Quotes of the Day:

"One of the strongest characteristics of genius is—the power of lighting its own fire." 

– John W. Foster

”Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.”

– Mark Twain

"Observe your enemies, for they first find out your faults." 

– Antisthenes

1. Israel Puts Military on High Alert as U.S. Sends Assets to Middle East

2. Why Ukraine’s Surprise Incursion on Russia Should Give Hope By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, William Taylor, Barry McCaffrey, James Clapper and Stephen Henriques

3. How China and North Korea could reunite as comrades in war

4. Tim Walz Has Always Been Consistent on China

5. All troops to get baseline cognitive testing in bid to treat traumatic injuries: Dept. of Defense

6. Love the army, defend the motherland: how China is pushing military education on children

7. The one policy conservatives across the world say will fix men: mandatory military service

8. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, August 12, 2024

9. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 12, 2024

10. Is the Deal Between Palantir Technologies and Microsoft a Game-Changer?

11. Elections Officials Battle a Deluge of Disinformation

12. The CIA Sent Him Deep Undercover to Spy on Islamic Radicals. It Cost Him Everything

13. The US tried to fix its foreign military sales system. Did it work?

14. Progressives jostle for nat sec jobs under Harris

15. Foreign investors pulled record amount of money from China in second quarter

16. China Overproduction Surge Gives Global South Pneumonia

17. Ukrainian Soldiers Describe Rapid Offensive Across Border as Russians Fled

18. National-security workforce needs young people, former NSA chief says

19. China Is in Denial About the War in Ukraine

20. Beyond Fusion: Preparing for Systems Rivalry (China)

21. The Hard Power Behind Olympic Triumph

22. Nuclear sub captain armed with doomsday weapons made sex tape with junior sailor at sea

1. Israel Puts Military on High Alert as U.S. Sends Assets to Middle East

Even the International Crisis Group is legitimizing Iran and its allies by calling them the "Axis of Resistance." Please stop.

Excerpt:

The Pentagon’s public announcement of the asset movement suggests the deployments are meant to have a deterrent function, said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the U.S. program at International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution think tank. “Should that fail, they are also in place to respond to any retaliation by Iran and the Axis of Resistance,” Finucane said, using Iran’s term for its regional alliance of militant groups.

Israel Puts Military on High Alert as U.S. Sends Assets to Middle East

First high-alert level this month is in response to Iran and Hezbollah preparing to attack

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-sends-carrier-missile-submarine-to-middle-east-as-iran-tensions-grow-ea700f9a?st=52h17kg6mo7534z&utm

By Omar Abdel-BaquiFollow in Dubai, Dov LieberFollow in Tel Aviv and Nancy A. YoussefFollow in Washington

Updated Aug. 12, 2024 5:20 pm ET

Israel put its military on high alert and the Pentagon said it is sending a guided-missile submarine to the region and speeding up the arrival of a second aircraft carrier, amid heightened concerns about a possible Iranian and Hezbollah response to the killing of militant leaders in Tehran and Beirut.

Israel set the high-alert level for its military for the first time this month after observing preparations by Iran and Hezbollah to carry out attacks, a person familiar with the matter said. Israel doesn’t know whether attacks are imminent and is proceeding cautiously, the person said.

The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, approved plans on Monday and said offensive and defensive preparations were under way, according to the Israeli military.

“We are in the days of vigilance and readiness,” said Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister. “The threats from Tehran and Beirut may materialize and it is important to explain to everyone that readiness, preparedness and vigilance are not synonyms for fear and panic,” he said.

The U.S. has shared intelligence it has gathered about shifting Iranian force postures, according to a U.S. official. But U.S. officials said that identifying the moving of military assets doesn’t provide enough information to determine the timing of a potential attack.

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Border clashes between Israel and Hezbollah risk spiraling into full war as the two sides continue to trade fire. WSJ explains how the group has gained power in the Middle East and why its fight with Israel is intensifying. Photo: Marwan Naamani/Zuma Press

“Our assessment is consistent with the assessment that the Israelis put out over the weekend in terms of what they’re potentially expecting to see,” said John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, referring to the view that “something could happen as soon as this week by Iran and its proxies.”

The U.S. and four European allies called on Iran to stand down from its threats of a military attack, according to a joint statement with the U.K., Germany, France and Italy released by the White House. The U.S. has warned Iran directly and through intermediaries that it could suffer a devastating blow were it to mount a major attack against Israel, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Iran’s forces “are waiting for the supreme leader’s order, whether for patience and endurance or for response,” said Brig. Gen Asghar Abbas-Gholizadeh, a commander of a provincial branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to a report by the state-run Iranian Students News Agency. “On the surface, it is too late to respond and take revenge, but the enemy is enduring a lot of pressure by waiting,” he said, according to the report.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Gallant by phone on Sunday that U.S. deployments strengthen the U.S. military posture in the Middle East in light of recent tensions and reflect a “commitment to take every possible step to defend Israel.”

A pair of high-profile killings in the capitals of Lebanon and Iran late last month elevated the threat of a wider conflict after 10 months of war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, an Iranian ally.

First, an Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed a top Hezbollah official. Hours later, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader and the face of the group in cease-fire negotiations with Israel, was killed in an attack at an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse in Tehran, shortly after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Iran blamed the attack on Israel and vowed revenge. Israel hasn’t publicly commented on the killing.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart on Sunday. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

People across the region have been anxiously waiting for a response, at times filling the void with dark humor. The U.S. and Israel have stepped up military preparations to fend off any attack, as a U.S.-led coalition did when Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel in April.

Austin told Gallant on Sunday that he had ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which is equipped with F-35C jet fighters, to move more quickly to the Middle East, where it would add to the capabilities of the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group already in the region. In early August, the Defense Department said the Lincoln would replace the Roosevelt, which is currently near the Gulf of Oman and has been at sea since the beginning of the year, defense officials said.

The Lincoln is moving quickly toward the region because U.S. officials would like the two carrier strike groups to overlap before the Roosevelt leaves, defense officials said. It is unclear how long the U.S. would keep two carriers in the region.

The Lincoln is currently near the South China Sea and will take roughly two weeks to reach the Middle East, the officials said. The Lincoln and the Roosevelt are nuclear-powered and can carry dozens of aircraft. The guided-missile submarine ordered to the region, the USS Georgia, can carry more than 150 Tomahawk missiles, according to the Navy.

An Israeli submarine off the coast of Haifa, Israel, last week. Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press

Helicopters operating from the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean this month. Photo: U.S. Navy/Zuma Press

Aircraft carriers often are deployed as a show of U.S. force and commitment to its allies or in defense of U.S. regional interests.

Likewise, by sending the Georgia, “we’re trying to send a message,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Monday, “which is we’re looking to de-escalate the situation, that we’re looking to have capabilities in the region to protect our forces while also support the defense of Israel.”

The Pentagon’s public announcement of the asset movement suggests the deployments are meant to have a deterrent function, said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the U.S. program at International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution think tank. “Should that fail, they are also in place to respond to any retaliation by Iran and the Axis of Resistance,” Finucane said, using Iran’s term for its regional alliance of militant groups.

The U.S. is concerned both about retaliation against Israel by Iran and its allies and against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, said Finucane. Five U.S. service members and two U.S. contractors were injured in a rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq last week.

The barrage by Iran in April was its first direct attack on Israel, launched in response to a strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria that killed a senior general. Iran telegraphed that attack, U.S. and Arab diplomats have said. Most of the missiles and drones were shot down before reaching Israel, and no one was killed, heading off further escalation.

Iran and its allied Lebanese militia Hezbollah still have reason to avoid a broader war. But Iran has kept diplomats guessing about its plans this time, raising concerns that damage caused by an Iranian strike, or an Iranian miscalculation of how Israel would respond to one, could set off a new round of escalation. 

An Israeli fighter plane flying over the border area with Lebanon recently. Photo: jalaa marey/AFP/Getty Images

An Iranian attack could also affect U.S.-led efforts to revive talks aimed at a cease-fire agreement in Gaza that would also ensure the release of hostages held by Hamas. The talks are expected to be held later this week, after negotiations were suspended following Haniyeh’s killing. A cease-fire in Gaza would likely help turn down the temperature across the Middle East.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian ran as a reformist and indicated a willingness to re-engage with the West. But on Sunday, Pezeshkian proposed a cabinet that included a mix of moderates and hawks. That disappointed many Iranians, and illustrated the president’s limited room for maneuver in a system where national security decisions are made by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and heavily influenced by the country’s military, particularly the Revolutionary Guard.

In Beirut, the mood has grown increasingly tense amid fears of Israeli military retaliation for any Hezbollah attack. Israeli jet fighters regularly fly low over the city, setting off sonic booms and rattling residents in a city on edge.

Bars and restaurants in the busiest quarters of the city remain open but half-empty, with DJ’s playing to deserted dance floors. Many residents who can afford it have sought refuge in holiday homes in the mountains. Flights out of the country are full.

Sune Engel Rasmussen contributed to this article.

Write to Omar Abdel-Baqui at omar.abdel-baqui@wsj.com, Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

2. Why Ukraine’s Surprise Incursion on Russia Should Give Hope By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, William Taylor, Barry McCaffrey, James Clapper and Stephen Henriques

Excerpts:

Perhaps the most consequential implication such an offensive provides, though, is the reassurance to international partners who have supported Ukraine up to this point in the war. As with France during the Revolutionary War, Ukrainian-allied investments have not been squandered. It is that same financial and military support that has enabled Ukraine to continue their resistance against Russian aggression and mount a swift and surprising incursion into Russian territory. The continued support will also likely dictate Ukrainian success in the current offensive and broader war. The recent act of resilience will provide additional fodder for those continuing to press for the continued support of Ukraine and will quiet those supporters-in-name but detractors-in-reality who have begun to call for appeasement with Russia.

So far, the free world has not wavered in its support for Ukraine against Russian aggression and Putin’s quest to rebuild the Russian empire. Zelenskyy’s bold actions in the last week have given the people of Ukraine and the world a renewed hope, like that of Washington traversing the Delaware or the US Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima after a hard-fought victory.

In 1917, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II fled after several years of war, massive military losses and a collapse of morale at the front and at home; a general civilian strike and a military mutiny in Petrograd, the monarch’s authority collapsed. No one knows where Putin’s tipping point might be.

Why Ukraine’s Surprise Incursion on Russia Should Give Hope

By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, William Taylor, Barry McCaffrey, James Clapper and Stephen Henriques

TIME · by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

Updated: August 12, 2024 10:12 AM EDT | Originally published: August 11, 2024 6:06 PM EDT

Sonnenfeld is Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Leadership at the Yale School of Management as well as founder and president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. He helped catalyze the retreat of 1,200 global corporations from Russia and has served as a personal, informal advisor to four U.S. presidents, two Democrats and two Republicans. He is the author of The Hero's Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire.

William Taylor, a U.S. Army commander in Vietnam and Bronze star winner was the 6th United States ambassador to Ukraine under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and as chargé d’affaires to Ukraine under President Donald Trump.

Barry McCaffrey, Four Star General, U.S. Army, former chief U.S. Southern Command, 24th Infantry Division, Operation Desert Storm, two Silver Stars and two Distinguished Service Crosses. NBC News military analyst.

James Clapper is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and served as Director of National Intelligence, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and first director of defense intelligence.

Stephen Henriques is senior research fellow at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and a former consultant to McKinsey & Co.

Ukraine is not about to seize Moscow, but its armed forces surprised many with its assault deep into Russian soil, now reportedly extending their reach from an initial six miles to more than 20. The recent counter-offensive by Ukrainian forces into Russia’s bordering Kursk region not only signifies the resolve of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, military leaders, and soldiers but also evokes important events in military history worth remembering.

In just a mere 24 hours, Ukraine's forces defeated two major lines of fortifications in the Kursk region that took Russia over two-and-a-half years and over $170 million to construct. Leading Kremlin critic, financier William Browder called this triumph is a profound humiliation for Putin’s aura of invincibility weakening his image before the Russian people.

While Ukraine’s advances are only slight in a geographical sense, they are significant in other ways that are equally, if not more, essential to finding success on the battlefield. Parallel moments in history show the strategic and symbolic implications of this campaign.

Boosting Ukrainian morale

The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte considered morale to be an underlying principle for military success, going as far as stating: “In war the moral is to the physical as three to one.” In World War II, the Battle of Iwo Jima served as a turning point in the war for the Pacific. While providing a strategic position, that hard-fought battle for the first Japanese home island catalyzed Allied troop and civilian morale.

The surprise attack by Ukraine could serve as a similar inspiration. Amid a concerted Russian offensive, an outmanned and exhausted Ukraine defied expectations and, for the moment, turned the tide. As with Iwo Jima, Ukraine’s quest is not to conquer new land, rather it is to stymie the enemy, reclaim their homeland, and ensure peace and prosperity for its people. The bold move by Zelenskyy and his military commander-in-chief, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, may be the impetus for Ukrainian soldiers to continue fighting elsewhere.

Forcing Russia to the defensive

In late 1776, General George Washington and his Continental Army had just suffered a series of defeats. Moreover, with an Army severely short of supplies, many were beginning to doubt their commander-in-chief and the prospects of success. Washington sensed the moment and decided to lead his troops through two pivotal battles, the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, in the middle of winter shifting the momentum to favor the revolutionaries and forcing the British to the defensive and to redeploy resources.

Like the Continental Army, Ukraine finds itself with both a limited number of supplies and troops. Success will only come in the form of carefully designed counterattacks that favor Ukraine’s smaller, nimbler forces, all while defending against unrelenting Russian pressure. The recent incursion may instigate Russia to divert resources from other regions, such as eastern Donetsk, where it has been conducting several offensives.

Opportunities for additional countermeasures by Ukrainian forces may present themselves as Russia redeploys troops, and potentially calls in conscripts, as well as resources from the eastern front and adjusts from an all-out offensive strategy to one that is more nuanced.Zelenskyy and Syrskyi must nowshow as Russia mounts its response, showing caution not to relinquish the invaluable manpower and equipment used for the original assault.

The confusion goes well beyond the battlefield for Russia. While Putin has been embarrassed on the world stage by Ukrainian advancements, leaders in the Kremlin have scrambled to recast the event as an act of terrorism, which further justifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia's National Counter-Terrorism Committee imposed a "counter-terrorism operation" regime across three regions on Friday in response to Ukraine's surprise cross-border incursion. Meanwhile, Russia's state Tass news agency has reported more than 76,000 people have been evacuated from the border area with new orders by Russian leadership to expedite additional evacuations. Such desperation will only continue to seed doubt among Russian soldiers and the public.

Solidifying international support and quieting doubters

Again, a look at the Continental Army of the Revolutionary War can tell us about the importance of financial and military support from foreign partners. In 1777, at the Battle of Saratoga, General Horatio Gates and his American soldiers defeated British forces just north of Albany to solidify their own advances, ultimately persuading the French to provide the revolutionaries with additional, and more significant, financial and military support. France’s aid was essential to America continuing their fresh offensive and the eventual success in Yorktown that ended the war for independence.

Perhaps the most consequential implication such an offensive provides, though, is the reassurance to international partners who have supported Ukraine up to this point in the war. As with France during the Revolutionary War, Ukrainian-allied investments have not been squandered. It is that same financial and military support that has enabled Ukraine to continue their resistance against Russian aggression and mount a swift and surprising incursion into Russian territory. The continued support will also likely dictate Ukrainian success in the current offensive and broader war. The recent act of resilience will provide additional fodder for those continuing to press for the continued support of Ukraine and will quiet those supporters-in-name but detractors-in-reality who have begun to call for appeasement with Russia.

So far, the free world has not wavered in its support for Ukraine against Russian aggression and Putin’s quest to rebuild the Russian empire. Zelenskyy’s bold actions in the last week have given the people of Ukraine and the world a renewed hope, like that of Washington traversing the Delaware or the US Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima after a hard-fought victory.

In 1917, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II fled after several years of war, massive military losses and a collapse of morale at the front and at home; a general civilian strike and a military mutiny in Petrograd, the monarch’s authority collapsed. No one knows where Putin’s tipping point might be.

Correction: The original version of this story misstated the year that Czar Nicholas II fled Russia.

TIME · by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

3. How China and North Korea could reunite as comrades in war

Gordon provides some interesting analysis based on the recent Foreign Policy article by Markus Garlauskus and Mathew Kroenig. And he included my somewhat contrarian views.

How China and North Korea could reunite as comrades in war

by Gordon G. Chang, opinion contributor - 08/12/24 10:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4820458-war-east-asia-china-north-korea/?utm

The next war in East Asia will consume the region. It will not be confined just to Taiwan, argue Markus Garlauskas and Matthew Kroenig in a new article in Foreign Policy.

Increased Chinese and North Korean military activity this month suggests that both regimes are contemplating going into battle. For instance, two days before Foreign Policy posted the piece, Kim Jong Un delivered a speech announcing the deployment of “250 new-type tactical ballistic missile launchers” to positions near the Demilitarized Zone.  

Kim praised North Korea’s “munition industry workers” for developing the launchers “by their own efforts and technology.” However, Richard Fisher, a China military analyst with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told me it is far more likely that the launchers are of Chinese origin and were built with Chinese parts and advice.  

In any event, the launchers can carry four tactical nuclear weapons each. As Kim boasted, they have “great military significance.” 

Garlauskas and Kroenig wrote that any conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan “would almost certainly become a region-wide war, engulfing the Korean Peninsula and pulling in both North Korea and South Korea.” The battle would give China “a strong incentive to strike U.S. bases in South Korea” and “urge North Korea to provoke and tie down U.S. forces there.”

They added that North Korea could fight beside China “to preempt a feared U.S. attack, take advantage of a distracted United States to settle old scores with its rival in Seoul or influence the outcome of a war that would have profound implications for its own security.” 

In late 1950, China sent “volunteers” to aid beleaguered North Korean forces in their fight against American, South Korean and other United Nations troops. Will the North now go to war alongside China? 

Traditionally, China has exercised great influence over North, largely because the Kim rulers needed Chinese aid and diplomatic protection, especially after the economic success of the North’s early years turned into decades of economic failure, beginning in the 1970s. 

Yes, the centuries-old antagonism between China and Korea remains, and the Kim regime often publicly disrespects Beijing. But the Chinese communists are patient overlords. The occasional North Korean defiance of China’s wishes is by no means significant. Chinese officials don’t expect obedience all the time, and they support their North Korean allies, whether or not they are compliant at any particular moment. 

When Jae Ho Chung was still a professor at Seoul National University, he told me that the Chinese know they have influence but prefer not to exercise it all the time. When China really wants something, it lowers the boom.

But does Beijing have enough leverage to coerce North Korea into fighting a war? The two states are parties to the 1961 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, which has a mutual defense clause. They were each other’s only military ally until June, when Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un inked a comprehensive agreement with a mutual defense provision.  

Fisher told me China has enough clout to force the North into launching “single diversionary strikes or coordinated joint attacks against South Korea, Japan or any number of American targets.” 

Not everyone agrees. 

“Kim will not act as China’s proxy or puppet,” David Maxwell of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Asia Pacific Strategy told me. “China will be unlikely to pressure or influence Kim to attack the South to support Chinese actions in Taiwan without substantial incentive, which for Kim can only be a guarantee that his actions will be successful.” 

China, of course, will not be able to provide such an assurance, especially if it is involved in conflict elsewhere. This means, as a practical matter, Kim must be able to get American troops off the Korean peninsula before he can join China’s side.

Maxwell, who served five tours of duty in Korea as a Special Forces officer, pointed out that the U.S., South Korea and the U.N. command can prevent Kim from aggressive actions by keeping their forces prepared for an attack. 

For more than half a century, three Kim rulers have successfully employed one tactic to avoid being dominated by far more powerful neighbors. “Dating back to the Korean War,” Maxwell told me, “the Kim family regime has effectively played Russia and China against each other, and it appears to be doing so today.” 

Kim Jong Un now has a problem, however. Both China and Russia, for the first time in decades, are closely coordinating actions. 

Last month, for instance, four Russian and Chinese nuclear-capable bombers — two Tu-95 Bears and two H-6Ks — intruded into the U.S. air-defense identification zone near Alaska. The Chinese and Russian navies and armies routinely exercise together as well. Moreover, China has been providing substantial support to Vladimir Putin’s faltering war against Ukraine. 

Kim, therefore, will have a difficult time playing off two “no-limits” partners that have decided to go to war together. And it will be difficult for the North Korean leader to keep Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin apart. The two leaders see the world in the same terms, identify the same enemy and conspire together.  

And both of them, despite severe problems, are getting arrogant. 

“Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,” Xi told Putin after their 40th in-person chat, in Moscow in March 2023. “And we are driving this change together.” 

Kim Jong Un, in the world, as the Chinese and Russian leaders perceive it, is someone who serves their interests. 

Kim can always say no to Xi and Putin, but these days that may not be an answer the latter are prepared to accept. So, as Garlauskas and Kroenig argue, Washington has to prepare for a multitheater war in East Asia, as China and North Korea, plus friend Russia, join together as comrades in battle.  

Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and “China Is Going to War.”  

4. Tim Walz Has Always Been Consistent on China

A balanced and objective analysis.

What I find most troubling in all this is that we have actual elected officials who would accuse the Governor of being a "Chinese asset" without any real evidence.

Tim Walz Has Always Been Consistent on China

Local newspapers reveal what the vice presidential candidate thought long before he came into the national spotlight.

By Paul Musgrave, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Foreign Policy · by Paul Musgrave

• Politics
• China

August 12, 2024, 1:42 PM

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s elevation to the national stage as running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris has suddenly put him in the spotlight. Walz had a low national profile until a successful behind-the-scenes strategy led him to be considered for Democrats’ suddenly vacant second spot.

One of the striking elements of Walz’s biography is his unusually deep connections to China. Walz first visited the country in 1989, just months after the Tiananmen Square protests, and returned to the country some 30 times afterward. As an educator and then a small business owner, he facilitated student groups’ trips to China. As a legislator, he served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which monitors human rights and the rule of law in the country, and co-sponsored resolutions urging the release of democratic activist Liu Xiaobo and remembering the Tiananmen Square victims.

Not all the attention to Walz’s China record has been positive. Republican and conservative figures have sought to portray Walz’s China ties as dangerous. On X, for example, Sen. Marco Rubio accused Walz of being a Chinese asset—“an example of how Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders”—who would “allow China to steal our jobs & factories & flood America with drugs.”

But Rubio’s attack has it precisely backward. Walz’s record is that of a measured critic of the Chinese Communist Party—prone neither to exaggeration nor accommodation. Nor is this a pose cooked up by spin doctors in the past few weeks. Small-town Nebraska newspaper articles—published well before Walz had any political ambitions—demonstrate that his professed affection for the Chinese people and culture has been matched by a longstanding criticism of the country’s rulers.

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, it didn’t take a lot to make the local papers. Walz, for instance, was once photographed for the Alliance Times-Herald—“Box Butte County’s Only Family-Owned Newspaper”—for a National Guard project: painting and repairing trash cans in the town center. (The photograph is about as exciting as the description suggests.)

The regular stuff of small-town news reporting—council meetings, 4-H club events, church announcements—was occasionally enlivened by stories about exceptional events. One such, it turned out, was Walz’s decision to teach in China as part of a program run by WorldTeach, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. (Many news accounts, at the time and later, describe WorldTeach as a Harvard-run program, but it’s more accurate to say it was founded by Harvard students.)

“I’ve always had a real interest in travel, and feel this is a golden opportunity to see a culture that’s 3,000 years old,” Walz, then a senior at Chadron State College, told the Chadron Record in an article announcing his selection in 1989.

Walz would be going under less than glamorous conditions. It was the first year that WorldTeach would make placements in China, the Record reported, and that meant participants had to be resourceful: “They said we’ll basically have to solve our own problems,” Walz said. He said he had to raise $2,500 for his transportation, health insurance, and orientation costs—and, once in China, he would only earn $100 per month in salary (although that was, the Record noted, “about twice the amount generally paid [to] Chinese teachers”).

Although the crackdown on protesters in June 1989 led Walz to wonder whether the trip would go on, the program remained in place. After orientation in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China, he traveled to his teaching site: a senior middle school in Foshan, a then-rapidly growing city in central Guangdong Province in southern China. There, he taught U.S. history and culture and English to classes of 65 students each from December 1989 to December 1990, according to a 1990 article in the Chadron Record. (Walz’s Midwestern-accentuated U.S. English was a change for the students, whose previous instructor was British, according to a 1994 article in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald.)

His trip was big enough news that the Record printed excerpts from a letter Walz wrote to a Chadron State faculty member while he was abroad. Walz wrote that he was “being treated like a king.” He was, he wrote, “totally responsible for my curriculum. But I’m managing.”

After he returned, Walz was invited to speak about his time at his alma mater, Chadron State. At about the same time, an interview about his year in China ran in local papers. His enthusiasm was obvious: “No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again,” Walz told the Record in 1990. “They gave me more gifts than I could bring home. It was an excellent experience.” (In 2024, the New York Post twisted this line as evidence that Walz had “fawned over Communist China.”)

Yet in context, it’s clear that Walz was no dupe. During his teaching year, he visited Beijing (a 40-hour trip by rail) and saw Tiananmen Square, according to the Record. As much as Walz loved China and the Chinese people, his attitude toward the Chinese Communist Party was bluntly critical. Tiananmen Square, he told the Record, “will always have a lot of bitter memories for the people.” (Walz later chose June 6 as his wedding date so he could “have a date he’ll always remember,” according to his wife.)

The problem with China, Walz observed, wasn’t its people but the government. “If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what [Chinese people] could accomplish,” he told the Record. “They are such kind, generous, capable people. They just gave and gave and gave to me. Going there was one of the best things I have ever done.”

Walz viewed China’s population as eager to leave its Communist-run society. “Many of the students want to come to America to study,” he told the Record. “They don’t feel there is much opportunity for them in China.” He mentioned that during one of his trips to nearby Macau, then still a Portuguese colony, the government granted amnesty to Chinese immigrants living in the colony illegally, triggering a stampede by tens of thousands of Chinese who wanted residency in the West.

The trip shaped Walz’s career as an educator. Within a few months of his return, Walz had found a job as a social studies teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, a town whose population was then just under 10,000 people. He created a pen-pal program linking his students to Chinese middle-school students at his old teaching placement, where a friend of his worked. The program was reported on the front page of the Alliance Times-Herald in 1991.

Walz, who must have been a dynamic teacher, used the exchange of letters to not only bridge cultural gaps but also demonstrate the stakes of then-acrimonious U.S.-China government relations to his students. Walz pointedly described the politics of the countries’ then-seemingly large trade imbalance (a fraction of what it is now) to the Times-Herald: “The Chinese government wants us to buy what they sell, but won’t buy what we sell.”

Soon, Walz was leading groups of students to China. The first visit was in July 1993, when he took 25 Alliance High School students on a trip partly funded by the Chinese government, although the students and sponsors, including Walz, had to cover costs of $1,580 each, according to an article in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald; Walz helped by raising funds from local businesses. (In a rare criticism of an aspect of Chinese culture, rather than the Chinese Communist Party, Walz responded to one student’s interest in hearing Chinese opera by saying he’d “rather eat glass” than see another Chinese opera.) Walz’s honeymoon with his wife, a fellow teacher, the next year involved two student trips to China, according to the Star-Herald. Later, he and his wife would start a business to promote similar exchanges.

For all his fondness toward China, Walz’s descriptions of its people at times reflected the prevailing stereotypes of the time. “The students are almost too well behaved,” he wrote in his letter from China that was excerpted in the Record in 1989. In a 1994 profile ahead of his honeymoon in China, Walz told the Star-Herald that it had been hard to memorize names and tell his students apart (although he also noted that Chinese students thought all Americans looked alike.) To the Times-Herald in 1993, he described his students as not overly creative but industrious: “[T]here was never even any unfinished homework,” he recalled. And, for Walz, mostly used to small-town life, the sheer scale of China was astonishing: “The people were the best part, and the worst part was the number of people.”

The contemporaneous (and surprisingly extensive) record of how Walz’s time in China influenced him clearly rejects the idea that Walz was groomed or otherwise misled by his time in the country. He was an earnest, young observer of a society and government radically unlike his own. After repeated exposure, however, China became increasingly familiar to him. His opinions about the Chinese people and their government derived from firsthand observations, filtered through his own background and reading.

Neither a hawk nor a dove, Walz approached China as a student and a teacher—an owl, to steal a metaphor. Throughout these early interviews, his insistence on the separation between a people and their government—and his repeated criticism of the Chinese government—was plain. So was his emphasis on the importance of democracy and recognizing where the United States fell short.

People change, and seeking clues to how a potential Vice President Walz would act based on how high school teacher Walz approached his lessons is clearly perilous. Still, it seems clear that Walz values facts, and in particular experience, rather than theory or ideology; that he has deeply held core beliefs about China’s people and government set in the era of Tiananmen; and that his commitment to promoting human rights—and U.S. economic interests in trade negotiations—is longstanding.

With that background, leavened by subsequent experience on China issues as a member of Congress, it seems more likely than not that Walz would be neither inflexibly hostile nor naïve about relations with Beijing.

Foreign Policy · by Paul Musgrave

5. All troops to get baseline cognitive testing in bid to treat traumatic injuries: Dept. of Defense

A very important step forward for taking care of our military personnel.

All troops to get baseline cognitive testing in bid to treat traumatic injuries: Dept. of Defense

abc7news.com · August 10, 2024

• military

ByAnne Flaherty

Monday, August 12, 2024 9:45AM

All troops to get baseline cognitive testing in bid to treat traumatic injuries, Department of Defense says

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is taking new steps to protect troops' brain health, including mandating baseline cognitive tests for all new recruits starting next year to make it easier to diagnose traumatic brain injuries later on in their career.

In a memo released on Friday, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks also directed the services to try to increase the distance between personnel and weapon blasts during training exercises to minimize exposure.

Protective equipment should also be provided to anyone firing certain weapons, including instructors, she wrote.

The move comes nine months after a United States Army Reservist Robert Card went on a shooting rampage at a local bar and a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, and killed 18 people and injured 13 more.

A post-mortem study of Card's brain by a center at Boston University and shared by Card's family found it was "likely" he suffered from traumatic brain injury.

Card had been a U.S. Army Reservist and a longtime instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, and it was believed that he was exposed to thousands of low-level blasts, according to doctors at Boston University's Concussion Legacy Foundation.

"Blast overpressure is one of many factors that can negatively affect warfighter brain health," wrote Hicks in a statement, which said her directive "builds on existing efforts" across the services to "mitigate the impacts of blast overpressure."

Brain health effects from "blast overpressure" isn't yet fully understood by researchers, which Hicks acknowledged in her memo. But researchers agree repeated exposure can impact a person's brain health and cognitive performance, causing such ailments as headaches, attention difficulty and memory loss.

Baseline brain tests are intended to make it easier to diagnose a brain injury by comparing what the brain looked like before a blast exposure.

Currently, the military only gives baseline cognitive testing to troops ahead of a deployment. But that approach wouldn't detect injuries from training.

The new Pentagon policy now mandates baseline testing for anyone entering service after Dec. 31. Active-duty troops already serving will receive baseline testing by the end of 2025, in addition to the new requirements for creating maximum distance between personnel and blast waves during training.

"This policy is not meant to preclude or unreasonably restrict commanders from conducting mission-essential weapons training," Hicks wrote in the memo. "Rather, this policy establishes requirements for practical risk management actions to mitigate and track [blast overpressure] BOP exposures across the DoD."

Report a correction or typo

Copyright © 2024 ABC News Internet Ventures.

abc7news.com · August 10, 2024

6. Love the army, defend the motherland: how China is pushing military education on children

Mandating patriotism is the way of totalitarian dictatorships.

But does it work?

(As SSG Pugh used to say on the PT stand at Ranger School when we did not sound off loud enough, "False motivation will get you nowhere." But I suppose for the Chinese youth it is a means to survival.)

Excerpts:

“We will create a strong atmosphere of national defence education, carry out rich and colourful activities, cultivate students’ patriotism, love for the army, and organisational discipline, and cultivate their ambitions to build and defend the motherland from an early age,” it says.

...

The growing emphasis on military training for civilians reflects a heightened nationalism in today’s China under Xi, who has also made clear his distaste for what he sees as declining masculinity in China, and the worsening risk that he could take the country into war over Taiwan.

“Requiring children to engage in performative military education activities at younger and younger ages normalises China’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy, and could potentially prepare the country psychologically for a contingency in which China engages in armed conflict,” said Bethany Allen, the head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s China programme.

China-based analysts have also told media the ruling Chinese Communist party (CCP) is learning from the Ukraine war and the potential need to have a population that can be quickly mobilised for conflict.

Increasing militarism by China under Xi Jinping has raised the risk of conflict or hostilities with other countries, particularly over Taiwan. At the same time its armed forces, despite undergoing a massive overhaul and modernisation process, are reportedly struggling with corruption issues and low recruitment.

The defence ministry said in September 2023 that primary and secondary schools across the country had begun the new school year with defence education lessons, “planting a deep sense of patriotism, respect for the military, and concern for national defence in the heart of students”.

Love the army, defend the motherland: how China is pushing military education on children

Growing emphasis on military training for civilians reflects heightened nationalism under Xi Jinping – and a growing risk of war over Taiwan

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/11/love-the-army-defend-the-motherland-how-china-is-pushing-military-education-on-children

Helen Davidson and Chi-hui Lin in Taipei

Sat 10 Aug 2024 21.00 EDT

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A

t Beijing Jiaotong University’s affiliated elementary school, a class of children, maybe six or seven years old, stand in a line in a rainbow painted hallway. A boy holds a replica handgun, and behind him other students grasp unwieldy fake assault rifles. Fake police flak jackets cover their blue and white tracksuits, and their heads swim inside too-big artillery helmets. In other photographs students practise drills, salute visiting soldiers, and arrange themselves on a sporting field to spell out “I [heart] u” next to a Chinese flag.

In the post that includes the photos, published online in April, the school says it has worked hard in recent years to conscientiously “promote the main theme of patriotism, and make it an important part of the school’s ideological and political education and moral education”.

“We will create a strong atmosphere of national defence education, carry out rich and colourful activities, cultivate students’ patriotism, love for the army, and organisational discipline, and cultivate their ambitions to build and defend the motherland from an early age,” it says.

The elementary school is among the thousands designated as “model schools for national defence education”, part of China’s push to increase military awareness and skills among its population – starting at younger and younger ages.

View image in fullscreen

Children at a Chinese military summer camp in Hefei, Anhui province, 2023. A bill mandating military training for younger children is making its way through the national congress. Photograph: Costfoto/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

More designations announced in January by the ministry of education and the central military commission almost doubled the number of “model schools”. They are likely to be followed by legal changes extending mandated training including “cadet activities” to students under 15. A bill proposing amendments to the National Defence Education Law was given its first reading in the rubber-stamping National People’s Congress in April.

The amendments make more prescriptive what was previously a guide, emphasising the need for basic military training in high schools and tertiary institutions, and allowing it to be extended to younger students for the first time.

China testing ability to ‘seize power’ in second day of military drills around Taiwan

Read more

“All state organs and armed forces, all political parties and public groups, all enterprises and institutions and grassroots self-government organisations of a mass character shall, in light of their specific conditions, organise national defence education in their respective regions, departments and units,” the draft said.

‘Rebuilding the strength of the Chinese Communist party’

The growing emphasis on military training for civilians reflects a heightened nationalism in today’s China under Xi, who has also made clear his distaste for what he sees as declining masculinity in China, and the worsening risk that he could take the country into war over Taiwan.

“Requiring children to engage in performative military education activities at younger and younger ages normalises China’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy, and could potentially prepare the country psychologically for a contingency in which China engages in armed conflict,” said Bethany Allen, the head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s China programme.

China-based analysts have also told media the ruling Chinese Communist party (CCP) is learning from the Ukraine war and the potential need to have a population that can be quickly mobilised for conflict.

Increasing militarism by China under Xi Jinping has raised the risk of conflict or hostilities with other countries, particularly over Taiwan. At the same time its armed forces, despite undergoing a massive overhaul and modernisation process, are reportedly struggling with corruption issues and low recruitment.

The defence ministry said in September 2023 that primary and secondary schools across the country had begun the new school year with defence education lessons, “planting a deep sense of patriotism, respect for the military, and concern for national defence in the heart of students”.

View image in fullscreen

People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers stand to attention before a giant screen showing the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in 2019. The PLA serves the Chinese Communist party rather than the state. Photograph: Jason Lee/Reuters

It’s not clear if the lessons are improving recruitment, and China’s punitive censorship culture makes it almost impossible to survey their impact on general opinion. Most published comments are similar to that of Feng Shanguo, a former soldier who took part in leading lessons at his child’s school, Neijiang No 13 in Sichuan.

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“It can help children to build tenacity, courage, and hard-working qualities,” Feng told state media.

But Katja Drinhausen, head of Merics’ research programme on Chinese policy, said military education was just one aspect of a broader campaign to boost the CCP’s strength at a time when it was facing multiple challenges including economic downturn, sporadic social unrest, multiple regional disputes, and worsening natural disasters driven by climate change.

“It’s important to put together the different pieces of the broader ambition,” Drinhausen said.

“There is renewed focus on military training and creating identity and buy-in from the broader population on what the military does, which also serves to build internal cohesion when the party needs to find new sources of social and political legitimacy cohesion because the economy isn’t doing it any more,” she said.

“First came a renewed focus on patriotic education and what ‘makes China great’ in schools. Then came a rollout of national security education, not just the mainland but also in Hong Kong … I do think these are different layers that are part of a broader strategic refocus on rebuilding the strength of the CCP inside China.”

Drinhausen also noted that the military, the People’s Liberation Army, is officially the armed forces of the CCP, not the Chinese state or its people, and has been used in the past to violently put down domestic protests.

“It’s helpful to see the development when it comes to military and defence focused education [in the context of different possible scenarios] because when you look at it that way, all these measures aren’t necessarily solely a precursor for war but serve all sorts of crisis management for the party going forward,” she said.

7. The one policy conservatives across the world say will fix men: mandatory military service

Will conscription make men out of today's boys?

Can we force patriotism on our people?

Excerpts:

The key distinction between straight-up conscription and groups like the Volunteers, the Peace Corps, or even Nunn and McCurdy’s scuttled Citizen Corps, is that these groups are non-mandatory, and non-coercive. Press-ganging and conscripting teenagers into service during a period of increased military hawkishness is a different thing altogether.

Some have gamely argued that instituting some version of compulsory service may actually be a progressive solution to inequality in the military. In 2013, the New York City congressman Charles B Rangel penned an editorial advancing this idea. When wars broke out following the 9/11 attacks, Rangel claimed that a draft would “ensure a more equitable representation of people making sacrifices in wars”.

Certain critics have claimed that the military regards poorer, underprivileged would-be recruits as “fodder”, while other data suggests that the top predictor for military recruitment is “familiarity with the military” – for instance, a history of family service. In any event, the case goes that a draft would go a long way to bringing the American military more in line with the demographics of the nation as a whole.

But expanding a draft is arguably a case of “negative privilege”: where a burden is redistributed in the name of fairness when freedom from that same burden could instead be equally applied. Civic proposals offer an alternative, in which demands for service are applied uniformly, but with less potentially fatal outcomes. “There have always been proposals for young people to become teachers, or to plant trees,” says Adler, the political economist. “Enlisting young people is not a left- or rightwing idea. It’s not a new idea.

“What is novel about the present circumstances,” he adds, “is who is issuing them. These are politicians who are destroying the economy, destroying the institutions that empowered young people, and that gave them the power to participate in the economy … Is there a progressive version of this? In its current form? No.” 

The one policy conservatives across the world say will fix men: mandatory military service

Proponents say the draft could help foster connection. Others see the proposal as a cynical political gimmick

• Read more from our series on young men and the US election

The Guardian · by John Semley

Photograph: Guardian design

In Hillbilly Elegy, the Ohio senator and Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance recounts the time he spent in the US Marine Corps. As a public affairs marine, Vance avoided the pressures of combat during the Iraq war, tasked instead with escorting the media through war zones, embedding himself with combat units to diarize their routines, and snapping photographs. He also liaised with local Iraqi residents, played soccer with school children, and handed out candy, as a show of good will on behalf of an occupying military force. On one occasion, Vance gave a tiny pencil eraser to a child, who received the bauble as if it were some great gift. “His face briefly lit up with joy,” Vance writes, “holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph.”

In Vance’s recounting, that moment constituted something close to an epiphany: a stark lesson in humility, gratefulness and the ability to find profound joy in a pencil eraser. Among more routine lessons (about hard work, grit, respect etc) it was one of Vance’s great takeaways from his military service.

Now he, and other American conservatives, are eager to share – or enforce – such a rare, character-defining privilege. Vance is among a cohort of politicians around the world engaging with the idea of a return to mandatory national service. The senator recently expressed enthusiasm for national service, claiming that it was a way for young Americans to get some “some skin in the game”. (Vance’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Elsewhere in the Capitol, the Republican senator Lindsay Graham likewise suggested that compulsory military service was a reasonable option for addressing shortfalls in military recruitment. For his part, Trump himself – who managed to dodge and defer being drafted into the Vietnam war five times – has explicitly rejected, via a post on his own Truth Social website, the idea that he will call for any sort of mandatory military service. Joe Biden also received deferments from the draft, on the basis of his asthma.

But could compulsory military service help address the ongoing loneliness “epidemic” and the crisis of alienation facing men and boys? Or is it just another desperate, cynical, nostalgic political gimmick?

Army ROTC cadets march in the Brooklyn Memorial Day Parade in New York City this year. Photograph: Adam Gray/AFP/Getty Images

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, has outlined measures for renewed mandatory service in Project 2025, its dense manifesto for reshaping the nation in its own rightwing image, under the leadership of America’s next conservative present (presumably Donald Trump). The group’s 887-page manifesto, titled Mandate For Leadership: The Conservative Promise, includes a lengthy chapter by Trump’s former acting defense secretary Christopher Miller, that outlines a conservative future for the US military.

Miller proposes that conservative leadership should “increase the number of junior ROTC [reserve officers’ training corps] programs in secondary schools” and require high school students to take the armed services vocational aptitude battery (Asvab), a test to gauge their suitability for military service. He also calls for banning transgender recruits from the military, along with the expansion of America’s nuclear weapons stores and its role hawking arms and military technology to other powers, re-embracing its role as what he terms, apparently without irony or euphemism, the “Arsenal of Democracy”. Representatives from Project 2025 responded to a request for comment with a note that stated: “Project 2025 is a coalition of more than 110 conservative organizations preparing to offer recommendations to the next conservative president. Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

To critics, such ideas seem like little more than a stalking horse for a renewed draft. (Indeed, Miller’s chapter laments that “the army no longer reflects national demographics to the degree that it did before 1974 when the draft was eliminated”.)

Cindy Sheehan, an American anti-war activist and former vice-presidential nominee for the Peace and Freedom party, compares the Project 2025 vision of America to “Sparta without any honor”. Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed by enemy action in 2004 during the Iraq war, says that “there is already too much military recruitment in secondary schools. Students should be focused on learning and preparing for a healthy future without being preyed upon by military recruiters.”

Young men burn draft cards at Arlington Street church in Boston in 1967, as part of a nationwide student effort aimed at disrupting the draft and ending the Vietnam war. Photograph: Boston Globe/Getty Images

Sheehan says that recruiters, and the whole military apparatus, rely in part on the idea of an “esprit de corps”. Such values, however, rarely square with the violent reality of life in the military, and the sense of increased social alienation many Americans experience when they return from war zones and readjust to civilian life.

***

However hollow their promises may seem, many of these new mandatory service proposals seem steeped in the language of alienation and loneliness, which has abounded, in the US and globally, in the years since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and resulting lockdowns and social distancing measures. In 2023, the US surgeon general released a lengthy report on the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”.

On the campaign trail in the UK, Rishi Sunak’s conservatives tried tapping into similar ideas. As outlined by the Tories’ policy manifesto, a proposed mandatory service scheme would have required every 18-year-old to chose between a year of paid military service (in either the armed forces or “cyber defence”) or 25 days a year of community service – working at charitable groups, hospitals or with police and fire departments.

It was the first such program proposed in the UK in 60 years.

Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives proposed mandatory national service before this year’s UK election. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/AP

The Conservatives’ “new model” of national service hinged on fairly old and unpopular promises: instilling a sense of national duty and forming bonds of fellowship through the common experience of armed conflict. Indeed, Sunak insisted that the program would go a long way to restore a “shared sense of purpose among our young people and a renewed sense of pride in our country”.

David Adler, a political economist and co-general coordinator of the organization Progressive International, regards the policy as fundamentally hypocritical. “A Tory government that refused to invest in young people’s basic welfare, their education, their health and their employment prospects through an assault on institutions through over a decade of austerity means that this proposal is so condescending,” he says. “They’re talking down to them and saying: ‘You haven’t made enough of yourselves, so we’re gonna throw you into the military.’”

Adler also sees the idea as fundamentally “gerontocratic”: that is, a superficial appeal to young people that was actually devised to resonate with the UK’s older voters. “Ageing societies are basically telling young people what to do,” he says. “In the past, the balance of forces, demographically, meant that young people, as a bloc, would be better able to kind of manage their interests, whether through revolts, rebellions, and protests or through just voting.”

The Tories’ historic drubbing at the ballot box suggests that this model didn’t exactly resonate with voters.

But across the globe, such plans are being floated with a renewed seriousness. Last month, the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, proposed a bill that would address the steady decline in the nation’s military ranks. The new law would see 18-year-old men served with a compulsory questionnaire, gauging their both their willingness and fitness for military service. (Military service was compulsory in Germany as recently as 2011.)

While the plan would not make service mandatory, it would equip military recruiters with a wealth of data and analytics, which could be used to better target potential servicemen. Pistorious, a center-left Social Democrat and one of Germany’s most popular politicians, has been vocal in sounding the alarm about the perceived military ambitions of Vladimir Putin, comparing the Russian leader to Adolf Hitler.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has discussed bringing back mandatory national service. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images

Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron has been mulling similar measures. The president has spoken of bringing back mandatory national service for teenagers and “restor[ing] authority” to France.

Amid shifting political landscapes and increased military activity on Europe’s eastern front, it can be tricky to gauge whether such appeals are sincere, or a more cynical attempt to sap support from increasingly popular far-right political parties. Indeed, the French Green party member Jean-Claude Renaux has claimed that Macron’s calls for a return to tradition and authority constitute little more than another gerontocratic appeal, pitched to “to nostalgic voters who idealize the past”.

Globally, scores of nations – from Brazil to Egypt, Greece to South Korea, Israel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo – that require some form of compulsory military service. What’s unique about the new proposals is not their existence, or even their core demands of an able-bodied citizenry, but the context of their emergence. It is one that Adler defines as a generalized “militarist” revival in European politics.

“There is a shift in policymaking power,” he explains, “away from one set of elites, who are focused on social and economic issues … to a different set of elites, who are focused on security, defense, war and peace. In all of these countries, we’re seeing a shift from one set of elites, who were trained in one set of questions, to a different set of elites who went to naval colleges and did war games.” The arrival of this new breed of elite is signalled by the ascendancy of Vance, whose railing against “dominant elite society” is betrayed by his Ivy League bona fides, military background, and deep ties to deeper-pocketed Silicon Valley tech billionaires.

***

Proposals by Sunak and others seem to echo an ostensibly more progressive, less explicitly militaristic, idea of national service. It is one for which Kevin Frazier, an American lawyer and writer, has been advocating for a long while. In a 2021 op-ed for the American Conservative, Frazier outlined a plan for a “Citizens Corps” that “can help all American youth build … economic, social, and human capital”. The idea of a “Citizens Corps” was originally proposed decades ago by two Democrats, the senator Sam Nunn and the representative Dave McCurdy. They introduced the Citizenship and National Service Act of 1989, ultimately unsuccessful legislation that outlined the institution of a national – and voluntary – civil service program, conceived as an alternative to higher education.

Military recruits practice taking the oath of enlistment before a ceremony with the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, at Fort George G Meade in Maryland last year. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

In such conceptions, high school graduates would be paid to take jobs working in their communities: in hospitals, in volunteer charity organizations, even in large-scale public works projects (as in the days of FDR and the Civil Works Administration). Such work could address labor shortfalls in these fields, while also fostering a different type of esprit de corps, in the age of the loneliness epidemic. “I really think that there are few more meaningful experiences than giving back to your community,” Frazier said. “If you’re doing that with friends and colleagues, I think it’s going to solidify some really meaningful bonds.”

Cindy Sheehan said opportunities in the US were “enormous”: “Perhaps a national service program that focuses on improving society, instead of destroying societies, would help the US come together in ways we haven’t in decades.”

Of course, in the US and elsewhere, versions of such programs already exist. AmeriCorps offers stipends to millions of volunteers, while the Peace Corps has long provided positions to young people (albeit typically after college) eager to help meet US humanitarian obligations abroad, especially in developing countries. At the state level, organizations like the California Volunteers recruit citizens (both volunteers and paid staffers) to assist in disaster recovery and other community efforts. “Service members get off their screens and out in the streets,” writes the California Volunteers’ chief service officer, Josh Fryday, in an email, “working together to solve community challenges. These programs foster belonging, purpose, lasting friendships and combat loneliness through shared experiences and collective action.”

Fryday, himself a navy veteran and former member of the judge advocate general’s corps (Jag), offers an alternative to military service, while nurturing many of the same values – duty, service, civic virtue – that have long been part of recruiters’ pitch materials. “We are giving thousands of Californians the same opportunity I had in the military,” Fryday writes, “to be a part of something bigger than yourself, to work towards a common purpose and to accomplish great things together.”

AmeriCorps volunteers work with Habitat for Humanity building homes for Hurricane Katrina victims in Rockefeller Plaza, New York City, in 2005. Photograph: Michael Nagle/Getty Images

The key distinction between straight-up conscription and groups like the Volunteers, the Peace Corps, or even Nunn and McCurdy’s scuttled Citizen Corps, is that these groups are non-mandatory, and non-coercive. Press-ganging and conscripting teenagers into service during a period of increased military hawkishness is a different thing altogether.

Some have gamely argued that instituting some version of compulsory service may actually be a progressive solution to inequality in the military. In 2013, the New York City congressman Charles B Rangel penned an editorial advancing this idea. When wars broke out following the 9/11 attacks, Rangel claimed that a draft would “ensure a more equitable representation of people making sacrifices in wars”.

Certain critics have claimed that the military regards poorer, underprivileged would-be recruits as “fodder”, while other data suggests that the top predictor for military recruitment is “familiarity with the military” – for instance, a history of family service. In any event, the case goes that a draft would go a long way to bringing the American military more in line with the demographics of the nation as a whole.

But expanding a draft is arguably a case of “negative privilege”: where a burden is redistributed in the name of fairness when freedom from that same burden could instead be equally applied. Civic proposals offer an alternative, in which demands for service are applied uniformly, but with less potentially fatal outcomes. “There have always been proposals for young people to become teachers, or to plant trees,” says Adler, the political economist. “Enlisting young people is not a left- or rightwing idea. It’s not a new idea.

“What is novel about the present circumstances,” he adds, “is who is issuing them. These are politicians who are destroying the economy, destroying the institutions that empowered young people, and that gave them the power to participate in the economy … Is there a progressive version of this? In its current form? No.”

The Guardian · by John Semley

8. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, August 12, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, August 12, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-august-12-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Israel: US and Israeli officials have warned that Iran will likely conduct a large-scale, coordinated attack targeting Israel in the days ahead. These statements are all consistent with CTP-ISW's ongoing assessment that Iran and its Axis of Resistance will most likely conduct a coordinated, large-scale drone and missile attack on Israel in response to Israel killing senior Axis of Resistance leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, in recent weeks.

• Russia: Iran is expected to imminently deliver hundreds of ballistic missiles to Russia to support its invasion of Ukraine. Western and Ukrainian sources have previously warned that Iran may be preparing to provide Russia with short-range ballistic systems, including multiple systems with maximum ranges and payloads significantly greater than the limits imposed upon Russia under its Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) obligations.

• Iran: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian submitted 19 cabinet minister nominations to Parliament. Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister-designate Abbas Araghchi described his foreign policy agenda during a meeting with the Iranian Parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee.

• Iraq: The Iraqi Resistance Coordination Committee—a coordinating body for Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—threatened to attack US forces if the United States conducts attacks within Iraq or uses Iraqi airspace to attack Iran.

• Gaza Strip: Hamas has refused to participate in ceasefire-hostage negotiations in Qatar scheduled for August 15.

9. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 12, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 12, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-12-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to portray himself as an effective and knowledgeable manager of the situation along the Ukrainian-Russian border and to shift responsibility for ongoing challenges in responding to the Ukrainian incursion in the area to other Russian military and government officials.

• The Kremlin's decision to publish footage showing Putin chastising senior Russian officials is likely a warning to other Russian officials to refrain from commenting about the Ukrainian incursion into Russia.

• Putin delegated overlapping tasks to the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), Federal Security Service (FSB), and Rosgvardia in the Ukrainian-Russian border area — further highlighting how the Russian force grouping in Kursk Oblast is struggling to establish the joint command and control (C2) structures necessary to coordinate operations.

• Putin offered several assessments about Ukrainian operations in Kursk Oblast, including one that undermined a long-standing Kremlin information operation falsely portraying Ukraine as unwilling to engage in legitimate, good-faith negotiations and putting the onus for peace negotiations on Ukraine.

• Ukrainian forces appear to be advancing further within Kursk Oblast despite recent milblogger claims that Russian forces were stabilizing the frontline in Kursk Oblast.

• Regional Russian officials appear to be offering notably frank assessments of the ongoing Ukrainian incursion.

• Senior Ukrainian officials provided updates about the ongoing Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast and warned that Russian forces may stage war crimes in Kursk Oblast in order to discredit Ukraine and Western support for Ukraine.

• Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted a drone strike against a Russian airbase in Moscow Oblast on the night of August 11 to 12.
• Russian forces recently advanced near Vovchansk, Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, and Pokrovsk.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) emphasized Russia's international defense ties at the Army-2024 International Military-Technical Forum in Moscow, likely in an effort to expand international military-technical cooperation and posture strong defense relations with Russia-friendly states

10. Is the Deal Between Palantir Technologies and Microsoft a Game-Changer?

Is the Deal Between Palantir Technologies and Microsoft a Game-Changer?

finance.yahoo.com · by Danny Vena, The Motley FoolSat, Aug 10, 2024, 8:10 AM6 min readLink Copied8

Arguably, the most important secular tailwind to emerge since early last year has been the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). This is causing an ongoing paradigm shift in business as companies figure out how best to benefit from these next-generation algorithms.

What sets generative AI apart from its predecessors is its versatility. These AI systems can be used to generate images, create stories, summarize data, and create presentations, all with a few simple prompts. Additionally, its ability to find patterns in data and streamline rote and time-consuming tasks is being heralded as the "fourth industrial revolution" and could dramatically alter how business gets done. Managers everywhere are working to secure their share of the potential windfall.

Now, enterprise software and cloud titan Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and AI and data analytics pioneer Palantir Technologies (NYSE: PLTR) have joined forces to develop cutting-edge AI solutions for the U.S. government.

Image source: Getty Images.

A dynamic duo

In a press release on Thursday, Palantir and Microsoft announced an expansion of their existing partnership to "bring some of the most sophisticated and secure cloud, AI, and analytics capabilities to the U.S. Defense and Intelligence Community."

The goal of the partnership is to create a "first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology" featuring Microsoft's Azure Cloud and OpenAI services and Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) in the government's secure cloud.

By joining forces, Palantir will deploy Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and AIP to Microsoft's Azure Government, Government Secret, and Top Secret Cloud platforms. Palantir will also adopt Azure's OpenAI service in these secure cloud environments.

The resulting integrated solution will allow government users to build AI systems for a variety of applications, including logistics, contracting, prioritization, action planning, and more.

What sets this agreement apart is the inclusion of Palantir's AIP. Management found that many users are reluctant to take the AI plunge because they simply don't know where to begin. The company began hosting boot camps or sessions that pair users with Palantir engineers to create these systems to solve real-world issues.

The program has been wildly successful, with many customers signing sizable contracts within days or weeks of attending a boot camp session. That strategy could work equally well for government users.

A win-win situation

Both Palantir and Microsoft have made a name for themselves in the fast-growing field of AI.

The success of Palantir's aforementioned strategy has been evident in its recent results. In the second quarter, revenue of $678 million grew 27% year over year, and Palantir generated a profit for a seventh consecutive quarter -- but there was much more going on under the hood.

The company's government revenue -- which tends to be lumpy -- grew 23% year over year, while commercial revenue grew 33%. This was fueled by the U.S. commercial segment, which has become Palantir's fastest-growing business, with revenue that surged 83% year over year and is now expected to grow at least 47% in 2024.

The engine behind that growth has been AIP. Palantir recently revealed it has hosted boot camps for more than 1,025 organizations over the past year, far exceeding its original plans for 500. The results have been stunning, as Palantir provided multiple examples of seven-figure deals signed within days or weeks of boot camp completion. This helps illustrate just how successful this novel strategy has been.

For its part, Microsoft was quick to adopt generative AI and developed Copilot, a suite of AI-powered assistants designed to simplify and streamline time-consuming administrative tasks. In its fiscal 2024 fourth quarter (ended June 30), Microsoft said the number of people who use Copilot at work more than doubled quarter over quarter. This helped fuel robust growth as revenue of $64.7 billion grew 15% year over year, while earnings per share (EPS) of $2.95 grew 10%.

Microsoft's biggest growth driver was its intelligent cloud segment, which grew 19% year over year and now represents 44% of total income. At the heart of the segment is Azure Cloud, which grew 29%. The company also noted that eight points of that growth were the result of AI services. Microsoft also said demand continued to outpace "our available capacity." It's worth noting that Microsoft's cloud growth continues to outpace that of its rivals, with much of the credit going to AI.

This helps to illustrate that Palantir and Microsoft are both profiting from the massive opportunity of generative AI, even as rivals lag behind.

Is the deal a game-changer?

One of the more intriguing prospects of this partnership is the complementary capabilities of these two AI superstars and the large number of applications the collaboration will enable. Microsoft's government-approved secure cloud will play host to Palantir's decades of AI expertise and its cutting-edge AIP. Furthermore, Palantir's boot camp strategy might attract users and use cases that might otherwise be missed.

Given their growth prospects and the opportunity to profit from AI, each of these stocks represents a compelling opportunity.

Microsoft is currently selling for 30 times forward earnings, just a slight premium to the multiple of 28 for the S&P 500.

At 82 times forward earnings, Palantir might seem prohibitively expensive, but those metrics don't take into account the company's accelerating growth. Using the forward price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio provides a more accurate picture, revealing a multiple of 0.3 -- when any number less than 1 suggests an undervalued stock.

This deal benefits both partners across the spectrum of their AI offerings. Microsoft gets to leverage Palantir's existing AI partnerships with U.S. government agencies, while Palantir benefits from the expansion of those existing revenue streams, as well as the accelerated adoption of AIP within the defense and intelligence communities. As such, this deal could actually rise to the level of game-changer, but only time will tell.

Should you invest $1,000 in Palantir Technologies right now?

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Is the Deal Between Palantir Technologies and Microsoft a Game-Changer? was originally published by The Motley Fool

finance.yahoo.com · by Danny Vena, The Motley FoolSat, Aug 10, 2024, 8:10 AM6 min readLink Copied8

11. Elections Officials Battle a Deluge of Disinformation

We should think hard about what is happening and how these people spouting/touting conspiracy theories are undermining the trust and confidence in our election system. Counterintuitively (at least for conspiracy theorists), it is our local and dispersed or decentralized election process that actually is a feature and not a bug and it is one of the best methods to prevent the type of conspiracies that conspiracy theorists espouse. 

We revere our military, law enforcement, and first responders for their service and sacrifice. But it is our local election officials who are demonstrating self service to ensure the "sanctity" of the most fundamental and important process in our federal democratic republic. We need to revere and respect our local election officials because they believe in supporting the system and making it work over the partisan politics the rest of us are engaged in.  They are serving selflessly.

Elections Officials Battle a Deluge of Disinformation

County clerks and secretaries of state are overwhelmed this year, as they stare down a “perpetual moving target” of new conspiracy theories, political pressure and threats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/12/business/media/2024-election-disinformation.html?

By Tiffany Hsu

Tiffany Hsu covers disinformation and its real-world effects in the 2024 election.

• Aug. 12, 2024

Tate Fall is overwhelmed.

When she signed on to be director of elections in Cobb County, Ga., last year, she knew she’d be registering voters and recruiting poll workers, maybe fixing up voting machines.

She didn’t expect the unending flood of disinformation — or at least, she wasn’t prepared for how much it would overtake her job. She has had election deniers shout at her at public meetings, fielded weekend calls from politicians panicked about a newly circulating falsehood, and even reviewed conspiracy theories circulating on Nextdoor forums that might worsen skepticism among distrustful constituents already doubtful that the democratic system is reliable and secure.

Image

In her role as director of elections in Cobb County, Ga., Tate Fall has been dealing with an unending flood of disinformation.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

And that was before the election went sideways.

In the weeks since former President Donald J. Trump was targeted in an assassination attempt and Kamala Harris replaced President Biden as the Democratic nominee, adding Tim Walz to the ticket, conspiracy theories have surged. The claims were pushed by pundits and politicians like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican known for promoting far-right conspiracy theories, who represents part of Ms. Fall’s jurisdiction.

The implications for Ms. Fall’s workload will not be good, she said, noting that conspiracy theories can make it harder to reach constituents who already find elections to be mystifying, like “magical” events.

“Anytime there’s a big event, that’s an opportunity for bad actors to seize on that and act on it,” said Ms. Fall, 30. “It’s our job to make sure we’re answering those questions effectively and communicating to our voters.”

Staff prepare for the upcoming election cycle at the Cobb County Elections and Registration offices. Conspiracy theories have surged in the past few weeks.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times

Increasingly, her generation of elections officials must multitask as defenders against disinformation and its consequences. On any given day, they are debunking claims that masses of dead people are contaminating the voting pool or that mail-in balloting is susceptible to fraud. In just the past year, they have been flooded with inane demands for details about their employees, faced harassment campaigns targeted at their female family members, received intimidating letters laced with fentanyl and been subjected to fake threats of bombings and break-ins.

The stress has pushed many public servants to resign or retire; in Wisconsin alone, the state association of county clerks found that 31 of its 72 members had never administered a presidential election, with most entering office after their predecessors left mid-term. The remaining officials, many of them overwhelmed and very tired, are once again marshaling their limited resources to try to reach people unmoved by earlier efforts to debunk and limit persistent online and offline rumors.

“Their job description has expanded significantly — it’s not just about getting voting equipment out once every couple of years, it’s a much longer and sustained process of getting trusted information out to the public,” said Jonathan Miller, the chief program officer at the Public Rights Project, a civil rights nonprofit. The group announced a project this year to help elections officials cope with increased litigation, especially in battleground states.

In another swing state — Michigan — Ottawa County residents “had a really difficult time” grappling with false narratives after the 2020 election, said Justin F. Roebuck, the county clerk. A Republican in a mostly Republican jurisdiction, he plunged into what his wife described as an existential crisis trying to understand what went wrong.

“Emotionally, I think, we’ve all gone through the wringer,” he said. “The vehicle for sowing fear and doubt about the system itself has changed — it’s just this perpetual moving target.”

Image

Justin F. Roebuck, the county clerk for Ottawa County in Michigan, has spent 17 years in election administration, but this year “definitely feels different,” he said. Credit...Alfield Reeves for The New York Times

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Ottawa County residents “had a really difficult time” grappling with false narratives after the 2020 election, Mr. Roebuck, the county clerk, said. Credit...Alfield Reeves for The New York Times

Mr. Roebuck has spent 17 years in election administration, but this year “definitely feels different,” he said. He has tried to conduct his own research — he twice took notes while watching “2,000 Mules,” a film built on unfounded allegations about election fraud, to analyze its misstatements. He shifted away from “throwing data and facts at people,” realizing that rigorous research from established think tanks may not move constituents who trust only right-wing outlets.

Now, he tries to reach voters on a personal level, stressing that he and his family are part of their community and care just as deeply for it.

“There’s a lot of people out there who are not bad actors, who are just really concerned because they’ve heard from sources they trust that there’s a problem,” he said.

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Ottawa residents at a voter inspector training. Mr. Roebuck said he shifted away from “throwing data and facts at people,” relying instead on personal connections.Credit...Alfield Reeves for The New York Times

The disconnect also exists in places like Oregon. The Democratic secretary of state, LaVonne Griffin-Valade, faced a steep cut to her annual budget for anti-disinformation measures, to $150,000 this year from $500,000 in 2022. That has forced her team to reuse old public service announcements and reduce their advertising spending by 35 percent compared with the midterms. Every day, her office fields hundreds of (often antagonistic) messages about the voting system, according to Ben Morris, her chief of staff.

When his team was building its playbook against conspiracy theories, academic research on disinformation was “incredibly important” as a resource, Mr. Morris said. In recent months, however, work on the subject by American universities and think tanks has been chilled by a right-wing campaign that cast it as a shadowy plot to stifle speech.

Mr. Morris’s team also hired an artificial intelligence company, Logically, to help monitor the spread of false claims via a service that he compared to “a Google alert on steroids.” In the fall, local Republicans said the team’s contract infringed on voters’ free speech. (Republicans in Washington State said that a similar contract with the secretary of state amounted to “political surveillance” and “government censorship.”)

Mr. Morris pushed back, saying that his team used Logically’s service to keep track of false narratives and identify which ones to debunk for constituents. The secretary of state’s office cannot take down online content and stopped submitting removal requests to social media companies after 2022 because “we didn’t think it was a good use of our time — Facebook and Twitter and those companies just ignored us,” he said.

Resistance from state legislators has tied up funding in various states that would have protected elections administrators and supported their efforts against conspiracy theories and false claims, officials said.

“Have those sorts of folks hampered what we’ve done? A little bit, yeah,” said Adrian Fontes, the secretary of state in Arizona and a Democrat. “We’re not doing anywhere near the kind of work that we could be doing because we understand the politics of the budgeting process, and there are some asks that we just refrained from making.”

Elections officials are doing what they can this year to shore up voter trust, setting up fact-checking websites (like in Pennsylvania) and posting refutations on social media (like a Mythbuster Mondays series in North Carolina).

Jazmin Wingert, the Republican county clerk for Stephenson County in Illinois, took an elections certification course with lessons on combating false narratives and meets nearly monthly with other county clerks to share security resources.

“It’s not an easy role,” said Ms. Wingert, 24, who is preparing to administer her first presidential election. “But I strongly believe in election integrity, and somebody has to fight the fight.”

The threats she and her peers face, however, are getting more technologically sophisticated.

Image

“It’s not an easy role,” said Jazmin Wingert, 24, county clerk for Stephenson County in Illinois. “But I strongly believe in election integrity, and somebody has to fight the fight.”Credit...Akilah Townsend for The New York Times

Many officials are girding for a potential October surprise powered by artificial intelligence — a piece of deepfaked audio or visual content, perhaps impersonating a candidate or poll worker, that cannot be debunked in time. The technology could also supercharge harassment campaigns, making it easier to blitz districts with frivolous public records requests asking for an overly broad range of documents, such as voter history files over an unspecified time frame, officials said. Last week, a bipartisan group of secretaries of state wrote to the tech billionaire Elon Musk to urge him to fix his A.I.-powered search assistant, Grok chatbot, saying it provided inaccurate information about ballot deadlines and then failed to correct the mistake for 10 days.

In Arizona, Mr. Fontes ran a crisis scenario exercise involving simulations of A.I.-enabled attacks, including deepfakes of election officials and attempts to harvest official login credentials. Several Republican election deniers in his state won their primary challenges late last month.

“I don’t have time to fret,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can to inoculate the system, to prepare it for our voters, for what we think might come. And I hope I’m overreacting.”

Tiffany Hsu reports on misinformation and disinformation and its origins, movement and consequences. She has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Tiffany Hsu

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 13, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Officials Battle Disinformation Deluging Voters. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

12. The CIA Sent Him Deep Undercover to Spy on Islamic Radicals. It Cost Him Everything

A long (painful) read. I have no idea who this person was, but I am sure there are many in the IC who must know this story.

These are the troubling concluding questions:

It’s a question of obligation: of what is owed to CIA officers like Lagunas when they’re in the field, burrowed undercover, and in mortal danger; and afterward, when their psychic scars begin to harden. And how an intelligence bureaucracy that must, at some level, approach people as interchangeable and replaceable — as cogs in a fearsome machine — must also account for individual humanity, especially when institutional and political incentives cut in the opposite direction.

Or, as a former agency officer tells me during a long discussion about Lagunas’ life: “To some, you’re a briefing point. To others, you’re a real person.”

The CIA Sent Him Deep Undercover to Spy on Islamic Radicals. It Cost Him Everything

A deep-cover CIA officer spent years underground trying to infiltrate Al Qaeda. But an investigation into his life, work, and death reveals mystery, moral quagmires, and the secret toll of the War on Terror

By Zach Dorfman

Illustration by Mark Smith

Aug 11, 2024 9:40 am

Rolling Stone · by Zach Dorfman · August 11, 2024

O ne day well into President George W. Bush’s second term, an ultra-deep-cover Central Intelligence Agency officer flew back to the United States for a break from a yearslong assignment in the Middle East.

The man had a bushy beard and a distinctive, needled scar on one arm from an old barracuda bite, likely earned while surfing — a favorite pastime in another life. But the operative couldn’t just hail a taxi and head to the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. Even in the United States, his identity had to be carefully shielded from most CIA personnel, let alone the enemy spy services that routinely blanketed the Washington, D.C., area with surveillance.

Since the operative had no known relation to the U.S. government — and the revelation of his real identity could be fatal overseas — the agency undertook extreme precautions to sneak him into Langley during his infrequent visits stateside.

To throw off potential pursuers, the operative would take a circuitous route to CIA headquarters, switching vehicles multiple times along the way. Only after his car slid into an underground garage in the bowels of Langley could he emerge for debriefings with the select group of CIA officials aware of his secret mission. The deep-cover spy was slated to meet CIA chief Michael Hayden himself. The owlish, eloquent Air Force general had assumed the directorship in May 2006. By this time, Hayden was a top veteran of a bruised America’s bloody War on Terror.

It is rare for CIA directors to meet personally with lower-level agency officers. But this deep-cover operative was anything but ordinary.

Recruited into an ultra-secret agency program in the aftermath of 9/11, he lived undercover for roughly half a decade in the Middle East as an Islamist radical, burrowing into extremist groups, a U.S. intelligence officer embedded deeply behind the War on Terror’s front lines. He was the CIA’s equivalent of a jihadist Donnie Brasco.

During his years undercover as an extremist, this man even infiltrated Al Qaeda itself, according to four former CIA officials. Intelligence he gathered was repeatedly briefed to the CIA director and the White House. Hayden, according to former officials, even pushed for an in-person meeting between the deep-cover operative and President Bush himself — the holy grail of honors for most CIA employees. And at one point, he would be snuck into the White House to meet the president. (Hayden declined to comment for this story. Bush did not return a request for comment.)

The CIA’s veil of secrecy often submerges individuals’ stories, over time, into a compartmented void. But within some agency circles, this operative’s feats were the stuff of hushed renown. He was a “freaking legend,” says a former colleague. A “hero,” says another. “Exceptionally ballsy and committed,” says a third.

But some within the agency questioned the tangible intelligence value of this operative’s work, and the broader efficacy of the CIA’s post-9/11 push to seed more deep-cover officers abroad, including into terrorist circles. For two powerful kingdoms within the CIA, locked in the eternal governmental battle over resources and prestige, his case became emblematic of deep disagreements about the agency’s role in the War on Terror.

It’s doubtful the deep-cover operative was thinking about bureaucratic knife fighting that day in Hayden’s office. Indeed, it’s not clear what he was pondering at all. Unlike many CIA operations officers, who tend toward blustery self-confidence, the deep-cover spy seemed awkward and uncomfortable and slightly withdrawn at the meeting, according to a former senior agency official.

To the former official, the operative behaved as if he just stepped out into the harsh summer sun, blinking and woozy, from inside a pitch-black movie theater. It was “like he was seeing the light of day” for the first time in a long while, this person recalls.

The spy’s behavior that day augured more serious psychological and emotional issues to come — issues that eventually led the CIA to pull him from his dangerous undercover assignment; issues that some former agency colleagues believe culminated in his tragic death in 2016.

Even after this operative’s death, however, disputes about his legacy have not dissipated. Nor have questions ceased about how the CIA ministers to — or disregards — the acute psychic strains sometimes faced by intelligence officers like him, or more broadly, about how it oversees the larger deep-cover corps of which he was a part.

President Bush secretly met Lagunas in the White House. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

His story serves as a requiem for the CIA’s War on Terror, mirroring its successes as well as institutional and moral disfigurements. And his case speaks to fundamental questions about the viability of the CIA’s human-focused spying mission in the 21st century — quandaries that, if anything, have only become more acute in the years after his death.

“What he did — at the time, we thought it was amazing,” says a former CIA official. But “time and distance” have revised this person’s assessment. “Did he just give his life for nothing? All the risk and danger, so what? What really was accomplished? What was really done?” asks the former agency official.

This article, based on extensive conversations with more than two dozen former CIA officials who spoke to Rolling Stone, is an attempt to answer those questions. It is the story of a man whose life, even for most of his CIA colleagues, is encased in shadow, unheralded and unknown; a spy secreted away from his agency compatriots, who fought in a secret war that was and wasn’t a war; an operative whose legacy is — even today — the object of contention and equivocation among the select CIA cohort who knew him and his work.

It is also the sort of story that, inevitably, contains gaps and blind spots and approximations. It is the result of years of careful biographical stitching of a man who operated in the most rarefied and covert corners of the U.S. government. Former CIA officials — rarely endowed with the “full picture” themselves — shared what they could, or what they were willing, with Rolling Stone.

But much about his life remains secret. And many of those secrets are now sealed, permanently, in the irreversible silence of an early grave.

Many of the former CIA officials who spoke with Rolling Stone for this story requested anonymity in order to discuss sensitive agency programs and operations. “Without commenting on claims specific to any individual, with regard to our workforce, CIA takes the mental, physical, and professional health of our officers very seriously, and in recent years has significantly expanded the resources available to our workforce,” wrote a CIA spokesperson in response to a detailed list of fact-checking questions. “We have no higher obligation than to ensure the safety and well-being of our workforce.” The agency declined to provide further comment.

“He looked out of central casting,” recalls a former CIA official. An Arabic-speaking Midwestern white boy with “a killer beard” turned jihadist.

THE DEEP-COVER OPERATIVE was known as “Anthony Lagunas” within the CIA, according to 13 former agency officials.

That isn’t his real name. It’s a pseudonym. The CIA employs these “pseudos,” as they’re called, as a security measure for undercover agency employees. The CIA is not a normal workplace. You can work closely with colleagues there for years and never know their true identities.

Since, out in the world, deep-cover CIA officers like Lagunas may operate under their real names, the true identities of such operatives are among the most closely guarded secrets in an organization defined by them.

In fact, most of the agency officials who spoke with Rolling Stone never knew Lagunas’ true name — let alone the sorts of biographical details one might expect to learn about a colleague. When it came to spies like Lagunas, “you didn’t touch the core of the other person’s life,” says a former CIA officer.

As a deep-cover operative, Lagunas was a member of a very small club. Most CIA officers abroad pose as diplomats or military personnel or other sorts of U.S. officials, maintaining what is known as “official cover.” Their connection to the U.S. government is overt; it’s their connection to the CIA that’s hidden, at least in theory.

Not so with Lagunas and his cadre. They are known within the CIA as “NOCs,” because they work under “non-official cover.” NOCs commonly pose as businesspeople — think import-exporters, high-tech experts, or financial advisers. Some work for established corporations; others as freelancers or consultants.

NOCs have no overt connections to the U.S. government, and therefore none of the protections afforded to such officials, like diplomatic immunity. If their identities are blown, it can mean arrest — or worse. NOCs can live a “very dangerous life,” remarked former CIA director James Woolsey in a 2010 interview with the University of Virginia.

And NOCs all have to “live their cover,” which means literally working two jobs: one’s day gig and one’s real job, as a spy. “If you’re going to seem to the Iranians to be a Syrian smuggler operating along the border, you have to probably actually go be a Syrian smuggler operating along the border for a few years,” said Woolsey at the same interview.

It’s well known that 9/11 precipitated an epochal shift at the CIA. But it’s easy, two decades on, to gloss over just how thoroughly it transformed the agency. Mired in a post-Cold War slump, the CIA had lacked the animating fire of a global confrontation between two superpowers. It found new purpose after Sept. 11, transforming itself from an organization focused on more traditional human-centered espionage — above all, the subtle art of stealing secrets from foreign governments — to an oft-lethal manhunting force arrayed against nonstate terror groups.

The agency “all went to war at the same time,” says Mick Mulroy, a former senior CIA official. Elite paramilitaries like Mulroy had been trained for combat operations. But for many CIA personnel, the agency’s post-9/11 metamorphosis came as a major shock.

Many had “joined the agency to serve their country for sure, but a whole lot of people weren’t thinking, ‘You know, I’m going to be driving around an ambush alley in an unarmored pickup truck with an M-4 strapped to my chest,’” Mulroy recalls.

The urgency of the post-9/11 world shook the CIA into action. “There was a lot of this, like, ‘Let’s just get out and go and then think about consequences later,’ ” says Janaki Kates, another former senior CIA official.

The new locus of power within the agency was its Counterterrorist Center (CTC), whose budget swelled with funding from Congress. After 9/11, CTC had the money; it had the staffing; it had the clout. And it also had the runway, because the Bush administration took a lax view on oversight as it prosecuted its deadly counterterrorism campaign across the globe. There wasn’t merely a capacious appetite for risk, recalls a former CIA official. “In the early- to mid-aughts, it was ‘Eat as much as you want,’ ” this person says. “There was no shortage of supersensitive, ethically dubious things going on at CTC at the time.”

The War on Terror also convulsed the agency’s NOC programs. Some in the national-security bureaucracy had long believed that the CIA needed to move much of its human spying operations “out of embassy,” away from traditional forms of cover — especially in order to infiltrate extremist groups.

“One needs to use non-official cover officers to recruit spies inside terrorist organizations,” said Woolsey during a 1998 congressional hearing. “Not too many of Mr. Bin Laden’s supporters and friends attend embassy cocktail parties,” he quipped.

After 9/11, powerful elements on the Hill and within the CIA pushed the agency to vastly expand its deep-cover operations. “The CIA must move emphatically to develop an entirely new collection paradigm involving greater use of non-official cover (NOC) officers,” wrote Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in 2002. Congress would throw billions at the initiative.

The decision was far from universally popular within the CIA itself. Before 9/11, the CIA’s NOC corps had been modest, with under 70 deep-cover operatives deployed worldwide, according to the intelligence historian Loch Johnson. After the attacks by Al Qaeda, the NOC program tripled or quadrupled in size, according to a former senior CIA official.

However, for many at Langley, the new NOCs weren’t properly trained, weren’t properly vetted, and weren’t properly deployed. “In the rush to get all these people out there after 9/11, it was just ‘Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up,’” recalls another former senior official. “Some of the things they did were just absolutely fucking crazy. Just stupid. And just so they could use up this money, and tell Congress, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got all these out-of-embassy platforms going on,’ and … they were delusional.”

Moreover, deep-cover CIA officers weren’t going to burrow into Al Qaeda by posing as international businessmen or tech entrepreneurs. If the agency was going to use NOCs to successfully infiltrate terrorist networks, it needed a different strategy. Inspiration would spring from an unlikely place.

IN THE FALL OF 2001, U.S. forces in Afghanistan detained a Taliban fighter who didn’t fit the normal jihadist profile. His name was John Walker Lindh. He was a 20-year-old white American man from California’s ultra-wealthy, left-wing Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Lindh, a convert to Islam, had left the U.S. a few years before to study at a Muslim religious academy in Yemen. From there, he traced a path to Pakistan, and eventually Afghanistan, where he trained at an Al Qaeda terrorist camp, and even met Osama Bin Laden.

The arrest of Lindh in Afghanistan showed that an American spy could infiltrate Islamists. James Hill/Redux

Lindh’s story was “proof of concept” for the sort of NOC program that, just a few years earlier, would have been laughed out of the room, says the former official. But no one was laughing now. This was “some of the impetus” for Lagunas, recalls the former official.

There was a logic to the idea. To maintain its terrorist infrastructure, Al Qaeda needed recruits with Western passports, natives who could embed themselves within Western societies. After Sept. 11, such operatives become an increasingly valuable commodity. “It was Al Qaeda’s dream to be able to recruit an American they could deploy,” recalls a former senior official. This, went the thinking, was a gap the CIA could exploit.

So a tiny, elite band of deep-penetration CTC NOCs was born. The objective was to spy on and disrupt Muslim extremist circles from inside them, to become members of the very terrorist groups the CIA was hoping to dismantle.

“We were able to infiltrate into the ranks of some of these organizations when people thought it was impossible to do so,” says a former senior CIA official. “Nothing’s impossible.”

The “convert NOC” program, as it was informally known, essentially cribbed its methodology from the Lindh case. CIA officers would go undercover as disaffected Westerners drawn to the study of Arabic or Islamic theology. They would “convert” to Islam — or, if the CIA spies happened to be Muslim already, evidence a radicalizing faith. They would enroll at madrassas abroad, institutions where the CIA believed these operatives could befriend people with connections to Islamist extremist or terrorist groups. And they would slowly, over years undercover, and through these deepening, concentric circles of trust, penetrate the terrorist groups themselves.

This was a radical proposition for the CIA, for several reasons. One related to the fundamental profile of the undercover CIA officials — and their targets. “What CTC did for the first time was the religious aspect of it,” says a former CIA official. “It was ‘We need to target people by their religious background.’ It was ‘I don’t need to seed people into IBM, I need to seed them into the local mosque.’”

Knotty legal issues were also inevitable. Neither undercover CIA officers nor recruited agency sources are allowed to provide “material support” to sanctioned terrorist groups without a legally prescribed waiver granted by CIA lawyers, sometimes in consultation with the Department of Justice. And even these waivers are highly circumscribed, permitting, say, an undercover CIA officer or asset to pony up funding for a terrorist group’s safe house, but not money for bomb-making materials.

Lagunas chafed over these seemingly arbitrary regulations, recalls a former colleague. He was incredulous over the idea that he could, in theory, “hand over a bag with 12 but not 13 Glocks, because that’s assisting terrorism — you’re expecting this guy to count the number of pistols?” recalls the former CIA official. “If that’s what you’re getting into — 12 or 13 — at this point, it doesn’t matter.” (Lagunas was underlining his frustrations with the legal regime governing his undercover mission, says the former CIA official, who didn’t know if he was actually involved in weapons transfers.)

It might have been cold comfort to Lagunas at the time, but U.S. officials understood the difficult position they were putting NOCs like him in. They “truly were sent out to do the impossible, and given some guidance that was just about impossible to follow in the real world and keep their cover,” says a former intelligence-community lawyer.

And for deep-cover operatives like Lagunas, maintaining cover can be a life-or-death proposition. A NOC outed while poking around a jihadist network would likely face immediate execution. Lagunas understood there was “no mercy with that crew he was with,” recalls a former CIA official.

When Lagunas joined the CIA, he couldn’t have dreamed of undertaking such an assignment. He was just a CIA trainee when the planes hit the towers. He hadn’t even begun his coursework at the Farm, the agency’s covert training facility in rural Virginia, yet. Nor had he been preselected to become a NOC, let alone one tasked with going undercover as an Islamic extremist. “He wasn’t hired for this,” recalls a former senior CIA officer. “9/11 happened.”

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Lagunas and a few others disappeared from the CIA’s normal training program. At first, recalls a former colleague, Lagunas’ fellow trainees weren’t sure what had happened to him — whether he had been transferred to some ultra-secret initiative, or just kicked out of the CIA altogether.

“It was Al Qaeda’s dream to recruit an American they could deploy,” recalls a former CIA official. This, went the thinking, was a gap the CIA could exploit.

“It was 50-50,” says a former agency official — because back then, Lagunas was known as a something of a wild man. A heavy drinker, he was “a bit of a womanizer — a lot of a womanizer,” recalls the former official. But Lagunas hadn’t been booted from the agency. Far from it. First, the CIA knew he had some preexisting knowledge of Arabic — a critical language skill for an agency scrambling to reinvent itself. But there were other, highly specialized criteria that drove his recruitment into this new, ultra-secret NOC initiative.

It was likely Lagunas’ unusual psychological profile, above all, that led to his selection. Not many of us can live another life — a lie — full time. Even fewer can do so when discovery of the charade might lead to imprisonment, torture, or death.

But Lagunas could go even further than most. “He had the ability to detach” from himself, recalls a former senior agency official. “And mentally, it’s a flaw. I don’t want to say it’s a split personality, or something like that. But the ability to detach one reality and to adopt a second reality to the point where you’re not acting it, but you are it, that’s a skill set that can’t be taught.”

This ability of Lagunas to detach — to inhabit that second existence, to become that undercover persona — “is a good and a bad thing,” continues the former senior official. “It’s a great thing if you’re going to do what he was doing. It’s a hard thing when the doorway between the two existences is never quite as clear as it might normally be for other people.”

Lagunas’ ability to dissociate was “extraordinary,” says this former official. But it “probably was the root of much of his challenge” in keeping track of where the undercover persona ended and the real man began, as he infiltrated ever deeper into the world of jihadist terror.

But all that came later. First, Lagunas had to actually begin his “conversion” to jihadism abroad, to get within the orbit of the people who would later introduce him to the real players in the world of Islamist extremism. He was extremely enthusiastic about his mission, recalls a former senior CIA official, driving the initiative and “rough plan” for his own deep-cover operation.

Lagunas had his assignment. “The cover was to learn Arabic,” recalls a former CIA official. “The goal was to infiltrate.”

AFTER UNDERTAKING SPECIALIZED training for deep-cover CIA officers, Lagunas made his way to the Middle East. Where he attempted his initial beachhead into Islamist radicalism is unclear. For at least part of his multiyear undercover odyssey, Lagunas was based in Cairo, living in a madrassa there, studying the Koran and establishing his jihadist bona fides, according to former officials. He also seemed to have spent time in Saudi Arabia.

The CIA needed to get Lagunas “Islamically sound,” says a former official, to know how “to go to a mosque and pray,” to appear to be an Islamic scholar, “a Salafi-minded guy,” in order to embed with devotees of the radical offshoot of Sunni Islam central to much jihadist thought.

“The cover was to learn Arabic, the goal was to infiltrate.” Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

Though increasingly fluent in Islamic theology, and able to present himself as deeply pious while undercover, Lagunas could be harshly dismissive of Islam in private. Once, during a clandestine meeting with another CIA officer, he carelessly chucked his ornate Koran onto a nearby bed, telling the other operative he didn’t “give a crap about that fiction,” recalls a former official. Lagunas was “not enthralled by what he was studying,” says the former official. The message was “Screw it, dude, it’s just a prop.”

Still, he managed to become increasingly embedded in the radical Islamist milieu. He lived in a madrassa, sleeping on the floor there, undertaking immersive study in Arabic and the Koran. Months undercover became years. Lagunas wasn’t the only CIA “convert” NOC burrowed within the jihadist world, but he remained undercover in that world for longer, and with fewer breaks, than his peers, according to former CIA officials.

And his transformation was impressive. He “looked like something out of Hollywood central casting,” recalls a former senior agency official: an Arabic-speaking Salafist with a “killer beard,” decked out in traditional garb, an all-American Midwestern white boy turned jihadist.

But gaining proximity to extremists is not necessarily the same thing as penetrating a terrorist group, let alone terrorist leadership. And neither necessarily translates into access to valuable intelligence — especially in a CIA bureaucracy obsessively focused on capturing or killing Al Qaeda leadership and other terrorist operatives.

And here is where Lagunas’ story gets tricky.

Tricky because there’s a vast gulf in how knowledgeable officials perceived — and still assess — Lagunas’ work. Tricky because Lagunas’ case helped fuel a proxy battle between the agency’s pugilistic type-A operations barons. Tricky because these disagreements touched on fundamentally divergent perspectives on the nature of intelligence itself, particularly in the counterterrorism world.

According to four former officials, Lagunas did eventually successfully infiltrate Al Qaeda itself — but Al Qaeda’s broader network, and not its leadership. “He was inside that organization, as well as the other satellite extremist organizations in and around it,” says a former senior CIA official.

But other former CIA spooks are skeptical of Lagunas’ accomplishments. It “may be generous” to say he penetrated Al Qaeda, says a former senior official, who muses that the “legend” of Lagunas may derive partly from “the fact that he was a white guy” living deep undercover as a Muslim radical, more than from any actual intelligence he produced. Three former officials say that while Lagunas did indeed work his way into radical Islamist circles, he never actually penetrated Al Qaeda.

Every great spy story is also a secret history of bureaucracy. And these wildly different assessments were driven, at least in part, by divergent institutional prerogatives.

Within the CIA, Lagunas had to serve two institutional masters: the Global Deployment Center (GDC) and Counterterrorist Center. (In 2005, CTC was officially renamed the Counterterrorism Center.) Lagunas’ ultimate “home” within the agency was GDC, which oversaw the agency’s NOC programs. Functionally, though, his program was run by CTC.

Bitter debate erupted between the two agency power centers. There was a “huge dichotomy in the workforce between the CTC guys, who would literally say, ‘That guy’s fucking worthless,’ and the [GDC] guys who would say, ‘This guy’s a shining example of the best we can be,’” says a former senior agency official. “It’s really amazing. In my life, I’ve never seen anything where the two sides were so diametrically opposed.”

Within the CIA, Lagunas’ case became a sort of Rorschach test over the fundamental principles of intelligence work in an age of terrorism.

CTC prized one thing above all else: “actionable” information to help kill or capture top terrorists in Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups. CTC wanted information to put “lead on the forehead” of terror targets. Everything else was a distraction.

Though he had successfully infiltrated extremist circles in the Arab world, Lagunas was not, by CTC’s lights, truly deployed behind the front lines in the War on Terror for much of his assignment. They wanted him embedded closer to global jihadist leadership in Afghanistan or Pakistan. He balked, according to a former senior CIA official. Frustration and resentment mounted within CTC.

The feeling there was “Lagunas is fucking around … he’s not accomplishing anything, we keep trying to get him in the fight, he’s resisting,” recalls the former senior official. CTC officials fumed that “he was smoking and joking and, you know, chasing women and drinking too much, and not living the Salafist lifestyle that would maybe get him ingratiated with the types of people we wanted to get him in front of,” says the former official.

For many within CTC, Lagunas’ operation was viewed as “something that more looks good on a PowerPoint presentation, as opposed to something actually valuable,” says another former senior official.

Senior officials with CIA’s Global Deployment Center, meanwhile, argued that Lagunas was providing critical intelligence in the War on Terror — and, more broadly, that he served as an example of the bravery, creativity, and savoir faire within the agency’s NOC corps.

“One part of the organization really, really, really wanted the success story they could brief up the command chain, about how great they were doing and, ‘Look at this guy, and look at that beard, and he’s living and working with the fellas, and he’s, like, sleeping at a madrassa, and this is fucking incredible, this is the stuff out of spy movies.’ … And it’s a great story to tell, and so they told it,” says a former senior official. “They really promoted the shit out of it.”

But to detractors within the CIA, Lagunas was yet another example of GDC “briefing deployments, not successes,” says another former official. “They had a map of the globe with push pins for where people were deployed, and that was one of their big, proud briefing moments of ‘Look where we’ve put people,’” recalls the former agency official. “‘Oh, we’ve got a guy in the Maldives? Why?’ ‘I don’t know, but we’ve got a guy in the Maldives.’”

Whatever the truth about the efficacy of his efforts, for a time, Lagunas was undeniably the GDC’s star brief, and according to some CIA sources, there was nothing superficial whatsoever about Lagunas’ accomplishments. “He was very, very talented and very adept at being able to acquire information that was incredibly helpful to the U.S. government,” says another former senior official.

“Day-to-day it was rare that you’d have something in your hand that you would be like, ‘Holy fuck, this is gonna change the universe. Somebody, quick, get the president on the phone,’” says the former official. “But, when someone did [say], ‘Someone’s gotta call the White House,’ there were a great number of times that the entire thing originated with this man.”

Many within the CIA fundamentally misunderstood Lagunas’ import, according to this former senior spook. First, because the number of agency officials privy to the true scope of his work was so tightly restricted, given its sensitivity. And second, according to this former senior spy, because many agency officials — particularly within CTC — did not really understand the difference between “strategic” and “tactical” intelligence.

“He was able to provide … the kind of information you’d need to draw the foundation of a program that would then have a great, widespread impact against the enemy,” says the former official. “So, without his contributions, there are a lot of lower-level, more tactical, perishable ops that never would have been able to be exploited or taken place.”

What sort of terrorism-related intelligence Lagunas provided the CIA is murky, and former agency officials refuse to divulge details of his assignment.

But it’s unlikely that Lagunas, working a dangerous job deep undercover, spent much time contemplating the distinctions between strategic and tactical intelligence, and the battles at Langley over his case — if he was aware of them at all.

Years spent inhabiting another person’s existence will do that. And former agency officials say there were signs, subtle at first, then more acute, that Lagunas was becoming untethered. But the deeper he penetrated into jihadist circles, and the more plaudits he received from his boosters at Langley, the fewer incentives there might have been at the CIA to see a man becoming undone.

“When someone would say ‘we gotta call the White House,’ a number of times it originated with this man.”

“I remember somebody saying it well: The agency is going to burn you down until you raise your hand. They’re never going to say ‘stop’ on your behalf,” says William Negley, a former CIA operations officer. (Negley is unfamiliar with the specifics of Lagunas’ case.)

It’s a cruel calculus, where success increases an operative’s momentum, but “that momentum can be destructive at times,” says a former senior official. They “become the dog that catches the car.”

The warning signs were there. Take Lagunas’ secret White House meeting with Bush. This would be the honor of a lifetime for most CIA officers. The president is the agency’s “top customer,” and the CIA is fiercely protective of its relationship with the Oval Office. And while the president might meet regularly with the agency’s director, or his CIA-supplied intelligence briefers, only under extraordinary circumstances would a rank-and-file agency officer be granted an audience with the commander in chief.

Accounts differ on why the meeting materialized when it did. “I heard it was the dynamic of keeping him happy,” says a former agency official — that Lagunas “wanted to be done” with his life undercover as a jihadist, and the meeting with President Bush was a way for the CIA to demonstrate how indispensable he was to the agency.

But there’s another way to view the get-together, says the former CIA official. Perhaps the agency’s concern wasn’t only in mollifying a wearied employee, but also in putting on a show for its top customer. Lagunas so convincingly looked the part of an Islamist radical. His bravery and perseverance were undeniable. And his story briefed so well to a man who had made “winning” the War on Terror the cornerstone of his presidency.

The CIA “did a whole lot of ball washing with Bush,” says the former official. “He could have killed the agency after 9/11. And he didn’t.” And agency officials, entrusted with winning that secret war, wanted — needed — to maintain the president’s confidence.

A drone strike in Iraq. The CIA was looking for targets in the War on Terror. Ramzi Haidar/AFP/Getty Images

But if the meeting was, even in part, designed to lift Lagunas’ spirits, it didn’t work. He downplayed its significance to colleagues. His reaction was “Yeah, I met the president, but now I’ve got to go back, and hopefully I get to sit next to a hot girl on the flight over,” recalls a former agency official.

Some had already begun to notice a certain drift in his bearing. The man with the uncanny ability to detach from his “real” life, to fully inhabit another, no longer seemed quite so sure what his real life even was anymore. CIA officials knew that spending too much time so deep undercover could sometimes sever a person from himself. And that, generally, was when it was time to bring a NOC in from the cold.

In such a case, a NOC’s entire value system could become impalpably, but profoundly, reordered — a dangerous psychic shift for an undercover intelligence officer. “As you detach from who you may actually be, as that becomes your new reality, the things that would normally have impressed you before no longer do,” says a former senior official. “The things that would have normally frightened you before, no longer do. Bureaucratic rewards that someone might want to give you no longer have the meaning they once would have had.”

Bureaucratic rewards like, say, meeting the president. But, for a NOC that far gone, it’s not going to matter. “You’re trying to reward them in a system to which they no longer belong,” says the former senior official. At that point in his deployment, Lagunas “didn’t identify with the value system that would have made that [event] a significant mark in his life,” says the former official. Lagunas’ muted reaction to meeting the president was evidence of a deeper dysfunction, believes this former official.

By the late 2000s, concerns about Lagunas’ deteriorating psychic health — as well as the acute physical danger of his assignment — percolated upward to the highest reaches of the agency. Lagunas, CIA officials concluded, needed to come home.

FAIRLY OR NOT, many within the CIA view the agency’s domestically-focused office, called the National Resources (NR) division, as an institutional backwater. As an intelligence service primarily empowered to operate abroad, the CIA has a built-in bias toward the foreign — and many of its operations officers, in particular, gauge the success of their careers by the geopolitical import of the countries to which they are posted.

But the CIA has a sizable, if generally hush-hush, presence within the U.S. itself, with NR offices dotting America’s major cities. Domestic CIA stations have produced important intelligence for the agency. But the CIA has also used these offices as rest stops — temporary or final — for agency operatives who can no longer cut it in the foreign arena. Some within the CIA have even derisively referred to NR as the “Near Retirement” division. Postings there can serve as unofficial decompression or cooling-off periods, time-outs of sorts.

“He was a good guy, but he was just kind of ate up” by the “baggage from that operation,” says a former CIA official. “He got into some shit, and it was bad.”

Such, it appears, was the case of Anthony Lagunas in Los Angeles. By the early 2010s, he was working at the agency’s large NR office there. No longer undercover as an Islamist radical, but still operating as a deep-cover intelligence officer, his new assignment had him placed somewhere in the entertainment industry — that is, Hollywood.

It’s not clear what Lagunas actually accomplished in Tinseltown. But the psychic hangover, the trauma of his time deep undercover as a jihadist was clear. “He was just not the same” after he returned stateside, says a former CIA official. His woes were compounded by a rough romantic breakup he was also navigating at the time.

“He was a good guy, but he was just kind of ate up” by the “baggage from that operation,” says another former agency official. Even if Lagunas’ CIA colleagues weren’t aware of the details of his time abroad, they understood “it was heavy, he got into some shit, it was bad, it was rough on him, [and] he was all fucked up,” says the former official.

At this point, it might have been best for Lagunas to leave the CIA altogether. “How many times can you invade Normandy before you have to do something else?” asks the former official. But he didn’t. What is crystalline, in hindsight, however, is his mounting psychological fragility and a rocky transition for the deep-cover spy, who may have been experiencing a sense of erasure.

He “came in from the cold to no reception,” says a former CIA official. “‘Oh, you did what? Well, that’s great. Make sure you log in at nine, buddy.’ It didn’t matter.” In the CIA, “people go do amazing things, [and] when you come back, it’s ‘Well, what have you done today for us?’”

But some things are impossible to forget, even if your bosses do.

IN THE FALL OF 2016, a former colleague of Lagunas’ received a call from a mutual friend from the agency. Lagunas was dead. He had passed suddenly in a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

It was an utter shock. “My blood went cold,” says a former agency officer. “He was the type of guy … that nothing could ever happen to him. He was bulletproof.”

The precise circumstances surrounding Lagunas’ demise were — and are — hazy. Drug or alcohol abuse likely contributed. Extreme depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, too. Was his death attributable to a sort of suicide by dissipation, colleagues wondered, or perhaps just a gruesome accident fueled by a toxic-chemical misadventure?

Lagunas was still working for the CIA, and the agency rumor mill — a persistent pressure valve in an organization entombed by secrecy — hummed. Theories often abound within the agency when CIA officers die unexpectedly abroad. Is a heart attack really just a heart attack? Do agency executives actually know the cause of death? Would they tell the truth even if they did? An organization adept at executing conspiracies is uniquely susceptible to thinking in terms of them.

For others, whether Lagunas technically died of a heart attack, or suicide, or a drug or alcohol overdose was almost beside the point. He was “fighting some demons,” says a former senior official, and his death was “tragic either way.” His true killers were all upstream, perhaps years upstream, of his solitary demise in Southeast Asia in 2016.

It was “stress [that] translated to cause of death,” says another former official. “The stress of life, what he went through.”

An operation like Lagunas’ “only works well in spy novels and screenplays,” says a former senior CIA official. Undercover spies like him “all come out of it with some sort of PTSD.”

Within the agency, unofficially at least, Lagunas’ story became known as a “cautionary tale,” says another former official, of the strains sometimes faced by CIA officers, and the acute dangers to their mental health.

A Memorial Wall commemorates fallen CIA officers at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. John McDonnell/”The Washington Post”/Getty Images

Being a NOC “is beyond the loneliest job ever,” says a former CIA officer. NOCs are, by necessity, alienated from the CIA at large. They cannot just walk into Langley and pal around with colleagues there. They cannot blow off steam with their co-workers inside the protective confines of a U.S. embassy abroad. Even the barest communication back to their overseers within the CIA can be fraught with peril. If a NOC is struggling with psychic pain, there are just fewer people around with whom that person can talk to, or who would recognize that an operative might need help.

“As far as there is such a thing as ‘normal’ CIA operations, the further removed you are from them, the more difficult it is to get” mental-health help, says Mulroy, the former senior agency official. “And that community is further removed.

“I don’t know how they assisted them with this type of support, because it’s more difficult to do that and maintain their status,” continues Mulroy, who is unfamiliar with Lagunas’ story.

The CIA has a self-protective, insular culture — at times, it operates almost like a secular priesthood, with a body of arcane traditions and holy texts — but there is an intense esprit de corps within the agency. NOCs have far fewer opportunities to partake in this communal institutional life.

Fundamentally, the opaque nature of the work of NOCs like Lagunas, and the experiential chasm that isolates them from fellow agency officers, means the psychic trauma they face just may not register to their “big CIA” colleagues.

At agency headquarters, “you’ve got people who are living in northern Virginia and worried about their mortgage payments, getting their kids to gymnastics, the parent-teacher conference, and meanwhile you’ve got this guy who’s trying to go into a terrorist organization,” recalls a former senior official. “And it just doesn’t work.” The CIA bureaucracy simply “wasn’t equipped for his mission, and it wasn’t equipped for the fallout.”

In truth, Lagunas’ quiet desperation may be more common within the agency’s corps of deep-cover operatives than generally acknowledged or understood. “For that cadre? He was middle-of-the-road for mental health and all that,” says a former senior official.

For NOCs like Lagunas, however, grappling with the psychic aftereffects of time spent deep undercover is often only half the battle. Many agency operations officers view NOCs as “second-tier” spooks, ill-qualified for high-level positions within the organization. NOCs who try to make the switch to “inside” work sometimes find themselves stymied and marginalized, and end up quitting the agency altogether.

These are “people we ask to do the hardest things in the world, with the least amount of support, and then we turn them around and kick them in the teeth when they come back” inside, says another former CIA official.

The CIA faces “deep challenges on the mental-health front,” says Negley, the former officer. “The symptoms are written all over the wall.”

NOCs are not the only CIA officers subject to acute psychic stressors, of course. Many activities undertaken by other agency personnel — like secretly meeting with sources in hostile, surveillance-laden environments, or paramilitary missions — can breed paranoia, tension, and anxiety.

The post-9/11 militarization of the agency brought a generation of CIA officers, most of whom were not trained paramilitaries, into the charnel-houses of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other secret war zones around the globe. Deep scarring of the agency’s War on Terror generation was inevitable.

After the advent of the War on Terror, “it took a while before we realized just how much it was affecting the psyche” of CIA officers, says Kates, the former senior CIA official. (Kates is also unfamiliar with the specifics of Lagunas’ case.)

“This is kind of a tidal wave coming at us,” says Negley, the former CIA officer. The CIA faces “deep, fundamental challenges” on the mental-health front, says Negley, who founded Sound Off, a nonprofit network that provides mental-health support to U.S. military and intelligence-community personnel. “The symptoms of ‘Hey, this community has a problem’ are written all over the wall.”

Some former CIA officials believe the institution, whether by commission or omission, has abandoned its own. “There’s a lot of folks out there that are flapping in the wind,” says one former CIA operative.

The agency provides “zero” psychological care to former spooks, according to Negley. “I know agency officers who are paying for other agency officers’ mental-health support, which is about as fucked as I can think,” he says. But these issues are beginning to burst into the open. “There’s been more discussion of CIA mental health in the last year than I’ve seen in the preceding 15 years.”

Over time, the CIA has at least tried to become more attuned to the psychic health of its current workforce, according to some former officials. In 2022, the agency even announced the appointment of its first-ever chief well-being officer.

The agency has undergone a “notable shift” on the mental-health front since the early post-9/11 years, says Kates. “Will I say that they were perfect? Oh, definitely not. Will I criticize? Certainly. But I will say that there were also a lot of steps taken. I think that there was an acknowledgment that people needed that support,” she says.

The CIA has also long employed a group of in-house psychologists, and as the War on Terror progressed, CTC increased the number of mental-health professionals available to agency officers working there, according to Kates and other former agency officials.

Whenever Lagunas returned to CIA headquarters from the Middle East, his bosses ensured he met with a staff psychologist, according to two former CIA officials. But whatever help the deep-cover spy was receiving, it clearly wasn’t enough.

Maybe Lagunas just wasn’t a good fit for work as a NOC, suggests one former senior official: “I’m not trying to minimize what this guy went through, but to say ‘Oh, the agency killed him’ — you all signed up for that. It’s tragic, but that’s the mission.”

Some CIA officers can go deep undercover, or work in war zones, and then come home and “kiss their wife and children, and life’s good,” says another former senior agency official. But others cannot isolate themselves so cannily from their own lives.

And Lagunas — a man so brilliant at compartmentalizing other aspects of his being — may simply have been unable to dam this particular sort of psychic seepage.

THERE IS A SOMBER MEMORIAL in the lobby of CIA headquarters, conceived as a sort of sacred space for agency employees. One hundred forty black stars are carved into a white marble wall, each representing a CIA employee who perished in the line of duty.

Many of the names of these CIA employees are public; some are still classified. A black leather book, known as the Book of Honor, sits encased in glass beneath the stars, the appellations of publicly-acknowledged CIA operatives inscribed within it.

Lagunas’ story may be an extreme one, but it isn’t unique. He was part of a select corps of intelligence officers pushed beyond their limits during a bloody shadow war, one fought with a secret and amorphous logic, in a conflict whose higher mathematics still constitutes forbidden knowledge to the American people.

Lagunas may not have been killed on the job, say former colleagues, but he was absolutely killed by it. He “won’t get a star on the wall,” says a former CIA officer, “but he should have.”

It’s a question of obligation: of what is owed to CIA officers like Lagunas when they’re in the field, burrowed undercover, and in mortal danger; and afterward, when their psychic scars begin to harden. And how an intelligence bureaucracy that must, at some level, approach people as interchangeable and replaceable — as cogs in a fearsome machine — must also account for individual humanity, especially when institutional and political incentives cut in the opposite direction.

Or, as a former agency officer tells me during a long discussion about Lagunas’ life: “To some, you’re a briefing point. To others, you’re a real person.”

Rolling Stone · by Zach Dorfman · August 11, 2024

13. The US tried to fix its foreign military sales system. Did it work?

​One of the fundamental questions is whether the FMS system is simply a bureaucratic process to support the US defense industry or is it a tool of strategy that should be executed in support of national and theater strategy and campaign plans?

And a second question is can our defense industrial base support both our military as well as foreign militaries in a way that supports US national and theater strategy?

The US tried to fix its foreign military sales system. Did it work?

Defense News · by Noah Robertson · August 12, 2024

Last summer when the Pentagon released its plan to fix its sprawling foreign military sales system, it also issued a warning.

Sasha Baker, then a top policy official and one of the co-chairs of the “tiger team” leading the effort, mentioned, pointedly, that they had tried this before. The U.S., she said, has tinkered with its foreign military system “roughly every 18 months for the last 20 years,” like a car in and out of the shop.

The goal this time, Baker said, was to make repairs that would last.

Little more than a year after their recommendations came out, though, it’s not clear whether the U.S. has succeeded.

All prompted by the war in Ukraine, the Pentagon, State Department and Congress launched their own efforts to reform their share of foreign military sales, or FMS. Having finished, they’re reporting different levels of progress.

The Pentagon is still trying to implement many of its recommendations, and a bill to start doing so in Congress hasn’t passed. State was more bullish about its own work but acknowledged a larger issue: Regardless of how fast the U.S. government moves, defense firms are still struggling to deliver orders.

Meanwhile, demand for American weapons has spiked. Total U.S. foreign military sales are already above $80 billion this fiscal year, said Cara Abercrombie, acting deputy for Pentagon policy. That’s higher than the FMS total in FY23 and more than $30 billion over that of FY22. Abercrombie predicted it would continue to rise.

As demand grows, the question now is whether the U.S. government and the defense industry can keep up.

“We’re really now trying to harness [the] bureaucracy,” Abercrombie said.

The wall

That bureaucracy is vast. The FMS system is spread across swathes of the U.S. national security system, including the State Department, Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency once mapped it out inside a government building in northern Virginia — and the chart took up an entire wall.

As Baker noted last year, reforming this system has been a priority for decades. American defense firms are considered the best in the world, but selling to other countries is often so difficult that supply hasn’t fully met demand.

Fixing FMS became more urgent the more America’s partners found themselves in need. The Trump administration opened the spigot of arms sales to Taiwan, facing a more powerful, more aggressive China. Taipei now has some $20 billion in orders that haven’t yet been delivered.

But everyone interviewed for this story agreed that the latest and most powerful spur for reform was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In the months afterward, the U.S. rushed weapons to Kyiv at a volume and pace rarely, if ever, seen.

Doing so involved using new tools and senior leaders in the government giving the process an unusual amount of attention, a senior State official, speaking anonymously per the department’s policy, told Defense News.

Countries suddenly anxious about their own security after Russia’s invasion started asking the U.S. why the system couldn’t move this fast for them as well.

“Many senior officials heard from our security cooperation partners that they were not satisfied with the timelines” at the start of the administration, the official said.

Thus came three efforts to speed those up: one each from the Pentagon, State Department and Congress, led by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

They had similar findings. The FMS system is so diffuse and so technical that it’s hard to monitor cases from start to finish. It doesn’t always speed up the sales that are most important for America’s own security goals, such as those to Taiwan and Ukraine. And America has extremely strict rules on what technology it can share with other countries, even when it’s in U.S. interests to do so.

“There’s been a lot of effort paid to identifying the problem,” said a Democratic congressional aide, who said the different parts of the government agreed, broadly, on the issues. “FMS is a strategic tool of policy that is too slow and too clunky to be as effective as we want it to be.”

‘Faster than that’

The aide was less confident about the solutions offered so far.

“The reform efforts have been granular and bottom-up, rather than big-picture [and] strategic,” the staffer said.

Officials leading those efforts largely agreed, but said that tweaks to the process are still important.

The State official, whose department administers foreign military sales, listed several areas of improvement, many of which were in a set of recommendations released last May.

The department is updating the curriculum for officers that handle security cooperation, so that they can better manage expectations and delays. It’s revised its own policies to make it easier to transfer aerial drones. And the State Department has tried to set requirements that apply to whole regions, rather than separate countries — like an oil filter that fits on a whole class of cars rather than only one make and model.

When pressed, the official couldn’t share statistics to show how much faster cases were now moving, but did say that the speed of aerial drones had increased. Overall, the official argued that the department wasn’t a major delay in the FMS process.

“It takes 98% of the cases 48 hours to go through the State Department,” the official said. “It’s very hard to move faster than that.”

‘Overburdened’

Where cases take much longer is the Defense Department, which has spent the last year implementing its own reforms.

Abercrombie, the policy official, described the progress so far in three main areas.

One is a group of Pentagon leaders that now meets once every quarter — though more often at lower levels — to make sure they’re paying attention to the issue and measuring their progress, almost like a monthly calendar reminder on a phone.

A Defense Department spokesperson said that the secretary and deputy secretary of defense receive quarterly updates on the reform efforts — and that the Pentagon is still studying how to best retool its process.

Another is a new set of meetings between the combatant commands, which work the closest with American allies around the world, and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which actually oversees cases.

The goal here, Abercrombie said, is to watch for any new issues — say, with a country or individual case — that may need higher-level attention.

Lastly, the Pentagon is setting up a new cadre of officials, embedded in embassies around the world, like defense attaches, to shepherd countries through the process. This core is meant to help each partner through the highly technical prep work required, making it faster and more accurate.

And it may require more people. The Defense Department is already “overburdened” with the jump in foreign military sales over the last two years, Abercrombie said. It’s deciding whether to hire civilians to supplement the uniformed personnel handling these cases.

Abercrombie didn’t offer specific cases that had sped up in the last year as a result of the changes. Instead, as an example, she mentioned that the Pentagon had recently issued a new “toolkit” meant to help Pentagon officials handle contracting, one of the hardest parts of the FMS process.

If a partner wants munitions that the U.S. buys in bulk, for instance, they need to know when the Pentagon’s deadline is to submit its own orders. Meeting that in time would let the other country add their number to the total and lower the price overall, like shopping at a wholesaler rather than a grocery store.

The toolkit is meant to help with those schedules, though when asked how one didn’t exist before, Abercrombie pointed to how vast FMS is — and how a process can act inefficiently when it’s so far spread out.

“It seems like common sense, but systemically it might not be,” she said.

What’s left

Each of the people interviewed for this story also mentioned the need for help from Congress: specifically raising the dollar number required to alert lawmakers about a sale, for a separate and sometimes lengthy review.

That threshold hasn’t been updated in decades, meaning it hasn’t met the rate of inflation.

Earlier this year, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill that, among other provisions, would raise the limit, though it’s since stalled. An aide to Mike Waltz, R-Fla., who sponsored the bill, said that they still expected it to proceed.

“I think it’s a speed bump,” the aide said, particularly amid the war in Gaza when arms sales to Israel are under more scrutiny.

The pause means that any changes from Congress in the near term will be, in the words of the first aide, “granular.”

Regardless of their efforts, a much longer part of the process is actually delivering on orders. Multiple sources told Defense News that firming up the defense industry needs to be an equal, if not higher, priority.

“For the actual process to get something on contract, the worst of those are a year or two years, whereas we’re regularly seeing eight-to-10 year total time frames for delivery,” said the first aide.

As an example, the State official mentioned six long-term contracts that Congress approved this year for munitions labeled critical by the Pentagon. Those contracts will help defense firms move faster, but none of the munitions are, by law, exportable — one instance of higher supply that won’t help address higher demand.

“None of this matters if our industry does not have the production capacity to fulfill the orders in a timely manner,” the State official said.

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.

14. Progressives jostle for nat sec jobs under Harris

Those who aspire to national security jobs in either administration are doing this. 

Excerpt:

A second think tanker said he might try to make more media appearances and arrange private briefings for people connected to the Harris campaign as a way to raise his profile among job seekers.

​But rather than partisan foreign policy perspectives, maybe either administration should be searching for professionals who place national security above party. I know that is a very naive statement, but one can dream.

Did the Biden administration opt for experience over party?

Excerpts:

For years, the Democratic foreign policy and national security establishment was dominated by people connected to Bill and Hillary Clinton, many of whom then worked for Barack Obama (including Hillary Clinton herself).

After the interlude of the Donald Trump years, Biden pulled in many people he knew from his time as vice president under Obama and decades in the Senate, where he was a foreign policy specialist.

Biden and his team also believed that experienced people needed to lead places such as the State Department after the personnel upheavals under Trump.

That limited the number of political appointee jobs available, including for progressives who’d amassed lists of possible hires for the Biden team.

“A lot of people volunteered for the Biden campaign thinking they’d have the opportunity to serve. Then they saw Biden pick people who had the box checked for having served in the Obama administration,” said one think tanker, who unsuccessfully sought a role on the Biden team and may seek a position with Harris.

Progressives jostle for nat sec jobs under Harris

By Nahal Toosi, Phelim Kine and Joseph Gedeon

08/13/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Politico

The liberal activists plan to offer Harris lists of names to consider, but their last such effort with Biden yielded little success.

Some of Kamala Harris' current top foreign policy aides worked for previous Democratic presidents, including her current national security adviser, Philip Gordon. | Jae C. Hong/AP

08/13/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Progressive national security professionals already are angling for positions in a possible Kamala Harris administration, hoping to steer the White House in a different direction on Israel and other issues after being largely shut out under President Joe Biden.

Some progressive activists plan to draft lists of people Harris could hire at places such as the National Security Council and the Defense Department. Others are polishing their résumés, sketching out policy briefs and mapping their connections to Harris world.

The progressives’ ultimate goal is to influence American foreign policy and national security from the inside. This proved hard to do under Biden, a Democratic moderate who came to the White House with a massive stable of longstanding aides — many of whom could trace their careers back to the Clinton administration. It didn’t help that progressives have relatively few people in their ranks with significant government experience in foreign policy roles.

Their plans, however, are a sign that Harris will face pressure on both policy and personnel from her left flank if she wins.

“We haven’t had the opportunity to build as big of a bench of people with this high-level experience,” said Matthew Duss, a progressive foreign policy thinker who has advised Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and is now with the Center for International Policy. “What I’m hoping is that the vice president and her team will commit to helping us build that bench, because these are going to be the people who eventually can develop and execute and implement a foreign policy that is actually fit for this moment.”

For years, the Democratic foreign policy and national security establishment was dominated by people connected to Bill and Hillary Clinton, many of whom then worked for Barack Obama (including Hillary Clinton herself).

After the interlude of the Donald Trump years, Biden pulled in many people he knew from his time as vice president under Obama and decades in the Senate, where he was a foreign policy specialist.

Biden and his team also believed that experienced people needed to lead places such as the State Department after the personnel upheavals under Trump.

That limited the number of political appointee jobs available, including for progressives who’d amassed lists of possible hires for the Biden team.

“A lot of people volunteered for the Biden campaign thinking they’d have the opportunity to serve. Then they saw Biden pick people who had the box checked for having served in the Obama administration,” said one think tanker, who unsuccessfully sought a role on the Biden team and may seek a position with Harris.

A second think tanker said he might try to make more media appearances and arrange private briefings for people connected to the Harris campaign as a way to raise his profile among job seekers.

Both of these individuals and others were granted anonymity to be candid about issues that are sensitive and can affect their careers.

Across the Democratic Party spectrum, many would-be job seekers now reason that Harris will need new people at an array of levels, from low-ranking special assistants to Cabinet members. Some of Biden’s appointees are likely to leave, and Harris may want to signal that she’s her own president, not merely an echo of her predecessor.

Progressive activists say they know their odds of getting many positions are low given the intense competition for such jobs and the fact that it often comes down to luck and connections.

At the same time, many progressives would be happy if Harris — who so far has come across as a relatively middle-of-the-road Democrat on foreign policy — would indulge some new ideas on challenges ranging from the Israel-Hamas war to the rivalry with Beijing.

“I favor a ‘clean sweep’ — we badly need some new thinking in U.S. foreign policy,” said Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia engagement at the Washington-based Defense Priorities think tank, which advocates for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy.

Spokespersons for the Harris campaign declined to comment.

Progressives are not monolithic and are still, in many ways, trying to figure out their preferred approach to foreign policy. But, broadly speaking, many in this group want U.S. foreign policy to be less militarized, more invested in diplomacy and more consistent on human rights. At times, progressives have echoed concerns of people on the far right, whose leaders also have called for less U.S. military engagement abroad.

Biden’s actions have gotten a mixed reception from progressives. Some were happy to see the U.S. withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, despite the chaos involved. Many also were impressed with how the Biden team has rallied much of the world to support Ukraine as it battles a Russian invasion, while not deploying U.S. troops to the fight.

But many have watched Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war with dismay given the humanitarian fallout in the Gaza Strip. They’re also worried that widespread anti-China sentiment in Washington could lead to a violent conflict with Beijing.

Harris appears to be a typical liberal internationalist like Biden, but some progressives hope that she’ll define herself more clearly once in the Oval Office and at least be more consistent on issues such as human rights, especially for Palestinians.

A Defense Department official who identifies as a progressive said that while Harris’ public persona may not come across as overtly left-leaning, her links to many on that stretch of the political spectrum offer opportunities for her to be swayed.

“She’s friends with so many progressive people, and there’s so many progressive people in that sphere that it changes the playing field,” the official said.

Harris will likely have plenty of foreign policy slots to fill.

Several of Biden’s top aides, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, will have already served a full, exhausting term, and even if Biden was reelected they likely would have stepped aside anyway for personal, health and other reasons. That makes it easier for Harris to name her own people to such posts.

But Harris also may keep some Biden appointees.

For one thing, despite her time in the Senate and as Biden’s vice president, she hasn’t developed a large network of her own foreign policy hands.

Some of her current top foreign policy aides worked for previous Democratic presidents. They include her current national security adviser, Philip Gordon, whom many expect will keep working for her if she steps into the presidency. Gordon, who has worked for the Biden, Obama and Clinton administrations, declined to comment.

Many lower-ranking Biden appointees may also wish to stay on, partly in hopes of moving up.

Besides, if Harris goes too far in pushing out Biden-era aides, it could seem she’s implicitly criticizing her predecessor.

There’s also the need for some continuity and stability.

“If she surrounds herself with newbies — no matter how smart and passionate — there will be overwhelming uncertainty, insecurities, blame-gaming and toxicity among the nat-sec team,” predicted a former national security official in the Obama administration.

During the run-up to the Biden presidency, progressive activists offered names to the president-elect’s team of people it should bring on board. The lists were not made public, but the people who pulled them together said relatively few of those named earned spots in the government.

Still, the plan is to try again with Harris, said Yasmine Taeb, one of the progressive activists who regularly met with Biden aides during the transition.

“We’re definitely hopeful she can bring in new blood,” she said.

A former U.S. official with links to the progressive community warned such groups to temper any expectations of landing high-profile posts precisely because there are relatively few known progressives with government experience. Having such a background matters when it comes to pushing through ideas in what can be a cumbersome bureaucracy and policymaking process.

It’s unlikely Harris will pick firebrand leftists who broadly oppose U.S. military intervention abroad for a Cabinet spot.

Still, skeptics of such hard power might be able to land in lower levels at various agencies, the former U.S. official said, and then they can learn the system and work their way up into other political appointee roles.

“You need somebody to be a deputy assistant secretary before they’re an assistant secretary and an assistant secretary before they’re an undersecretary, or have some sort of a meaningful career path that gives them some judgment,” the former official said.

There may be many career government employees with progressive leanings. But unlike political appointees, career staffers are expected to implement the policies of whoever is in the White House and are discouraged from openly discussing their personal views.

The Defense Department official attributed their ability to land a spot more to luck than to strategy because “people didn’t realize how left of center I am.”

A Harris ally said the vice president likes to hire people with a diversity of experience, and that it’s possible she’ll look well beyond Washington and its think tanks to fill national security slots.

But the ally also argued that if people — progressives included — truly want to work for a President Harris, they need to hustle now and start working for her campaign.

Even just volunteering to hand out pamphlets could show initiative that could pay off with a job offer later, especially because, unlike Biden, Harris doesn’t have legions of longstanding aides she may feel compelled to hire.

“Don’t sit there polishing your résumé waiting for January 2025,” the ally said. “People should be knocking on doors and doing everything they can to get her elected.”

Politico

​15. Foreign investors pulled record amount of money from China in second quarter

Foreign investors pulled record amount of money from China in second quarter

Foreign investment into China has slumped in recent years after hitting a record US$344 billion in 2021. PHOTO: ST FILE

Updated Aug 12, 2024, 09:11 PM

https://www.straitstimes.com/business/foreign-investors-pulled-record-amount-of-money-from-china-in-second-quarter?fbclid

BEIJING - Foreign investors pulled a record amount of money from China in the second quarter, likely reflecting deep pessimism about the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped almost US$15 billion (S$19.9 billion) in the April to June period, marking only the second time this figure has turned negative, according to data released on Aug 9 by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (Safe). It was down about US$5 billion for the first six months.

Should the decline continue for the rest of 2024, it would be the first annual net outflow since at least 1990, when comparable data begins.

Foreign investment into China has slumped in recent years, after hitting a record US$344 billion in 2021. The slowdown in the economy and rising geopolitical tensions have led some companies to reduce their exposure, and the rapid shift to electric vehicles in China also caught foreign car companies off guard, prompting some to withdraw or scale back their investments.

The fall comes despite Beijing’s growing efforts to attract and retain foreign investment, following the smallest increase on record in 2023.

The government wants to show that the country remains open and attractive to foreign businesses, in the hope that companies will bring advanced technologies and resist pressure from the United States and elsewhere to decouple from China.

Safe’s data, which tracks net flows, can reflect trends in foreign companies’ profits, as well as changes in the size of their operations in China. Multinationals have more reason to keep cash abroad than in China, as advanced economies have been raising interest rates while Beijing has been lowering them to stimulate the economy.

Earlier figures from the Ministry of Commerce showed that new foreign direct investment into China during the first half of 2024 was the lowest since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

Chinese outbound investment also hit a record, with firms sending US$71 billion overseas in the second quarter, a rise of more than 80 per cent from the US$39 billion in the same period in 2023.

Chinese companies have been rapidly stepping up investment, with money going into projects such as electric vehicle and battery factories.

The data also showed that the anomaly in the measurement of China’s trade surplus continues to grow, hitting a record US$87 billion in the second quarter and taking it to almost US$150 billion for the first half of 2024. That gap was highlighted by the US Treasury earlier in 2024 in a report that called on China to clarify why the numbers were so different.

According to a recent report from the International Monetary Fund, this discrepancy “seems to be mainly caused by the different methodologies used to record exports and imports of goods”. BLOOMBERG

16. China Overproduction Surge Gives Global South Pneumonia

China Overproduction Surge Gives Global South Pneumonia

Surge in cheap exports playing havoc with domestic economies

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/china-overproduction-surge-south-pneumonia?utm=

Our Correspondent

Aug 13, 2024

Last month, shortly before her 15-year rule came to an abrupt if bloody end, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made a trip to Beijing, meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and signing various cooperation agreements. But she cut her visit short, apparently, according to some sources, because she was dissatisfied with the financial aid Beijing was willing to offer.

The visit was supposed to have reflected the fact that China is the country’s largest trade partner. However, what has gone largely unnoticed among all the words written about China as partner and source of capital for the nations of the so-called Global South is that the China-Bangladesh trade relationship has been about the most unbalanced on the plant. The most recent data show China’s exports of US$26 billion as 27 times its imports from Bangladesh.

Most of Bangladesh’s exports – mainly textiles and garments – go to the west, to the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, etc. Meanwhile, its large overall merchandise trade gap is primarily filled with remittances of US$30 billion from Bangladeshi workers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and families settled in countries such as the US, UK, Canada, and Malaysia.

The bottom line is that China is extracting huge income gains from Bangladesh largely reliant on distant sources for its trade revenues. Now, however, it is not just Bangladesh which has reason to complain about China’s predatory trade behavior – which is not deliberate but which follows on from the imbalance in China’s economy between a lack of domestic demand and massive oversupply of productive capacity across a range of industries. Most of the attention has been given to a surge in anti-dumping and other restrictive measures introduced by western countries including focused on new industries such as solar panels and electric vehicles. But many Global South countries are now reacting against the surge in cheap Chinese exports made cheap not so much by lower production costs but by China’s excess domestic supply and a need to raise cash. Large upper-middle-income countries such as Mexico and Turkey are also taking defensive action.

So far this year, China’s exports to the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations have grown by 12 percent compared with an overall export rise of 7 percent – and the neighbors are getting restive. Commodity exporters such as Malaysia and Indonesia may not have significant trade imbalances with China, but they do fear for their domestic manufacturing and any threats to employment and corporate health. Indonesia has announced tariffs of up to 200 percent on some items, not necessarily from China but most probably. Malaysia too is looking to anti-dumping measures. Vietnam has already imposed anti-dumping duties on certain steel products from China and India is likely to do the same. All this is despite the freer trade supposed to come with various economic partnership arrangements.

To make matters worse, the surge in Chinese exports is occurring at a time when China’s import demand is quite slack and likely to remain so, at least for raw materials given the likely prolonged slump in construction due to over-supply of housing and some infrastructure.

Quite how bad things can get for industries elsewhere is illustrated in Latin America where China has grabbed a large share of the steel market. Just this month Chile’s major steel plant, Huachipato, announced that it was closing production as it is unable to compete despite the fact that protective tariffs between 25 percent and 34 percent had been imposed on Chinese products in April following a previous closure of the Huachipato plant.

The Chilean government is anxious not to upset China, which is the major buyer of its copper, of which Chile is the world’s largest producer. But fear of retaliation may be exaggerated. Copper is a globally traded and priced commodity so any change in China’s sourcing would likely be balanced by other buyers. Chile anyway has to suffer the reality that China mainly imports Chilean copper ore and concentrates and exports metal, thus depriving Chile of the value-added in refining its own ore.

That is indeed rather typical of the problems that many exporters of metals face – the difficulty of making local refining profitable in the face of the scale of investment in refining in China. In different ways, the sustained slowdown in China’s economy, together with over-investment in capacity are changing the way that trade partners view what was once a great opportunity.

​17. Ukrainian Soldiers Describe Rapid Offensive Across Border as Russians Fled

Reinforce success.

Can it be sustained? Will they be able to hold what they have taken? Can they exploit this in negotiations? How will Putin respond? Will there be escalation?

Map graphic, video at the link.

Ukrainian Soldiers Describe Rapid Offensive Across Border as Russians Fled

Ukrainian reinforcements are arriving—including from other fronts, where Kyiv’s forces were already spread thin

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/ukrainian-soldiers-describe-rapid-offensive-across-border-as-russians-fled-f98256bd?mod=hp_lead_pos9

By Isabel ColesFollow

 and Ievgeniia Sivorka | Photographs by Svet Jacqueline for WSJ

Aug. 12, 2024 9:00 pm ET

SUMY, Ukraine—It was in darkness around 3 a.m. when the Ukrainian platoon encountered the most serious obstacle to their audacious invasion of Russia last week: a row of concrete pyramids designed to obstruct tanks.

They quickly dispatched one of the pyramids with three tank rounds, then poured through the gap in their armored vehicles. The Russian enemy, largely conscripts, mostly fled or surrendered as they were quickly overwhelmed.

“In two-and-a-half years Russia built no defense line,” said the Ukrainian platoon’s 33-year-old commander, who goes by the call sign Yanyk.

Ukrainian incursion into Russian territory

Ukrainian forces in Kursk

Russian forces

KURSK REGION

Russia

Belarus

BELGOROD

REGION

Kursk

Krasnaya Yaruga

Kyiv

Direction of Ukrainian attack

Kharkiv

Chasiv Yar

Ukraine

Dnipro

Pokrovsk

Mol.

Mariupol

Kherson

Odesa

Sea of Azov

CRIMEA

100 miles

Black Sea

100 km

Note: advances and forces as of Aug. 12

Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project; Russian Defense Ministry

Andrew Barnett and Camille Bressange/WSJ

Within a few days, Ukrainian forces had seized more than two dozen villages in a lightning offensive that has shocked Russia and lifted spirits in Ukraine. It also has raised questions among military analysts about how sustainable it is given Russian superiority in manpower and weaponry along most of the rest of the front line.

For now, Russia is struggling to contain Ukrainian advances. But some Ukrainian soldiers waiting to join the battle from Sumy, the Ukrainian regional capital on the border, said they had been pulled from already threadbare units on the eastern front in Ukraine, suggesting Kyiv was already facing challenges finding fresh troops to maintain momentum.

Still, images of Ukrainian soldiers like Yanyk and his comrades charging through Russian territory and tearing down Russian flags from village halls have raised morale among Kyiv’s beleaguered army and embarrassed Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yanyk was in a village near the Russian border Monday, preparing to return to the Ukrainian-controlled town of Sudzha about 7 miles inside Russia. Videos he posted online from his forays into Russia show Yanyk driving along dark, deserted roads, stopping to take the signs of conquered villages as trophies. “Now we’re going to be hanging out on your land just like you are on ours,” he says in one of the videos.

Ukraine Advances Into Russian Territory in Surprise Incursion

Ukraine Advances Into Russian Territory in Surprise Incursion

Play video: Ukraine Advances Into Russian Territory in Surprise Incursion

Ukraine says its forces have seized control of 386 square miles of Russian territory after it launched a surprise armored incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Photo: Anatoliy Zhdanov/Reuters

The swift maneuvers are reminiscent of Ukraine’s last successful counteroffensive that routed Russian forces from the Kharkiv region in 2022. Ukraine’s top military commander, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, who led the Kharkiv operation, on Monday said 1,000 square kilometers of Russia were now in Kyiv’s control.

On a visit to Kyiv on Monday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) called the incursion “brilliant” and “bold,” urging the Biden administration to provide Ukraine with more weapons.

By thrusting across the border, Kyiv is seeking to divert Moscow’s resources away from other parts of the front line where Ukrainian forces are under intense pressure. But opening a new front risks stretching Ukrainian forces even thinner.

As fighting rages in Kursk, Russian forces have continued to gain ground in eastern Ukraine, creeping toward the logistical hub of Pokrovsk and hammering the nearby city of Chasiv Yar located on strategically important heights in the Donbas region.

At the same time, the Kursk invasion is an affront to Putin, who has ordered his military to swiftly eject Ukrainian forces. Addressing the “urgent problems” there at a meeting with top officials on Monday, Putin said Ukraine aimed to destabilize Russian society and strengthen its position in any future negotiations.

“The leaders of the Kyiv regime are not only committing a crime against the Russian people, but have in fact embarked on the path of extermination of the Ukrainians themselves,” he said. More than 120,000 people have been displaced by the fighting and 28 towns and villages are under Ukrainian occupation, the acting governor of Kursk told the meeting.

A Ukrainian armored vehicle seen in Sumy region, Ukraine.

Ukrainian servicemen in an undisclosed area in the eastern Donetsk region last week. Photo: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images

Ukraine’s ultimate plans are unclear. But whether Kyiv seeks to expand its incursion or cling on to what it already has, it will face trade-offs, said David Blagden, senior lecturer in international security at the University of Exeter in the U.K.

“The personnel, equipment and logistics demands of attempting to sustain the incursion then hold the taken territory will be significant, especially as supply lines lengthen,” Blagden said in emailed comments.

In a village near the Russian border, two Ukrainian soldiers awaiting orders to join the battle in Kursk said they had just arrived from the front line near Pokrovsk, where Ukrainian forces are under heavy pressure. “We came to help,” said one of them.

Another soldier said he was surprised to learn he was being transferred to the Sumy border region as his unit was so short of men that infantry spent as long as 45 days straight in a trench. The 25-year-old had been stationed in Chasiv Yar, one of the hottest spots on the front line, until a week before the incursion.

There is a higher concentration of troops in Kursk, he said, where he is helping shore up the rear as Ukrainian forces push further forward. Compared with the east, the skies are less saturated with drones that make concealing movement practically impossible, he said.

His unit is facing some problems, however. Its Soviet-designed automatic grenade launcher proved ill-suited to the fluid battles in Kursk because it is difficult to mount.

Others had been shifted to the Sumy region well in advance. The deputy commander of a squad that is taking part in the offensive said his unit had been sent there about two months ago but only found out about the Kursk offensive shortly before it got under way.

“Everybody is more or less happy with how it’s going,” said the soldier, who goes by the call sign Pokemon.

A Ukrainian armored fighting vehicle rolls through a village in the Sumy region.

Rooftops in the city of Sumy, Ukraine.

He said he had anticipated stiffer resistance. “They were mainly kids doing their mandatory service,” he said of the soldiers they encountered. His squad took three prisoners, the youngest of them age 19.

The incursion might strengthen Ukraine’s hand, giving Kyiv something to trade with Russia, Pokemon said. Despite the gains, he cautioned that keeping Ukrainian units in Russia properly supplied would be difficult. “The logistics needs to be very well thought through,” he said.

Another soldier said he hoped the offensive would expedite an end to the war. He had yet to join the battle, but said other members of his brigade had taken four prisoners from an artillery unit. Two others were killed and the rest ran away.

“This is the first time Russia has had war on its territory since World War II,” he said. “Everybody was afraid of Russia, but we are showing there is nothing to be afraid of.”

Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 13, 2024, print edition as 'Ukraine’s Offensive Shocks Russia but Poses Risks'.

18. National-security workforce needs young people, former NSA chief says

And in conjunction we need a lot of the old people to get out of the way and make way for the young people (and especially those 30-40-somethings with experience while making room for the 20 somethings to gain experience).

I would personally like to go back to work in the government in a national security capacity (and I would if asked) but on objective reflection, I think the government needs younger national security professionals.

National-security workforce needs young people, former NSA chief says

defenseone.com · by David DiMolfetta

LAS VEGAS — Presidential election interference, a once-in-a-generation pandemic, the SolarWinds Orion hack and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are just a small sampling of what Gen. Paul Nakasone witnessed during his time leading the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.

In taking the position in 2018, he set “wake-up conditions” for when an on-duty officer would call him during an emergency that would require attention from the president or secretary of defense. In his first year, he got 3 calls. In his final month on the job, he was phoned over 10 times.

“It’s for you. It’s them. Good luck,” he recalled his wife telling him whenever a call came through. His description of what became a routine habit for the Nakasone family elicited laughs from an audience of hackers and security practitioners at the DEF CON hacking conference here.

“We matched the fires on the ground with fires on net,” he said onstage, telling stories about when U.S. cyber warriors teamed up with on-ground infantry to take on Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq nearly a decade ago, a sign that cyberspace had fully emerged as a tangible asset in conflict zones.

A few years after that, Cyber Command began deploying its cyber warriors to allied nations in “hunt forward” operations that root out enemy hackers and slow adversaries’ cyber operations while gaining important defensive insights for future cyberwar. The agencies’ analysts suggested sharing digital hunting data not just with U.S. intelligence officials, but with the private sector, too.

That new dynamic first surfaced in 2020, when the NSA was tasked with overseeing how adversaries were looking for information about private companies’ vaccine development, Nakasone said, recalling when the U.S. was pushing to develop a viable COVID-19 vaccine in mere months. Such public-private partnerships have now become commonplace, especially in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Nakasone donned a relaxed outfit consisting of a striped shirt and black jeans at DEF CON instead of his military uniform, but his attitude about the state of national security hasn’t changed.

He’s now on a new mission: Protecting borders, having allies and possessing the military capabilities to deal with adversaries is part of the current national security equation, but a new series of different borderless threats challenge nations today, and that goes well beyond the higher rate of phone calls he received later in his tenure.

“The scope, scale, sophistication and speed of what we’re facing is tremendously different” versus five years ago, he said.

To Nakasone, it means that younger people need to have a seat at the national security table, he told reporters on the sidelines of DEF CON. “Gen Z will be the No. 1 sector within our workforce. Okay, that’s great. But it also requires that knowledge and skills and ability that have just left us — whether or not they’re baby boomers like myself or millennials — you’ve got to be able to pass that information on,” he said.

Officials in 2024 have frequently said the global threat environment has reached an all-time high. It’s been signaled in public testimony from officials who have called out Chinese hackers embedding into U.S. critical infrastructure, as well as an increased buildup of military assets in must-pass congressional funding bills. A record number of people voting in elections around the world has only catalyzed these threats, as endless concerns about AI-driven disinformation have come to life.

He hopes to begin addressing the issue through a new Vanderbilt University national security research institute launching next month. “We’re talking 25 for 2025,” he said, as part of an effort to put 25 Vanderbilt interns into governmental national-security roles to help kickstart the effort.

He wants the institute to also research emerging security risks at the speed and scale he’e become used to in his time in service. “The question is, how do you think differently about national security?” he said, arguing that schools are now central for addressing national-security challenges. “[Vanderbilt] has the ability to move at a much quicker [research] pace,” he said.

Nakasone, in essence, wants to add a new intersection point between public and private partnerships, enhancing the relationship with academic research.

“Our intelligence is really good. But I would tell you: the bottom line is we’re not keeping up,” he said. “We need a new strategy.”

In a way, this enhanced relationship is a callback to the September 11 attacks that kickstarted many of the societal discussions over warfare, armaments, surveillance laws and intelligence gathering, he said. “If you see something, say something,” was a regular phrase that came in the wake of the terrorist attacks, where officials argued that, with the benefit of hindsight, intelligence agencies and private firms were too stovepiped to pick up patterns that would have enabled proper information-sharing to stop the plane hijackings.

Part of the recruitment process for engagement with the institute began at DEF CON. Nakasone made it a point to discuss the Vanderbilt initiative at the end of his presentation, which brought in hundreds of viewers. “The appeal to DEF CON here is, these are the people that work in cyberspace every single day,” Nakasone said to reporters. “So guess what? They’re probably the first people that are going to see something.”

Some 15 times more people over the age of 50 work in national security than under the age of 30, he said, arguing it’s time for a new generation of national-security workers to help the U.S. shore up its defenses.

“We want policymakers who can code, and coders who understand policy,” he said. “I think we have to reflect the generational change and the tenor of our times.”

defenseone.com · by David DiMolfetta

19. China Is in Denial About the War in Ukraine

Excerpts:

In February, a group of experts at Renmin University took stock of the global situation and concluded that “the external environment no longer continuously progresses and improves.” Instead, they went on, “we have a situation of great changes and great struggles that are confrontational, protracted, and cruel.” Although Putin remains firmly in power in Moscow, and his effort to annex Ukrainian territory has not yet yielded the outright strategic tragedy many Chinese analysts initially predicted, Beijing’s external environment is far from benign. Relations with the United States remain fractious. In China’s immediate neighborhood, American allies such as Australia, Japan, and the Philippines are strengthening their defensive capabilities. Conflict is destabilizing the Middle East. China’s position in the international order remains strong but is increasingly unsettled.

All of this has extraordinary salience for China’s own designs on Taiwan. Russia’s war on Ukraine offers general lessons about the complexities of modern warfare, the possibilities for an international response to a purportedly regional dispute, and the costs of a protracted military conflict. What Xi is learning from this crisis remains inscrutable. But Chinese analysts’ views offer a window into the possible lessons the Chinese government is drawing from Putin’s war. Their interpretations are varied and individual. After watching two years of war in Ukraine, however, many have concluded that the West has no stomach for conflict and will grow tired of supporting democracies facing an invading force if the economic costs are high. This conclusion is often overstated and probably underestimates American resolve. But the very fact that they have drawn it suggests that the Taiwan Strait—and the world at large—may be heading in a still more dangerous direction.

China Is in Denial About the War in Ukraine

Why Chinese Thinkers Underestimate the Costs of Complicity in Russia’s Aggression

By Jude Blanchette

August 13, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong · August 13, 2024

In the weeks following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese government struck a tone of cautious support for Moscow. Spokespeople for the Chinese government repeatedly stressed that Russia had the right to conduct its affairs as it saw fit, alleged that the word “invasion” was a Western interpretation of events, and suggested that the United States had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin by backing a NATO expansion. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, expressed sympathy for Russia’s “legitimate concerns.”

Yet outside of the Chinese Communist Party leadership, the reaction was more concerned. Although the vast majority of universities and think tanks in China are state funded, the analysts and academics who work there still retain a degree of independence, and their views exert a measure of influence on the government. After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, these analysts openly fretted about how the conflict could damage China’s relationship with Europe and the United States, further fracture the global economy, and diminish the wealth and power of Russia, China’s most important partner. “The negative impact of the war on China [will be] huge,” Yan Xuetong, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars, argued in May 2022, warning that a protracted conflict would wreak havoc on the global economy and trigger “heightened tensions” between China and neighbors such as Japan. The West’s “unprecedentedly united” effort to sanction the Russian economy, as the international relations scholar Li Wei put it, surprised Chinese experts. Some, such as Wang Yongli, a former Bank of China vice president, worried that sanctions would threaten the globalization on which the Chinese economy depends.

More than two years into the war, however, such stark public pessimism has dissipated, replaced by cautious optimism. The Russian and Chinese economies, these experts now reckon, have largely avoided crippling harm from Western sanctions. Russia is reconstituting its defense industrial base and has avoided the extreme diplomatic isolation that once seemed a plausible outcome of Putin’s gambit.

Some of these analysts’ conclusions about the war in Ukraine—for instance, that the United States’ domestic consensus in favor of arming Kyiv would falter—have been borne out. But other realities are conspicuously absent from the Chinese public discourse. China has, in fact, incurred costs as a result of Putin’s war and Beijing’s economic and diplomatic support for it. Europe has not completely turned its back on China, but the country’s deepening relationship with Russia has caused a significant deterioration in its relations with many European countries that cannot easily be reversed. And the symmetry between Putin’s lust to seize Ukrainian territory and Beijing’s long-standing appetite to absorb Taiwan has provoked the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific to harden their defenses.

These blind spots matter because in China, the war in Ukraine is serving as both an observatory and a laboratory as the country prepares for heightened geopolitical conflict with the United States. As they analyze events in Ukraine, Chinese scholars seek to assess the United States’ and Europe’s resolve and understand what risks China might be forced to bear in a geopolitical or military crisis. Some experts, such as the leading military strategist Zhou Bo, have concluded that NATO’s hesitancy to make certain major interventions on Ukraine’s behalf proves that, aside from the United States, Taiwan would lack defenders in a future conflict with China. Although these scholars tend to be careful not to discuss the contours of a potential war in the Taiwan Strait too explicitly, many seem to be drawing a straight line from the cracks in the United States’ determination to support Ukraine and its likely will to stomach a possible protracted conflict with Beijing.

WORRY COURT

Chinese experts, particularly those based at elite academic institutions or at think tanks affiliated with the government or military, serve as both interpreters and influencers of official policy. They publish in government-sanctioned journals and media outlets, and although their opinions frequently align with government orthodoxy, many of them also test policy ideas not yet publicly voiced by officials or float new political propositions as trial balloons to gauge official reaction. Even under the regime of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, where public discourse is tightly controlled, some of these experts can still cautiously explore sensitive topics, walking a fine line between intellectual independence and political loyalty.

Chinese experts have not been monolithic on Putin’s war. From the moment Russian troops crossed into Ukraine in 2022, Chinese analysts have offered differing perspectives on the impact the conflict would have on Chinese interests and the proper interpretation of Western efforts to counter the Russian offensive. On the whole, however, their early reactions were shaped by concern that the war would mark a historic post–Cold War turning point. Chinese scholars consistently concluded that Russia’s invasion would drive a major realignment of the international order. This view was trenchantly expressed by a group of scholars at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank known for its high-quality analysis despite its direct affiliation with China’s Ministry of State Security. In February 2023, these scholars argued that the invasion was a “watershed in history” that revealed the existence of a “latent new order” different from the security architecture that dominated for three decades after the end of the Cold War.

Xi has, of course, spoken of the dawn of a “new era” for the global order. He has repeatedly touted the idea that the world is undergoing “profound changes unseen in a century” that will be marked by growing risks but also potential benefits to China, by overturning the United States’ dominance in geopolitics, technology, and the global economy.

Chinese scholars initially concluded that Russia’s invasion would upend the international order.

Many scholars initially feared that Russia’s attack could upset China’s ability to steer itself carefully into this new era. The event punctured their sense that China, more than any country besides the United States, enjoys the capacity to decide the trajectory of the global economy and world events. Moreover, the swift, unexpected assault on Ukraine highlighted the dangers of a sudden, significant rupture in relations between China and the West. U.S.-led sanctions on Russia would hasten “the formation of two sharply opposing camps,” Wang, the former Bank of China vice president, lamented, which would “pose a great threat” to the ongoing process of globalization that fuels China’s economic growth. In June 2022, the foreign policy scholar Chen Dongxiao worried that a prolonged war would “significantly increase the difficulty for Beijing in handling Sino-U.S. relations.”

Chinese analysts were especially startled by the West’s coordinated push to sanction the Russian economy. That effort offered a “vivid demonstration of the tools of economic power” that the United States could muster, Li wrote. Not all Chinese experts agreed on the sanctions’ likely efficacy. Some, such as Huang Jing, argued that the West’s “world war without gunpowder” would fail because sanctions on the energy and financial sectors are notoriously “leaky” and because, he contended, disagreements would emerge between the United States and Europe.

But others concluded that the United States still wields unrivaled power over the international financial system. Zhang Bei, an analyst at the People’s Bank of China, predicted that the United States’ leverage over key payment and settlement mechanisms, including the SWIFT system, which handles interbank messaging, would allow it to threaten Russia’s “national financial security.” The economist Wang Da went further, likening the expulsion of Russia from SWIFT to a nuclear attack. The United States’ capacity to devastate a rival financially would have stark implications for China: in October 2022, one researcher at China’s central bank warned that China must be ready to defend against a U.S. effort “replicating this financial sanction model against China” in the “context of the intensified Sino-U.S. strategic game and the Taiwan Strait conflict.”

As the sanctions began to take hold and the Russian military stumbled, Chinese scholars also worried that Russia’s standing as a valuable strategic partner might be in peril. One of China’s most prominent experts on Russia, Feng Yujun, predicted that “Russia’s influence in the world economy and international political system” would “decline significantly”; another expert, Yuan Xun, predicted that the sanctions would “make it difficult for Russian companies to raise funds, increase the risk of [Russian] stock market crashes, [lead to] a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises potentially facing bankruptcy risks, reduce employment opportunities, increase unemployment rates, and reduce [Russian] citizens’ incomes.”

SUNNY SIDE UP

Today, however, a substantially more sanguine outlook dominates the discourse of China’s experts. They have noted that the Western response to the war has not produced the most catastrophic outcomes that many had predicted. The “most intense wave of sanctions [in] history,” scholars at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies concluded in a February 2024 report, “did not achieve the expected results, but instead brought a backlash and counter-sanctions” as Russia found lifelines for its currency and trade with China and other countries. Many Chinese analysts also contended that Putin has evaded truly damaging diplomatic isolation, citing his recent state visits to North Korea and Vietnam and that in July, he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Moscow. As a headline from the Chinese edition of the Global Times trumpeted after Putin’s trip to Hanoi: “The West’s Isolation of Russia Has Been Broken.”

In this view, China has avoided paying any significant economic or diplomatic price for propping up Putin’s war efforts. Indeed, the war has created trends that may redound to China’s benefit. The Russian economy’s ability to weather Western sanctions has impressed many Chinese scholars. After a visit to Moscow in February 2024, Xu Poling, an expert on the Russian economy, remarked that the war in Ukraine “has injected a steroid shot into the lethargic Russian economy, making it stronger and more vigorous.” He even speculated that Putin “is not exactly in a hurry to end the conflict.” Other analysts have marveled at how the war has reanimated Russia’s languishing military-industrial complex, which, a Global Times analysis concluded, had been “in a state of insufficient investment and production.” Since February 2022, the analysis observed, it has “accelerated the acceptance of state investment and increased production capacity,” leading to a “comprehensive recovery of Russian military-industrial enterprises” and “significant progress” in the production of new tactical missiles, armored vehicles, and drones.

As the war drags on, Chinese analysts also believe that the West’s unity is fracturing. As Democrats and Republicans fight “fiercely against each other and as the [U.S. presidential] election approaches, [the] situation is getting more and more unfavorable for Ukraine,” the prominent Eurasian Studies expert Ding Xiaoxing wrote in February. Jin Canrong, a hawkish international relations scholar, predicted that a public “backlash” against support for Ukraine in European countries and the United States would eventually doom Kyiv’s ability to defend itself.

LOSS ADJUSTMENT

Many of these Chinese experts’ analyses are fair, even astute. But missing from the public-facing discussion in China is a true recognition of the costs Beijing has assumed as a result of its support for Putin’s war. Experts’ early assessments lingered on dramatic potential damage to China; now, they tend to ignore or underappreciate the serious costs Beijing has incurred. China’s relations with most European countries have degenerated, probably irrevocably. In the declaration following its July summit, NATO included an unprecedentedly sharp denunciation of Beijing’s behavior, calling China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war effort—language that would have been unthinkable prior to February 2022.

Frustration with China is not limited to European policymakers. Europeans who were recently very bullish on Chinese-European relations—especially those with business interests in China—now hold a much dimmer view. A May survey of European CEOs by the European Round Table for Industry found that only seven percent believed that Europe’s relations with China would improve in the next three years. More than 50 percent saw future deterioration. In a July survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that polled nearly 20,000 people, 65 percent of respondents in 15 European countries agreed that China has played a “rather negative” or “very negative” role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Although Western sanctions have not broken the Russian economy, the war in Ukraine has spurred further global economic fragmentation. For decades, Beijing has worked to build economic self-sufficiency; Chinese government planners stepped up these efforts around 2018 as they sought to prepare China for the splintering of globalization and the fracturing of supply chains. But China was not ready for the degree to which the war in Ukraine—coupled with growing national security concerns in many countries about technological dependence on China—hastened this fragmentation, prompting U.S. and European governments, companies, and investors to reallocate capital away from China and other geopolitically exposed markets. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified foreign investors’ concerns about the Chinese market as it raised fears that Beijing could also face sanctions or economic repercussions because of its alignment with Moscow and its saber rattling toward Taiwan.

The war in Ukraine, and particularly Beijing’s decision to strengthen its strategic partnership with Russia, is also exacerbating the rifts in an already fractious U.S.-Chinese relationship. The Biden administration has repeatedly warned Beijing that the economic, technological, and diplomatic lifeline China is extending to Moscow works at cross-purposes with its stated desire for a stable bilateral relationship with the United States. But Beijing has continued to double down on its Russian gamble, including by launching a recent joint patrol with Russian bombers in the airspace just off the Alaskan coast. In May, Washington sanctioned over a dozen Chinese companies for their direct support of Moscow’s war effort. More sanctions are likely to come irrespective of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

FRAUGHT LESSONS

In February, a group of experts at Renmin University took stock of the global situation and concluded that “the external environment no longer continuously progresses and improves.” Instead, they went on, “we have a situation of great changes and great struggles that are confrontational, protracted, and cruel.” Although Putin remains firmly in power in Moscow, and his effort to annex Ukrainian territory has not yet yielded the outright strategic tragedy many Chinese analysts initially predicted, Beijing’s external environment is far from benign. Relations with the United States remain fractious. In China’s immediate neighborhood, American allies such as Australia, Japan, and the Philippines are strengthening their defensive capabilities. Conflict is destabilizing the Middle East. China’s position in the international order remains strong but is increasingly unsettled.

All of this has extraordinary salience for China’s own designs on Taiwan. Russia’s war on Ukraine offers general lessons about the complexities of modern warfare, the possibilities for an international response to a purportedly regional dispute, and the costs of a protracted military conflict. What Xi is learning from this crisis remains inscrutable. But Chinese analysts’ views offer a window into the possible lessons the Chinese government is drawing from Putin’s war. Their interpretations are varied and individual. After watching two years of war in Ukraine, however, many have concluded that the West has no stomach for conflict and will grow tired of supporting democracies facing an invading force if the economic costs are high. This conclusion is often overstated and probably underestimates American resolve. But the very fact that they have drawn it suggests that the Taiwan Strait—and the world at large—may be heading in a still more dangerous direction.

• JUDE BLANCHETTE is Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong.

Foreign Affairs · by China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong · August 13, 2024

20. Beyond Fusion: Preparing for Systems Rivalry (China)

Excerpts:

Beijing’s deceptive and coercive approach to security and development challenges U.S. and other democratic policymakers seeking to counter China’s ambitions with narrowly targeted tools like export controls and investment screening measures. As more U.S. and allied firms become involved in the high-stakes cat-and-mouse game of technology protection policies and work-arounds, U.S. policymakers’ efforts to build what they describe as a “high wall and small yard” to protect American national security without disrupting commercial ties are under increasing strain. Decision-makers face a critical challenge: How do you regulate the flow of dual-use technology when your rival has systematically erased the boundaries between peaceful and military applications?

This problem is only getting more urgent as evidence of the strategy’s effectiveness mounts, when measured by the metrics that matter most for U.S. interests. It has enabled the People’s Liberation Army to develop and field asymmetric capabilities across warfighting and non-traditional security domains that could give it an advantage in a potential conflict. Moreover, the strategy has also helped Chinese enterprises, both state-owned and nominally private, to capture significant global market share in advanced industries, while also concentrating the party’s capacity to mobilize national resources in times of emergency and war. Addressing the challenge requires a fundamental shift in mindset and strategy. To maintain democratic advantages in the face of China’s growing military and economic power, the United States and its allies should recognize military-civil fusion as a core feature of the systems rivalry between the Chinese Communist Party and democratic nations, retool our institutions and policies to confront the challenge head-on, and reindustrialize our economies to offset China’s manufacturing advantages.

​...

Conclusion

The time for equivocation is over. By the metrics that matter most for U.S. interests, military-civil fusion has been a success and presents serious challenges that must be addressed. A fundamental reckoning is overdue and will require the United States and its allies to retool policies, realign institutions, and revitalize the industrial base to address the challenge. Only through decisive action can the United States and other democracies maintain — or regain — strategic advantages and protect their interests in the face of China’s growing asymmetric military capabilities and economic power.

Beyond Fusion: Preparing for Systems Rivalry - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Liza Tobin · August 13, 2024

In 2007, when former Chinese leader Hu Jintao urged China to pursue “Military-Civil Fusion with Chinese characteristics,” few in the United States paid attention, much less anticipated the dilemma that this emerging Chinese strategy would pose to U.S. policymakers. Almost two decades later, as the U.S. government considers further restricting China’s access to the advanced semiconductors critical to the AI revolution, military-civil fusion — the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy to intentionally blur the lines between military and civilian sectors — lies at the heart of the drama. Previous controls, imposed in 2022 and expanded in 2023, came on the heels of the discovery of U.S. semiconductor technology in a supercomputer engineered to develop hypersonic missiles for the People’s Liberation Army. New evidence suggests that U.S. microelectronics technology has also aided Chinese advancements in nuclear weapons, torpedoes, and other military applications.

Through military-civil fusion, the party seeks to align the entire Chinese science and technology enterprise to strengthen the twin pillars underpinning all Chinese national strategies – security and development. By design, the strategy often implicates both Chinese and foreign firms and research organizations, facilitating the transfer of dual-use technologies across borders, sometimes without the knowledge or consent of the foreign entities involved. As a form of political-economic governance, the strategy is predicated on obfuscation and values hostile to a free and open society, as well as a range of “brute force” tactics that undermine the fabric of transparent, competitive markets. Perhaps most importantly, the strategy is ultimately designed to enable China to develop the world’s most high-tech military, meaning that its broader strategic significance cannot be understated.

Beijing’s deceptive and coercive approach to security and development challenges U.S. and other democratic policymakers seeking to counter China’s ambitions with narrowly targeted tools like export controls and investment screening measures. As more U.S. and allied firms become involved in the high-stakes cat-and-mouse game of technology protection policies and work-arounds, U.S. policymakers’ efforts to build what they describe as a “high wall and small yard” to protect American national security without disrupting commercial ties are under increasing strain. Decision-makers face a critical challenge: How do you regulate the flow of dual-use technology when your rival has systematically erased the boundaries between peaceful and military applications?

This problem is only getting more urgent as evidence of the strategy’s effectiveness mounts, when measured by the metrics that matter most for U.S. interests. It has enabled the People’s Liberation Army to develop and field asymmetric capabilities across warfighting and non-traditional security domains that could give it an advantage in a potential conflict. Moreover, the strategy has also helped Chinese enterprises, both state-owned and nominally private, to capture significant global market share in advanced industries, while also concentrating the party’s capacity to mobilize national resources in times of emergency and war. Addressing the challenge requires a fundamental shift in mindset and strategy. To maintain democratic advantages in the face of China’s growing military and economic power, the United States and its allies should recognize military-civil fusion as a core feature of the systems rivalry between the Chinese Communist Party and democratic nations, retool our institutions and policies to confront the challenge head-on, and reindustrialize our economies to offset China’s manufacturing advantages.

Become a Member

Evolution of the Strategy in the Party’s Rhetoric and Statecraft

China’s strategy to merge its military and civilian sectors is ambitious and unique, characterized by its large scale, wide scope, and systematic approach. Unlike America’s decentralized military-industrial complex in which private sector participation is voluntary, or the former Soviet Union’s highly centralized system, China’s military-civil fusion strategy effectively blends private sector innovation with centralized oversight, blurring the lines between top-down direction and bottom-up initiative.

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chinese leaders have sought to integrate security and development priorities. Although it has a long prehistory, military-civil fusion is primarily associated with Xi Jinping’s tenure as general secretary. Two years after elevating it to the status of a national strategy, Xi in January 2017 established and took charge of a new body, the Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development, to guide its implementation.

The 19th Party Congress in October 2017 marked a watershed moment for the party in connecting military-civil fusion to the achievement of China’s national goals. In his work report, Xi declared the party’s ambition for China to become “global leader in terms of comprehensive national power and international influence,” a high-level articulation of China’s overarching national objectives. Additionally, Xi emphasized the importance of developing a “deep pattern of military-civil fusion and building an integrated national strategic system and capabilities” (一体化的国家战略体系和能力) — the framework for achieving these goals. This term represents the party’s concept of a system that mobilizes all state and societal resources to enhance China’s comprehensive national power (综合国力). As keen observers have noted, party theorists made this connection between these two concepts even clearer a month later, stating, “The end goal of military-civil fusion deep development is to build up China’s unified military-civil system of strategies and strategic capabilities.”

Under Xi’s leadership, extensive bureaucratic structures and numerous plans, regulations, and guidance documents have been established to promote military-civil fusion throughout China. Greg Levesque notes that “almost every provincial and municipal government has formed local-level military-civil fusion development committees led by party officials and rolled out development plans.” Xi has also overseen the establishment of military-civil fusion demonstration bases: innovation clusters across the country designed to facilitate resource sharing across entities in strategic technology sectors, such as aerospace, aviation, advanced equipment manufacturing, new materials, electronics and information technology, energy systems, biomedicine, and automotive.

Evolution of U.S. Policy Response

U.S. analysts began taking note of military-civil fusion in the early to mid-2010s, but it garnered significant attention from senior policymakers starting in 2018. That year, a speech by then-Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation Christopher Ford highlighted the challenges the strategy posed to U.S. export control policies. Several months later, the Department of Energy denied licenses to export civilian nuclear technology to China General Nuclear Power Group, a state-owned enterprise, citing military diversion and proliferation concerns. In May 2020, the Trump administration’s China strategy (which one of us co-authored) highlighted the strategy explicitly, emphasizing Beijing’s exploitation of foreign dual-use technology. Later that month, the administration suspended student and researcher visas for a very narrow set of Chinese applicants with known ties to the Chinese military, who were seeking to enter the United States undercover to collect sensitive technology know-how. Additional actions included export controls on Chinese companies linked to the strategy. The Biden administration has maintained these policies, though its public focus on military-civil fusion has lessened in favor of what some in the administration have articulated as a “narrow and targeted” approach to protecting foundational technologies and others have summed up as “a small yard and high fence” — terms that contrast starkly to military-civil fusion’s sweeping scope.

Beijing’s pursuit of “deep fusion,” meanwhile, has accelerated, even as Beijing downplayed public discussion of the strategy starting in 2019. Initially, this shift was a reaction to U.S. criticism of the strategy, but quieter Chinese rhetoric did not signal retreat of the concept. As the Department of Defense has noted, since 2022, occasional mentions of the strategy have returned but have largely been superseded by calls to “build an integrated national strategic system and capabilities.”

Evaluating Progress

Over the last several years, a large body of Western analyses have documented the strategy’s doctrinal and institutional features, evolution over time, and implications for the United States and other democracies. Given the strategy’s importance, it is striking that the China-watching community has so far been reluctant to make a judgment on the strategy’s overall success or failure, with some analysts concluding it is too early to tell. But nearly a decade has passed since Xi elevated the pursuit of military-civil fusion to a national strategy. A growing body of evidence indicates that the strategy has contributed to major technology breakthroughs, resulting in significant military and economic benefits to China. Central to these advances is Beijing’s longstanding emphasis on industrial production as a key source of comprehensive national power. China’s emergence as the world’s leading manufacturing superpower yields economic gains and dominance in a number of dual-use sectors, undermining U.S. deterrence and revealing supply chain vulnerabilities that could advantage Beijing in crises or conflicts. Several case studies are instructive.

Consider Chinese efforts to lead in global navigation satellite system technology. BeiDou, China’s homegrown challenger to the U.S.-designed global positioning system, has been hailed by Chinese commentators as a “model of military-civil fusion.” BeiDou emerged as a military system in the 2000s and has since overtaken the global positioning system to become the world’s largest global navigation satellite system constellation with 58 operational satellites. As a report from the Belfer Center makes clear, the Chinese government “recognizes that BeiDou’s commercial applications can enhance the [Chinese Communist Party’s] political, economic, and security goals.” The security implications of BeiDou’s growing global reach are especially significant, providing China with asymmetric advantages across space, cyber, and maritime domains and enabling it to provide military support to Russia and Iran.

China’s shipbuilding sector is another clear fusion success story, with the party leveraging all levers of state power — including laws that direct commercial Chinese maritime firms to support the Chinese military — to cement its advantages and transform China into a maritime power. China has vaulted from producing merely 5 percent of merchant tonnage in 1999 to becoming the world’s leading producer of both military and commercial hulls in 2023, with shipbuilding capacity roughly 232 times that of the United States. China’s shipyards have become illustrative of Xi’s call to accelerate the fusion of “infrastructure, key facilities, and resources based on essential requirements.” Those resources include foreign investment and know-how (technology transfer is a key pillar of the strategy and has aided China’s shipbuilding efforts in particular). China’s third and most capable aircraft carrier, the Fujian, shares assembly facilities with commercial hulls, including for foreign clients, while a number of China’s demonstration bases include a focus on shipbuilding. Moreover, Beijing has forged technical cooperation agreements with shipbuilding firms in Japan, South Korea, and Germany, which have provided access to advanced designs and technologies.

Beyond these core sectors, Chinese officials see a major role for the strategy in driving innovation in new technology domains and leading in future industries. The party has prioritized biotechnology as a strategic industry ripe for fusion development, especially as AI enables more capable manipulation of biological building blocks. This has raised concerns in Washington given that major Chinese biotech enterprises are working closely with the People’s Liberation Army. China’s achievements in supercomputing, enabled by military-civil fusion, are also notable. The Tianhe supercomputer series, developed primarily by China’s National University of Defense Technology, serves as a technology platform for civilian enterprise groups and is helping to position the Chinese military for future breakthroughs in military applications such as encryption breaking, secure communications, simulation, and navigation.

Whole-of-Nation Mobilization

Military-civil fusion has long sought to bridge the gap between the national defense mobilization system and the state emergency management system. Through the strategy, Beijing aims to ensure it is able to activate a coordinated response during a crisis, whether military or civilian in nature. Party commentators have praised China’s COVID-19 pandemic response as evidence of the effectiveness of their military-civil fusion system, reinforcing the party’s broader propaganda efforts to showcase its governance superiority. According to Xi and Chinese military scholars, the party’s mobilization of various entities, including military units, government agencies, the United Front, and individual companies validated China’s “People’s War” — a reference to Mao Zedong’s conception of revolutionary armed struggle — approach to solving major problems.

The implications of China’s COVID-19 response extend beyond crisis management. The party retained mobilized system features post-lockdown, with the party seizing on the politics of emergency to blur the lines between wartime and peacetime governance, potentially in preparation for conflict. This approach was exemplified by the party’s use of community-based surveillance systems — established during the pandemic but still in place as of mid-2024 — to strengthen social control. Additionally, the Chinese military’s use of “robo-dogs” (a technology originally developed for commercial use) to bark orders at residents during the pandemic represents a vivid example of military-civil fusion in the form of techno-authoritarian policing tactics that have outlasted the pandemic, despite domestic backlash against Beijing’s heavy handed controls.

Implications and Recommendations

Despite dramatic progress, Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy faces two primary obstacles to further success: namely, deteriorating economic conditions and America’s growing lead in AI as of mid-2024. On the first, policies enacted by democratic market economies to “de-risk” from China have selectively limited China’s access to foreign technology, investment, and markets. At the same time, the United States is leading the AI revolution in many respects, potentially hampering China’s ambitious vision for AI-enabled “intelligentized” warfare. In addition, most advanced AI chips and the sophisticated tools required to manufacture them are designed and produced primarily by firms based in the United States or democratic nations, and U.S. and allied export controls have constrained supply, albeit imperfectly. These challenges are significant, but the party has set its sights on leading the world in AI by 2030, and its ability to direct resources within its system and leverage China’s scope and scale means the United States has no room for complacency. China’s efforts to develop indigenous technology alternatives and apply them for military use are likely to see continued progress, albeit more slowly than would be the case in the absence of foreign de-risking and U.S. controls.

Recognize. As a first step, addressing the challenge of military-civil fusion requires framing it accurately. Military-civil fusion, and the party’s framework for operationalizing it along with its broader goals — the National Strategic System and Capabilities — are core features of the systems rivalry between China, on the one hand, and the United States and its democratic allies, on the other. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have used “strategic competition” to describe the U.S. relationship to China, but a future administration should take a page from the European Union’s playbook, when it used the term “systemic rival” to describe China in a joint communication in 2019.

To tackle the challenge of military-civil fusion, adopting a systems rivalry mindset is crucial. “Rivalry,” compared to “competition,” implies higher stakes, unpredictability, and no assumption of a level playing field or shared rules, since the rivalry emerges from fundamental differences in governance systems and values. A systems rivalry mindset entails shifting from a defensive to an offensive posture, and actively identifying and exploiting the party’s vulnerabilities for democracies’ strategic advantage. To do so, analysts and policymakers must understand how the party conceptualizes the National Strategic System and Capabilities and its role in achieving its objectives through party, state, military, corporate, and overseas channels. This knowledge provides a critical foundation for identifying gaps in China’s system, such as information asymmetries and breakdowns and economic or technology chokepoints that the United States and its allies can exploit, particularly as the expression of these strategies becomes more nuanced in official documents. Also essential is to acknowledge the deep disparities between the two nations’ systems and reject moral equivalence. While many countries, including the United States, encourage cooperation between military and civilian sectors, the opaque, unaccountable, and coercive features of the party’s Leninist approach to governance sets Beijing’s approach apart.

Retool. The United States must adapt and retool its strategies and institutions to confront the challenge, adopting a philosophy of risk-based prioritization across the board. Leaders should prioritize limiting economic entanglement with China in areas that touch critical infrastructure, national resilience, and warfighting capabilities, recognizing the evolving nature of China’s strategic approach to these sectors. Second, there are areas where U.S. security and economic goals are misaligned. To drive alignment, the White House could appoint an economic security czar to lead the development of a national economic security strategy to set strategic objectives and coordinate the use of tools such as export controls and sanctions. The czar could also lead efforts to deepen collaboration with allies and partners to develop shared threat assessments and strategies for research, development, and investment in strategic technologies. Third, the United States and other democracies must address the critical gap in research security concerning the transfer of knowledge in fundamental research, which current policies focused on technology transfer often overlook. This oversight is particularly dangerous in the context of military-civil fusion, where seemingly benign scientific collaborations can contribute to China’s military capabilities. Partnerships and information exchanges among government, industry, and academia will be essential to addressing research security gaps.

Reindustrialize. China’s primary asymmetric advantage over the United States lies in its ability to manufacture goods across the industrial value chain at tremendous scale. Beijing’s progress entrenching asymmetries in industrial base capacity call into question the ability of the United States to competitively produce dual-use technologies and prevail in a protracted conflict. However, recent trends in manufacturing technology present the United States with a unique window of opportunity to reconstitute its industrial base and re-establish defense-industrial deterrence. A wide range of technologies, from AI to robotics and 3-D printing, are transforming manufacturing industries, with factories becoming increasingly software-defined. Given its advantages in software and AI, the United States has the potential to combine significant investments in production capacity — especially in strategic sectors — with efforts to accelerate the adoption of advanced manufacturing paradigms, positioning the nation to offset China’s advantages.

Conclusion

The time for equivocation is over. By the metrics that matter most for U.S. interests, military-civil fusion has been a success and presents serious challenges that must be addressed. A fundamental reckoning is overdue and will require the United States and its allies to retool policies, realign institutions, and revitalize the industrial base to address the challenge. Only through decisive action can the United States and other democracies maintain — or regain — strategic advantages and protect their interests in the face of China’s growing asymmetric military capabilities and economic power.

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Liza Tobin is senior director for economy at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) and served previously as China director at the National Security Council during the Trump and Biden administrations. Addis Goldman is an associate director for economy at SCSP, and Katherine Kurata is a director for intelligence at SCSP.

This essay is adapted from the authors’ chapter for the 2024 NBR-INDOPACOM Conference on the People’s Liberation Army, which will be published by the National Bureau of Asian Research in summer 2025. The authors wish to thank former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China, Chad Sbragia, for insights on the National Strategic System and Capabilities.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Liza Tobin · August 13, 2024

21. The Hard Power Behind Olympic Triumph

The Hard Power Behind Olympic Triumph

The Games in Paris succeeded because they were protected by a ring of steel.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-hard-power-behind-olympic-triumph-national-security-made-paris-games-possible-e67bca55?mod=latest_headlines

By Walter Russell Mead

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Aug. 12, 2024 5:12 pm ET

Runners pass the Eiffel Tower during the women’s Olympic marathon in Paris, Aug. 11. Photo: piroschka van de wouw/Reuters

Paris

The Summer Olympics were a triumph for the beleaguered President Emmanuel Macron, for the city of Paris and above all for the athletes. The Games reminded the world why we look to France for elegance and why France receives more tourists than any country in the world.

They also reminded everyone why the Games matter. Launched in 1892 by the French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), the modern Olympic movement reflects and embodies the strengths and weaknesses of the current world order in a way that no other global event comes close to doing.

It isn’t only that the final medal count, with the U.S. and China tied for the most gold medals and the Americans winning the most medals overall, offers a rough match for the state of the current global competition between the two great powers. It is that the Olympic Games reflect the current structure of the global order.

The Olympics are a distinctly Western and even imperialist creation. Coubertin saw the 19th-century British ethos of amateur athletics as described in books such as Thomas Hughes’s “Tom Brown’s School Days” both as a revival of the best traditions of the ancient Greeks and as a key contributor to Victorian Britain’s culture of economic and political liberty at home. Those conditions in turn gave Britain the power to uphold the Pax Britannica. Coubertin believed that an international Olympic movement could promote world peace by uniting nations in a peaceful competition and strengthen France by encouraging the young to develop their physical and mental capacities through athletic training.

More than this, the principles Coubertin identified in athletic competition stand at the core of the culture of ordered liberty that propelled the West to global leadership in the 19th century and can still power the world to new heights of prosperity and freedom today.

The blended ideals of competition and cooperation at the heart of the Games don’t only symbolize the principles behind free governments and free markets. They embody them. The creative synthesis of competition and cooperation is how democratic capitalism works. The rules of sports such as basketball and tennis exist to make the competition more thrilling and to allow true excellence to shine forth. In the same way, constitutional order allows free competition between political ideas. Similarly, the laws and rules that surround markets exist to allow markets to do their work more efficiently, and to fill the world with an ever-growing abundance of ever cheaper and better goods and services.

At the Games as in the wider world, those ideals aren’t always fully realized. Still, despite their shortcomings and their distinctively Western and even imperialist origins, the Olympics have been widely embraced around the world. The competition has made humanity run faster and jump farther than ever before. The closing ceremony, in which athletes and Paris 2024 volunteers representing more than 200 nations peacefully carried their flags, offered something as close to the realization of a united humanity as we are likely to see.

But there is something else to be learned from the spectacle. The Olympics, like the broader world order, can’t be taken for granted. There is, for example, the constant threat of cheating and attempts to “game” the system in various ways. At the Olympics, such efforts can compromise the fairness of given competitions. Carried to extremes, they would turn the Games into a mockery. In the wider world, systemic cheating and abuse threaten the survival of the global trading system.

There is another threat to the Olympic Games and to the peace of the wider world. French authorities were on high alert during every moment of the games. The opening day witnessed dangerous acts of sabotage, and much worse would have occurred without the dedication and competence of the security forces. Phenomenal athletes such as ace swimmer Katie Ledecky and your Global View columnist’s rowing nephew, Nick Mead, could carry their country’s flag in the closing procession only because 45,000 police, 10,000 soldiers and 22,000 private security personnel were vigilant over the Games.

The Paris Games were a triumph for French and Western soft power, broadcasting an inspiring vision of the best humanity can achieve. But the Games succeeded only because they were protected by a ring of steel. Hard power was the necessary foundation of all the joy, all the excellence and all the competitive drama that made the Games so great.

In these dangerous times it would be catastrophically foolish to forget that the same truth holds in the wider world. The culture of ordered liberty that Coubertin saw in amateur sport can still bring freedom and prosperity to America and the wider world—but the arena of peaceful competition must always be defended.

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Appeared in the August 13, 2024, print edition as 'The Hard Power Behind Olympic Triumph'.

22. Nuclear sub captain armed with doomsday weapons made sex tape with junior sailor at sea

And now in the category of what was this guy thinking?

If you are going to do something that gets you fired you may as well do something in a big way (not!)

At least the sailors will have memories of the skipper that they will always talk about.

Photos at the link. https://nypost.com/2024/08/12/world-news/captain-of-armed-nuclear-sub-made-sex-tape-with-underling-at-sea/

Nuclear sub captain armed with doomsday weapons made sex tape with junior sailor at sea

New York Post · by Isabel Keane · August 12, 2024

The captain of an ultra-elite UK nuclear sub armed with doomsday weapons filmed a sex tape with an underling while at sea, officials say.

The officer was in charge of the $5 billion Vanguard-class submarine — which carries Trident Two nuclear arms — when he took the X-rated video of himself and the junior sailor, the Sun reported.

The unnamed captain, who once met Princess Anne, moved on to a desk job — but eventually doomed himself by allegedly sharing the X-rated selfies, which higher-ups caught wind of, the outlet reported.

The captain of the nuclear sub doomed himself by sharing some X-rated selfies of the seamy encounter. Nomad_Soul – stock.adobe.comThe troubling incident occurred aboard a Vanguard submarine. PA Images via Getty Images

Crewmates then corroborated the seamy at-sea shenanigans, it said.

The officer, one of the youngest to captain a nuclear-powered sub, was suspended and soon after sacked under the navy’s “zero tolerance policy” for inappropriate behavior.

The scandal comes as the UK’s navy suffers a shortage of submarine staff, according to the outlet.

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The Royal Navy has four nuclear-armed submarine classes: Vanguard, Vengeance, Victorious and Vigilant — and always has a vessel at sea in case of a nuclear attack.

In a statement, the Royal Navy told the Sun, “All forms of unacceptable behavior are taken extremely seriously and anything which falls short of the highest standards will not be tolerated.

“Anyone who is found culpable will be held accountable for their actions, regardless of their rank or status,” it added.

New York Post · by Isabel Keane · August 12, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com