nothing is a national security priority.

The government could also produce an annual scorecard to rank national security concerns by order of current importance. Such an approach would both enable policymakers to highlight which arenas of national security they believe warrant the greatest attention now and show the public how different threats have been rated over time. Equally important, scorecards would allow administrations to de-emphasize some threats without dismissing them entirely—that is, it would force U.S. officials to state which issues are less vital than others. Even if the specific ranking proved controversial, such an exercise would bring more focus to national security debates and help identify underrated threats.

Calibrating national security priorities has always been a challenge for U.S. officials. In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously delivered a National Press Club speech in which he specified which parts of the globe were within the U.S. “defense perimeter.” He did not include the Korean Peninsula. Nonetheless, when North Korea invaded South Korea less than six months later, the Truman administration deployed 300,000 troops. Korea was not a U.S. national security priority—until it was.

In the 70 years since, the definition of national security has been stretched almost beyond recognition. New technologies have multiplied the vectors through which external forces can threaten the United States. Furthermore, because security issues command greater staffs and budgets, policy entrepreneurs have strong incentives to frame their interests as matters of national security. The forces that push issues into the national security queue are far more powerful than the forces that lead policymakers to exclude them. Nevertheless, even with this expansion, the United States has been blindsided by events: 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, the October 7 attacks. Simply having a longer list of threats hasn’t really helped prepare for the unexpected.

National election campaigns take all the pathologies of the national security bureaucracy and make them worse. Presidential candidates routinely declare that the election is about the soul of the nation and that if the other side wins, Americans will no longer have a country to defend. Given how polarized the United States is now, this tendency seems only likely to grow in the run-up to the 2024 election. Still, both parties’ candidates should clarify which national security issues they believe are more pressing and which ones belong on the back burner, which demand proactive responses and which necessitate better preparation.

Americans may never completely agree about what is and is not a national security issue. But a process that lets policymakers agree on how to disagree would allow for an improved national security discourse—and, ideally, improved national security.

• DANIEL W. DREZNER is Distinguished Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel W. Drezner · August 12, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

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