Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"War should be carried on like a monsoon; one changeless determination of every particle towards the one unalterable aim."

– Herman Melville

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

– John Adams

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."

– George Orwell

1. The U.S. will very likely fight a 3-front war against Russia, China and Iran, Palantir's Alex Karp says

2. Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?

3. Chinese and Philippine ships collide at Sabina Shoal, a new flash point

4. Why US special operators training in the Arctic matters to China

5. The Kursk Offensive Dilemma by Mick Ryan

6. FPRI to Host a Joint Conference with the Irregular Warfare Center

7. The Dwindling Strategic Flame: Reviving Creative Defense Planning

8. The long-term consequences of US intel leaks

9. Kursk Pocket Shows Ukraine Still in the Fight

10. Ukraine's Incursion Into Kursk - Tactical Genius?

11. Blinken says U.S. proposal is ‘maybe the last’ chance for Gaza cease-fire

12. Kyiv repels Russian aerial attack, North Korean ballistic weapons used in strike, city authorities say

13. Why Does America Seem to Support Hamas and Iran?

14. It’s time to end the myth that the US needed to drop atomic bombs to end World War II | Opinion

15. Opinion America’s failed approach to Iran can’t really be called a strategy

16. Future of Taiwan is strategically important to America: INDOPACOM chief

17. US Military Presence in Syria Carries Substantial Risks, But So Does Complete Withdrawal

18. The US needs more pop-up air bases worldwide to keep enemies guessing

19. Zelenskyy envisions buffer zone as Ukraine pushes into Kursk region

20. The Long Shadow of Soviet Sabotage Doctrine?

21. The Trouble With Allies

22. Strategy for a New Era: USSOCOM Takes on Strategic Competition

1. The U.S. will very likely fight a 3-front war against Russia, China and Iran, Palantir's Alex Karp says

Whew. At least Palantir does not assess north Korea will cause a war. We should be thankful for that "analysis." (Note sarcasm).

But oina serious note, this summarizes many of the controversies associated with Palintir. NY Times complete article follows .

He told the Times he won’t apologize for what he believes in and whom Palantir supports: “I’m not going to apologize for defending the U.S. government on the border, defending the Special Ops, bringing the people home. I’m not apologizing for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or lots of other places.”

The U.S. will very likely fight a 3-front war against Russia, China and Iran, Palantir's Alex Karp says

Fortune · by Jason Ma

But Alex Karp, CEO of the data-mining software company Palantir which is known for its work in defense and intelligence, warned that the U.S. may have to wage war in three different theaters in the future.

He told the New York Times that he thinks the U.S. will “very likely” find itself in a three-front war with China, Russia and Iran. As a result, he said the Pentagon should continue developing autonomous weapons at full speed, pointing to big mismatches in how far the U.S. would be willing to go while fighting a war compared to other countries.

“I think we’re in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he added. “Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.”

Karp continued: “In fact, given that we have parity technologically but we don’t have parity morally, they have a huge advantage.”

He also said the military is very close to the threshold where “somewhat autonomous drones” that can kill become the most important weapons.

“You already see this in Ukraine,” Karp noted.

Elsewhere in the sprawling Times profile, which also covered his personal life, business practices, and opinions on a range of people and issues, he urged Democrats to show more strength.

“Are we tough enough to scare our adversaries so we don’t go to war? Do the Chinese, Russians and Persians think we’re strong?” said Karp, who supported President Joe Biden and is now backing VP Kamala Harris in the election. “The president needs to tell them if you cross these lines, this is what we’re going to do, and you have to then enforce it.”

Waging war on three fronts at once would likely require more troops, notwithstanding any increased reliance on drones or other autonomous weapons.

After years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military’s size has dropped, while the Pentagon has turned more attention to the Pacific and a possible conflict with China.

While on a separate train of thought on race, class, and affirmative action, Karp told the Times he is also “pro draft.”

“I think part of the reason we have a massive cleavage in our culture is, at the end of the day, by and large, only people who are middle- and working-class do all the fighting,” he explained.

Representatives for Palantir didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Palantir has come under criticism for supporting Israel during its war with Hamas, and Karp previously has acknowledged some of his employees will keep quitting over that stance.

He told the Times he won’t apologize for what he believes in and whom Palantir supports: “I’m not going to apologize for defending the U.S. government on the border, defending the Special Ops, bringing the people home. I’m not apologizing for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or lots of other places.”

Fortune · by Jason Ma

2. Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?

A long read for anyone who has wondered about Palintir.

Excerpts:

Palantir was founded in 2003 by a gang of five, including Karp and his old Stanford Law School classmate Peter Thiel (now the company’s chairman). It was backed, in part, by nearly $2 million from In-Q-Tel, the C.I.A.’s venture capital arm.

“Saving lives and on occasion taking lives is super interesting,” Mr. Karp told me.

He described what his company does as “the finding of hidden things” — sifting through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior.

Mr. Karp does not believe in appeasement. “You scare the crap out of your adversaries,” he said. He brims with American chauvinism, boasting that we are leagues ahead of China and Russia on software.

“The tech scene in America is like the jazz scene in the 1950s,” he said in one forum. He told me: “I’m constantly telling people 86 percent of the top 50 tech companies in the world just by market cap are American — and people fall out of their chair. It’s hard for us to understand how dominant we are in certain industries.”

In the wake of 9/11, the C.I.A. bet on Palantir’s maw gobbling up data and auguring where the next terrorist attacks would come from. Palantir uses multiple databases to find the bad guy, even, as Mr. Karp put it, “if the bad guy actually works for you.”

The company is often credited with helping locate Osama bin Laden so Navy SEALs could kill him, but it’s unclear if that is true. As with many topics that came up in the course of our interviews in Washington, Palo Alto and New Hampshire, Mr. Karp zips his lips about whether his company was involved in dispatching the fiend of 9/11.

“If you have a reputation for talking about what the pope says when you meet him,” Mr. Karp explained, “you’ll never meet the pope again.”

He does crow a little about Western civilization’s resting on Palantir’s slender shoulders, noting that without its software, “you would’ve had massive terror attacks in Europe already, like Oct. 7 style.” And those attacks, he believes, would have propelled the far right to power.

Palantir does not do business with China, Russia or other countries that are opposed to the West. Mr. Thiel said the company tries to work with “more allied” and “less corrupt” governments, noting dryly that aside from their ideological stances, “with corrupt countries, you never get paid.”

“We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Mr. Karp said. “It’s interesting how radical that is, considering it’s not, in my view, that radical.”

He added: “If you believe we should appease Iran, Russia and China by saying we’re going to be nicer and nicer and nicer, of course you’ll look at Palantir negatively. Some of these places want you to do the apology show for what you believe in, and we don’t apologize for what we believe in. I’m not going to apologize for defending the U.S. government on the border, defending the Special Ops, bringing the people home. I’m not apologizing for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or lots of other places.”

As one Karp acquaintance put it: “Alex is principled. You just may not like his principles."

Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?

In a rare in-depth interview, this billionaire man of mystery, the head of Palantir Technologies, talks about war, A.I. and America’s future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/style/alex-karp-palantir.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm

By Maureen Dowd

Reporting from the White Mountains in New Hampshire

Aug. 17, 2024

Alex Karp never learned to drive.

“I was too poor,” he said. “And then I was too rich.”

In fact, Mr. Karp, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies, the mysterious and powerful data analytics firm, doesn’t trust himself to drive. Or ride a bike. Or ski downhill.

“I’m a dreamer,” he said. “I’ll start dreaming and then I fall over. I started doing tai chi to prevent that. It’s really, really helped with focusing on one thing at a time. If you had met me 15 years ago, two-thirds of the conversation, I’d just be dreaming.”

What would he dream about?

“Literally, it could be a walk I did five years ago,” he said. “It could be some conversation I had in grad school. Could be my family member annoyed me. Something a colleague said, like: ‘Why did they say this? What does it actually mean?’”

Mr. Karp is a lean, extremely fit billionaire with unruly salt-and-pepper curls. He is introvert-charming (something I aspire to myself). He has A.D.H.D. and can’t hide it if he is not interested in what someone is saying. After a hyper spurt of talking, he loses energy and has to recharge on the stationary bike or by reading. Even though he thinks of himself as different, he seems to like being different. He enjoys being a provocateur onstage and in interviews.

“I’m a Jewish, racially ambiguous dyslexic, so I can say anything,” he said, smiling.

Unlike many executives in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp backed President Biden, cutting him a big check, despite skepticism about his handling of the border and his overreliance on Hollywood elites like Jeffrey Katzenberg. Now he is supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, but he still has vociferous complaints about his party.

When he donates, he said, he does it in multiples of 18 because “it’s mystical — 18 brings good luck in the tradition of kabbalah. I gave Biden $360,000.”

The 56-year-old is perfectly happy hanging out in a remote woodsy meadow alone — except for his Norwegian ski instructor, his Swiss-Portuguese chef, his Austrian assistant, his American shooting instructor and his bodyguards. (Mr. Karp, who has never married, once complained that bodyguards crimp your ability to flirt.)

“This is like introverts’ heaven,” he said, looking at his red barn from the porch of his Austrian-style house with a mezuza on the door. “You can invite people graciously. No one comes.”

The house is sparse on furniture, but Mr. Karp still worries that it is too cluttered. “I do have a Spartan thing,” he said. “I definitely feel constrained and slightly imprisoned when I have too much stuff around me.”

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Asked about the dangers of artificial intelligence, Mr. Karp said, “The only solution to stop A.I. abuse is to use A.I.”Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

So how did a daydreaming doctoral student in German philosophy wind up leading a shadowy data analytics firm that has become a major American defense contractor, one that works with spy services as it charts the future of autonomous warfare?

He’s not a household name, and yet Mr. Karp is at the vanguard of what Mark Milley, the retired general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called “the most significant fundamental change in the character of war ever recorded in history.” In this new world, unorthodox Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Mr. Karp and Elon Musk are woven into the fabric of America’s national security.

Mr. Karp is also at the white-hot center of ethical issues about whether firms like Palantir are too Big Brother, with access to so much of our personal data as we sign away our privacy. And he is in the middle of the debate about whether artificial intelligence is friend or foe, whether killer robots and disembodied A.I. will one day turn on us.

Mr. Karp’s position is that we’re hurtling toward this new world whether we like it or not. Do we want to dominate it, or do we want to be dominated by China?

Critics worry about what happens when weapons are autonomous and humans become superfluous to the killing process. Tech reflects the values of its operators, so what if it falls into the hands of a modern Caligula?

“I think a lot of the issues come back to ‘Are we in a dangerous world where you have to invest in these things?’” Mr. Karp told me, as he moved around his living room in a tai chi rhythm, wearing his house shoes, jeans and a tight white T-shirt. “And I come down to yes. All these technologies are dangerous.” He adds: “The only solution to stop A.I. abuse is to use A.I.”

Inspired by Tolkien

Palantir’s name is derived from palantíri, the seeing stones in the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasies. The company’s office in Palo Alto, Calif., features “Lord of the Rings” décor and is nicknamed the Shire.

After years under the radar, Mr. Karp is now in the public eye. He has joked that he needs a coach to teach him how to be more normal.

Born in New York and raised outside Philadelphia in a leftist family, Mr. Karp has a Jewish father who was a pediatrician and a Black mother who is an artist. They were social activists who took young Alex to civil rights marches and other protests. His uncle, Gerald D. Jaynes, is an economics and African American studies professor at Yale; his brother, Ben, is an academic who lives in Japan.

“I just think I’ve always viewed myself as I don’t fit in, and I can’t really try to,” Mr. Karp said. “My parents’ background just gave me a primordial subconscious bias that anything that involves ‘We fit in together’ does not include me.

“Yes, I think the way I explain it politically is like, if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.”

Mr. Karp has his own unique charisma. “He’s one of a kind, to say the least,” said the Democratic strategist James Carville, who is an informal adviser to Palantir.

When I visited the Palo Alto office, Mr. Karp accidentally knocked down a visitor while demonstrating a tai chi move. He apologized, then ran off to get a printout of Goethe’s “Faust” in German, which he read aloud in an effort to show that it was better than the English translation.

“If you were to do a sitcom on Palantir, it’s equal parts Larry David, a philosophy class, tech and James Bond,” he said.

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Mr. Karp at the Senate building in Washington last year. He was among the tech industry titans, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who took part in a discussion of A.I. with lawmakers.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

“Saving lives and on occasion taking lives is super interesting,” Mr. Karp told me.

He described what his company does as “the finding of hidden things” — sifting through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior.

“If you have a reputation for talking about what the pope says when you meet him,” Mr. Karp explained, “you’ll never meet the pope again.”

As one Karp acquaintance put it: “Alex is principled. You just may not like his principles.”

Kara Swisher, the author of “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story,” told me: “While Palantir promises a more efficient and cost-effective way to conduct war, should our goal be to make it less expensive, onerous and painful? After all, war is not a video game, nor should it be.”

Mr. Karp’s friend Diane von Furstenberg told me that he sees himself as Batman, believing in the importance of choosing sides in a parlous world. (The New York office is called Gotham and features a statue and prints of Batman.) But some critics have a darker view, worrying about Palantir creating a “digital kill chain” and seeing Mr. Karp less as a hero than as a villain.

Back in 2016, some Democrats regarded Palantir as ominous because of Mr. Thiel’s support for former President Donald J. Trump. Later, conspiracy theories sprang up around the company’s role in Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort pushing the Covid-19 vaccine program from clinical trials to jabs in arms.

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In December 2016, Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect, met with tech executives including the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.Credit...Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Some critics focused on Palantir’s work at the border, which helped U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down undocumented migrants for deportation. In 2019, about 70 demonstrators blocked access to the cafeteria outside the Palo Alto office. “Immigrants are welcome here, time to cancel Palantir,” they shouted.

The same year, over 200 Palantir employees, in a letter to Mr. Karp, outlined their concerns about the software that had helped ICE. And there was a campaign inside Palantir — in vain — to get him to donate the proceeds of a $49 million ICE contract to charity.

I asked Mr. Karp if Mr. Thiel’s public embrace of Mr. Trump the first time around had made life easier — in terms of getting government contracts — or harder.

“I didn’t enjoy it,” he said. “There’s a lot of reasons I cut Biden a check. I do not enjoy being protested every day. It was completely ludicrous and ridiculous. It was actually the opposite. Because Peter had supported Mr. Trump, it was actually harder to get things done.”

Did they talk about it?

“Peter and I talk about everything,” Mr. Karp said. “It’s like, yes, I definitely informed Peter, ‘This is not making our life easier.’”

Mr. Thiel did not give money to Mr. Trump or speak at his convention this time around, although he supports JD Vance, his former protégé at his venture capital firm. He said he might get more involved now because of Mr. Vance.

Palantir got its start in intelligence and defense — it now works with the Space Force — and has since sprouted across the government through an array of contracts. It helps the I.R.S. to identify tax fraud and the Food and Drug Administration to prevent supply chain disruptions and to get drugs to market quicker.

It has assisted Ukraine and Israel in sifting through seas of data to gather relevant intelligence in their wars — on how to protect special forces by mapping capabilities, how to safely transport troops and how to target drones and missiles more accurately.

In 2022, Mr. Karp took a secret trip to war-ravaged Kyiv, becoming the first major Western C.E.O. to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and offering to supply his country with the technology that would allow it to be David to Russia’s Goliath. Time magazine ran a cover on Ukraine as a lab for A.I. warfare, and Palantir operatives embedded with the troops.

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A Ukrainian government handout image of Mr. Karp meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov in 2022.Credit...Office of the President of Ukraine

While Palantir’s role in helping Ukraine was heralded, its work with Israel, where targeting is more treacherous, because the enemy is parasitically entangled with civilians, is far more controversial.

“I think there’s a huge dichotomy between how the elite sees Ukraine and Israel,” Mr. Karp said. “If you go into any elite circle, pushing back against Russia is obvious, and Israel is complicated. If you go outside elite circles, it’s exactly the opposite.”

Independent analysts have said that Israel, during an April operation, could not have shot down scores of Iranian missiles and drones in mere minutes without Palantir’s tech. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scorched-earth campaign in Gaza, the starving and orphaned children and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians have drawn outrage, including some aimed at Mr. Karp and Mr. Thiel.

In May, protesters trapped Mr. Thiel inside a student building at the University of Cambridge. In recent days, senior U.S. officials have expressed doubts about Israel’s conduct of the war.

Mr. Karp’s position on backing Israel is adamantine. The company took out a full-page ad in The New York Times last year stating that “Palantir stands with Israel.”

“It’s like we have a double standard on Israel,” he told me. If the Oct. 7 attack had happened in America, he said, we would turn the hiding place of our enemies “into a parking lot. There would be no more tunnels.”

As Mr. Karp told CNBC in March: “We’ve lost employees. I’m sure we’ll lose more employees. If you have a position that does not cost you ever to lose an employee, it’s not a position.”

He told me, “If you believe that the West should lose and you believe that the only way to defend yourself is always with words and not with actions, you should be skeptical of us.”

He added: “I always think it’s hard because where the critics are right is what we do is morally complex. If you’re supporting the West with products that are used at war, you can’t pretend that there’s a simple answer.”

Does he have any qualms about what his company does?

“I’d have many more qualms if I thought our adversaries were committed to anything like the rule of law,” he said, adding: “A lot of this does come down to, do you think America is a beacon of good or not? I think a lot of the critics, what they actually believe is America is not a force for good.” His feeling is this: “Without being Pollyannaish, idiotic or pretending like any country’s been perfect or there’s not injustice, at the margin, would you want a world where America is stronger, healthy and more powerful, or not?”

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In 2019, demonstrators protested the role of Palantir Technologies in aiding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Credit...Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Asked about the impending TikTok ban, he said he’s “very in favor.”

“I do not think you should allow an adversary to control an algorithm that is specifically designed to make us slower, more divided and arguably less cognitively fit,” he said.

He considered the anti-Israel demonstrations such “an infection inside society,” reflecting “a pagan religion of mediocrity and discrimination and intolerance, and violence,” that he offered 180 jobs to students who were fearful of staying in college because of a spike in antisemitism on campuses.

“Palantir is a much better diploma,” he told me. “Honestly, it’s helping us, because there are very talented people at the Ivy League, and they’re like, ‘Get me out of here!’”

Mr. Karp sometimes gets emotional in his defense of Palantir. In June, when he received an award named in honor of Dwight Eisenhower at a D.C. gala for national security executives, he teared up. He said that when he lived in Germany, he often thought about the young men from Iowa and Kansas who risked their lives “to free people like me” during World War II. He said he was honored to receive an award named after the president who had integrated schools by force.

Claiming that his products “changed the course of history by stopping terror attacks,” Mr. Karp said that Palantir had also “protected our men and women on the battlefield” and “taken the lives of our enemies, and I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of.”

He told the gala audience about being “yelled at” by people who “call themselves progressives.”

“I actually am a progressive,” he said. “I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers — I’m trying to be nice here — out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”

He added that “we in the corporate world” have “to grow a spine” on issues like the Ivy League protesters: “If we do not win the battle of ideas and reassert basic norms and the basic, obvious idea that America is a noble, great, wonderful aspiration of a dream that we are blessed to be part of, we will have a much, much worse world for all of us.”

How It Started

Mr. Karp practicing tai chi at his home in New Hampshire.Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

The wild origin story of Palantir plays like a spy satire.

After graduating from Haverford College, Mr. Karp went to Stanford Law School, which he called “the worst three years of my adult life.”

He wasn’t interested in his classmates’ obsession with landing prestigious jobs at top law firms. “I learned at law school that I cannot do something I do not believe in,” he said, “even if it’s just turning a wrench.”

He met Mr. Thiel, a fellow student, and they immediately hit it off, trash-talking law school and, over beers, debating socialism vs. capitalism. “We argued like feral animals,” Mr. Karp told Michael Steinberger in a New York Times Magazine piece.

The liberal Heidegger fan and the conservative René Girard fan made strange bedfellows, but that’s probably what drew them together.

“I think we bonded on this intellectual level where he was this crazy leftist and I was this crazy right-wing person,” Mr. Thiel told me, “but we somehow talked to each other.”

“Alex did the Ph.D. thing," he continued, “which was, in some ways, a very, very insane thing to do after law school, but I was positive on it, because it sounded more interesting than working at a law firm.”

Mr. Karp received his doctorate in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt. He reconnected with Mr. Thiel in 2002, while working at the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership in San Francisco. The two began doing “vague brainstorming,” as Mr. Thiel put it, about a business they could start.

Mr. Thiel thought he could figure out how to find terrorists by using some of the paradigms developed at PayPal, which he helped found, to uncover patterns of fraud.

“I was just always super annoyed when, every time you go to the airport, you had to take off a shoe or you had to go through all this security theater, which was both somewhat taxing but probably had very little to do with actual security,” Mr. Thiel said.

They brought in some software engineers.

“It was two and a half years after 9/11, and you’re starting a software company with people who know nothing about the C.I.A. or any of these organizations,” Mr. Thiel recalled.

It was all very cloak-and-dagger, in an Inspector Clouseau way. They decided to seek out John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who was dubbed the godfather of modern surveillance; Admiral Poindexter had been forced to resign as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser after the Iran-Contra scandal broke. After 9/11, he worked at the Pentagon on a surveillance program called Total Information Awareness.

During the meeting, Mr. Thiel said he felt he was in the presence of a medal-festooned, Machiavelli-loving member of the military brass out of “Dr. Strangelove,” with “a LARPing vibe.”

“We had a hunch that there was a room marked ‘Super-Duper Computer,’ and if you went inside, it was just an empty room,” Mr. Thiel said. They feared their budding algorithm “would end up in a broom closet in the Pentagon,” so they moved on.

In 2005, Mr. Thiel asked Mr. Karp to be the frontman of a company with few employees, no contracts, no investors, no office and no functional tech. “It charitably could have been described as a work in progress,” Mr. Thiel said.

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Palantir’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Karp and his motley crew got a bunch of desks and explained to clients that they were unmanned because the (fictional) engineers were coming in later.

“God knows why Peter picked me as co-founder,” said Mr. Karp, who had to learn about coding on the job. “It was, in all modesty, a very good choice.”

Mr. Thiel explained: “In some ways, Alex doesn’t look like a salesperson from central casting you would send to the C.I.A. The formulation I always have is that if you’re trying to sell something to somebody, the basic paradox is you have to be just like them, so they can trust you — but you have to be very different from them so that they think you have something they don’t have.”

He said that Mr. Karp would not be suited to running Airbnb or Uber “or some mass consumer product.” But Palantir, he said, “is connected with this great set of geopolitical questions about the Western world versus the rising authoritarian powers. So if we can get our governments to function somewhat better, it’s a way to rebalance things in the direction of the West.”

“Normally,” Mr. Thiel continued, “these are bad ideas to have as a company. They’re too abstract, too idealistic. But I think something like this was necessary in the Palantir case. If you didn’t get some energy from thinking about these things, man, we would’ve sold the company after three years.”

Mr. Karp could not have been more of an outsider, to Silicon Valley and to Washington. He and his engineers had to buy suits for their visits to the capital. “We had no believers,” he said. “I kept telling Palantirians to call me Alex, and they kept calling me Dr. Karp. Then I realized the only thing they could believe in was that I had a Ph.D.”

The first few years, when tech investors were more interested in programs that let you play games on your phone, were rough. “We were like pariahs,” Mr. Karp said. “We couldn’t get meetings. If they did, it was a favor to Peter.”

With administrators in Washington, Mr. Karp recalled: “It was like, What is this Frankenstein monster doing in my office, making these wild claims that he can do better on things I have a huge budget for? How can it be that a freak-show motley crew of 12-year-old-looking mostly dudes, led by a pretty unique figure, from their perspective, would be able to do something with 1 percent of the money that we can’t do with billions and billions of dollars?”

“There’s nothing that we did at Palantir in building our software company that’s in any M.B.A.-made playbook,” Mr. Karp said. “Not one. That’s why we have been doing so well.”

He said that “the single most valuable education I had for business was sitting at the Sigmund Freud Institute, because I spent all my time with analysts.” When he worked at the institute in Frankfurt while getting his doctorate, Mr. Karp said, he would smoke cigars and think about “the conscious subconscious.”

“You’d be surprised how much analysts talk about their patients,” he said. “It’s disconcerting, actually. You just learn so much about how humans actually think.” This knowledge helps him motivate his engineers, he said.

How It’s Going

Mr. Karp said he likes to think of Palantir’s workers as part of an artists’ colony or a family; he doesn’t use the word “staff.” He enjoys interviewing prospective employees personally and prides himself on making hires in under two minutes. (He likes to have a few people around who can talk philosophy and literature with him, in German and French.)

“A lot of my populist-left politics actually bleed into my hiring stuff,” he said. “If you ask the question that the Stanford, Harvard, Yale person has answered a thousand times, all you’re learning is that the Stanford, Harvard, Yale person has learned to play the game.”

Even if he gets a good answer from a “privileged” candidate and a bad answer from “the child of a mechanic,” he might prefer the latter if “I have that feeling like I’m in the presence of talent.”

He views Palantirians like the Goonies, underdogs winning in the end. “Most people at Palantir didn’t get to do a lot of winning in high school,” Mr. Karp said at a company gathering in Palo Alto, to laughter from the audience.

He thinks the United States is “very likely” to end up in a three-front war with China, Russia and Iran. So, he argues, we have to keep going full-tilt on autonomous weapons systems, because our adversaries will — and they don’t have the same moral considerations that we do.

“I think we’re in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he said. “Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.”

“In fact,” he added, “given that we have parity technologically but we don’t have parity morally, they have a huge advantage.”

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Mr. Karp, who said he supports Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, described his politics as “populist-left.”Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

Mr. Karp said that we are “very close” to terminator robots and at the threshold of “somewhat autonomous drones and devices like this being the most important instruments of war. You already see this in Ukraine.”

Palantir has learned from some early setbacks.

In 2011, the hacker group Anonymous showed that Palantir employees were involved in a proposed misinformation campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and smear some of its supporters, including the journalist Glenn Greenwald. (Mr. Karp apologized to Mr. Greenwald.) Then, at least one Palantir employee helped Cambridge Analytica collect the Facebook data that the Trump campaign used ahead of the 2016 election.SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

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A pro bono contract with the New Orleans Police Department starting in 2012 was dropped after six years amid criticism that its “predictive policing” eroded privacy and had a disparate impact on people of color.

“We reduced the rates of Black-on-Black death in New Orleans,” Mr. Karp said, “and we have these critics who are like, ‘Palantir is racist.’ I don’t know. The hundreds of people that are alive now don’t think we’re racist.”

Mr. Carville, a New Orleans pooh-bah, asserted that the partnership ended because of “left-wing conspiracy theories.”

Palantir’s rough start in Silicon Valley came about, in part, because many objected to its work with the Department of Defense.

In 2017, Google won a Pentagon contract, Project Maven, to help the military use the company’s A.I. to analyze footage from drones. Employees protested, sending a letter to the C.E.O., Sundar Pichai: “Google should not be in the business of war,” it read. Soon after, Google backed away from the project.

In response, Palantir shaded Google in a tweet that quoted Mr. Karp: “Silicon Valley is telling the average American ‘I will not support your defense needs’ while selling products that are adversarial to America. That is a loser position.” Palantir picked up the contract in 2019.

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That same year, Mr. Thiel said that Google had a “treasonous” relationship with China. When Google opened an A.I. lab in 2017 in China, where there’s little distinction between the civilian and the military, he argued, it was de facto helping China while refusing to help America. (That lab closed in 2019, but Google still does business with China, as does Apple.)

“When you have people working at consumer internet companies protesting us because we help the Navy SEALs and the U.S. military and were pro-border — and you’re becoming incredibly, mind-bogglingly rich, in part because America protects your right to export — to me, you’ve lost the sheet of music,” Mr. Karp said. “I don’t think that’s good for America.”

Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University and an authority on tech companies, agrees that many Silicon Valley C.E.O.s have been virtue-signaling and pretending to care about the progressive political views of employees, but really would sell “their mother for a nickel.”

“They’re not there to save the whales,” Mr. Galloway said. “They’re there to make money.”

He added: “Some of these big tech companies seem to be engaged in raising a generation of business leaders that just don’t like America, who are very focused on everything that’s wrong with America.

“Alex Karp is like, ‘No, we’ll cash the Pentagon’s check and we’ll collect data on our enemies.’ He’s gone the entirely opposite way, and I think it was a smart move.”

Palantir’s “spooky connotations,” as one executive put it, dissipated quite a bit when the company went public in 2020 and took on more commercial business; its clients include Airbus, J.P. Morgan, IBM and Amazon.

Mr. Thiel said that while Palantir had a brief stint working on a pilot program for the National Security Agency, the company would not want to do any more work there: “The N.S.A., it hoovers up all the data in the world. As far as I can tell, there are incredible civil liberties violations where they’re spying on everybody outside the U.S., basically. Then they’re fortunately too incompetent to do much with the data.”

The company has started turning a profit, and the stock has climbed. After a triumphant earnings report this month, Palantir’s stock price jumped again.

“The share price gives us more street cred,” Mr. Karp said.

In 2020, after 17 years in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp moved Palantir’s headquarters to Denver. “I was fleeing Silicon Valley because of what I viewed as the regressive side of progressive politics,” he said.

He thinks that the valley has intensified class divisions in America.

“I don’t believe you would have a Trump phenomenon without the excesses of Silicon Valley,” he said. “Very, very wealthy people who support policies where they don’t have to absorb the cost at all. Just also the general feeling that these people are not tethered to our society, and simultaneously are becoming billionaires."

“Not supporting the U.S. military,” he said, in a tone of wonder. “I don’t even know how you explain to the average American that you’ve become a multibillionaire and you won’t supply your product to the D.O.D. It’s jarringly corrosive. That’s before you get to all the corrosive, divisive things that are on these platforms.”

Akshay Krishnaswamy, Palantir’s chief architect, agreed on their Silicon Valley critics: “You live in the liberal democratic West because of reasons, and those reasons don’t come for free. They act like it doesn’t have to be fought for or defended rigorously.”

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Mr. Karp’s workout room.Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

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A few of his favorite things.Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

Mr. Karp said things had evolved. “I think there’s a different perception of us now a little bit. A lot of that was tied to Trump, ICE work. It built up and we were definitely outsiders. We’re still outsiders, but I feel less resistance for sure. And people have a better idea of what we do, maybe.” He added, “Defense tech is a big part of Silicon Valley now.”

The A.I. revolution, he said, will come with a knotty question: “How do you make sure the society’s fair when the means of production have become means that only 1 percent of the population actually knows how to navigate?”

I asked if he agrees with Elon Musk that A.I. is eventually going to take everyone’s jobs.

“I think what’s actually dangerous,” Mr. Karp replied, “is that people who understand how to use this are going to capture a lot of the value of the market and everyone else is going to feel left behind.”

Mr. Karp’s iconoclastic style and ironclad beliefs have inspired memes and attracted a flock of online acolytes — some call him Papa Karp or Daddy Karp. He has no social media presence, but his online fans treat him like a mystic, obsessing over the tight white T-shirts he wears for earnings reports, his Norwegian ski outfits, his corkscrew hair, his Italian jeans and sunglasses and his extreme candor. (In a recent earnings report, Mr. Karp dismissed his rivals as “self-pleasuring” and engaging in “self-flagellation.”)

He is not, as one colleague puts it, “a wife, kids and dog person.”

“I tend to have long-term relationships,” he told me. “And I tend to end up with very high IQ women,” including some who tell him he’s talking nonsense.

He prefers what he calls a German attitude toward relationships, where “you have a much greater degree of privacy,” he said, with separate bedrooms and “your own world, your own thoughts, and you get to be alone a lot.” There is much less requirement to “micro-lie” about where you were or whom you were with.

I asked Mr. Karp about his 2013 quote to Forbes that “the only time I’m not thinking about Palantir is when I’m swimming, practicing qigong or during sexual activity.”

He frowned, noting: “It should be tai chi. I don’t know why people always conflate tai chi with qigong. Yes, that was in my early days, when we were a pre-public company and I was allowed to admit I had sexual activity.”

So it’s true that the notion of settling down and raising a family gives him hives?

“There’s some truth in that,” he said. “This is how I like to live. See, I’m sitting here doing my freedom thing. I train. I do distance shooting.” He reads. “Who else has a Len Deighton spy novel next to a book on Confucian philosophy?”

Many of the doyennes of Washington society would love to snag the eligible Mr. Karp for a dinner party. He told me he has “a great social life.” But when I asked him what that is, he replied, “First of all, I’m a cross-country skier, so then I do all this training.”

He continued, “To have an elite VO2 max, an elite level of strength, it’s just consistency and the Norwegian-style training method.”

Some who know Mr. Karp said that the happiest they had ever seen him was last year when Mike Allen reported for Axios that the C.E.O.’s body fat was an impressive 7 percent.

Mr. Karp may be able to do more than 20 miles of cross-country skiing without being out of breath, but there are some sports at which, he admitted, he’s “a complete zero. For example, ball sports. I really suck at them.”

Unlike Mr. Musk and other tech lords, Mr. Karp is not into micro-dosing ketamine or any other drug. “My drug is athletics,” he said. “I love drinking, but now I’ve moved to drinking very little because what I’ve noticed is if you’re traveling all the time, the alcohol, it really affects your brain.” He’s on the road about 240 days a year.

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Mr. Musk and Mr. Karp at the forum on A.I. in Washington last year.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Mr. Karp said of his dyslexia: “I think this is not getting less, it’s likely getting more. In 40 years, I’ll be unable to read.”

In New Hampshire, we had a lunch of lobster pasta — he kept his panic button on the table — and then went shooting on his property. He expertly hit targets with a 9-millimeter pistol from 264 yards. When an aide suggested that a photographer not shoot Mr. Karp in the act of shooting, he overruled the idea.

“Actually, honestly, guns would be much better regulated if you had someone who knows guns,” he said. “I’m not a hunter. I’m an artist with a gun.”

(Later, Mr. Karp pointed out that he had been shooting at targets that were about twice as far from him as Mr. Trump was from his would-be assassin. “There’s something really wrong with security for our future president, or maybe not future president,” he said. “All these people need a different level of security.”)

Mr. Karp believes the Democrats need to project more strength: “Are we tough enough to scare our adversaries so we don’t go to war? Do the Chinese, Russians and Persians think we’re strong? The president needs to tell them if you cross these lines, this is what we’re going to do, and you have to then enforce it.”

He thinks that in America and in Europe, the inability or unwillingness to secure borders fuels authoritarianism.

“I see it as pretty simple: You have an open border, you get the far right,” he said. “And once you get them, you can’t get rid of them. We saw it in Brexit, we see it with Le Pen in France, you see it across Europe. Now you see it in Germany.”

“They should be much stricter,” he continued. That, he said, “is the only reason we have the rise of the right, the only reason. When people tell you we need an open border, then they should also tell you why they’re electing right-wing politicians, because they are.”

“The biggest mistake — and it’s not one politician, it’s a generation — was believing there was something bigoted about having a border, and there are just a lot of people who believe that,” he said.

Weeks later, we were back in the Washington office, which is dubbed Rivendell, after a valley in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and is filled with tech goodies like a Ping-Pong table, a pool table and a towering replica of Chewbacca.

We picked up our conversation about politics, talking about the swap of President Biden and Vice President Harris, the rise of JD Vance, the assassination attempt and the changed political landscape.

Mr. Karp concurred with his friend Mr. Carville on the problem of drawing men to the Democratic Party, saying, “If this is going to be a party complaining about guys and to guys all the time, it’s not going to succeed.”

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At the shooting range on his property in New Hampshire. “I’m an artist with a gun,” Mr. Karp said.Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

He continued: “The biggest problem with hard political correctness is it makes it impossible to deal with unfortunate facts. The unfortunate fact here is that this election is really going to turn on ‘What percentage of males can the Democrats still get?’”

Describing himself as “progressive but not woke,” he said, “We are so unwilling to talk to the actual constituents that are voting for the Democratic Party who would probably strongly prefer policies that are more moderate.”

Given Mr. Karp’s blended racial identity, I wondered how he felt about Mr. Trump’s attack on the vice president’s heritage.

“I think people are most fascinated by the fact of this whole Black-Jewish thing,” he said. “I tend to be less fascinated by that.”

He added: “I think that people always expect me somehow to see the world in one way or another, and I don’t really understand what that means. I see the world the way I see it. I think, at the end of the day, if people want to choose what their identity is, then they choose it, and that’s their definition.”

I note that he recently made an elite list of Black billionaires.

He shrugged. “Some Black people think I’m Black, some don’t,” he said. “I view me as me. And I’m very honored to be honored by all groups that will have me.”

He added: “I do not believe racism is the most important issue in this country. I think class is determinate, and I’m mystified by how often we talk about race. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m not saying people don’t have biases. Of course, we all do, but the primary thing that’s bad for you in this culture is to be born poor of any color.”

He said he would support class-based affirmative action and declared himself “pro draft.”

“I think part of the reason we have a massive cleavage in our culture is, at the end of the day, by and large, only people who are middle- and working-class do all the fighting,” he said.

Since I had last seen him, Mr. Karp had gotten caught between two of the battling billionaires of Silicon Valley, lords of the cloud vituperously fighting in public over the possible restoration of Donald Trump.

According to an account in Puck, Mr. Karp was onstage with the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman at a conference last month in Sun Valley, Idaho, sponsored by the investment bank Allen & Company, when Mr. Hoffman called Mr. Thiel’s support for Mr. Trump “a moral issue.” Speaking up from his seat in the audience, Mr. Thiel sarcastically thanked Mr. Hoffman for funding lawsuits against Mr. Trump, which allowed the candidate to claim that he is “a martyr.”

Mr. Hoffman snapped back, “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr” — an unfortunate comment given what would later happen in Butler, Pa.

I asked Mr. Karp whether the encounter was as uncomfortable as it seemed.

“Well, I’m used to being uncomfortable,” he said. “I’m going to stick with my friends. I just feel the same way I always feel when Peter is under attack, which is: ‘This is my friend. I feel that my friend is being attacked, and I will defend him.’”

The fancy digital clock behind Mr. Karp’s desk, which tells time in German, had gone from “Es ist zehn nach drei” to “Es ist halb vier.”

It was time to go.

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Mr. Karp said that while working at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, he learned things that were helpful to him later as a business leader.Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

Confirm or Deny

Maureen Dowd: You run the Twitter account Alex Karp’s Hair.

Alex Karp: I wish.

Your favorite movie is the classic kung fu flick “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.”

One of my favorite movies.

You have 10 houses around the world, from Alaska to Vermont, from Norway to New Hampshire.

You have to reframe that as I have 10 cross-country ski huts.

You love the idea of Peter Thiel backing Olympic-style games where the athletes will dope out in the open.

Deny. I want the best cross-country skiers to win without doping.

You love to watch spy shows and German movies, and one of your favorite filmmakers is Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Confirm.

You have 20 identical pairs of swim goggles in your office.

No longer. I used to. I gave up swimming. There’s an emptiness to it.

You commissioned a French comic book, “Palantir: L’Indépendance,” with yourself as the protagonist.

Oui!

You starred in a movie by Hanna Laura Klar in 1998, “I Have Two Faces,” where you looked like a young Woody Allen.

I look better than Woody Allen.

Your dissertation is about how people transmit aggression subconsciously in language, presaging the rise of the right in America and Europe.

Often, the more charismatic ideologies were, the more irrational they were.

The dissertation touched on expressing taboo wishes. Do you want to share some of those?

I would love to express taboo wishes with you, but not to your audience.

Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. More about Maureen Dowd

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 18, 2024, Section ST, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: To Save Your Country, Scare the Enemy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

3. Chinese and Philippine ships collide at Sabina Shoal, a new flash point

Again, I include this quote from a Philippine Ambassador:

“The West Philippine Sea, not Taiwan, is the real flashpoint for an armed conflict,”

– Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez February 28, 2024

Chinese and Philippine ships collide at Sabina Shoal, a new flash point

The incident, the first time in decades that Beijing and Manila have clashed over the Sabina Shoal, may derail efforts to lower tensions in the South China Sea.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/18/china-philippines-sabina-shoal-collision/

5 min

108

The damaged BRP Cape Engano following a collision with a Chinese vessel near the Sabina Shoal, in a photo provided by the Philippine Coast Guard. (Philippine Coast Guard/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

By Rebecca Tan and Lyric Li

Updated August 19, 2024 at 2:31 a.m. EDT|Published August 18, 2024 at 10:34 p.m. EDT

SINGAPORE — Chinese and Philippine coast guard vessels collided early Monday near the Sabina Shoal, according to officials from both countries and security analysts tracking ship movements, opening a new flash point between the countries in their territorial dispute in the South China Sea.

While skirmishes between Chinese and Philippine ships have been increasing across the South China Sea, Monday’s incident marks the first time the countries have clashed directly over the Sabina Shoal. The collision could derail recent efforts at de-escalation in one of the world’s busiest waterways.

Early Monday morning, a Chinese coast guard vessel attempted to stop a Philippine boat from reaching the Sabina Shoal, said Gan Yu, a spokesperson for the China Coast Guard. The Philippine boat behaved “in an unprofessional and dangerous manner, resulting in a collision,” Yu said in a statement. “Responsibility lies entirely with the Philippines,” he added.

Philippine authorities rejected this account, saying two of its coast guard vessels were subject to “unlawful and aggressive maneuvers” by Chinese ships while en route to the Sabina Shoal. One of its boats was left with a hole in its deck, and another suffered “minor structural damage” after being rammed by a Chinese vessel, said Jonathan Malaya, assistant director general of the Philippine National Security Council.

Following World news

Following

China claims the vast majority of the South China Sea as its territory, although it has no legal backing to do so. Its claim includes all of the Spratly Islands archipelago, where the Sabina and Second Thomas shoals are located and where the Philippines, a U.S. security ally, has competing claims.

The Sabina Shoal, 86 miles from the Philippine island of Palawan, is one of the closest maritime features in the Spratlys to the Philippines. It is within the 200 miles that the Philippines considers its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

“The battle lines have moved closer to the Philippines,” said Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

Since April, the Philippines has deployed a coast guard vessel, the BRP Teresa Magbanua, to Sabina Shoal to monitor Chinese activity in the area. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday accused the Philippines of attempting to send supplies to the BRP Teresa Magbanua “in a plot to establish permanent presence.”

A Philippine Coast Guard member holds flags during the arrival of a Chinese naval training ship for a goodwill visit at Manila's port last year. (Basilio Sepe/AP)

China “firmly opposes” such actions and “will continue to take resolute and forceful measures” to safeguard its interests in the South China Sea, spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a regular news briefing.

A spokesman for the Philippine Coast Guard, Jay Tarriela, responded by saying the Philippines has the right to deploy any of its vessels within its EEZ.

What China is concerned about, security analysts say, is a potential repeat of what happened in 1999, when the Philippines ran aground a World War II-era ship on Second Thomas Shoal to stake its claim over the reef.

The rusting BRP Sierra Madre, which serves as a Philippine navy outpost, has since become a singular tripwire for open conflict between China and the Philippines. Last month, following a violent encounter near the Sierra Madre, Chinese and Philippine officials met for talks and agreed to lower tensions.

What happened at the Sabina Shoal, however, suggests that was a narrow truce, Powell said. China seems “undeterred” when it comes to its broader efforts to dominate the waterway, he said.

Zhu Feng, executive director of the China Center for Collaborative Studies of the South China Sea at Nanjing University, said that from China’s view, it “cannot afford to keep its hands off” the situation at the Sabina Shoal without risking being perceived as weak or tolerant of Philippine assertiveness.

Unless there’s a meaningful resolution over the dispute at the Second Thomas Shoal, Zhu said, confrontations between China and the Philippines are likely to continue.

The Philippines has filed 40 diplomatic protests to China so far this year for violating its sovereignty, according to Manila’s Department of Foreign Affairs. Earlier this month, a pair of Chinese jets flew over another contested reef, the Scarborough Shoal, dropping flares in the path of a Philippine patrol aircraft.

The Philippines has not said whether it intends to maintain a permanent presence at the Sabina Shoal. Orlando Mercado, a former Philippine secretary of defense who oversaw the grounding of the BRP Sierra Madre, said he thinks the country should.

The clash at the Sabina Shoal shows China has “a total disregard for our maritime rights” and little interest in finding or abiding by a negotiated compromise, Mercado said. “There’s no room for appeasement anymore,” he added.

A 2016 arbitration ruling by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea overwhelmingly sided with the Philippines, finding that China’s territorial claims to the Second Thomas Shoal were unlawful and that the reef lies inside the Philippines’ EEZ.

But Beijing rejected the ruling as “null and void” and has refused to adhere to it.

Li reported from Seoul.

4. Why US special operators training in the Arctic matters to China

So is climate change a national security issue or not? Or has it become so politicized due to the different views on both how to combat it and as well as how to exploit the methods for combating it (which some would argue includes an excuse for wealth transfer which is one of the reasons why climate change is so controversial).

Whether you believe in climate change or not, the fact is that there is an increasing possibility that there will be new northern year around shipping lanes.

Excerpts:

The U.S.’ increased activity in the Arctic goes beyond just drills. A little over two years ago, the Army launched a new aviation command in Alaska. In June 2022, the 11th Airborne Division established its Arctic aviation command at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. Known as the Arctic Angels, they oversee two active-duty aviation battalions.

One reason for the renewed interest in the top of the world is climate change. The Arctic has less ice, and scientists think the shipping lanes could soon be open year-round. Russia and China both want to use those lanes to ship goods to Europe. No one in the West or NATO wants to see China trying to throw its weight around in the Arctic like it’s doing in the South China Sea.

US, allies show force in South China Sea amid China’s territorial claimshttps://t.co/5JAbE7Iu8l

— Straight Arrow News (@StraightArrow__) August 7, 2024

“As a former intelligence officer, I’m always going to be extraordinarily skeptical about what the Chinese are doing,” Shoemaker told Straight Arrow News. “Everything that any organization does in China is, technically speaking, meant to bolster and glorify the Chinese Communist Party. At the end of the day, everything that is produced is meant to showcase how wonderful Chinese communism is.”

China currently has several scientists positioned at various Arctic sites conducting environmental research, which is considered dual use, meaning the findings could also be used to benefit the military.

Why US special operators training in the Arctic matters to China

san.com ·

DVIDS

By Ryan Robertson (Anchor, Reporter), Brett Baker (Producer)

Things are heating up in one of the coldest places on the planet. For the better part of July and into early August, some of the most elite special operations forces in the U.S. military participated in Operation Polar Dagger.

The exercises test the most highly trained U.S. personnel in one of the planet’s most unforgiving environments. This year’s exercise marks the first since the Pentagon released its updated review of the U.S. Arctic Strategy, which calls the region critical to U.S. defense.

Despite denials from the Pentagon, there is growing evidence suggesting Chinese interest in using Cuba as a surveillance hub. https://t.co/tlTpzwMRgr

— Straight Arrow News (@StraightArrow__) July 2, 2024

“You never just have a training exercise just for the purpose of having an exercise. There’s always going to be a point or a goal” Matt Shoemaker, a former U.S. intelligence officer, said.

According to Shoemaker, the drills are a great chance for U.S. forces to hone their craft and they tell regional adversaries that U.S. interest in the Arctic isn’t going anywhere.

“If you remember, during the Cold War, the thought was, and actually the plan was, that the Soviets were going to fire their nuclear missiles over the North Pole,” Shoemaker said.

Units from the Army, Navy, and Air Force participated in this year’s Polar Dagger, providing air, land, and sea assets, like the USS John Canley, an expeditionary mobile base ship built out of a converted commercial cargo ship.

NORAD intercepts Russian and Chinese bombers off Alaska coasthttps://t.co/7RrWmwD3OB

— Straight Arrow News (@StraightArrow__) July 26, 2024

The U.S.’ increased activity in the Arctic goes beyond just drills. A little over two years ago, the Army launched a new aviation command in Alaska. In June 2022, the 11th Airborne Division established its Arctic aviation command at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. Known as the Arctic Angels, they oversee two active-duty aviation battalions.

One reason for the renewed interest in the top of the world is climate change. The Arctic has less ice, and scientists think the shipping lanes could soon be open year-round. Russia and China both want to use those lanes to ship goods to Europe. No one in the West or NATO wants to see China trying to throw its weight around in the Arctic like it’s doing in the South China Sea.

US, allies show force in South China Sea amid China’s territorial claimshttps://t.co/5JAbE7Iu8l

— Straight Arrow News (@StraightArrow__) August 7, 2024

“As a former intelligence officer, I’m always going to be extraordinarily skeptical about what the Chinese are doing,” Shoemaker told Straight Arrow News. “Everything that any organization does in China is, technically speaking, meant to bolster and glorify the Chinese Communist Party. At the end of the day, everything that is produced is meant to showcase how wonderful Chinese communism is.”

China currently has several scientists positioned at various Arctic sites conducting environmental research, which is considered dual use, meaning the findings could also be used to benefit the military.

Everything that any organization does in China is, technically speaking, meant to bolster and glorify the Chinese Communist Party

Matt Shoemaker

“Anytime there’s dual use, anything, that’s always going to least raise eyebrows and throw up a couple of red flags just to take a closer look,” Shoemaker said.

Studying ionic changes in the atmosphere can help weather prediction. The findings can also help missiles fly more efficiently through the same atmosphere. Data from studying oceanic acoustics can be helpful in several applications, like tracking animal migrations or enemy submarines.

China spent the last decade building up its military. All that spending didn't leave enough in the budget for Chinese soldiers to cook their meals, though. So, the soldiers started stealing fuel from rockets, missiles, and jets. https://t.co/yudxfskzlY

— Straight Arrow News (@StraightArrow__) January 12, 2024

While war with China in the Arctic or elsewhere is not a foregone conclusion, Shoemaker said the Pentagon needs to prepare for every outcome.

Things are heating up in one of the coldest places on the planet–literally and figuratively.

For the better part of July and into early August–some of the most elite special operations forces in the us military took part in an exercise known as Operation Polar Dagger.

The exercises are meant to test the most highly trained US personnel, along with their tactics and equipment, in one of the most unforgiving environments on the planet.

This year’s Polar Dagger exercises are the first since the Pentagon released its updated review of the US Arctic strategy, which calls the region critical to the defense of the US homeland.

“You never just have a training exercise just for the purpose of having an exercise. There’s always going to be a point or a goal.”

Matt Shomaker is a former US intelligence officer. He says the drills are a great chance for US forces to hone their craft, but they also tell regional adversaries that US interest in the Arctic isn’t going anywhere.

“If you remember, during the Cold War, the thought was and actually the plan was, actually – that the Soviets were going to fire their nuclear missiles over the North Pole.”

Units from the army, navy, and air force all took part in this year’s polar dagger exercises…so there was a mix of air, sea, and land assets, like the USS John Canley, one of the navy’s expeditionary sea base ships built out of a converted commercial cargo ship.

The US’ increased activity in the Arctic goes beyond just drills. The Army announced it’s activating a new aviation command in Alaska.

The 11th airborne division–aka the Arctic Angels–stood up its Arctic aviation command at Fort Wainwright–which will oversee two active-duty aviation battalions.

So why is the us itching to get more Arctic assets?

Well, climate change is a factor. There’s less ice in the Arctic, and scientists think the shipping lanes could open year-round soon. Russia and China both want to use those lanes to ship goods to Europe–

but no one in the West or NATO wants to see China trying to throw its weight around in the Arctic like its doing in the South China Sea.

“As a former intelligence officer, i’m always going to be extraordinarily skeptical about what the Chinese are doing because them being a communist country, everything that any organization does in China is technically speaking, meant to bolster and glorify the Chinese Communist Party. At the end of the day, everything that is produced is meant to showcase how wonderful chinese communism is.”

China has scientists positioned at Arctic sites all over the globe–conducting environmental research, which is seen as dual-use–meaning the findings could also be used to benefit the military.

“Anytime there’s dual use, anything, that’s always going to least raise eyebrows and throw up a couple red flags just to take a closer look.”

Studying ionic changes in the atmosphere can help weather prediction–

but the findings can also be used to help missiles better fly through the atmosphere

The data from studying oceanic acoustics can be useful in a number of applications, such as tracking animal migrations or enemy submarines.

While a war with China in the Arctic, Pacific, or elsewhere is not a foregone conclusion–Shoemaker says the Pentagon still needs to prepare for every outcome now.

We have more stories about military interests in the Arctic. You can find all of those at our website, san.com, or on the Straight Arrow News app.

For Straight Arrow News, I’m Ryan Robertson.

san.com ·

5. The Kursk Offensive Dilemma by Mick Ryan

Excerpts:

Conclusion

For the foreseeable future therefore, both Ukraine and Russia must commit to conducting two major ground campaigns concurrently. While Russia is probably better placed to resource two such campaigns, neither Ukraine nor Russia is likely to be able to do so into 2025. The issues explored in this article will hopefully inform readers about how complex and challenging the decision making will be about Kursk and the Donbas campaigns for Ukraine and Russia in coming weeks and months.

Unfortunately, as stunning and clever as the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk has been, it may not change Putin’s overall war goals. Previous setbacks, including the Russian Army’s defeat in its 2022 Kyiv offensive, its defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson as well as the international sanctions regime, have not modified Putin’s overall goal of subjugating Ukraine and destroying its capacity to exist as a sovereign, prosperous democracy. Kursk, unfortunately might only make him more determined to achieve this – assuming he remains president.

But, if we are lucky, Ukraine’s audacity, demonstration of offensive capacity and most importantly – will – might convince the U.S. and its NATO partners to reconsider their strategy for supporting Ukraine and the level of resourcing it provides. A new strategy of defeating Russia in Ukraine, proven possible in the Battle of Kursk, should be the evolved course for the West. Until then, both sides will continue smashing away at the other in the hope that their opponent culminates first and that they can break the will of the other.

The Kursk Offensive Dilemma

Can Ukraine and Russia both continue executing two major ground campaigns?

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-kursk-offensive-dilemma?utm=

Mick Ryan

Aug 19, 2024

Image: @Militarylandnet on Twitter / X

We see, therefore, in the first place, that under all circumstances War is to be regarded not as an independent thing, but as a political instrument; and it is only by taking this point of view that we can avoid finding ourselves in opposition to all military history.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book 1, Chapter 1.27

When observing the events, big and small, in contemporary wars, I find myself drawn back to the theory of war to provide the intellectual foundations to understand what is happening and why. Not everything can be explained by satellite images, newspaper articles or the online OSINT community (as good as it is). Military theory often provides context to better explain what we are seeing in the war in Ukraine. As Clausewitz’s quote above notes, the major campaigns of this war are always grounded in politics, not just the search for military advantage.

The big development in the war in Ukraine in the past two weeks has been Ukraine’s Kursk offensive and the seizing of over 1100 square kilometres of Russian territory. This has been an impressively planned and executed Ukrainian ground operation. It has demonstrated Ukrainian learning and adaptation after the failure of its 2023 counteroffensive, which will be the topic of a future article here. The Kursk operation may also change the direction of the war.

Ukrainian objectives for the Kursk operation have gained some recent clarity with statements by the Ukrainian President, as well as other Ukrainian officials. In the past 24 hours, President Zelenskyy has spoken of how the Kursk operation seeks to achieve several objectives.

The first objective is political. Zelenskyy has described how "we’ve already expanded and will continue to expand the circle of those who support a just end to this war. It's essential that Ukraine enters this fall even stronger than before." Ukraine must not only be stronger as the year tapers off into Winter, but it must also be seen as such by its supporters, the international fence-sitters and those who are actively supporting Russia.

This is important because the Ukrainian aim here is to demonstrate that Russian victory is not inevitable, and that Ukraine can fight and win. These comments are also intended to help ensure continued support from the U.S. and NATO, address the cuts in German assistance to Ukraine next year, and to have restrictions on the use of weapons in Russia lifted.

Another element of this political objective is to pierce the Russian bluffing about escalation. Ukraine has demonstrated, again, that the various red lines projected by the Russian president are nothing but a chimera designed to reinforce Western political timidity about decision-making on the war, and shape Western decisions about provision of weapons. Remember when the provision of artillery and tanks was supposed to escalate the war?

The creation of a buffer zone is another objective described by Zelenskyy. This cleverly appropriates Russian language, which the Russian president used to justify its invasion of Kharkiv oblast earlier this year. But it is throwing down a gauntlet to the Russians by stating that Ukraine intends to hold at least some of the territory it has seized in Kursk, and that this will be an ongoing military and political problem for Russia. It also offers a potential future negotiating point but absorbs significant Ukrainian military resources.

Finally, Zelenskyy mentions the Kursk operation being part of a larger effort to destroy Russia’s war-making capacity. He notes that “our primary task in defensive operations overall [is] to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive operations.” While this includes the full range of military operations across Ukraine, as well as its strikes on strategic energy and military targets in Russia, Kursk is designed by the Ukrainians to lure the Russians into a fight that they were not expecting on their own territory.

The operation thus far has demonstrated an effective orchestration of close and deep operations. These deep operations, such as interdiction of Russian reinforcement convoys, airfield strikes and dropping bridges over the Seim River to secure the Ukrainian flank and potentially shape Ukrainian operations south of the river, have all enabled the Ukrainian advance and complicated Russia’s response. The Ukrainian advances, while continuing, have slowed in their second week.

Ukraine’s advance into Kursk. Source: @UAControlMap

At some point soon, Ukraine’s advance into Kursk will culminate due to a combination of the Russian response, casualties, extended lines of communications and the limits placed on the operation by the President and the Commander-in-Chief, General Syrskyi. Once this occurs, the Ukrainians still have the three options available to them, which I explored in this previous post.

In short, the three options I examined were as follows:

Option 1. Option 1 is for the Ukrainian forces to consolidate on the terrain they have seized so far and then defend it until some form of negotiation takes place.

Option 2. The second option is for the Ukrainian forces to undertake a partial withdrawal from the territory it has seized, back to ground that is more defensible. This would include the creation of a buffer zone.

Option 3. The third option for Ukraine would be to fully withdraw back to the international border between Russia and Ukraine.

Option 2 now appears to be a stronger possibility than the other two options. Indicators that lead me to this observation include the apparent deployment of an Engineer Brigade, which is normally used for operational level tasks such as hardened C2 and logistics facilities and more robust obstacle zones. The dropping of the Seim brigades might also indicate an indication to widen the Ukrainian salient to the west – although it might just be a flank protection measure as well. The recent statements by President Zelenskyy also gives an indication that Option 2 may be the preferred approach in the coming days or weeks.

This will take a lot of Ukrainian resources to hold. But will also take a much larger Russian commitment to push them out.

At this stage of the Ukrainian offensive, there are three issues that will exert an influence on the ultimate outcome of the Kursk offensive as well as the direction of the war in Ukraine into the northern fall and winter. These are: Russia’s immediate response to Kursk; Russia’s medium-term choices in military strategy; and, the resolution to the dilemma of how Ukraine and Russia can fight two concurrent major campaigns.

Russia’s Immediate Response and Strategic Choices

The initial shock of surprise experienced by the Russians has begun to wear off. They are slowly assembling their response to the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, although this Russian response remains insufficient in scale and coordination.

One of the complicating factors for the Russians is their recent changes to command and control in the region. While old saying “amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics” might hold some truth, command and control is THE key topic that military planners and leaders discuss at great length to get right.

Dara Massicot covered this topic in a post on 13 August. As she wrote then, “the entirety of the area was formerly the Western Military District (2010-24). Russia decided to split it up in March-April 2024 to cope with NATO expansion. It named two commanders: Lapin (LEMD) and Kozovlev (MOMD)…this AFU operation has successfully exploited seams of responsibility between the FSB, Rosgvardia and MOD.” Unity of Command is an important principle of war in every Western military institution for good reason. The shortfalls in this area will continue to compromise Russia’s response.

Russia however has been moving more ground units and formations into the Kursk area of operations. As a British Ministry of Defence post mentioned on 16 August, “after initial disarray and disorganisation, Russian forces have deployed in greater force in the region [and] they have begun to construct additional defensive positions.” These deployments, notwithstanding the chaotic conditions that prevail, will have had an impact on Ukrainian tempo and the pace of their offensive operations.

Russia faces some tough choices now that Ukraine has established itself on Russian territory. The most important one is where on its frontline is it willing to take more tactical and operational risk? The response to the Kursk incursion will require infantry, armour, EW, fires, drones and a range of combat service support organisations. Even the Russians must economise with these forces in their maintenance of the long frontline in Ukraine. So far, there have been redeployments of some Russian forces from the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine as well as from within Russia itself.

However, if the fighting in Kursk continues for months and months, and pushing the Ukrainians out is harder and more costly for the Russians than anticipated (which is very likely), even tougher choices will need to be made by the Russian military leadership and Putin. At the moment, Russia’s choices for its overall Ukraine strategy until the end of this year probably encompass variants of the following:

Sustain the main effort in the Donbas with Kursk being a secondary effort. This would see Russia focused primarily on seizing key Ukrainian cities in the Donbas, compromising the overall Ukrainian scheme of defence there. This would be a significant achievement for the Russians, despite its high cost, because it moves them much closer to controlling all of the Donbas.
Sustain the main effort in the Donbas but at a lower tempo and step up Kursk response operations. This might compromise the Russian ability to seize key cities in eastern Ukraine but might force a shut down in the Ukrainian Kursk offensive at an earlier point. Like the other options, this presents the Ukrainians with opportunities to target Russian forces in transit to Kursk, and identify new weak points in the Russian frontline which might be exploited.
Designate the response in Kursk as the Russian military main effort for the war. This would see a major shift in Russian forces from Russia and Ukraine to seal off the Kursk incursion and push the Ukrainians back into Ukraine. However, it would probably see the Russian attempts to seize Pokrovsk and other strategic cities halted, or at least paused until 2025. This option would also present many more targeting opportunities to the Ukrainians in their deep operations to destroy Russian war making capacity, while also presenting additional weaknesses on the Russian frontline that Ukraine might exploit (assuming it has the forces remaining with which to do so).
Designate the Kursk and Donbas operations as ‘equal’ main efforts. While this doesn’t make a lot of military sense, and probably is not able to be fully resourced, this might be the option that Putin directs out of political expediency.

At this point, the nuclear issue should also be raised briefly. Is it possible that Putin could consider the employment of tactical nuclear weapons to defend Russia and expel Ukrainian troops from ‘the motherland’. The key question that Putin would ask his generals would be whether the use of such weapons would fundamentally change the course of the Ukrainian campaign in Kursk, and the war in general. The answer at this point is probably ‘no’. And given all of the political, strategic and humanitarian downsides of using nuclear weapons, the prospect of their use by Russia at present appears very limited.

Ultimately, the Russian decision will be one that makes most sense politically to Putin. Military realities are important to him but the survival of his regime is an existential matter. Putin will need to decide which is the most dangerous to his regime – giving up on taking Pokrovsk and Toretsk in 2024 (and continuing towards them next year), or not regaining control of Russian territory quickly.

What all of these options demonstrate is that Russia can potentially sustain two concurrent major ground operations in Ukraine and Russia. How well they might do so, and the Ukrainian capacity for concurrently fighting two major ground campaigns, is explored next.

Fighting Two Major Ground Campaigns Concurrently

One of the early lessons the Russians appear to have learned in 2022 was that multiple, concurrent major campaigns were not only difficult to orchestrate but very difficult to resource with sufficient infantry, fires, air defence and Russian air force support. From mid 2022, the Russians focussed their ground operations in eastern Ukraine. Similarly, the Ukrainians have focussed on one major campaign at a time, be it the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives or the 2023 counter offensive, while sustaining defensive operations elsewhere.

The current situation is somewhat new. Both sides are now undertaking two concurrent major campaigns that are consuming large quantities or manpower (especially for the Russians), munitions and supporting arms such as EW, drones, logistics and air defence. While both might be able to surge their forces for short periods, it is unclear if the Ukrainians or Russians can sustain such an approach for months at a time. One side or the other will have to make a difficult choice about their priorities and significantly reduce their resourcing for one of their major campaigns.

One of the issues that will influence how long the Ukrainians can stretch their tactical and operational advantages in Kursk is the ongoing Battle of the Donbas, and particularly the continuing Russian advance on the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. This city is an important logistics hub in the Donbas and forms a key link in a chain of Ukrainian defensive locations in the region. On the Pokrovsk axis, Ukraine appears to have been unable to halt the Russian advance as they capture settlements south of the rail line. Russian forces appear to have also advanced into outer Toretsk, as well as advancing in Niu-York.

The Russian Pokrovsk axis of advance. Source: Institute for the Study of War

Thus far, despite their losses in Kursk, the Russians have not been distracted from their grinding advance on Pokrovsk. While there may be important tactical, operational and political gains if the Russians seize it, it remains to be seen whether the Russians can sustain their pressure here in the Donbas and resist the growing political imperative to act decisively against Ukraine’s thrust into Russia.

While Russian mobilization, and ongoing monthly recruiting, appears sufficient to providing the manpower for these two campaigns (at least for the present), Ukraine is still in the process of reinforcing and expanding its forces in the wake of the new mobilization laws.

There are no magical solutions to the reconstitution and force generation challenges faced by Ukraine in the wake of 2023 operations. While there has obviously been progress on this front since the beginning of the year, training lots of new people and generating effective combat units are two very different concerns. Ukraine still faces force generation challenges and an overall deficit in personnel compared to Russia. For Ukraine to undertake its Kursk operation, it will have had to take risk in many other parts of the frontline, including defending against the Russian Pokrovsk and Toretsk axes of advance.

Resources will be a significant influence on which of the campaigns either side chooses to sustain as its main effort. The culminating points for both Ukraine in Kursk, and Russia in the Donbas, will play a role. Other potential operations, such as subsequent Ukrainian operations in Belgorod, offensive operations to take advantage of Russian weaknesses caused by troops redeploying to Kursk, and the continued defensive deployment of forces along the border with Belarus, will also be considerations in strategic decision making.

But ultimately the choice of which ground campaign will be the focus for Ukraine and Russia will hinge on political considerations. For Russia, as I wrote above, Putin will need to choose which of his major operations in Ukraine or Russia will deliver the most progress against his desired strategic outcome, and which of them – if not properly resourced – will be the most dangerous to his regime.

For Ukraine, the question of how much territory can be ceded in the Donbas, casualties in the Kursk operation, the Russian response, use of Ukrainian offensive capability elsewhere, and the feedback from allies will influence their decision. As Zelenskyy noted in his recent speech, “it's essential that Ukraine enters this fall even stronger than before.” This is not just a statement of military strategy. It is also a statement of political necessity. As such, Ukraine will be hoping the Kursk offensive will deliver a shift in the political momentum in the war, just as the Ukrainians have seized the battlefield initiative.

The coming weeks will give us more insights into which if the Ukrainian or Russian strategies for two concurrent major campaigns will prove successful. But like all wars, prediction of the ultimate outcome to this dilemma remains impossible.

Conclusion

For the foreseeable future therefore, both Ukraine and Russia must commit to conducting two major ground campaigns concurrently. While Russia is probably better placed to resource two such campaigns, neither Ukraine nor Russia is likely to be able to do so into 2025. The issues explored in this article will hopefully inform readers about how complex and challenging the decision making will be about Kursk and the Donbas campaigns for Ukraine and Russia in coming weeks and months.

Unfortunately, as stunning and clever as the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk has been, it may not change Putin’s overall war goals. Previous setbacks, including the Russian Army’s defeat in its 2022 Kyiv offensive, its defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson as well as the international sanctions regime, have not modified Putin’s overall goal of subjugating Ukraine and destroying its capacity to exist as a sovereign, prosperous democracy. Kursk, unfortunately might only make him more determined to achieve this – assuming he remains president.

But, if we are lucky, Ukraine’s audacity, demonstration of offensive capacity and most importantly – will – might convince the U.S. and its NATO partners to reconsider their strategy for supporting Ukraine and the level of resourcing it provides. A new strategy of defeating Russia in Ukraine, proven possible in the Battle of Kursk, should be the evolved course for the West. Until then, both sides will continue smashing away at the other in the hope that their opponent culminates first and that they can break the will of the other.

6. FPRI to Host a Joint Conference with the Irregular Warfare Center

See details (Conference Agenda and Registration) at the FPRI website here: https://www.fpri.org/news/2024/08/fpri-to-host-a-joint-conference-with-the-irregular-warfare-center/

FPRI to Host a Joint Conference with the Irregular Warfare Center

Mon, 08/19/2024 - 7:17am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/fpri-host-joint-conference-irregular-warfare-center

On Tuesday, September 17th and Wednesday, September 18th, 2024, the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare and DoD's Irregular Warfare Center will co-sponsor a conference to discuss lessons learned from America's post-9/11 irregular wars. The conference will take place at the U.S. Naval Institute's Jack C. Taylor Conference Center at 290 Wood Road, Annapolis, MD, 21402 on the U.S. Naval Academy grounds.

The conference will begin at 9:00 am Tuesday with a keynote address by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Irregular Warfare and Countering Terrorism, Maren Brooks. After the keynote address, the conference will alternate between paper presentations and panel discussions on seven topics related to lessons learned from our various post-9/11 irregular warfare operations. These topics include intelligence and counterintelligence activities; human terrain operations; information operations; using police and militias in a counterinsurgency; working with foreign partner forces; medical operations; and logistics/support operations. Conference papers will cover lessons learned in regions ranging from the Sahel to the Philippines as well as Afghanistan and Iraq. Papers to be presented include titles such as Advise-Assist-Enable: A Critical Analysis of the U.S. Army's Security Force Assistance Mission during the War on Terror by Dr. John Nagl and Marshall Cooperman; Prolonged Field Care: Development, Challenges, and Lessons Learned Post-9/11 by Lara Kendall and Paul Loos; The Rise and Fall of Afghanistan's Local Defense Forces by Arturo Munoz; and Fixing Intelligence or Fixing the Force? US Military Adaptation for Intelligence Requirements in Afghanistan and Iraq by Nathan White and over a dozen others.

Confirmed panel members include former Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers; General (Retired) John Allen USMC; Major General (Retired) Ed Reeder Jr., U.S. Army Special Forces; Major General (Retired) Edward Dorman, U.S. Army; General Alizai of the Afghan Army; Center for Strategic and International Studies Vice President Seth Jones; Dr. John Nagl (author of the book Learning To Eat Soup With A Knife) and a number of other distinguished individuals. There will be a reception from 4:30 - 6:00 pm on September 17 for panel members, paper presenters and the audience to meet and mingle. Each session will have a Q&A period to maximize audience participation.

Those interested in attending, should visit this link, which will provide the conference agenda and registration information: FPRI to Host a Joint Conference with the Irregular Warfare Center - Foreign Policy Research Institute. There is no charge for the conference or the reception. There will be a slight charge for parking and box lunches for those who wish to order them. Registration closes on September 4th. We hope to see you there.

7. The Dwindling Strategic Flame: Reviving Creative Defense Planning

Excerpts:

The Decline in Thinking About the Unthinkable

Strategic Prophylaxis

What Caused the Decline in Creative Strategic Thinking?

Some Ways Forward

Reflecting on the strategic failure of the Vietnam war, Brodie issued an important warning to the strategic community: “we need people who will challenge, investigate, and dissect the prevailing dogmas of international relations and of our foreign policy rather than merely echo them.”[x] Now, more than ever, we need creative, prophylactic thinking about the unthinkable events that just might occur. The impossible is only impossible until it happens. To inspire a renaissance in this type of strategic thinking, perhaps two suggestions. First, the schools that teach strategy, be they universities or the professional military educational (PME) establishments, must also incorporate into their curriculums the study of historical counterfactuals. Counterfactuals ask the “what if?” questions about history that can inspire forward thinking, creative defense planning. For instance, Sir Niall Ferguson’s edited volume Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals should be required reading for all strategists.[xi] Second, Congress might consider establishing a nonpartisan working group that draws on a wide variety of scholars and practitioners from outside the DC foreign policy establishment with the sole purpose of creatively thinking through unthinkable problems. This type of interdisciplinary working group would work long-term, high-risk strategic issues free of the groupthink of bureaus and bureaucrats, a sort of non-government Office of Net Assessment.

We are already two decades into a bloody 21st century. The prospect that our century turns bloodier, risking even nuclear war, is not far-fetched, and might happen very soon. And it might become bloodier in ways we might not expect. The strategic discipline has never been more important, the stakes have never been higher. We need a renaissance of strategic thinking, one that particularly focuses on creative strategic prophylaxis of threats thinkable and unthinkable. The world might depend on it.

The Dwindling Strategic Flame: Reviving Creative Defense Planning - Military Strategy Magazine

militarystrategymagazine.com · August 14, 2024

“Strategy is the future of present decisions”- Garry Kasparov

“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”- Savielly Tartakower

To cite this article:

Dolitsky, Phillip, “The Dwindling Strategic Flame: Reviving Creative Defense Planning,” Military Strategy Magazine, Exclusive Article, August 14, 2024.

About the Author:

Phillip Dolitsky is an independent national security and foreign policy analyst, focusing on the intersection of strategy, military ethics, and classical realism. His writing has appeared in Chesterfield Strategy, Parameters, Military Strategy Magazine and more. He can be found on X @phillyd97.

Strategy and defense planning belong to the realm of the unknown. There is nothing as certain as the uncertainty of the future and yet all polities depend on their safety and survival by striving to meet the challenge of uncertainty. All nations must attempt, in the words of the late British strategist Colin Gray, “to get the biggest issues right enough” and to “seek good enough answers to the right questions.”[i] As such, strategy necessitates a rigorous and often uncomfortable examination of potential threats, no matter how improbable they may seem. It involves moving beyond the conventional wisdom and exploring scenarios that stretch the boundaries of our current understanding of, and hope for, the world. It requires navigating a delicate balance between caution and creativity, with deep roots in history, where planners must envision not just the likely developments but also the wild cards that could disrupt the status quo. In other words, it requires that strategists and defense planners think about the unthinkable. This particular aspect of the strategic flame is dwindling. The current war in Israel and the discussions surrounding the looming conflict with China over Taiwan should serve as warnings for what might occur if we completely extinguish the strategic imperative to think about the unthinkable. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to identify this unfortunate trend in strategic thinking, describe an approach to defense planning called “strategic prophylaxis” and offer a few potential remedies to the malady.

The Decline in Thinking About the Unthinkable

During the Cold War, much of American strategic thought was dedicated to “thinking about the unthinkable” in the context of nuclear war. The famed “Wizards of Armageddon” did not merely postulate and stipulate on geopolitical threats and then shrug their shoulders at the magnitude of the problem; they attempted to articulate clear and actionable strategies as best as one can about events that had not happened and might never have happened. To name but a few examples: Colin Gray and Keith Payne argued that “Victory Is Possible” in a nuclear war, Bernard Brodie detailed the interplay between tactical nuclear weapons and conflict escalation, Herman Kahn, perhaps the most creative of the Wizards, delineated separate rungs on an “escalation ladder” that led to general nuclear war.[ii] Thank God, we can never know how well any of their theories would have worked in the advent of nuclear war. But if, as the Cold War nuclear theorists insisted, there is value in nonuse, there is also value in thinking about the unthinkable. Should general nuclear war have occurred, there would have been some thinking about how it could have been managed. The United States would not have stumbled into calamity totally blind. Following the Cold War, however, this type of creative strategic thinking, especially about “unthinkable” problems, significantly declined.

I first noticed this decline in creative strategic thinking when I was researching my master’s thesis on Israeli counterterrorism strategy. I noticed that none of the literature (with one singular passing reference) mentioned the prospect of the Israeli Defense Forces retaking the Gaza strip and ousting Hamas from power. This struck me as odd. The unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza strip in 2005 was always a risky endeavor and the Israeli political and military establishments knew then that the power vacuum created by the disengagement might very well be filled by Hamas. Could no one have thought that the situation might become untenable? Did no one really plan for such a contingency? Had anyone considered whether or not Israel could, in the event that it needed to, reestablish unilateral control over the Gaza strip? And if so, at what cost? With its military alone or with the resettling of Israeli citizens? Dumbfounded, I contacted scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, including members of the IDF, and asked: had anyone thought about recapturing the Gaza strip if the situation there became untenable and unmanageable? Not only was the answer a resounding no—I was laughed it. The general consensus among scholars and soldiers was that Hamas was the only group that could ever rule in Gaza following the disengagement, so no one had bothered to consider any alternative geopolitical reality. The general sentiment I received was one of astonishment that I was even asking such “outlandish” questions.

And then the October 7th Massacre happened, prompting Israel’s just war against Hamas in Gaza. Shortly thereafter, calls for what would happen “the day after” began. What has become apparent since 10/7 is that the Israeli defense and political establishments are thinking about this question on the fly.[iii] They are attempting to manage and wage a tricky and contentious urban war while also contemplating the larger strategic picture that the war fits into. Israel will surely win at the operational and tactical levels of the war in Gaza, but it needs to win at the strategic level for lasting stability. It is a tragedy that it had not considered what that might look like until it was forced to. Perhaps in 2005 the prospect of recapturing the Gaza strip was unthinkable. But one must think about the unthinkable, especially when it comes to inherently risky geopolitical behavior.

The American defense establishment seems to be on track to suffer a similar fate as the Israelis when it comes to preparing and thinking about a war with China, ostensibly over Taiwan. Whether one believes that the United States should completely and utterly pivot to the Indo-Pacific or whether you think that deterring China goes through Ukraine in its fight against Russia, war with China is the topic on everyone’s mind in the US defense world. If current declassified wargames are to be believed, the United States hardly has a “one-war military” and its weapons stockpiles are so low that the United States would run out of all critical munitions within eight days in a conflict with China.[iv] One would therefore hope to see a bounty of thinking and writing about how to deal with a war against China within these restraints. Yet, shockingly, much of the intelligentsia has instead insisted on arguing for solutions to the problem that take years to fulfill: prioritizing and expediting multi-year procurements of munitions, establishing and widening defense coproduction, a rearranging of American strategic priorities and commitments, etc. These solutions, all good and right, are thinkable solutions if one assumes that war with China is still far enough away that we might have time to prepare somewhat adequately for it. But what about the unthinkable, say, a scenario that sees China making a move against Taiwan before the US presidential election?

Perhaps, therefore, the right questions to ponder are: in the event that war breaks out with China before anyone expected, how should the US military achieve the defense of Taiwan given its constraints? If naval power, a likely flashpoint in any war over Taiwan, runs the risk of being put out of commission early on in any conflict, should/could/can airpower become the prime US military arm? Can one attempt to defend and control territory with some semblance of air power? Should the US nuclear capability play a more prominent role in defending Taiwan? Might the US consider a tactical nuclear strike as a way to inflict great damage with minimal munitions and capability? In other words, how might the United States actually fight a war against China over Taiwan? What limited military means achieve US strategic ends if the military is simply not equipped to take the fight to the end or to its greatest liking? And if is it completely certain that any war with China before massive defense industrial base measures or re-posturing are complete would end in calamity, should the US even engage militarily at all? If not, what are its grand strategic objectives vis-à-vis China that account for their aggression and expansion in the Indo-Pacific? These are the types of unthinkable questions strategists and politicians should be thinking about.

Strategic Prophylaxis

This type of thinking and approach to strategy, what I call “strategic prophylaxis,” has been the type of thinking that characterizes the best chess players and games at the highest level. Prophylactic thinking in chess, explains Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson, “arises naturally from viewing chess from an inter-subjective perspective. Once you start to look at positions with an awareness of your opponent’s perspective, you are already thinking prophylactically to an extent.” Furthermore, “prophylaxis is every bit as important in attack as it is in defense” for “the attackers who are most likely to succeed are those who acknowledge the opponent’s right to defend himself. They strive to work around these defenses that they have seen ahead of time, and always make plans for themselves with reference to the opponent (emphasis added).”[v] This is sound advice for any strategic planner, advice the strategic community must quickly heed, and it is no wonder that former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov became a wise strategic analyst.

Moreover, what makes top-level chess so exciting is bearing witness to players thinking the unthinkable. Especially before the advent of computer chess engines, what made chess particularly beautiful and inspiring was seeing its top practitioners play wild, unthinkable moves that led to decisive victory. One might normally never consider intentionally losing a piece of value, let alone a queen. But considering the unthinkable move is what made the likes of Kasparov, Mikhail Tal and others so powerful (I have often thought that this mind-boggling video of Kasparov calculating a famous piece sacrifice in a world championship match is a great lesson in strategic thinking, particularly the acute awareness of the balance of power and the long term consequences of his “unthinkable” sacrifice of a full knight). To be great at chess, one must consider the moves you expect and the ones you don’t. That is also how one must do great strategic planning.

What Caused the Decline in Creative Strategic Thinking?

I suspect that there are two main catalysts for the decline in creative, prophylactic thinking about strategy and defense planning. The first is the advent of the digital age and the ubiquity of the internet and social media. Digital technology has had its most pernicious effects on our attention spans and sense of time. Social media has the dual effect of making the immediate story or news both incredibly relevant and urgent and terribly ephemeral. As the philosopher Anton Barba-Kay notes, “when information has become an overwhelming flood, when our awareness is constantly drawn to and involved in everything occurring to the world’s nervous system, the only way to get by is to skim the surface (emphasis added).” Moreover, writes Barba-Kay, “Online writing does not reward attention – nor is it meant to, since its claim to attention is precisely that it is happening now. Following what’s going on at the moment serves as the main criterion of what merits notice (emphasis added).”[vi]

The ubiquity of social media and the internet means that the average person is “intimately” aware of foreign policy events, thus fomenting domestic pressure on government and defense officials to “react” to the current moment. Because we can see the horrors of war from our devices that seem always to be at arm’s reach, the strategist feels compelled to “do something now,” even if that something has hardly been thought through. The “urgency” of foreign policy in the digital age does not readily lend itself to long term, creative thinking about the unthinkable. If the now is the only timeframe that matters, one must not waste time thinking about all the alternate possibilities of tomorrow.

The second and related catalyst is the hesitation to swim against the current of fashionable thinking in foreign policy, especially in an environment that values experience over thinking and knowledge.[vii] In the essay that arguably launched the entire discipline of strategic studies, the dean of American strategists Bernard Brodie warned about “the aphorism or slogan which provides the premises for policy decisions.” He noted that “the military profession is by no means alone in its frequent recourse to the slogan as a substitute for analysis… but among the military we find some extreme examples of its ultimate development.”[viii] Today’s national security establishment, much like the one Brodie was lamenting, is still awash in buzzwords and slogans: deterrence, strategy by denial, escalation and more. These slogans have, in Brodie’s words, “induce[d] rigidity of thought and behavior in a particular direction.” There is a pressure to work within the fold, to think in accordance with what everyone else is thinking and to be “policy relevant”[ix] (I suspect that part of the reason that history has been replaced by political science in strategic education is because traditional historical inquiry is wrongly understood to not be as relevant or au courant as political science). Perhaps no one wants to be the outlier that was Herman Kahn, but strategists of his creative nature are desperately needed.

Some Ways Forward

Reflecting on the strategic failure of the Vietnam war, Brodie issued an important warning to the strategic community: “we need people who will challenge, investigate, and dissect the prevailing dogmas of international relations and of our foreign policy rather than merely echo them.”[x] Now, more than ever, we need creative, prophylactic thinking about the unthinkable events that just might occur. The impossible is only impossible until it happens. To inspire a renaissance in this type of strategic thinking, perhaps two suggestions. First, the schools that teach strategy, be they universities or the professional military educational (PME) establishments, must also incorporate into their curriculums the study of historical counterfactuals. Counterfactuals ask the “what if?” questions about history that can inspire forward thinking, creative defense planning. For instance, Sir Niall Ferguson’s edited volume Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals should be required reading for all strategists.[xi] Second, Congress might consider establishing a nonpartisan working group that draws on a wide variety of scholars and practitioners from outside the DC foreign policy establishment with the sole purpose of creatively thinking through unthinkable problems. This type of interdisciplinary working group would work long-term, high-risk strategic issues free of the groupthink of bureaus and bureaucrats, a sort of non-government Office of Net Assessment.

We are already two decades into a bloody 21st century. The prospect that our century turns bloodier, risking even nuclear war, is not far-fetched, and might happen very soon. And it might become bloodier in ways we might not expect. The strategic discipline has never been more important, the stakes have never been higher. We need a renaissance of strategic thinking, one that particularly focuses on creative strategic prophylaxis of threats thinkable and unthinkable. The world might depend on it.

References

[i] Colin S. Gray, Strategy and Defence Planning: Meeting the Challenge of Uncertainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 177–78.

[ii] Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne, “Victory Is Possible,” Foreign Policy, no. 39 (1980): 14–27, https://doi.org/10.2307/1148409; Bernard Brodie, Escalation and the Nuclear Option, Princeton Legacy Library (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (New Brunswick, N. J: Transaction Publishers, 2010).

[iii] “Israel’s Interest in Planning for ‘The Day After,’” The Highland County Press, accessed August 7, 2024, https://highlandcountypress.com/opinions/israels-interest-planning-day-after.

[iv] Seth Jones, “Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment: The Challenge to the U.S. Defense Industrial Base” (CSIS International Security Program, January 2023).

[v] Jonathan Rowson, The Seven Deadly Chess Sins (Gambit Publications, 2001), 156–57.

[vi] Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (Cambridge New York (N.Y): Cambridge University press, 2023), 33.

[vii] Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich, eds., Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), 3.

[viii] Bernard Brodie, “Strategy as a Science,” World Politics 1, no. 4 (1949): 467–88, https://doi.org/10.2307/2008833.

[ix] Francis J. Gavin, “Policy and the Publicly Minded Professor,” Journal of Strategic Studies 40, no. 1–2 (2017): 269–74.

[x] Bernard Brodie, “Why Were We So (Strategically) Wrong?,” Foreign Policy, no. 5 (1971): 158, https://doi.org/10.2307/1147725.

[xi] Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Penguin Books, 2011).

militarystrategymagazine.com · August 14, 2024

8. The long-term consequences of US intel leaks

Excerpts:

During the Trump presidency, intelligence cooperation between Israel and the United States reached unprecedented levels of openness and intimacy. But due to his experience with the Obama-Biden administration, when Biden entered office, Netanyahu reportedly ordered Israel’s spy agencies to curtail intelligence sharing with their U.S. counterparts.

This policy was abrogated during the Bennett-Lapid government’s 17-month tenure. Acting at the urging of the Biden administration, upon entering office in May 2021, Bennett reinstated the intelligence sharing. And as the leak of Israel’s role in Khodei’s assassination in May 2022 made clear, the Biden administration returned the favor by reinstating Obama’s practice of leaking Israeli operations that were believed to endanger its efforts to appease Iran.

In all likelihood, the Al-Jarida report was indeed false. The implications of the report—that the United States would facilitate the roundup and all but certain torture and murder of Mossad agents by the regime in Iran in the middle of a major war—are simply too extreme to countenance. The rupture such a hostile move would cause to U.S.-Israel intelligence ties would be too severe for even a hostile administration to accept. Even worse from a U.S. perspective, such a step would undermine the credibility and trustworthiness of U.S. intelligence agencies in the eyes of partners and agents worldwide.

All the same, both the Obama-Biden and the Biden-Harris administrations’ records of bad faith towards Israel on issues related to Jerusalem’s efforts to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons make it difficult at first blush to dismiss reports like Al-Jarida’s as disinformation.

The long-term consequences of US intel leaks - JNS.org

Both the Obama-Biden and the Biden-Harris administrations have hindered Jerusalem’s efforts to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

jns.org · by Caroline B. Glick · August 16, 2024

(August 16, 2024 / JNS)

On Wednesday, Fox News and The Jerusalem Post ran stories based on a report from Kuwait’s Al-Jarida newspaper claiming that the U.S. had revealed to Iranian authorities the identities of 10 Mossad agents in Iran who allegedly were involved in the July 31 assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Al-Jarida claimed its report was based on information provided by a member of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The alleged source told the Kuwaiti paper that U.S. officials had visited Iran secretly after the assassination with the goal of appeasing the regime. They told their Iranian counterparts that Israel had not informed them of its plans to kill Haniyeh and proceeded to provide them with the Mossad agents’ identities.

On Thursday, Fox News deleted the story and the Post updated its report. The updated article led with the news that the U.S. National Security Council denied the Kuwaiti story.

On Wednesday night, I shared the Post report on my X account. My post received well over one million views. Following the Post’s publication of its revision and Fox’s deletion of its initial report, I deleted my post and shared the Post’s revised story.

Given the severity of the charge, why were Fox News and the Post so quick to report the Al-Jarida story? Why was my initial inclination to lend credence the report? The answer, in short, is that the Biden-Harris administration, like the Obama-Biden administration before it, has a track record of leaking Israeli operations in Iran.

Consider just a few well-known and widely reported examples.

In May 2022, senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Sayyed Khodei was killed by gunmen outside his home. The gunmen escaped the scene on a motorcycle. According to Israeli officials, Khodei served as deputy commander of IRGC Unit 840 and was involved in planning cross-border plots against foreigners, including Israelis. At the time he was killed, Khodei was reportedly planning the assassination of French Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.

To avoid the prospect of retaliation and escalation, Israel did not claim responsibility for the strike. But Biden officials told The New York Times that Israel had killed him. The operation was carried out during Naftali Bennett’s premiership and Bennett and his associates were reportedly angered by the administration’s move, which raised the prospect of increased Iranian violence against the Jewish state.

On April 12, 2021, Israel bombed the electricity line serving the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and so rendered the entire installation nonfunctional. The operation was considered the most substantial act of sabotage Israel had yet carried out against Iran’s nuclear sites. It took place a week and a half after the Biden administration had inaugurated its negotiations with the Iranians towards reinstating the 2015 nuclear deal.

Still led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the time, Israel opted to wait until two hours before the operation to inform the administration of its plans. Netanyahu’s decision reportedly owed to his fear that President Joe Biden or his advisers would leak the planned mission to the media to prevent it from taking place.

Netanyahu’s fears of U.S. leaks were based on his experience with the Obama administration.

Throughout Barack Obama’s two terms in office, his administration routinely leaked information about Israel’s operations and planned operations in Iran and Syria. The administration’s leaks undermined Israel’s efforts to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and endangered its bid to block Iran from transferring advanced weapons to Hezbollah terror forces in Lebanon.

Highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be) of the leaks by the Obama administration revolve around its successful effort to block Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear installation at Fordow in 2012.

On March 29, 2012, Foreign Policy magazine reported that Azerbaijan had agreed to permit Israel to launch a strike against Iran’s nuclear installations from its air bases. The same day, Bloomberg reported on a congressional report that claimed it was futile to attack Iran’s nuclear installations because “Iran’s nuclear installations were so dispersed that it is unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be.”

The Foreign Policy report quoted a U.S. intelligence officer saying, “We’re watching what Iran does closely … But we’re now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we’re not happy with it.”

Israel’s veteran military affairs commentator Ron Ben-Yishai, in a column in Ynet, expressed outrage at the U.S. leaks. Accusing Obama of “betraying Israel,” Ben-Yishai fumed, “This ‘surgical strike’” of leaks is undertaken via reports in the American and British media, but the campaign’s aims are fully operational: To make it more difficult for Israeli decision-makers to order the IDF to carry out a strike, and what’s even graver, to erode the IDF’s capacity to launch such strike with minimal casualties.”

The leaks weren’t only geared towards preventing an airstrike or commando raid on Iran’s installations. They were directed as well against Israel’s efforts to undermine the Iranian nuclear program through cyberwarfare and other forms of sabotage.

On June 1, 2012, the administration leaked the Stuxnet cyberwarfare program to the New York Times. Stuxnet was a top-secret cyber worm developed jointly by the United States and Israel. Beginning in 2010, it was used to sabotage Iran’s main centrifuge production site at Natanz. The Times reported that in 2012, Obama was outraged because Israel had modified the cyber worm and allegedly sought to expand the use of the cyberweapon to other Iranian installations including economic infrastructure.

The Times’s story quoted one of Obama’s briefers telling the then president, “We think there was a modification done by the Israelis.” After Obama questioned the officials, then-Vice President Joe Biden expressed outrage. Biden “fumed, ‘It’s got to be the Israelis. They went too far.’”

The Stuxnet leak wasn’t a one-off. Two weeks later, the administration leaked details of another joint U.S.-Israel cyber tool called “Flame,” to The Washington Post. Flame was reportedly developed for spying on Iran’s nuclear program.

The Post reported that “the United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon.”

Then there was Syria. More or less at the outset of the civil war in 2011, Israel began carrying out operations in Syria to block Iran’s efforts to transfer advanced weapons, including guided missiles to Hezbollah terror forces in Lebanon. Israel made it a point never to acknowledge its operations so as to minimize pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to retaliate.

Beginning in 2012, as the Obama administration opened covert nuclear talks with Iran, Washington began leaking information about the Israeli strikes to the media to undermine them and deter Israel from intensifying its operation. For instance, on July 5, 2013, the administration told The New York Times that Israel was behind a strike on a shipment of a P-800 Yakhont surface-to-sea missile system at Latakia.

In a long analysis of Obama’s Iran strategy published in 2015, former Bush National Security Council director Michael Doran argued that Obama chose to shield Assad from efforts to overthrow him to ingratiate himself with the Iranian regime, which, he claimed, rightly viewed the Assad regime as an “Iranian equity.”

Israel’s relations with the United States reached new lows in 2013-2015 as U.S. nuclear talks with Iran went into high gear. The talks and the agreements they produced served to legitimize Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ultimately provided Iran with a windfall of cash and a glide path to a nuclear arsenal by 2025. In other words, the nuclear talks, and the deals they produced, constituted a strategic betrayal of Israel by the Obama administration.

In October 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2012, while keeping Israel in the dark about his nuclear talks with Tehran, Obama had U.S. spy agencies conduct aggressive espionage against Israel’s military bases and eavesdropped on secret communications by Israeli leaders to prevent Netanyahu from ordering a military assault on the Fordow installation in Iran.

Currently, the Biden administration is deploying a second naval carrier group to the region amid growing fears in Washington that Israel may strike Iran’s nuclear installations ahead of or in the aftermath of an Iranian strike on Israel. In a similar fashion, Obama ordered a second U.S. aircraft carrier to the region in 2012, amid fears of an impending Israeli strike on Fordow.

In 2013, National Security Agency defector Edward Snowden revealed that the United States was eavesdropping on foreign allied leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande and Netanyahu.

Chastened, Obama pledged to end the practice. But insofar as Israel was concerned, far from ending the espionage, he stepped it up. In a stunning exposé in December 2015, months after the nuclear deal was approved in Congress, The Wall Street Journal revealed the extent of NSA spying on Israel.

In its zeal to uncover Israel’s moves to undermine the nuclear deal Obama had negotiated with Iran, Obama’s National Security Agency intercepted communications between Israeli officials and American Jewish leaders as well as members of Congress and transferred the information to the White House.

The aggressive spying was illegal because it effectively involved spying on American citizens and lawmakers. The unprecedented move showed that the Obama administration viewed Israel’s determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as the major threat to its primary foreign policy goal—realigning the United States towards Iran and away from Israel and the Sunni Arab states by engaging in nuclear appeasement of Tehran.

During the Trump presidency, intelligence cooperation between Israel and the United States reached unprecedented levels of openness and intimacy. But due to his experience with the Obama-Biden administration, when Biden entered office, Netanyahu reportedly ordered Israel’s spy agencies to curtail intelligence sharing with their U.S. counterparts.

This policy was abrogated during the Bennett-Lapid government’s 17-month tenure. Acting at the urging of the Biden administration, upon entering office in May 2021, Bennett reinstated the intelligence sharing. And as the leak of Israel’s role in Khodei’s assassination in May 2022 made clear, the Biden administration returned the favor by reinstating Obama’s practice of leaking Israeli operations that were believed to endanger its efforts to appease Iran.

In all likelihood, the Al-Jarida report was indeed false. The implications of the report—that the United States would facilitate the roundup and all but certain torture and murder of Mossad agents by the regime in Iran in the middle of a major war—are simply too extreme to countenance. The rupture such a hostile move would cause to U.S.-Israel intelligence ties would be too severe for even a hostile administration to accept. Even worse from a U.S. perspective, such a step would undermine the credibility and trustworthiness of U.S. intelligence agencies in the eyes of partners and agents worldwide.

All the same, both the Obama-Biden and the Biden-Harris administrations’ records of bad faith towards Israel on issues related to Jerusalem’s efforts to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons make it difficult at first blush to dismiss reports like Al-Jarida’s as disinformation.

jns.org · by Caroline B. Glick · August 16, 2024

9. Kursk Pocket Shows Ukraine Still in the Fight

Pocket or Bulge?

Excerpts:

Finally, Ukraine – like all others on Russia’s border – needs a long-term plan for defense. Tanks and armored vehicles will be vital for security. The land approaches from Russian will have to be guarded permanently. To do so, Ukraine will need a minimum of 300-500 modern tanks such as the M1 Abrams to create an agile, modern land force.

As for Putin, he fell back on his standard riposte: nuclear threats against the capitals of Europe. Putin does not have good options. Russia’s forces are tied down in the Donbass, making small tactical gains at huge cost, according to British Chief of Defense Staff Admiral Tony Radakin. The Kursk flank move caught Putin by surprise and without reserves in the area. If Ukraine penetrates further, Ukraine could be in position to threaten Russian logistics and supply. Of course, Russia may counter-attack, but any scenario will stir up Putin’s critics.

Still, Putin had better watch his back with Beijing. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi appeared as surprised as the rest of the world, sputtering old platitudes about “no expansion” of the war in remarks made Aug. 12. Moscow is an economic vassal of China at this point. Yet the Chinese must be dismayed by seeing Ukraine’s tanks and Strykers in Russian territory; another undeniable sign that Russia is no glorious military power.

Kursk Pocket Shows Ukraine Still in the Fight

By Rebecca Grant

August 17, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/17/kursk_pocket_shows_ukraine_still_in_the_fight_1052326.html?mc_cid=584be739ff&mc_eid=70bf478f36

n this photo provided by the Ukrainian Defence Ministry Press Office, a strategically important bridge over the river Seym is destroyed by Ukrainian troops as they continue their incursion into the Kursk region, Russia, Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. The bridge was used by the Kremlin to supply its troops and its destruction could hamper their efforts. (Ukrainian Defence Ministry Press Office via AP)

Ukraine’s war against Russia is a stalemate no more. Putin did not see this coming. And NATO is content to let Ukraine take the war to Russia.

As the second week of Ukraine’s operation in Kursk oblast began, Ukraine claimed to hold 74 sites in a pocket about 45 miles long and 20 miles wide. Video clips showed Ukrainian tanks, modified with reactive armor, on the ground in Russia. U.S.-made Strykers were in action as Ukraine displayed new skills in combined-arms operations.

“It’s creating a real dilemma for Putin, and we’ve been in direct contact, constant contact, with the Ukrainians,” U.S. President Joe Biden said Aug. 13.

First and foremost, this is payback for more than 2,000 attacks launched by Russia into Ukraine from the Kursk region, according to Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Georgiy Tykhy.

For now, Putin is downplaying the Kursk pocket as a skirmish, even as local Russian officials declare states of emergency in front of Ukraine’s advance. However, his recent salvo of nuclear threats against NATO capitals suggests Russia’s leader is feeling the pressure. Whatever happens next, pay attention to the tactical lessons around this Kursk pocket. They could impact future course of the war… and Ukraine’s long-term defense.

First, Ukraine has scored a surprise by pushing the war “into the aggressor’s territory,” as President Volodymyr Zelensky said Aug. 10. “Ukraine is proving that it can indeed restore justice and is ensuring the exact kind of pressure that is needed – pressure on the aggressor,” Zelensky added.

Next, Ukraine’s combat experience and training by NATO members is paying off. Ukraine “is quite well-organized,” Michael Clarke of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute told Sky News. “They know what they are doing, and they’ve got a plan,” Clarke said, to include rotating troops in and out of the battle zone. That’s highly professional and will be a morale boost for Ukraine’s forces in the east and south.

So far, the White House is fine with all this. A few months ago, the White House joined Britain and other allies in authorizing Ukraine to use NATO-supplied weapons to hit specific targets inside Russia. Evidently, that policy extends to ground combat, too. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Aug. 9 that Ukraine has permission to attack imminent build-ups of Russian forces. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh confirmed Ukraine’s operations in Kursk “are within the U.S. policy of where they can operate our weapons, our systems, our capabilities.”

NATO does not appear worried about escalation either. On the contrary, the German Foreign Ministry said last week that Ukraine’s self-defense was “not limited to its own territory.” “We see no reason to restrict the activities of Ukrainians” echoed Finland’s President Alexander Stubb on Aug. 14.

Clearly, Ukraine has tacit permission to intensify the war, and why not? This is the era of the digital battlefield. Escalation control is quite feasible. Constant communication makes attack zones easy to set up and regulate in real time, down to the meter. U.S. commanders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria frequently blocked off battle sectors for control of long-range fires, and air and drone strikes. For example, one who is very familiar with that system is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown, an Air Force F-16 fighter pilot who commanded air operations in the Middle East at the height of the anti-ISIS war.

Ukraine has demonstrated tight command and control, racking up a series of strikes with drones and long-range artillery. The Russians said Ukraine attacked with over 100 drones on the night of Aug. 14. Over the weekend of Aug. 10-11, drones struck an airbase near Moscow. On August 3, an ATACMS sank the Russian Kilo-class submarine Rostov on Don in Crimea.

Expect all this to continue. Ukraine’s commanding general Oleksandr Syrskyi told The Guardian he has a plan for the Kerch Strait bridge, and indeed for all of Crimea.

Dr. Rebecca Grant is a national security analyst and vice president, defense programs for the Lexington Institute, a nonprofit public-policy research organization in Arlington, Virginia. She has held positions at the Pentagon, in the private sector and has led an aerospace and defense consultancy. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccagrantdc and the Lexington Institute @LexNextDC.

10. Ukraine's Incursion Into Kursk - Tactical Genius?

Excerpts:

Russia has used this argument repeatedly over the past two-and-half years – but it has never acted on any of its threats of escalation. It is unlikely to do so now. On the one hand, it would require Putin to acknowledge a state of war – first with Ukraine, and then, by extension, with the west. On the other hand, it would very likely trigger an Article 5 response from Nato, calling for collective defence from member states that would inevitably lead to a full-scale military confrontation.

Neither is in Putin’s interest. And the latter could not possibly achieve for Russia what Putin might hope to gain through negotiations – especially if he enters them from a position of strength.

Ukraine’s operation in the Kursk region is likely to deny the Russian president this opportunity and tilt the playing field further in favour of Kyiv ahead of any future talks. For that reason alone, the current Ukrainian offensive is worth continued western backing and calling Putin’s bluff.

Ukraine's Incursion Into Kursk - Tactical Genius?

By Stefan Wolff

August 19, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/19/ukraines_incursion_into_kursk_-_tactical_genius_1052411.html?mc_cid=584be739ff&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Ukraine’s Kursk incursion: how the invasion of Russia could change the political focus of the conflict

The Ukrainian operation in Russia’s Kursk region began in late July with several days of airstrikes before Kyiv’s ground forces quickly advanced several miles deep into Russian territory on August 6, 2024. Since then, according to various reports, they have established an expanded foothold of as much as 1,000 square kilometres. They have destroyed a lot of Russian equipment and inflicted heavy casualties on Russian forces.

The Kremlin has rushed forces to the region but has so far failed to halt the Ukrainian advance, let alone drive Ukrainian forces from Russian soil. Now, according to as yet unconfirmed but credible reports, Putin has appointed Alexei Dyumin to head up what it calls its “counter-terrorist” response to the Ukrainian incursion. This is significant in several ways.

First, there is the personnel dimension. Dyumin is Putin’s former bodyguard, but also served as deputy head of the GRU military intelligence service, deputy defence minister and, until the end of May 2024, as governor of the Tula region, south of Moscow.

He was then appointed as secretary to the State Council. This is a body that brings together all the governors of Russia’s regions and is chaired by the Russian president. The choice of Dyumin – someone clearly outside the traditional military hierarchy – is indicative of Putin’s lack of trust in his military leaders to get the job done. Dyumin’s handling of this crisis could therefore either accelerate or end his rise among the Russian political elite.

If he is successful, it would potentially cement his status as a prime candidate to succeed Putin.

Putin’s phraseology, referring to Ukraine’s operation as a provocation requiring a “counter-terrorist” response, is also significant. It implies that he is still reluctant to admit that he has plunged Russia into an actual war with its neighbour. Rather, the counter-terrorist operation now underway inside Russia sits next to what Putin has called the “special military operation” being conducted in Ukraine.

Both mask the true extent of the problem that Putin now faces. On the one hand, the Russian president has to deal with a very costly war in Ukraine. The conflict has fundamentally altered the global geopolitical landscape and left Moscow with few alternatives to an unflattering and difficult-to-manage alliance with China, Iran and North Korea.

On the other hand, it undermines further the perception of Putin’s own competence and that of his key military leaders in their ability to safeguard Russian national security. Even if they are eventually able to contain and push back the Ukrainian forces that are, for now, firmly lodged surprisingly deep inside Russia, the very fact that they could get as far as they have for as long as they did is an undeniable failure.

Blame the west

It’s also worth noting that Putin has doubled down on one of his key justifications for his war of aggression against Ukraine – that this is all the fault of the west. Reportedly claiming that “the west is fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians”, is another indication that, for Putin, this war is about much more than Ukraine possibly joining Nato and the EU. It’s also an important guide to what can be expected from Moscow in the long-term when it comes to potential negotiations with Kyiv over an end to the war.

What Moscow will want out of those is a weakening of Ukraine and the west – and a relative strengthening of its own position, particularly when it comes to any potential future confrontation with Nato. This will also be important for Putin domestically, including in terms of his legacy, which we know to be very important to him. Any such preferential outcome will potentially also enhance Russia’s infuence in any Chinese-led alliance emerging as a counterpoint to the US and its allies.

This continued framing of the conflict as one between Russia and the west also raises the stakes for Ukraine’s western allies, and quite significantly so. It potentially gives Russia an opportunity to claim that Nato as a whole, or individual Nato members, have become co-belligerents and are therefore legitimate targets for Russian escalation of the conflict.

The UK’s reiteration of its position that arms supplied to Ukraine can, with the exception of long-range Storm Shadow missiles, be used by Kyiv in its operation in the Kursk region will no doubt be framed by Moscow as one such instance of western powers acting as belligerents against his country.

Neither is in Putin’s interest. And the latter could not possibly achieve for Russia what Putin might hope to gain through negotiations – especially if he enters them from a position of strength.

Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

11. Blinken says U.S. proposal is ‘maybe the last’ chance for Gaza cease-fire

Blinken says U.S. proposal is ‘maybe the last’ chance for Gaza cease-fire

Secretary of State Antony Blinken will also meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a trip to Israel.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/19/israel-hamas-gaza-war-latest-cease-fire/

By John Hudson, Rachel Pannett and Annabelle Timsit

Updated August 19, 2024 at 5:28 a.m. EDT|Published August 19, 2024 at 1:19 a.m. EDT

TEL AVIV — Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli leaders Monday that a U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal is potentially their last chance to secure Israeli hostages from Hamas and bring lasting security to the Middle East.

“This is a decisive moment — probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a cease-fire, and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security,” Blinken said alongside Israeli President Isaac Herzog during his ninth trip to the Middle East since the cross-border Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

The U.S. deal supported by mediating partners Qatar and Egypt includes a six-week cease-fire, the release of scores of Israeli hostages captured in the attack in exchange for Palestinian detainees, and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from major population centers in Gaza.

While the Biden administration has said that a deal could be concluded as early as this week, the leaders of Hamas and Israel cast doubt on the prospect almost as soon as Blinken arrived in Israel on Sunday.

Following World news

Following

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out an Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border, a key demand of Hamas, telling his cabinet on Sunday he is conducting “give-and-take” negotiations “not give-and-give.”

Hamas accused the United States of adopting all of Israel’s demands in its proposal — and none from its side. “What happened in the last meeting is that the U.S. administration presented a proposal that includes everything Netanyahu wants,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told The Washington Post.

Blinken, who is also meeting with Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, acknowledged that it was a “fraught moment” for Israel, where there are concerns of potential attacks by Iran, Hezbollah and others.

Blinken emphasized it was important that “no one take any steps that could derail this process” through “provocations.” He also warned against the conflict escalating to other places. The Biden administration still expects a resumption of talks from the key negotiating partners later this week, said a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks.

After his meetings in Israel, Blinken will travel to Egypt on Tuesday.

Here’s what else to know

A “powerful explosive device” detonated in Tel Aviv Sunday night, in what Israeli police and the internal security service Shin Bet called a “terrorist attack” in a joint statement. The explosion occurred near a synagogue in which dozens of people were praying, Israeli news outlet Ynet reported. Israeli police spokesman Eli Levy told Israeli military radio station Galatz that if the explosion had occurred a few meters closer to the synagogue, “we would have woken up to a huge disaster.” One person was moderately injured and taken from the scene to receive medical care, authorities said. Earlier, Tel Aviv District Police Commander Peretz Amar said a person carrying the explosive device was killed.

The Israel Defense Forces said “multiple suspicious aerial targets” crossed into Israel from Lebanon and some fell in the area of Ya’ara, about 1.5 miles south of the Lebanese border. Herzog in remarks with Blinken said Israeli soldiers were attacked in Ya’ara on Monday morning “by Hezbollah terrorists with drones, and there is information that we have suffered possible casualties.” Hezbollah said in a statement Monday that it attacked an Israeli barracks in Ya’ara and a military base outside of Acre, in northwestern Israel, with a “swarm” of suicide drones that it said killed and injured officers and soldiers. The group said the attack was in retaliation for an earlier Israeli attack in southern Lebanon.

Blinken spoke with Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, the Saudi foreign minister, on Sunday. According to U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel, the pair discussed the efforts to finalize a cease-fire deal, and Saudi Arabia’s role in continuing the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, as well as concerns about the Houthis, an Iranian-backed rebel group.

At least 40,099 people have been killed and 92,609 injured in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, mostly civilians, and says 331 soldiers have been killed since the launch of its military operation in Gaza.

Joyce Lau, Hajar Harb, Kareem Fahim and Lior Soroka contributed to this report

12. Kyiv repels Russian aerial attack, North Korean ballistic weapons used in strike, city authorities say

How do they know they were north Korea?

They were either shot down or they failed in flight (snarky comment for sarcasm but perhaps not far from the truth).

Excerpts:

Popko added that according to preliminary information, Russian forces "most likely used KN-23, North Korean-made ballistic missiles."

Information released later by Ukraine's Air Force said one Russian and two ballistic missiles were used in the attack, as well as five cruise missiles and eight kamikaze drones.

It added that the two North Korean ballistic missiles, three cruise missiles and all eight kamikaze drones were intercepted by Ukraine's air defenses.

The others "did not reach their desired targets" though no further information was given.

Kyiv repels Russian aerial attack, North Korean ballistic weapons used in strike, city authorities say

kyivindependent.com · by Abbey Fenbert · August 18, 2024

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Kyiv repelled a Russian missile and drone attack in the early hours of Aug. 18, with city authorities saying North Korean ballistic weapons were used in the strike.

No damage or casualties have been reported in the capital.

"This is the third ballistic missile attack on the capital in August, with a clear interval of six days between the attacks," Serhii Popko, the head of Kyiv Military Administration, said in a post on Telegram.

Popko added that according to preliminary information, Russian forces "most likely used KN-23, North Korean-made ballistic missiles."

Information released later by Ukraine's Air Force said one Russian and two ballistic missiles were used in the attack, as well as five cruise missiles and eight kamikaze drones.

It added that the two North Korean ballistic missiles, three cruise missiles and all eight kamikaze drones were intercepted by Ukraine's air defenses.

The others "did not reach their desired targets" though no further information was given.

Air raid sirens rang out in Kyiv twice overnight though Popko said all the missiles and drones were downed on the approaches to the capital so no explosions were heard by those in the city.

Later on the morning of Aug. 18, Ukraine's State Emergency Service published photos of damaged residential buildings in the surrounding Kyiv Oblast and said rescuers were assisting people, but did not mention any casualties.

North Korea has long been shaping up as Russia's leading weapons supplier, reportedly providing Moscow with extensive military packages, including ballistic missiles and over 3 million artillery shells.

But the quality of the North Korean weapons is questionable – around half of the missiles fired at Ukraine by Russia have malfunctioned and exploded in mid-air, Reuters reported on May 7, citing Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office.

Russian forces have intensified attacks against Kyiv in the summer of 2024. A mass drone attack launched on July 31 was the heaviest drone strike on the capital since the beginning of the year, according to the Kyiv City Military Administration.

Russia also targeted Kyiv in a missile strike on July 8 that hit a children's hospital, killing two people and injuring 32 others.

How Russia broke through Ukraine’s air defense to strike Kyiv children’s hospital

Russia unleashed one of its deadliest attacks against Kyiv on July 8, killing 33 people and injuring 121 others. Residential buildings and medical facilities suffered damage, with one Russian missile hitting Ohkmatdyt, the country’s largest children’s medical center. Rather than evidence of some t…

The Kyiv IndependentMartin Fornusek

kyivindependent.com · by Abbey Fenbert · August 18, 2024

13. Why Does America Seem to Support Hamas and Iran?

Why Does America Seem to Support Hamas and Iran?

Aug 19, 2024, 12:55 AM

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-does-america-seem-to-support-hamas-and-iran/

by Yoel Bin-Nun

For years, many believed that America’s apparent missteps in the Middle East stemmed from a lack of understanding of the region’s complexities. However, recent developments suggest a more deliberate and concerning strategy.

In a remarkable turn of events, the United States has managed to temporarily defuse the Iranian threat of an attack on Israel, orchestrated alongside Hezbollah, by engaging them in negotiations in Qatar. These negotiations, ostensibly driven by concerns for the lives of Israeli hostages, reveal a more troubling agenda.

A high-ranking American intelligence official was dispatched to Doha, where Israeli intelligence leaders were already present. Hezbollah, in a surprising move, announced a halt to its planned assault, aligning this pause with the ongoing talks in Qatar, which also include discussions between Qatar and Iran. Notably absent from these negotiations are Hamas representatives, raising questions about the true objectives at play.

Allowing Hamas to rebuild?

According to the American plan, the release of most hostages still alive will not occur during the ceasefire stages, but only after a complete withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza. This withdrawal would facilitate the reconstruction of Hamas, even before the ruins of Gaza are rebuilt.

Meanwhile, significant shipments of military aid from Iran to Hamas, poised to be smuggled through Sinai, are waiting for the IDF to vacate the Philadelphi Corridor— a fact well-known to both the Egyptians and the Americans and even reported in the media.

All American efforts to prevent a “regional war” now appear focused on ending Israel’s campaign in Gaza, restoring Hamas’s power, and averting conflict in the north.

Implications for the region

The implications of this American effort are stark and deeply troubling:

Erosion of Israeli Security: The immediate consequence of America’s current strategy is the erosion of Israeli security along both the Gaza and northern borders. Even if Hezbollah (temporarily?) abides by a UN resolution to position its forces north of the Litani River, the long-term outlook is bleak. The border settlements, once vibrant communities, are poised to become militarized zones, with most residents unlikely to return. This shift signals not only a grave harm to the settlements that have long been the consensus within Israel’s Zionist public but also the creation of so-called ‘security belts’ within Israel’s own borders. In essence, what should have been a decisive victory for the IDF is at risk of becoming a strategic failure for the State of Israel.The situation could deteriorate further as our adversaries regroup, planning massacres and kidnappings along the borders of Sharon and Samaria, with the intent to dismantle settlements in the valleys, Sharon, and beyond. It is worth recalling that some of Israel’s most significant territorial withdrawals—from Sinai, Gaza, and northern Samaria—were orchestrated not by leftist governments, but by right-wing administrations. The pattern is alarming and suggests that political alignments offer little protection against strategic missteps.
Acceptance of a Nuclear Iran: On a broader scale, America’s actions are setting the stage for the acceptance of a nuclear Iran as a regional power. By tacitly reconciling with an Islamic dictatorship that oppresses its own people, the United States is positioning Iran as a strategic partner. For Israel, this is a perilous development. The heavy price for America’s current approach will be paid by the State of Israel, likely in the near future. What America is doing now is merely delaying an inevitable ‘regional’ war—postponing what might have been the last opportunity to prevent a nuclear Iran to a future where Iran, armed with nuclear capabilities, can initiate conflict at a time of its choosing. Should this scenario come to pass—God forbid—President Biden and Vice President Harris will be etched in history alongside figures like Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, who, through the Munich Agreement, sought to appease the Nazi regime, inadvertently paving the way for the most catastrophic world war to date.

What can be done to stop this?

About the Author

Dr. Rabbi Yoel bin Nun is one of the founders of Yeshivat Har Etzion. He received his rabbinic training at Yeshiva Merkaz HaRav and his Ph.D. from Hebrew University. In 1986, he established Michlelet Yaakov Herzog for training Jewish Studies teachers, especially in Bible instruction. Between 2000-2006 he served as the Rosh Ha-Yeshiva of Yeshivat HaKibbutz HaDati in Ein Tzurim.

14. It’s time to end the myth that the US needed to drop atomic bombs to end World War II | Opinion

I disagree. First, it is hard to prove or disprove this and the author only offers opinions of some notable people.

But more importantly, as long as nuclear weapons exist we need to study this and the decision making and intelligence process (and debate whether it was necessary or not) that took place surrounding the decision to employ these weapons. If you end the "myth" then we might no longer examine this to help inform future decision making.

It’s time to end the myth that the US needed to drop atomic bombs to end World War II | Opinion

Michael Childers

Sun, August 18, 2024 at 7:07 AM EDT·3 min read

470

It was disappointing to see debunked myths about World War II published recently in The Kansas City Star as if they were undisputed facts. Those assertions were that:

President Harry Truman’s use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to end the war.
The war was then only at a midpoint.
The use of these weapons saved “half million lives.”

In truth, by June 1945, Japan had been militarily defeated, its once powerful Imperial Navy and air services capable of little resistance, according to Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, in his 1997 essay, “Was Hiroshima Necessary?”

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said of these bombings: “The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Most American military leaders criticized the bombings publicly after the war, including Truman’s chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy and even the well-known war hawk Gen. Curtis LeMay, who led the bombings over Tokyo, and who said in a press conference on Sept. 20, 1945: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.” When asked to clarify, LeMay said, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

Gar Alperovitz — perhaps the historian who knows the issue best, having written the books “Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam” and ”The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb,” with seven collaborators and 112 pages of endnotes — says that the 1990 declaration by J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, convinced him that the use of atomic weapons on Japan was unnecessary. Walker said:

“The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisors knew it.”

On Aug. 5, 2005, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, co-authors of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” wrote an article in The Los Angeles Times entitled “The myths of Hiroshima.” In it, they said:

“The hard truth is that the bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper’s magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.” (Since the total American casualties in WWII were 405,000, the suggestion of an invasion of Japan taking one million or half a million American lives is ludicrous, and Bundy vacillated between one million and half million.)

“By the time historians were given access to the secret files necessary to examine this subject with care, the myth of huge numbers of American, British and Japanese lives saved had already achieved the status of accepted history,” Rufus E. Miles Jr. wrote in the journal International Security in fall of 1985. Had they focused on the “striking inconsistencies between” the wartime documents and “those parts of the principal decision-makers’ memoirs that dealt with estimates of lives saved. Had they done so, and followed the subject where it led, they would have been forced to conclude that the number of American deaths prevented by the two bombs would almost certainly not have exceeded 20,000 and would probably have been much lower, perhaps even zero,” Miles concluded.

The real truth was suppressed for some time, but now that the records are available, it is time for the real story to come out.

Michael Childers is a consultant and journalist in Kansas City. He has been published regularly in Aircraft Interiors International magazine, Experience Magazine, Inflight magazine and others.

15. Opinion America’s failed approach to Iran can’t really be called a strategy

Conclusion:

I dislike the Iranian regime and everything it stands for. I admire the brave women and men who have opposed it in the streets and paid a heavy price for their opposition. I applaud those who have tried to moderate the country from within, knowing they’re bucking the regime’s anti-U.S. history and DNA. I hope that, one day, this great nation will be able to return to its rightful place of prestige in the region and the world. But hope is not a strategy. The United States and its allies need to devise a policy toward Iran that recognizes the reality that the Islamic republic exists — and then put in place threats and punishments to deter it, but also incentives so that it has a reason to relax tensions. This will not lead to a détente, let alone cooperation with Tehran. But it could reduce the many frictions that might tip this volatile region into a long and bloody war.

Opinion America’s failed approach to Iran can’t really be called a strategy

The idea of ‘maximum pressure’ has backfired, adding to instability in the Middle East.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/16/iran-strategy-trump-biden-failure/

By Fareed Zakaria

August 16, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

The Middle East is today as close to a broad regional war as it has been in decades. There are many explanations for this tense reality, but one force casts a shadow over all of them: Iran. Iran has decided that it has more to gain than to lose by pursuing an aggressive policy directed against Washington and its allies in the region. This new and dangerous reality results from one factor above all: the collapse of any coherent U.S. policy toward Iran.

Consider the failure of Washington’s current approach. Since President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, U.S. policy toward Iran has been one of “maximum pressure.” The number of sanctions against Iran rose from 370 under Barack Obama to more than 1,500 during the Trump administration, making the country the most sanctioned on the planet. While the other partners in the nuclear-deal negotiations — European powers, Russia and China — objected, the United States used secondary sanctions to effectively block them from trading much with Tehran. The Biden administration has mostly continued the Trump policy, with a few modifications and relaxations.

And what has been the result of the Trump-Biden policy of maximum pressure? Freed from the constraints of the nuclear deal, Iran has massively advanced its nuclear program. It now has 30 times more enriched uranium than the deal allowed, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The deal created a year-long “breakout time,” the period necessary to produce the nuclear fuel needed for a weapon. Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tehran was one to two weeks away from breakout capacity.

Meanwhile, Iran has responded to the pressure from abroad by forging closer ties with an array of substate groups in the region — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria. Together this “axis of resistance” has plunged Israel into its longest and most perilous war in decades, diverted about 70 percent of vessel traffic out of the Red Sea, and turned Iraq and Syria into reliable client states. By virtually any measure, Washington’s policy toward Iran has failed.

Opinions about the Middle East

OpinionAmerica’s failed approach to Iran can’t really be called a strategy

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OpinionNetanyahu has managed to frustrate just about everyone

OpinionA detainee-abuse scandal erupts just when Israel can least afford it

OpinionNew president, same Iran

OpinionLow turnout in Iran’s elections is what the regime fears most

OpinionI’ve never seen Israelis as gloomy as they are today

OpinionAfter Hamas’s latest cease-fire rejection, Biden has two options

OpinionNetanyahu’s speech to Congress could cause long-term damage

OpinionThe paradox ahead for Gaza: A postwar where war goes on

OpinionHamas isn’t interested in releasing hostages. Cue the next rescue.

OpinionAmericans are being held hostage in Gaza. We cannot forget them.

OpinionDon’t worry, Trump will go back in time and fix everything

OpinionBiden’s deal with Saudi Arabia may be dead on arrival, thankfully

OpinionEasing civilian suffering should be the easy part of this war

OpinionOut of the Gaza war, there is an opportunity

OpinionTake it from conservative national security experts: Trump is unfit

OpinionThe U.S. assembles the pieces of a possible Gaza war endgame

OpinionIran has lost its president. Its people need to regain their freedom.

Why has maximum pressure not worked? Hadi Kahalzadeh, a research fellow at Brandeis University, has authored a careful study that comes to an important conclusion:

“The expanded sanctions regime … has had adverse consequences for the Iranian middle classes … causing them to lose faith in the reformist politicians who supported a new round of diplomacy. Iranian hard-liners invoked the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal to show that they had been right all along to dismiss the negotiations as a sham. As European and other international companies began to withdraw from Iran … the hard-liners opened the door to Chinese investors and called on their own loyal business interests to fill the vacuum.”

Even after a reformist, Masoud Pezeshkian, was recently elected president, he still has had to cave to the religious and military establishments that hold real power.

The truth is that, for almost a decade, Washington has had an attitude toward Iran — unrelenting opposition and pressure — but not a strategy. The Obama administration tried an approach that paired extreme sanctions with a way out for Iran — if it would restrict its nuclear program. By containing Iran’s most potent threat, Obama hoped the country would end up being less aggressive in its neighborhood.

International experts agree Iran largely adhered to the nuclear deal. Tehran, however, did not wind down its regional activities (which were never part of the deal).

Could nuclear negotiations have led to some kind of broader relaxation of tensions? It’s impossible to know, because in the span of two years, Trump took power and reversed U.S. policy altogether.

The Biden administration could have changed course but feared that doing so would trigger too strong a reaction from Republicans. The problem is that the current approach does not amount to a strategy. Rather, it is an attitude based primarily on pandering to American domestic audiences by looking “tough.” It’s a vague notion that unrelenting opposition will yield something, perhaps a collapse of the regime itself.

I dislike the Iranian regime and everything it stands for. I admire the brave women and men who have opposed it in the streets and paid a heavy price for their opposition. I applaud those who have tried to moderate the country from within, knowing they’re bucking the regime’s anti-U.S. history and DNA. I hope that, one day, this great nation will be able to return to its rightful place of prestige in the region and the world.

But hope is not a strategy. The United States and its allies need to devise a policy toward Iran that recognizes the reality that the Islamic republic exists — and then put in place threats and punishments to deter it, but also incentives so that it has a reason to relax tensions. This will not lead to a détente, let alone cooperation with Tehran. But it could reduce the many frictions that might tip this volatile region into a long and bloody war.

738

Comments

Opinion by Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. Twitter

16. Future of Taiwan is strategically important to America: INDOPACOM chief

But is it important to the people of Taiwan? Are they willing to do all that is necessary to deter and defend? Or does America want the defense of Taiwan more than its people?

And what do we do if PRC subversion of Taiwan is successful and the Taiwan political system opts for a political settlement that concludes with "reunification?"

Future of Taiwan is strategically important to America: INDOPACOM chief

Stars and Stripes · by Wyatt Olson · August 16, 2024

Adm. Samuel Paparo speaks at the Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium in Honolulu on Aug. 15, 2024. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

WAIKIKI BEACH, Hawaii — Preventing a forceful takeover of Taiwan by China is strategically important to America because the “knock-on” effects of such a conflict would foment global chaos and misery, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said Thursday.

“The interconnectedness of the world economy and its knock-on effects is a matter of importance to all of us,” Adm. Samuel Paparo said during a symposium hosted by the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation at Waikiki Beach.

“And this is why the matter of the Taiwan question and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait is important to all of us,” Paparo told an audience on the final day of the Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium.

China regards the democratically governed island as a renegade province that must, at some point, accede to Beijing’s control.

China’s military in recent years has increasingly encroached on Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the area just beyond its airspace.

In May, China simulated bomber attacks and ship-boardings during two days of military exercises around Taiwan.

U.S. Pacific Fleet, which Paparo commanded until May when he took the reins at INDOPACOM, routinely sends warships through the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate U.S. support for Taiwan and for freedom of navigation.

At the symposium, attended by personnel from special operations units from more than two dozen nations, Paparo offered up brief opening comments before fielding a range of questions that began with, “Why should we care about Taiwan?”

The question reflected the debate over American involvement in Ukraine, which is defending itself against an invasion by Russia, as well as other global hotspots.

An isolationist wing of the Republican Party opposes providing further shipments of arms to Ukraine.

Former president and this year’s Republican nominee Donald Trump has long questioned American involvement with NATO. Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, said shortly after the Russian invasion in 2022 that he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

Some observers have expressed concern that the U.S. abandoning Ukraine would only embolden Beijing to take Taiwan by force.

The Taiwan Relations Act, passed by Congress in 1979, however, instituted a policy of maintaining “the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”

Paparo also cited events in Ukraine in arguing that Taiwan’s security is of strategic consequence.

“It is important to all nations that matters not be settled by force,” Paparo said. “This is the matter at hand in Ukraine. This is the matter at hand in the Middle East.”

The “knock-on effects” of unsettling the so-called international rules-based order “results in tremendous disorder and tremendous misery,” he said.

“These principles of sovereignty, the principles of freedom of movement — of goods and services, of ideas and of people — have lifted 60% of the world out of poverty since the end of the second World War,” he said. “This is what these principles have brought the world.”

The future of Taiwan must be settled under “the principles of self-determination, peacefully, through negotiation,” he said.

Stars and Stripes · by Wyatt Olson · August 16, 2024

17. US Military Presence in Syria Carries Substantial Risks, But So Does Complete Withdrawal

US Military Presence in Syria Carries Substantial Risks, But So Does Complete Withdrawal

military.com · by The Conversation | By Sefa Secen Published August 16, 2024 at 9:52pm ET · August 16, 2024

U.S.-backed forces in eastern Syria launched a major attack on three posts manned by pro-government gunmen on Aug. 12, 2024, killing at least 18 fighters in a rare provocation near the border with Iraq.

The assault marked the worst clashes in eastern Syria in nearly a year. Earlier in August, eight U.S. personnel stationed in Syria were injured in a drone attack purportedly carried out by Iranian-backed militants.

These incidents highlight a fact that is often forgotten: The U.S. still has an active presence in Syria. The Deir ez-Zor Military Council behind the Aug. 12 attack is part of the Syrian Democratic Forces – a Kurdish-led alliance that has been a major U.S. partner in Syria. The group and its local affiliates now control much of the territory that the terrorist Islamic State group once controlled.

And as of the beginning of 2024, the U.S. still had close to 1,000 military personnel in the eastern part of Syria. Recent reports suggest that amid the growing tension in the region, additional resources and soldiers have made their way to the civil war-torn country.

U.S. troops in Syria serve various purposes: helping prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State group, supporting Washington’s Kurdish allies and containing the influence of Iran and Russia – both of which also have a military presence in Syria.

But the costs and risks associated with this indefinite U.S. involvement could be significant. A continued presence risks prolonging America’s entanglement in a protracted and costly conflict with no clear end in sight, while antagonizing NATO ally Turkey, which views Syria’s Kurdish groups as a cross-border threat.

As an expert on Middle East security, I focus on the evolving geopolitical landscape and argue that the U.S. must carefully weigh its commitments in Syria against the broader goals of regional stability and its relationships with allies and adversaries alike. Ultimately, whether the U.S. decides to stay or withdraw, the decision will have profound implications for Syria as well as for regional and global actors involved in the country’s ongoing civil war.

Growing US engagement

U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war is a complex story. Shortly after the civil war began in 2011, the Obama administration placed sanctions on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and supported factions of the opposition.

However, the administration was largely indecisive about when, how and to what extent it should intervene against the Assad regime. In part, this reflected growing war-weariness among the American public following a decade of engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, Washington struggled at first to find reliable partners on the ground in Syria.

A U.S. soldier observes form the top of a fighting vehicle at a US military base at undisclosed location in Northeastern Syria, Monday, Nov. 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Darko Bandic)

As popular protests grew into a full-scale military conflict in 2012, President Barack Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” for the U.S. The following year, the Syrian military did just that, deploying chemical weapons during an attack on Ghouta, a rebel-held area, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 1,500 civilians, including more than 400 children.

Yet the Obama administration hesitated to involve the U.S. militarily in the conflict, fearing escalation due to increasing Russian and Iranian support for the regime.

The U.S. military involvement in Syria began in September 2014, when a U.S.-led coalition, including the United Kingdom, France, Jordan, Turkey, Canada, Australia and others, launched an air campaign against the Islamic State group and fellow radical group al-Nusra Front inside Syria.

Following the airstrikes, American troops entered northeast Syria to back a Syrian Kurdish force known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, and later the Syrian Democratic Forces, an umbrella group that consists of majority Kurdish and other ethnic and rebel groups.

The U.S. did not take direct military action against the Assad regime until April 2017, when the Trump administration launched a missile strike on Shayrat Airbase in response to a suspected chemical attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib province.

In December 2018, President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of the 2,000 to 2,500 U.S. ground troops in Syria, believing the coalition’s operations against the Islamic State group had been largely successful and that the U.S. presence in eastern Syria was unnecessary.

However, instead of a total withdrawal, the U.S. announced that a contingency force would remain indefinitely.

Military presence today

As of 2024, around 900 U.S. soldiers, along with an undisclosed number of contractors, are operating in Syria, according to the Defense Department. Most U.S. forces are deployed in northeast Syria in support of the Syrian Democratic Forces, with some supporting the Free Syrian Army at the al-Tanf garrison in southeast Syria, along a transit route between Iraq and Syria used by both Islamic State group fighters and Iran-backed militias.

But U.S. military support for Kurdish groups in Syria has angered its NATO ally Turkey, which views the YPG as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a designated terrorist organization.

Prioritizing Turkey’s security concerns, the Trump administration ordered all U.S. forces to withdraw from Rojava in early October 2019 ahead of a Turkish incursion into the region. But the move also damaged the U.S. alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Meanwhile, to appease their Kurdish allies, U.S. troops repositioned to eastern Syria, reinforcing their presence in the al-Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor governorates – two Syrian Democratic Forces-controlled regions of Syria that are rich in oil and gas.

What an American withdrawal could mean

The U.S. military presence currently serves three purposes.

First, its presence in northeast Syria acts as a deterrent to military incursions by either the Syrian regime or Turkey into the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). If U.S. forces were to withdraw, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which acts as the AANES’ de facto military, would need to negotiate the region’s autonomy with Turkey and the Syrian regime, both of which have made their opposition to Kurdish autonomy very clear.

Recent rapprochement attempts between Turkey and Syria have also fed Kurdish fears that a complete American withdrawal would tip the balance of power in divided Syria against them, risking their very survival.

Second, the U.S.’s presence in southeast Syria puts pressure on neighboring Iran, whose influence the U.S. seeks to limit in the region. The U.S. presence also serves as a counterbalance to Russian influence and ambitions in Syria and the Middle East. Notably, Russian airstrikes in 2015 over opposition-held areas of Aleppo and the bombing of hospitals were crucial in helping Assad regain territory and stay in power.

Third, the U.S. and its local partners have reportedly detained around 5,000 Islamic State group fighters and 50,000 indoctrinated family members. If these detainees were freed by any authority, the group could be reconstituted and grow. Underscoring the threat, the U.S., along with the Syrian Democratic Forces, thwarted a major prison break by Islamic State group fighters in early 2022.

Nonetheless, continued U.S. presence in Syria is not assured. In 2023, Republicans in the House attempted to force the Biden administration to withdraw the remaining troops. They failed. But Trump, again the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, has made it clear that he sees no role for the U.S. in “endless wars.”

Meanwhile, a U.S. troop pullout, despite the consequences, has precedence. The Biden administration withdrew all American troops from Afghanistan in 2021 and is formally transitioning to an advisory role in Iraq.

But for the time being, U.S. military presence in Syria continues and is emblematic of the broader challenges facing American foreign policy in the Middle East. The decision to stay or withdraw is a strategic one that will reverberate across the region.

Sefa Secen is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Political Science, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

military.com · by The Conversation | By Sefa Secen Published August 16, 2024 at 9:52pm ET · August 16, 2024

18. The US needs more pop-up air bases worldwide to keep enemies guessing

The US needs more pop-up air bases worldwide to keep enemies guessing

Defense News · by Bradley Bowman and Lydia LaFavor · August 16, 2024

The U.S. Air Force completed the eight-day Bamboo Eagle 24-3 exercise on Aug. 10, bringing over 3,000 service members and more than 150 aircraft together to operate in the Western United States and Eastern Pacific. The large-scale exercise paired important Agile Combat Employment (ACE) training with a Red Flag exercise designed to hone cutting-edge tactics for air warfare. This exercise, and future efforts like it, are critical to strengthening the U.S. Air Force’s (USAF) ability to operate in contested environments at all echelons, which is essential to deterring and defeating aggression in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East.

By doctrinal definition, ACE is the “proactive and reactive operational scheme of maneuver executed within threat timelines to increase survivability while generating combat power.” In translation, this means air forces must be able to flex from major regional bases to smaller or non-traditional operating sites to survive and continue operations.

Such operations require a challenging reconceptualization of everything in the generative process for airpower, including command and control, maintenance, logistics, and air and missile defense for ground operations, to name a few considerations. Developments in the strategic environment underscore that reconceptualization is also essential.

The Commission on the National Defense Strategy report released on July 30 echoes longstanding concerns of USAF leadership that adversaries will aggressively target overseas air bases to prevent them from being used to launch and recover aircraft. Consider the growing threats in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East and initial efforts to respond to challenges the services have not confronted in recent decades.

In the Pacific, Pentagon assessments note the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has the ballistic and cruise missiles to target regional air bases, ports, and ground infrastructure in Japan and the Philippines, as well as U.S. bases as far away as Guam. In a major contingency in the Taiwan Strait, the USAF must be able to sink ships and destroy adversary aircraft. It will be difficult to sustain that effort if American pilots have nowhere to land.

In Europe, Russian forces continue to use long-range fires, hypersonic missiles, and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to target Ukrainian air operations on the ground. Eyeing these developments, even the newest NATO members, Sweden and Finland, are developing low-footprint air operations by landing advanced fighters on highways to refuel and re-arm while rapidly relocating both between and within bases.

How a new, mobile package keeps Reaper drones ready to fight in Europe

The U.S. Air Force wants to stand up bases where MQ-9 Reapers land no matter the weather, and refuel closer to the front line.

Since August 2020, U.S. Air Forces Central Command has telegraphed episodes of its ACE implementation in the Middle East for deterrent effect against Tehran. ACE maneuvers increased in complexity over time and included hot-pit refueling at non-traditional sites, tactical munitions ferrying to forward locations, agile airlift, dynamic command and control, and the deployment of mobile long-range fires for organic forward operating location defense. Most recently, these maneuvers incorporated aircraft launching from U.S. Air Forces Europe for a coalition exercise in the Middle East.

Despite these early ACE-related advances, the USAF seeks to institutionalize ACE in the premier exercise for intensive air combat training: Red Flag. The massive resources invested in recurring Red Flag exercises and large numbers of participants, including coalition partners, create a perennial opportunity for increasingly complex ACE training to reach the largest number of airmen. Traditionally, Red Flag emphasizes aerial combat and is designed to test aircraft, aircrew, maintainers, and flightline-adjacent capabilities. But the incorporation of Bamboo Eagle into Red Flag was a stress test of the entire chain of command and the ability of Air Force wings to execute a kill chain when forced to disaggregate and re-aggregate across operating locations.

Bamboo Eagle also rehearsed the employment of advanced technologies that make such distributed operations and dynamic re-tasking possible. Those technologies included “an architecture where we can talk to any aircraft, any command post, any entity that plays a role in this system, anywhere in the world in real time,” USAF Warfare Center Commander Maj. Gen. Christopher Niemi stated in a media call on Aug. 1.

At a time of growing threats in multiple regions, ACE operations or exercises can be used as a signal to adversaries to bolster deterrence. Such operations cast doubt in the minds of military planners whether they can effectively target U.S. combat forces. That, in turn, will increase adversary concerns that the costs associated with any American response could exceed any benefits associated with prospective aggression. In other words, ACE can play a fundamental role in strengthening both deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment.

So, how can Congress and the State Department help? Congress should press the Air Force for its lessons learned from Bamboo Eagle, focusing on steps to improve future exercises as well as efforts to implement lessons learned and strengthen the necessary capabilities.

Congress should also provide the funding necessary to conduct increasingly large and complex exercises that span multiple combatant commands and are scripted specifically to improve the capability and capacity of the USAF to implement ACE doctrine in a contested environment in support of joint operations.

Meanwhile, the State Department should redouble efforts to gain host nation approval for Department of Defense access to a larger number of airfields and operating locations while also exploring opportunities to work with allied nations to develop plans and civilian infrastructure that could rapidly be converted for operational use. This could include maintenance of straight roads or highways, reservation of nondescript storage facilities, and even the clearance of terrain to meet landing zone or drop zone criteria. Encouraging their low-cost investments could prove vital in combined major combat operations.

Finally, Congress should press the Army and Marine Corps to redouble investments in, and maximize procurements of, portable air defense and counter-UAS solutions that the effective employment of ACE requires. Those solutions must be operable by the smallest teams possible, set up in minutes rather than hours, and fit in the cargo hold of a C-130 or smaller platforms designed to land in the most austere locations.

Adversary capabilities are growing, and serious new conflicts may be on the horizon. There is no time to waste to ensure the USAF can sustain progress in conducting disaggregated combat operations.

Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Dr. Lydia LaFavor is a research fellow.

19. Zelenskyy envisions buffer zone as Ukraine pushes into Kursk region

"Buffer zone" encompassing Russian or Ukraine territory or a combination of both?

Zelenskyy envisions buffer zone as Ukraine pushes into Kursk region

Defense News · by AP Staff · August 19, 2024

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday the daring military incursion into Russia’s Kursk region aims to create a buffer zone to prevent further attacks by Moscow across the border.

It was the first time Zelenskyy clearly stated the aim of the operation that began Aug. 6. Previously, he had said the operation aimed to protect communities in the bordering Sumy region from constant shelling.

Zelenskyy said “it is now our primary task in defensive operations overall: to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions. This includes creating a buffer zone on the aggressor’s territory -– our operation in the Kursk region,” he said in his nightly address.

This weekend, Ukraine destroyed a key bridge in the region and struck a second one nearby, disrupting supply lines as it pressed the incursion, officials said.

Pro-Kremlin military bloggers acknowledged the destruction of the first bridge on the Seim River near the town of Glushkovo will impede deliveries of supplies to Russian forces repelling Ukraine’s incursion, although Moscow could still use pontoons and smaller bridges. Ukraine’s air force chief, Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk, on Friday released a video of an airstrike that cut the bridge in two.

Less than two days later, Ukrainian troops hit a second bridge in Russia, according to Oleshchuk and Russian regional Gov. Alexei Smirnov.

As of Sunday morning, there were no officials giving the exact location of the second bridge attack. But Russian Telegram channels claimed that a second bridge over the Seim, in the village of Zvannoe, had been struck.

According to Russia’s Mash news site, the attacks left only one intact bridge in the area. The Associated Press could not immediately verify these claims. If confirmed, the Ukrainian strikes would further complicate Moscow’s attempts to replenish its forces and evacuate civilians.

Glushkovo is about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) north of the Ukrainian border, and approximately 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of the main battle zone in Kursk. Zvannoe is located another 8 kilometers (5 miles) to the northwest.

Kyiv previously has said little about the goals of its push into Russia with tanks and other armored vehicles, the largest attack on the country since World War II, which took the Kremlin by surprise and saw scores of villages and hundreds of prisoners fall into Ukrainian hands.

The Ukrainians drove deep into the region in several directions, facing little resistance and sowing chaos and panic as tens of thousands of civilians fled. Ukraine’s Commander in Chief, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, claimed last week that his forces had advanced across 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles) of the region, although it was not possible to independently verify what Ukrainian forces effectively control.

Buffer zones sought by both sides

In his remarks on creating a buffer zone, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces “achieved good and much-needed results.”

Analysts say that although Ukraine could try to consolidate its gains inside Russia, it would be risky, given Kyiv’s limited resources, because its own supply lines extending deep into Kursk would be vulnerable.

The incursion has proven Ukraine’s ability to seize the initiative and has boosted its morale, which was sapped by a failed counteroffensive last summer and months of grinding Russian gains in the eastern Donbas region.

For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin said while visiting China in May that Moscow’s offensive that month in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region was aimed at creating a buffer zone there.

That offensive opened a new front and displaced thousands of Ukrainians. The attacks were a response to Ukrainian shelling of Russia’s Belgorod region, Putin said.

“I have said publicly that if it continues, we will be forced to create a security zone, a sanitary zone,” he said. “That’s what we are doing.”

Ukraine’s move into Kursk resembled its lightning operation from September 2022, led by Syrskyi, in which its forces reclaimed control of the northeastern Kharkiv region after taking advantage of Russian manpower shortages and a lack of field fortifications.

Zelenskyy seeks permission to strike deeper into Russia

On Saturday, Zelenskyy urged Kyiv’s allies to lift remaining restrictions on using Western weapons to attack targets deeper in Russia, including in Kursk, saying his troops could deprive Moscow “of any ability to advance and cause destruction” if granted sufficient long-range capabilities.

“It is crucial that our partners remove barriers that hinder us from weakening Russian positions in the way this war demands. … The bravery of our soldiers and the resilience of our combat brigades compensate for the lack of essential decisions from our partners,” Zelenskyy said on the social platform X.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry and pro-Kremlin bloggers alleged U.S.-made HIMARS launchers have been used to destroy bridges on the Seim. These claims could not be independently verified.

Ukraine’s leaders have repeatedly sought authorization for long-range strikes on Russian air bases and other infrastructure used to pummel Ukraine’s energy facilities and other civilian targets, including with retrofitted Soviet-era “glide bombs” attacking Ukraine’s industrial east in recent months.

Moscow also appears to have increased attacks on Kyiv, targeting it Sunday with ballistic missiles for a third time this month, according to the head of the municipal military administration. Serhii Popko said in a Telegram post the “almost identical” August strikes on the capital “most likely used” North Korean-supplied KN-23 missiles.

Another attempt to target Kyiv followed at about 7 a.m. Popko said, this time with Iskander cruise missiles. Ukrainian air defenses struck down all the missiles fired in both attacks on the city, he said.

Fears mount for Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant

Elsewhere, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Saturday the safety situation at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is deteriorating.

International Atomic Energy Agency head Rafael Grossi urged “maximum restraint from all sides” after an IAEA team at the plant reported an explosive carried by a drone detonated just outside its protected area.

According to Grossi, the impact was “close to the essential water sprinkle ponds” and about 100 meters (100 yards) from the only power line supplying the plant. The IAEA team at the plant has reported intense military activity in the surrounding area in the past week, it said.

Kyiv and Moscow have traded blame for attacks near the power plant since it was captured by Russian forces early in the 2022 invasion, including a fire at the facility last weekend. Grossi said the blaze had caused “considerable damage,” but posed no immediate danger to nuclear safety.

Belarus says it’s deploying more troops on Ukraine border

Russian ally Belarus has massed “nearly a third” of its army along its border with Ukraine, according to authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Lukashenko told Russian state TV that Minsk was responding to the deployment of more than 120,000 Ukrainian troops to the 1,084-kilometer (674 mile) frontier. Belarus’ professional army numbers upward of 60,000.

Ukrainian border force spokesman Andrii Demchenko said Sunday it had not observed any sign of a Belarusian buildup.

Lukashenko, in power for three decades, has relied on Russian support to suppress the biggest protests in Belarus’ post-Soviet history after his 2020 reelection, widely seen as a sham both at home and abroad. He allowed Russian troops to use Belarus’ territory to invade Ukraine and let Moscow deploy some tactical nuclear weapons on its soil.

20. The Long Shadow of Soviet Sabotage Doctrine?

For Putin it is all about making the "USSR" great again.

Excerpts:

These parallels suggest that the long shadow of the Soviet sabotage doctrine continues to guide Putin’s way of covert war. If this is indeed the case, more is yet to come. Agents-saboteurs could be redirected to hit political targets including government or political party headquarters. They may also seek to strike sensitive security installations or intelligence training schools. Next in line might also be media outlets or investigative hubs critical of the war. Further proliferation to Western targets in the Global South would also be on brand. If tensions increase, so will the intensity and force of Moscow’s sabotage effort.

Which of this galaxy of targets will the Kremlin choose to strike next depends on capacity, capability, and priorities — whether these are more tactical, aimed at undermining the West’s war effort, or rather strategic, aimed at sowing discord and spreading panic in the West. Putin’s actions, however, do not exist in a vacuum. They will be determined by developments in the Ukraine War. Moreover, what the other side does will also be key: whether Ukraine will escalate its use of conventional or irregular warfare on Russian soil; how the West will choose to respond, individually or via NATO; as well as how well each side will read their opponent’s escalation thresholds.

The Long Shadow of Soviet Sabotage Doctrine? - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Daniela Richterova · August 19, 2024

Boris Nikolaevich Rodin was a known entity in the KGB. Operating as an intelligence officer in London from 1947 to 1951, he helped manage the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean — members of the notorious Cambridge Five spy ring of British double agents who secretly passed critical information to the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century. Better known under his alias “Korovin,” he was also intimately engaged in recruiting another one of Her Majesty’s greatest traitors — one George Blake, a Secret Intelligence Service officer who volunteered to spy for the Soviets after being captured in the Korean War. In the early 1960s, this veteran agent runner took on his last assignment in the KGB as head of the Thirteenth Department — dedicated to planning sabotage operations against the Kremlin’s most loathed adversaries. Together with allies in Prague and East Berlin, during the Cold War, Moscow devised dozens of plans to attack or disrupt Western targets.

Thanks to recent discoveries in the Czech Security Service Archive, we are now able to reconstruct the doctrine that informed the Soviet Bloc’s way of sabotage for much of the 20th century and draw parallels with the myriad suspected sabotage attacks we have seen in Europe and the United States since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While several defector accounts, government, think-tank, or journalist investigations have provided a glimpse into the world of Putin-era sabotage, we still know precious little about the history of the Kremlin’s plans to use of this destructive tool of statecraft. This is a problem as the sabotage operations we are seeing play out today seem to mimic Moscow’s Cold War doctrine in important ways. A careful examination of the formerly top-secret Czechoslovak security and intelligence files suggests that today’s choice of target states is led by a similar rationale as during the Cold War. The intensity of attacks continues to be determined by level of escalation. The types of operational targets being hit today all feature on the Soviet Bloc’s Cold War sabotage list. And, finally, while we are seeing important technical tweaks to outsourcing and recruitment, Moscow continues to rely on so called “agents-saboteurs” to carry out these high-risk operations. These parallels are striking — and if Vladimir Putin decides to follow the Cold War playbook diligently, more is yet to come.

Sixty years after Rodin headed the KGB’s sabotage enterprise, in 2024, mysterious fires have been ravaging civilian and military facilities across Europe. They follow other seemingly random incidents damaging fiber-optic cables, railway systems, GPS signals, department stores, and ammunition manufacturing plants across Europe that have escalated in frequency following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Most recently, three high-speed rail lines in France were sabotaged before dawn on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Targets in the United States have also recently taken hits, with a major explosion damaging an ammunition plant in Pennsylvania in April and another deadly explosion hitting a weapons plant in Arkansas in July. While in some cases the target countries are still determining the cause or searching for culprits, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Denmark have arrested individuals connected to these attacks. What is more, with various levels of confidence, these governments have openly declared Russia responsible.

More than two years into the war in Ukraine, the threat of Russia-sponsored sabotage continues to loom large over Western security. NATO has set up dedicated cells to monitor and protect critical infrastructure. Some governments are introducing new legislation, while others are updating their national security strategies to appreciate the severity of the threat. The continent’s spies and law-enforcement officers now closely liaise with partners over cases of arson or suspicious ship movements. The public has been asked to remain vigilant.

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Exporting Sabotage

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence organization (GRU) and its civilian security and intelligence organization (KGB) each sported their own “special purpose” unit and force. These sabotage outfits were led by a distinct set of principles and plans designed to use so-called “kinetic means” to hit their adversaries where it hurt most. In the 1960s, the KGB exported its sabotage doctrine and helped set up similar highly clandestine outfits in partner states, East Germany and Czechoslovakia included.

The foreign branch of the Czechoslovak State Security Service established a dedicated sabotage unit in April 1963. The so-called Special Purpose Service (Služba zvláštního určení) was arguably set up as a reaction to the 1961 Berlin Crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which represented a significant escalation in East-West relations. As detailed in the April 1963 statute of the Special Service, the unit was designed to “prepare and carry out diversion, sabotage, marauding, and other operations, aimed at disrupting the adversary’s economic and military potential during the time of peace, but primarily during war, with the aim of supporting the foreign policy and security of the world socialist system.”

To get a head start, the State Security Service held numerous meetings with their Soviet counterparts, who had by now set up their own dedicated sabotage outfit within the KGB. As detailed in a memo from August 1964, Soviet sabotage-masters encouraged their allies to not commit most of their plans to paper due to their sensitive nature. Their Czechoslovak counterparts, however, did not listen — noting down statutes and minutes of meetings as well as archiving detailed operational plans, sabotage manuals, photos, and postmortems of explosion tests. Thanks to their diligence, three decades after the end of the Cold War, we get a front-line view of the Soviet Bloc’s sabotage doctrine: the motives, their choice of targets, and who they entrusted with executing the missions.

Demoralize, Downgrade, and Undermine

According to the doctrine that the KGB shared with their Czechoslovak counterparts in January 1963, the objectives of sabotage operations were threefold. They were to be deployed against the adversary to disrupt policies and military plans seen as antagonistic to Moscow’s interests. In an ideal scenario, sabotage operations would demoralize the government’s resolve to pursue these policies or undermine public support for them. The Kremlin also saw sabotage as an effective instrument to undermine the unity of the enemy camp. On the one hand, Soviet Bloc spymasters hoped to sow discord among national political parties. On the other, they also thought it a powerful tool to generate strife within NATO — French-American, Greek-Turkish, and British-German tensions were to be exploited and amplified. Finally, as the KGB spymasters told their allies, on a tactical level, sabotage was considered an effective way to cause economic harm or undermine military capability — an objective particularly crucial during times of escalation or all-out war.

While all adversarial states were fair game, at the same meeting in 1962, Moscow encouraged its partners to focus on countries that hosted institutions representing Western power, such as Belgium where NATO sported its headquarters and military command. France and Germany were singled out as top targets due to their perceived pivotal roles in any potential Western-led war. If other states were deemed vital to Western war strategy, they would also be added to the list. With harder or global targets, such as the United States, Moscow’s spies suggested hitting their assets elsewhere — ideally in Latin America.

Operational Targets

The KGB also presented their allies with a detailed typology of operational targets. Typically, these would include energy supply systems such as electric power plants or fuel supply systems, specifically pipelines or refineries. In the 1960s, Czechoslovakia’s sabotage unit developed plans to attack oil pipelines across the German River Iller, one of Europe’s more important waterways, the Rhine, and the Le Havre-Paris pipeline operated by Trapil.

Communication infrastructure, including railways, bridges, tunnels, ports, and highways, was also at the top of the list. The objective was to either physically attack these targets or disrupt their signaling and control systems. They focused on Europe’s two largest ports in Rotterdam and Antwerp. Apart from their significance to Western European industry and commerce, they were also singled out for their role in transporting goods to South Vietnam during the height of the war.

Other worthy targets included telecommunication systems such as telephone hubs, cables, or radars. Their destruction, especially during wartime, would impede the enemy’s ability to mount a coordinated counterattack. Objects of key public and industrial importance were also on Moscow’s radar. Drinking water reservoirs, chemical plants, or warehouses — such as one underground storage facility in Mechernich, West Germany — were earmarked for potential sabotage.

The Czechoslovak State Security Service took inspiration from manuals detailing the use of industrial explosives developed for agricultural purposes, namely that of ammonium nitrate. [Security Services Archive (Archiv bezpečnostních složek), Czech Republic, First Directorate Files, reg. no. 11792/113; MTH 22250.]

Military facilities and sites were a key focus. Weapons of mass destruction facilities would be as closely watched as those designed to provide shelter from a potential attack. Government nuclear bomb shelters, such as one located in the West German district of Ahrweiler, were to be put under surveillance, as were the systems that managed their ventilation or water supply.

Soviet Bloc sabotage-masters were also keen to strike against Western special forces units designed to conduct partisan warfare behind enemy lines in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe. These units were closely reconnoitered with the aim of learning about them, learning from them, but also developing them as potential targets. The U.S. 10th Special Forces Group, located in Bad Tölz and Lenggries, affectionately codenamed by the Czechoslovaks as “The Killers,” was selected as a target, as was one of the French Army’s elite units, the 11th Parachute Brigade, based in Calvi-Corsica.

Finally, sabotage plans were also devised against what Moscow considered to be Western propaganda hubs or “psychological diversion” centers. The headquarters of Radio Free Europe in Munich was a key target, as were the dozens of dissidents from across the Soviet Bloc who worked for the broadcaster.

These kinetic operations were to be matched with various “active measures” — propaganda stunts or disinformation — designed to force-multiply. Coupled with destructive sabotage operations, they could further amplify existing fissures within Western societies and politics, instigate unrests, spread panic, and thus undermine government credibility or sway public opinion in favor of anti-imperialist actors.

Between Peace and War

Remarkably, the nature of each act of sabotage would be determined by political context and level of escalation. In other words, there was a doctrinal separation for each stage of tension. According to detailed guidelines of the Special Tasks Service laid out in October 1966, an operation mounted in peacetime would differ from one carried out during times of crisis, escalation, or all-out war. In times of peace, Soviet Bloc sabotage planners focused on smaller-scale, subtle attacks designed to appear as accidents. These could be technical disruptions on transportation lines, random fires, or seemingly accidental biological or chemical contamination. More destructive operations, which would bear hallmarks of deliberate state-based acts, were to be mounted on a more extensive scale during escalation or all-out war. There was a doctrinal separation for each level of tension.

The Culprits

A complicated ecosystem of intelligence officers and agents was deployed to carry out these highly sensitive operations. This was outlined in the Special Tasks Service’s statute approved by Minister of the Interior Lubomír Štrougal in April 1963. According to this document, during peacetime, the top of the sabotage operations pyramid was reserved for officers specifically trained in running sabotage missions. They were stationed at embassies in target countries under diplomatic cover and tasked with running a network of illegals — deep-cover officers stationed abroad. The illegals were trained to identify suitable targets, develop operational plans, identify vulnerabilities, and handle explosives. During times of escalation or war, the statute detailed, they would typically step up to the top of the pyramid and replace legal cover officers who were often known to their adversaries and typically expelled during crises.

The base of the pyramid was made up of a complicated network of agents run by the illegals. Each would contribute to the operation in a unique way. Illegal agents — Soviet citizens or foreigners recruited, trained, and provided with foreign identity documents — were to settle in a target or a third country to aid the preparation for sabotage operations. This network further encompassed “support agents” who took care of the security and viability of sabotage units on enemy territory and “agents keepers” who provided safe houses and cover addresses. For the purposes of sabotage, “access agents” — security guards, engineers, or telephone operators — were key to acquiring information on otherwise inaccessible targets.

Finally, a special cast of agents — “agents-executioners” or “agents-saboteurs” — would be hired to carry out the operation. They were typically run and recruited abroad, but Moscow and its allies also kept a reserve at home ready for deployment in the event of war. These were to be reliable, capable, courageous individuals with some knowledge of handling various means of sabotage — were they of chemical, biological, explosive, or arsenous nature. For each operation, these so-called “destructive means” were either prepared in the Soviet Bloc by specialists, or agents-saboteurs were trained in devising their own. Typically, these agents would be activated via radio, coded letter, courier, or by an assigned illegal.

The Long Shadow

While during the Cold War, Soviet bloc spies stopped short of carrying out these daring plans, the attacks Europe has been grappling with since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seem to mirror Moscow’s Cold War-era sabotage doctrine in important ways. They are directed against those NATO member states that are most crucial or supportive of the Ukrainian war effort — aka those most adversarial to Russia. They have intensified at a time when the West upped the ante by increasing its financial and military support for Ukraine and consented to its weapons being used on Russian territory — developments the Kremlin views as an escalation. They are accompanied by active measures or what could be termed as “strategic vandalism,” exemplified by the recent “coffin affair” in Paris, arguably staged by Russia to undermine France’s increased support for Ukraine.

The modus operandi we are seeing today also appears to mimic the KGB’s Cold War plans. The types of targets being hit across Europe all feature on Moscow’s list from 60 years ago — be they directly linked to the West’s support of Ukraine’s war effort, or of a purely civilian nature. Agents-saboteurs — individuals with no formal links to Russia’s secret state — continue to be recruited to carry out these missions, albeit the means by which they are approached, directed, or compensated have arguably changed, democratized and migrated to cyberspace. Despite this shift, however, as Joshua Rovner observed in 2022, we have not yet seen a more strategic pivot to high-impact cyber sabotage — which would requires exceptional skill, organization, investment, and a necessary dose of luck.

What Happens Next?

These parallels suggest that the long shadow of the Soviet sabotage doctrine continues to guide Putin’s way of covert war. If this is indeed the case, more is yet to come. Agents-saboteurs could be redirected to hit political targets including government or political party headquarters. They may also seek to strike sensitive security installations or intelligence training schools. Next in line might also be media outlets or investigative hubs critical of the war. Further proliferation to Western targets in the Global South would also be on brand. If tensions increase, so will the intensity and force of Moscow’s sabotage effort.

Which of this galaxy of targets will the Kremlin choose to strike next depends on capacity, capability, and priorities — whether these are more tactical, aimed at undermining the West’s war effort, or rather strategic, aimed at sowing discord and spreading panic in the West. Putin’s actions, however, do not exist in a vacuum. They will be determined by developments in the Ukraine War. Moreover, what the other side does will also be key: whether Ukraine will escalate its use of conventional or irregular warfare on Russian soil; how the West will choose to respond, individually or via NATO; as well as how well each side will read their opponent’s escalation thresholds.

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Daniela Richterova, Ph.D., is associate professor in Intelligence Studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She specializes in the history of Cold War espionage, covert action, and state relations with terrorists and revolutionaries. Her new book, Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Terrorists and Revolutionaries, comes out in January 2025 with Georgetown University Press. Twitter: @dRichterova.

Image: The Central Intelligence Agency via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Daniela Richterova · August 19, 2024

21. The Trouble With Allies

[As an aside and completely unrelated to this essay, I would make Richard Haas' short but powerful book, Bill of Obligations, required reading for high school freshman and seniors as well as college freshman and seniors (it needs to be read multiple times).]

Independent action seems like a no-brainer." Why aren't we already (and always) doing this in the right circumstances? They certianly do it with us.

Excerpts:

If all other approaches fail or are deemed too costly, there is one powerful option left to deal with a disagreement with an ally: independent action. Instead of trying to get another country to alter its behavior, the United States can work around that country, promoting American interests as it sees fit.

...

Independent action should also include a willingness to publicly criticize behavior or even join the other countries’ domestic political debates. The leaders of Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan have all worked legislators and the media; U.S. presidents should take a page from their books and do the same thing. In 2015, Netanyahu spoke to Congress to argue against the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, and in June 2024, he recorded a video falsely accusing the Biden administration of threatening Israel’s security by holding back arms and ammunition. Obama should have asked for equal time in the Knesset to take his case for the nuclear deal to the Israeli people, and Biden ought to have marched into the White House briefing room and demanded an apology from Netanyahu for misrepresenting the facts. In situations like these, what is called for is tough love—or at least tougher love.

Independent action is no panacea, since it doesn’t stop the offending behavior, although it could lead the partner to back off. But it does allow the United States to shield itself from and offset some of the adverse consequences. It also helps preserve the relationship while reminding the friend that the United States has options of its own. And in the long run, this tactic can demonstrate the costs of not taking U.S. preferences and interests into account. That, after all, should be the thrust of any U.S. strategy toward an ally with which it disagrees: to pursue its interests without doing irreparable damage to a valued relationship.

The Trouble With Allies

America Needs a Playbook for Difficult Friends

By Richard Haass

September/October 2024

Published on August 19, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens · August 19, 2024

Immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, U.S. President Joe Biden agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel had the right to defend itself. But in the months that followed, disagreements mounted over how that right was exercised. The Biden administration disapproved of Israel’s at times indiscriminate military campaign in Gaza, its restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid, its failure to stop the construction of new Jewish settlements and settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, and its prioritization of the war on Hamas over negotiations to release hostages. Above all, the administration was frustrated with Israel’s utter failure to put forth a viable strategy for governing Gaza once Hamas is degraded, an omission compounded by its refusal to advance any plan to address the Palestinian desire for self-rule.

Israel receives $3.8 billion annually in U.S. military aid, and the United States has been the country’s most dependable supporter for decades. And yet the United States was remarkably reluctant to publicly confront Israel over Gaza. Only after more than four months of seeing its private advice mostly rebuffed did the Biden administration openly break with Israel—and even then, it acted at the margins. It placed sanctions on a few extremist settlers, airdropped food into Gaza, built a floating pier on Gaza’s coast to facilitate aid shipments, and went against Israeli preferences on two largely symbolic UN Security Council resolutions. In May, seven months into the war, the administration placed a hold on the delivery of some large U.S.-made bombs to avoid even more civilian casualties. That same month, it threatened to pause the shipment of other military systems if Israel launched a full-scale assault on the city of Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold, although it never followed through because it considered Israel’s attacks on the city as less than all-out. If success is defined as persuading Israel to adopt the course Washington wants, then U.S. policy toward the country since October 7 must be judged a failure.

The tensions with Israel over the past year are merely one example of a persistent but underappreciated predicament of U.S. foreign policy: how to manage disagreements with friends and allies. In two of the biggest crises the United States faces in the world today—the wars in Ukraine and Gaza—the question is how best to deal with a partner that depends on Washington but at times resists its counsel. In both cases, the Biden administration has responded in a muted, ad hoc way, often with little to show for it. It is ironic that an administration that has put U.S. alliances at the center of its foreign policy has found it so difficult to manage the differences that arise in those relationships.

To be fair, the problem long predates the Biden administration. It is inherent to alliances, be they de jure or de facto, since even the closest friends do not have identical interests. Over many decades, the United States has developed an extensive playbook for navigating disputes with adversaries, with tactics including everything from arms control agreements and diplomatic summits to economic sanctions, regime change, and war. When it comes to handling disputes with friends, however, Washington’s thinking is far less developed. The United States’ sprawling network of alliances gives it a meaningful advantage over China and Russia, neither of which has many allies; in reality, this advantage often amounts to much less than it should.

The good news is that decades of history suggest that certain tactics for managing disputes with friends and allies work better than others. Washington should draw on its ample experience, good and bad, to help it think systematically about such differences so it can prevent them from emerging or, more realistically, better contend with them when they do. In particular, the United States needs to be prepared to act more independently, openly criticizing its friends’ policies if it considers them unwise and advancing alternative policies of its own. If Washington did that, it would have a better shot at achieving what might seem impossible: avoiding ruptures in its valuable relationships while safeguarding its interests.

HISTORICAL FRICTION

One might expect that the United States’ overwhelming power ensures compliance among allies, and often it does. But at least as often, power does not translate into influence. Sometimes, allies simply resist or ignore U.S. preferences and steel themselves for the consequences. At other times, they attempt to circumvent the administration, mobilizing sympathetic domestic actors—Congress, the media, political donors—to pressure the White House to change course. This was a strategy used by Nationalist China, whose vaunted “China Lobby” exerted enormous influence on Washington early in the Cold War, and Israel has embraced it, too. Another option for American partners is to diversify their diplomatic portfolios, reducing their dependence on the United States by finding new patrons. Both Saudi Arabia and Turkey, for example, have turned to Russia and China as their ties with the United States have deteriorated.

Why do allies dare to defy Washington? Because much more is usually at stake for them than for the United States, a disparity that gives them leverage despite their dependence. In many instances, the bone of contention constitutes much of the ally’s security or economic interests, whereas for the United States, it is merely one of many priorities, and so Washington is less likely to go to the mat over the dispute than is the ally. What’s more, if Washington distances itself from an ally, no matter how justified its actions, some critics will allege that it is no longer a reliable partner, perhaps prompting allies to act without taking U.S. interests into account and emboldening adversaries to challenge them. Such considerations restrain the United States.

Partly as a result, friction is more the rule than the exception when it comes to U.S. ties with friends and allies. During World War II, the United States clashed with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union over how best to prosecute the war. It quarreled with Nationalist China over its strategy for defeating the Communists during the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s; with France, Israel, and the United Kingdom over their invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis of 1956; with France over NATO’s command structure in the 1950s and 1960s; with South Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s over governance and military strategy; and with Japan in the 1980s over trade. For more than 50 years, Washington has been at loggerheads with its NATO allies in Europe over defense spending. During the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, it could not bring most of its allies around to support that action.

Why do allies dare to defy Washington? Because much more is usually at stake for them.

Pakistan is perhaps the epitome of a difficult friend. For the seven decades after its creation in 1947, the country has been a major recipient of U.S. economic and military aid. During the Cold War, Pakistan helped the United States contain the Soviet Union and facilitated the U.S. diplomatic opening to China. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it emerged as the United States’ chief partner in funneling arms to anti-Soviet forces there. But the relationship was often characterized by bitter disagreements over Pakistan’s nuclear program, its poor record on human rights and democracy, and its support for the Taliban and terrorism, including its harboring of Osama bin Laden. As a result, Pakistan saw the United States as an unreliable friend—and the United States saw Pakistan as more of a problem than a partner.

Turkey offers another example of a relationship between ostensible allies that has intensely frustrated both sides. Turkey was an anchor of NATO during the Cold War, a critical member of the coalition that prevailed against Iraq during the Gulf War, and a country once heralded as evidence that Muslim-majority countries could be pro-Western, democratic, and accepting of Israel. But Washington and Ankara have also fallen out over Turkey’s military presence in Cyprus, its inadequate commitment to democracy and human rights, and, in recent years, its pro-Russian foreign policy, discrimination against the Kurds, and disputes with Israel.

When one looks at this long history of disputes between the United States and its friends and allies, six relatively distinct tactics for managing them emerge. Some involve carrots, others involve sticks, and still others accept that the ally’s unwanted behavior won’t be changed—or can be changed only if its regime changes. There is no approach that works for all situations, but some do work better than the alternatives.

THE POWER OF PERSUASION

Persuasion is the most basic tool of alliance management. A good example of the tactic is the United States’ decades-long effort to dissuade Taiwan from formally declaring independence. Such a declaration would almost certainly trigger Chinese military action, perhaps a blockade or invasion of the island, forcing the United States to decide whether to come to Taiwan’s defense. Any U.S. response, be it action or inaction, would prove costly. Successive U.S. administrations have pointed out to Taiwan how much it has gained despite its lack of international recognition—the island is now a vibrant democracy with a thriving economy that has enjoyed more than half a century of peace—and how much it would stand to lose if it pursued independence. Perhaps even more important, Taiwan has been made to understand that the United States would be far less likely to intervene on its behalf if it is seen as having provoked a crisis.

A second successful example of persuasion involves Israel. In January 1991, in the opening hours of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military’s campaign to liberate Kuwait, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles against Israel to bring it directly into the war and, in so doing, lead Arab states to drop out of the international coalition that had formed against him. Israeli leaders understandably sought to exercise their right to self-defense, but U.S. President George H. W. Bush persuaded them to hold back, arguing that Israel’s entry into the war would jeopardize a goal more important to them: defeating Iraq. He also pledged that the United States would destroy Iraqi launch sites. Even though Bush and his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, had a strained relationship, the Israeli government made the difficult decision to stand down.

But some more recent U.S. efforts to restrain Israel, above all the attempt to rein in its military campaign in Gaza, have had decidedly worse results. The Biden administration’s pleas to dissuade Israel from escalating its conflict with Iran have had a more mixed record. On April 1, 2024, Israel launched an airstrike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria, killing several senior members of Iran’s Quds Force. The Biden administration was given only minimal warning of the attack and worried that it risked transforming what had been an indirect conflict in Gaza into something more direct and dangerous. Two weeks later, Iran retaliated with a barrage of drones and missiles against Israel. Fearing an escalatory cycle even though the Iranian attack caused only negligible damage, the Biden administration privately advised Israel not to respond militarily. “Take the win,” Biden told Netanyahu, adding that if Israel did escalate, it would be on its own. Israel did not stand down, but it did respond in a limited way, firing a handful of missiles from aircraft outside Iran’s airspace, destroying an air-defense battery near Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, and keeping largely silent about the attack afterward. In short, Israel largely heeded U.S. advice, and an even larger crisis was averted.

GETTING TO YES

When persuasion alone fails, the United States can turn to incentives, another tool in the alliance management toolkit. A prime example of the successful use of incentives comes from the 1980s, when Israel opposed the U.S. sale of “airborne warning and control system” surveillance aircraft, or AWACS, to Saudi Arabia. The United States wanted to accommodate Saudi desires, but Israel worried about maintaining its military edge over the Arab countries and lobbied hard against the deal. The Reagan administration lobbied just as hard to overcome congressional opposition to it. In the end, a compromise was reached: the sale went ahead, but with conditions, including a guarantee that no information gathered by the AWACS would be transferred to third parties without U.S. consent.

In addition to mollifying allies, incentives can be used to encourage behavior that otherwise might not materialize. The United States has provided economic and military aid to Egypt to strengthen the government so it would maintain peace with Israel. It has provided assistance to Pakistan to promote counterterrorism cooperation, maintain collaboration in Afghanistan, and preserve at least some influence over Islamabad’s domestic and foreign policy. And it has provided aid to Turkey to promote restraint in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, bolster NATO, and limit Russian inroads.

Sanctions are the opposite of incentives. These measures are normally thought of as weapons wielded against adversaries, yet they have also been used against friends. In 1956, Washington applied such pressure on France, Israel, and the United Kingdom after their invasion of Egypt and attempt to seize the Suez Canal. It levied sanctions against Turkey in the wake of its 1974 intervention in and occupation of Cyprus; against Pakistan in 1990 over its nuclear weapons program; against Israel in 1981 over its bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor and in 1991 over its settlement of Soviet Jews in the occupied territories; and against Saudi Arabia in 2021 over the murder of the dissident (and U.S. permanent resident) Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

Delivering humanitarian aid at the Gaza coast, June 2024

Amir Cohen / Reuters

If the goal was to modify the target’s behavior, the results of these sanctions were generally not encouraging. The one exception was during the Suez crisis, when France, Israel, and the United Kingdom backed down in the face of U.S. economic pressure. But the episode occurred at a time when the British were particularly vulnerable to U.S. economic pressure (the pound sterling could not hold its value without Washington’s backing), France was heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil, and Israel had yet to amass much political support in the United States. Neither the threat nor the reality of sanctions stopped Pakistan’s nuclear program. The same can be said for the sanctions aimed at ending Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus.

Sanctions can have value as a normative tool, however: even if they fail to stop the unwanted activity, they can still raise costs for the friend and signal U.S. displeasure, sending a broader message to other friends about U.S. preferences. A case in point was the George H. W. Bush administration’s policy toward Israel in 1991. The administration had gone to considerable lengths to pressure the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate and was seeking to convene a regional peace conference after the Gulf War. So it was frustrated when the Israeli government put into place subsidies and other policies to incentivize those refugees to live in settlements in the occupied territories—especially since the Israeli government had asked the United States to guarantee $10 billion in loans meant to facilitate their move. The Bush administration tried to get the Israeli government to end policies designed to steer Soviet Jews to settlements; when that failed, it reduced the amount of loans it would guarantee, demonstrating that ignoring U.S. entreaties would come at a cost.

The most draconian approach to dealing with a disagreement with a friend is to seek the ouster of the offending government. That was the approach the Kennedy administration took with its troublesome South Vietnamese ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem. The administration had done much to boost Diem’s political prospects, but it soon grew disillusioned with his corrupt and ineffective leadership, viewing him as a liability in the struggle against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Matters reached a head in the summer of 1963, when the U.S. officials in Saigon made clear that they and their bosses in Washington would look favorably on a coup led by senior military officers. By November 2, Diem was not just out of power but dead, killed by the soldiers who ousted him. Yet the Kennedy administration’s decision didn’t achieve its desired effect: Diem’s successors proved equally incapable of winning over the Vietnamese people and defeating the North. What the coup did do, however, was associate the United States ever more closely with the government and fate of South Vietnam.

A more recent, and infinitely more modest, effort at regime change comes from 2024. Chuck Schumer—the Senate majority leader, a Democrat from New York, and arguably the most prominent Jewish politician in the United States—had grown frustrated with Israel’s seeming lack of concern for civilian lives in Gaza. On March 14, he delivered a speech from the floor of the Senate castigating Netanyahu for the high death toll and calling for new elections in Israel on the assumption that a change in leadership would translate into a change in policy. His call did signal displeasure from a stalwart supporter of Israel, but it failed to induce any change in the country’s leadership or policy. Worse, it had the counterproductive effect of allowing Netanyahu to wrap himself in a nationalist cloak as a defender against outside interference.

SEE NO EVIL

Another option for dealing with an irksome ally is more passive: looking the other way. Instead of making an issue out of a disagreement with a friend, Washington can ignore the transgression, recognizing that attempts to change a partner’s behavior would be too costly or doomed to fail. Think of this as diplomatic avoidance.

Again, Israel provides a good example of this approach at work. In the 1950s and 1960s, the country decided that it needed a nuclear arsenal of its own to counter the enormous conventional military advantages of its Arab enemies, which refused to accept its existence. The United States strongly opposed the Israeli nuclear program, which violated its commitment to nuclear nonproliferation. Over time, however, Washington decided not to make a big deal of the disagreement, concluding that Israel could probably never be persuaded to give up its quest for the bomb. The United States had other, more important Cold War priorities in the Middle East that required cooperation with Israel, and it had other tools (including military aid and nuclear assurances) that could hold back other friends in the region from going nuclear. Officials may also have thought that a nuclear Israel could persuade Arab governments that the Jewish state was in the region to stay, in the process paving the way to acceptance and even peace talks. Looking the other way was made easier by Israel’s decision never to officially acknowledge its arsenal and to avoid obvious testing. More than half a century later, the policy seems vindicated: there is peace between Israel and several of its neighbors, and no other country in the region has yet to follow Israel’s lead and go nuclear.

When it comes to other Israeli activity, however, diplomatic avoidance has proved far more costly. After its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel constructed settlements throughout territories it acquired in the conflict: the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza, and Sinai. Most U.S. administrations viewed these settlements as impediments to any future exchange of territory for peace. Still, no U.S. president (with the partial exception of George H. W. Bush) demanded that Israel stop building or expanding settlements and threatened sanctions if it didn’t. U.S. officials were uninterested in a political fight with Israel and its American supporters in the absence of a promising agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Not surprisingly, the number of settlements and settlers has skyrocketed over the past 50-plus years. And as predicted, even before October 7, the establishment of a Palestinian state became a much harder sell within Israel, since settlers are a powerful voting constituency, and among Palestinians, who have grown far more skeptical that peace would give them control over significant, contiguous territory.

Disagreements with friends cannot be wished away.

The United States has also looked the other way with Ukraine. Many U.S. officials doubted the wisdom of Ukraine’s decision to launch a major counteroffensive in 2023, worried that it would not only fail but also divert precious resources away from the task of defending the territory Ukraine already held. Others feared that if the counteroffensive were to succeed, it might prompt Russia to use, or at least threaten to use, nuclear weapons. The administration was also reluctant to press for any diplomatic initiative that would entail Ukraine compromising its goal to recover all its lost territory going back to 2014. But the U.S. government was unwilling to confront Ukraine, lest it appear that it wasn’t doing enough on behalf of a beleaguered friend resisting aggression.

In this case, avoidance backfired. As predicted, Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough while using up precious ammunition and equipment and costing many lives. That failure also handed an argument to members of Congress who opposed aid to Ukraine, making it easier for them to claim that the assistance wasn’t associated with a policy that stood a chance of succeeding. It would have been better for the Biden administration to have pressed Ukraine to adopt a defensive strategy as soon as the battlefield stabilized in mid-2022 and to indicate what territorial arrangements it might be prepared to accept in exchange for a temporary cease-fire. That approach would have preserved the country’s manpower and resources and persuaded Russia that no amount of offensive effort on its part could succeed.

The United States has followed a passive approach toward India, too. In recent years, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have prioritized the U.S. relationship with the world’s most populous country to push back against China, expand bilateral trade and investment, and engender goodwill among the politically active Indian American community. But this strategy has required overlooking India’s growing illiberalism at home, its extrajudicial killings abroad, and its continued economic and military ties with Russia, making the United States appear more opportunistic than principled. Over time, looking the other way comes with risks, since an India that is less devoted to its secular heritage could become less united and stable. Washington’s nonconfrontational approach also increases the likelihood that India will continue to hedge in its foreign policy and remain a less than fully reliable U.S. partner.

WORKAROUND

If all other approaches fail or are deemed too costly, there is one powerful option left to deal with a disagreement with an ally: independent action. Instead of trying to get another country to alter its behavior, the United States can work around that country, promoting American interests as it sees fit.

Frustrated with the military campaign in Gaza, the Biden administration has used the tactic against Israel. In February 2024, after vetoing three UN Security Council resolutions it regarded as unfair to Israel, the United States, over Israeli protests, introduced one of its own that called for a temporary cease-fire. The proposal was promptly vetoed by China and Russia for being too supportive of Israeli concerns, but the next month, the United States abstained on another resolution that Israel had asked it to veto. In Gaza, meanwhile, the Biden administration also acted unilaterally, airdropping food and constructing a floating pier on the Mediterranean coast to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid. In May, it placed a hold on supplying 500- and 2,000-pound bombs that can cause widespread civilian casualties. The impact of all this independent action was modest: it failed to do much to limit the severity of the humanitarian crisis, but it did signal that Israel did not have a veto over U.S. policy.

Another recent example involves Ukraine. In 2022 and 2023, the Biden administration refused to provide Kyiv with aircraft, long-range missiles, and cluster munitions. The policy was not a sanction, since it wasn’t a punishment meted out in response to anything deemed counterproductive. Rather, it was a unilateral decision to hold back weapons that Washington thought would be insufficiently effective and potentially escalatory.

Arguably the most dramatic example of independent action was the May 2011 U.S. military raid that killed Bin Laden, who had been hiding in a compound close to Pakistan’s military academy. Assuming that at least some senior Pakistani officials knew of his presence there and sympathized with him, the Obama administration decided not to warn Pakistan of the raid. Instead, U.S. forces flew in without permission, violating the sovereign territory of a friend in what proved to be a successful mission. U.S. officials rightly concluded that the stakes were too high to jeopardize the operation by notifying the Pakistani government and that, at any rate, the U.S.-Pakistani relationship was already so fraught that the marginal effect of this offense would likely be negligible.

Independent action can go too far, however. Consider recent U.S. policy in Afghanistan. In February 2020, the Trump administration, seeing no path to either military victory or negotiated peace after two decades of war, went behind the back of the Afghan government and signed an agreement with the Taliban to end the U.S. military presence in the country. The deal wound down the U.S. presence, but at an enormous cost: it undercut and demoralized the Afghan government, paving the way for the Taliban to regain control of the country 18 months later, when the Taliban seized Kabul as the Afghan government collapsed. The Biden administration could have reneged on the agreement with the Taliban; there was a good chance that the Afghan government could have survived had Washington maintained its relatively light footprint of several thousand personnel in noncombat roles. Such a policy promised neither peace nor victory, but compared with what transpired, it would likely have been much better for the people of Afghanistan—and for the United States’ reputation.

WHEN FRIENDS FEUD

Much of U.S. policy toward allies is built on the assumption that agreement is the norm and disagreement the exception. Finding common ground should almost always be possible, policymakers implicitly believe, given how dependent U.S. allies are and how easy it is for Washington to draw on its considerable resources to penalize or support them. But this confidence is misplaced. Disagreements with friends are a regular feature of U.S. foreign policy, one that cannot be wished away.

The first step to addressing the problem head-on is to understand which approaches work and don’t work, and when. Persuasion can be difficult or impossible when the friend sees core interests at stake. Still, genuine strategic dialogue on the most sensitive issues, if done privately and before a policy is decided, can head off crises and surprises in the relationship. And even if the effort fails, it can be cited to justify a decision to turn to other approaches.

What might this mean in practice? With Israel, Washington should put forward its thinking on diplomatic and military responses to Iran’s nuclear program and Hezbollah, as well as on what it wants from Israel regarding the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank. It should also hold honest, if difficult, discussions with Ukraine, making the case for a largely defensive military orientation and a diplomatic initiative that reflects realities on the ground.

Incentives naturally make persuasion more effective, and the tool appears to be working with Saudi Arabia: Riyadh is considering normalizing its relations with Israel and limiting its relationship with China in exchange for a U.S. security pact and civilian nuclear help. With Ukraine, the United States could pledge to reduce restrictions on the use of American weapons and offer long-term military aid and security assurances, all to persuade Kyiv to adopt a more defensive military strategy and declare its readiness in principle to accept an interim cease-fire. With Taiwan, it could more explicitly promise to come to the rescue in the event of a Chinese invasion (a policy sometimes known as “strategic clarity”), while making clear that Taipei needs to exercise restraint on cross-strait issues and invest more in its own defense. With Israel, it could agree to buttress a stabilization plan for Gaza or offset the costs of any peace agreement with the Palestinians, offering additional military assistance to meet any increased threats stemming from a loss of territory and economic assistance to compensate those who would be required to vacate settlements.

The track record for sanctions does not inspire confidence; when used against friends, they are better at signaling U.S. displeasure than at changing behavior. If the offending behavior continues after sanctions are imposed, over time, other considerations take precedence and the measures are eased or removed altogether, making the United States look weak and hypocritical. As a rule, before imposing a sanction on a friend, Washington should consider whether it will want to sustain a sanction, given that other interests will inevitably intervene. And if it does decide to go that route, the sanctions should be narrowly targeted.

Biden with leaders from Middle Eastern countries in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 2022

Mandel Ngan / Pool / Reuters

The Biden administration’s reaction to the Khashoggi murder is an example of getting it wrong and right. It was completely predictable that relations with Saudi Arabia would have to take into account Iran, Israel, the war in Yemen, oil prices, and China, all of which made it unsustainable to treat the kingdom as a pariah. But then the administration wisely pivoted. It showed its unhappiness with what had taken place and its commitment to principle (something the Trump administration did not do) by releasing the CIA’s investigation into the murder and sanctioning a number of Saudi senior officials who were not central to the workings of the relationship. But it did not introduce sanctions or conditions that would have made it impossible to cooperate.

The harshest instrument, regime change, should be avoided. It is unlikely to result in new leadership, and even when it does, there is no guarantee that the new regime will be both preferable and enduring. Few things in foreign policy are harder than engineering the internal workings of another country. Trying to do so with an ally is all but sure to backfire, taking the focus off substantive disagreements, handing the target a nationalist card to play, and raising uncomfortable questions in other allied capitals.

Looking the other way can make sense when it would be nearly impossible to influence a friend’s behavior or when other large interests are at stake that argue against a confrontation. The tactic does not make sense, however, when the United States possesses ample influence or when the costs of ignoring the problem are high.

Persuasion, incentives, sanctions, and looking the other way have something in common: they all leave the initiative with the friend or ally, which explains their poor track record. The one option that hands control to the United States is independent action. Working around an ally can be attractive when the other options fail or are ruled out and U.S. interests still call for something to be done.

With Israel, the Biden administration could build on its existing workarounds and go much further. It could, for example, require that goods made in Israeli settlements be labeled as originating in the occupied territories rather than as “made in Israel,” restoring a policy that the Trump administration reversed. The United States could stop sugarcoating its objection to settlements and describe them as “illegal” rather than as merely “obstacles to peace” or “inconsistent with international law”—and support a UN Security Council resolution saying so. It could do more to reform and strengthen the Palestinian Authority. And it could publicly articulate and push for its vision for governance in Gaza and for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more broadly.

Working around an ally can be attractive when the other options fail.

In Ukraine, similarly, the United States could stipulate that none of the arms it provides could be used for a new counteroffensive and that military aid would be continued only if Ukraine committed to accepting an interim cease-fire based on the current territorial division. (To be clear, Ukraine would not have to give up its territorial claims, its ability to rearm, or the option to join alliances as a condition of aid.) What would result would not be peace, but as the experience of the Korean Peninsula has made clear, an armistice can at least stop the war.

Independent action should also include a willingness to publicly criticize behavior or even join the other countries’ domestic political debates. The leaders of Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan have all worked legislators and the media; U.S. presidents should take a page from their books and do the same thing. In 2015, Netanyahu spoke to Congress to argue against the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, and in June 2024, he recorded a video falsely accusing the Biden administration of threatening Israel’s security by holding back arms and ammunition. Obama should have asked for equal time in the Knesset to take his case for the nuclear deal to the Israeli people, and Biden ought to have marched into the White House briefing room and demanded an apology from Netanyahu for misrepresenting the facts. In situations like these, what is called for is tough love—or at least tougher love.

Independent action is no panacea, since it doesn’t stop the offending behavior, although it could lead the partner to back off. But it does allow the United States to shield itself from and offset some of the adverse consequences. It also helps preserve the relationship while reminding the friend that the United States has options of its own. And in the long run, this tactic can demonstrate the costs of not taking U.S. preferences and interests into account. That, after all, should be the thrust of any U.S. strategy toward an ally with which it disagrees: to pursue its interests without doing irreparable damage to a valued relationship.

RICHARD HAASS is President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Senior Counselor at Centerview Partners, and the author of The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens.

Foreign Affairs · by The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens · August 19, 2024

22. Strategy for a New Era: USSOCOM Takes on Strategic Competition

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Article

Strategy for a New Era: USSOCOM Takes on Strategic Competition

https://interpopulum.org/strategy-for-a-new-era-ussocom-takes-on-strategic-competition/

Lauren Hickok & Larson Miller

Published

3 days ago

In a new era of strategic competition, U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) must identify opportunities to out-compete China and Russia when and where it is most crucial, maintaining the U.S. technical edge and strategic advantage. USSOCOM needs a foundation for strategy and policy, and approaches for achieving impact.

interpopulum.org · by ByLauren Hickok & Larson Miller

Strategy for a New Era

In a new era of strategic competition, U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) must identify opportunities to out-compete China and Russia when and where it is most crucial, maintaining the U.S. technical edge and strategic advantage. SOCOM needs a foundation for strategy and policy, and approaches for achieving impact.

The future operating environment will be shaped by expansionist peer and near peer adversaries, greater strategic competition among rival states, and emerging technology. China and Russia are seeking to expand their global influence, transnational terrorist groups continue to maintain a presence in critical regions, and emerging technologies are shaping the operating environment in new ways.

Winning means successfully prevailing in the gray zone—below the level of armed conflict. However, USSOCOM’s role extends beyond the gray zone; U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) must be ready to fight and win in support of partner nations and U.S. interests.

The challenge for U.S. strategists is that maintaining the advantage over America’s adversaries will be a costly and complex endeavor. While winning the counterterrorism fight could be done reasonably well with set resources, this is not so for strategic competition, a decades-long competition and defense mobilization potentially on the scale of the Cold War. Strategists should focus on vital U.S. national interests, while identifying the geographic regions and strategic assets that are critical—those that advance progress toward the ‘ends’ that U.S. strategy seeks to accomplish.

CONTACT Lauren Hickok, lhickok@mitre.org | LLarson Miller, ljmiller@mitre.org

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy, or position of the U.S. Government, United States Special Operations Command, MITRE Corporation, or the Department of Defense. © 2024 Arizona State University

USSOCOM can drive up prospects for success. At the very least, USSOCOM can:

Identify geographic regions and assets of strategic value, and place data in strategic context for leaders
Set U.S. policy on gray zone competition and develop expertise
Leverage strategic reviews and net assessments

Prioritizing key geographic regions and assets according to their intrinsic strategic value will position SOF to outcompete China and Russia when and where it is needed most—whether for maintaining a strong posture in the gray zone, successfully deterring the outbreak of armed conflict, supporting U.S. allies, or preparing for future conflict with China and Russia. Strategists will have a clear understanding of where it is most important to fight and win.

Better interpreting and contextualizing data and dashboards on strategic competition is vitally important. At a fundamental level, this means understanding how data and dashboard displays relate to U.S. national interests, grand strategy, and leadership decisions. Ideally, these displays and information feeds will clearly differentiate top priorities from lesser concerns—making it abundantly clear where SOF must confront the adversary and what is at stake.

USSOCOM also needs to set policy on strategic competition in the gray zone—further defining acceptable competition for economic influence, natural resources, rare earth reserves, and control of global supply chains. A clear paradigm will better advance U.S. policy, which involves a host of interagency and foreign partners. USSOCOM has already taken the initiative to develop expertise on strategic competition and escalation dynamics in the gray zone, improving prospects for success.

Finally, strategic reviews and net assessments will be crucial to success. Within this domain, the concept of return on investment is central—because strategy at a very basic level involves choices about how to apply available resources to achieve desired ends—crucial for a potentially decades-long era of strategic competition that has real potential to draw down resources.

Overall, USSOCOM establishes the ends strategy strives to accomplish, characterizes the strategic setting, and selects the means to achieve desired ends. The process remains iterative—with the strategic reviews and net assessments offering the opportunity to adjust the strategy over time.

Finite Resources

America’s resources are finite. Absent a focus on key threats and high-value strategic assets, the U.S. will incur high costs in a new era of strategic competition. One can imagine several sub-optimal outcomes:

In the first scenario, the U.S. maintains the strategic advantage and technical edge, but at far higher cost than necessary.
In the second scenario, the U.S. again maintains the strategic advantage, but fails to actualize this favorable posture to achieve America’s global objectives.
In the third and final scenario, U.S. resources applied to strategic competition have limited strategic impact—in fact, these resources could have been better applied to rapid acquisition of new technology or technical innovation.

In each scenario, America has limited strategic imagination. The focus is on competing with adversaries across all dimensions of national power rather than taking a transformative approach that leverages known patterns of adversary behavior and strategic culture. Focusing on those dimensions of strategy drives up prospects for success—a reminder that a resource-driven approach can only accomplish so much. Policymakers often assume that by applying resources, a nation state can achieve proportionate strategic impact; however, flawed assumptions can limit prospects for success.

In the gray zone, no intrinsic start or finish exists. This could prompt a baseline level of U.S. expenditure without a guiding strategy—a situation with high potential for wasted resources. Ultimately, a lack of prioritization could mean endless resource drain— perhaps on the scale of the Cold War.

In short, by competing with China and Russia on a global scale without a clear hierarchy of objectives, the U.S. may have a more limited opportunity to apply resources intensively in truly vital geographic regions where ‘wins’ in the gray zone are an imperative—and where the additional resources serve to buy down risk. National security strategists can benefit from a starting point for crafting strategy in a new era—an era in which counterterrorism remains important to international security but is no longer the principal USSOCOM mission, and where the imperative to advance strategic competition takes on primacy.

USSOCOM in a New Era

Focusing on first order U.S. national security interests enables strategists to develop useful end states when crafting strategy for the use of SOF. USSOCOM leadership has already noted an intention to focus on innovation, strengthen alliances, and win the gray zone. USSOCOM will also prepare for the outbreak of conflict, to include aggression against a U.S. ally or international partner, such as Ukraine. SOF’s role in deterring great power rivals from initiating armed conflict is growing and will include collecting information in preparation for future conflict, preparing the environment, and building strong partnerships. The U.S. will seek to maintain the strategic advantage and technical edge over Russia and China, while establishing integrated deterrence and offering supporting allies. These efforts take place below the level of armed conflict, but also above it, should adversaries seek to initiate hostilities, further escalate, or set the stage for a broader conventional war or nuclear conflict. Ultimately, the development of SOF capability must be in step with the National Security Strategy (NSS), the National Defense Strategy (NDS), and White House policy.

Table 1 (Objectives in a New Era) summarizes the ends U.S. strategy aims to accomplish. These goals are consistent with the NDS. Aligning SOF activities to this structure makes clear the tradeoffs that emerge at the strategic level when choosing different resource allocations, force postures, or SOF capabilities.

These objectives and end states (shown in Table 1) established, strategists will need to consider the relative value of placing emphasis to the left or right of boom—and the risk tolerance associated with any such choice. As USSOCOM strives to counter China, strategists must consider the balance of resources to devote to gray zone competition, deterring conflict, or fighting a large-scale conventional war—without knowing whether competition will remain in the gray zone indefinitely.

The Future Operating Environment

Strategists must size up the future operating environment—where SOF must fight and win. Understanding regional dimensions of the future operating environment will be particularly important—and identifying U.S. strategic priorities by region is an excellent place to start. The 2022 NDS makes clear that a major U.S. defense priority will be “deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe.”

Fundamental shifts are taking place in the structure of the international system, as prospects for a unipolar system guided by U.S. hegemony are diminishing. Some anticipate an increasingly multipolar world order, as Russia and China seek to exert political, military, and economic power and influence globally to attain the strategic and technical edge. Changes are overtaking other realms; observers predict large shifts in human geography, including through greater migration, humanitarian crises, and increasing political instability. External trends like climate change will introduce unexpected challenges. Finally, advances in technology will shape the nature of strategic competition among rival great powers, each seeking to develop or maintain the technical edge.

Objectives in a New EraU.S. Advances Vital National Interests The U.S. secures vital national interests. The U.S. maintains the American way of life, including democratic governance and a free civil society. The U.S. advances national interests and goals as described in the 2018 and 2022 NDS. This includes a commitment to allies and partners, countering rival great powers in critical realms, and maintaining the strategic advantage over adversaries. In addition to deterring the outbreak of armed conflict and building robust integrated deterrence, DoD cultivates capability to prevail in armed conflict with China in the Indo Pacific or with Russia in Europe.U.S. Denies the Adversary In a new era of strategic competition, the U.S. denies the adversary: Victory below the threshold of war (in the gray zone)Victory through armed conflict (beyond the gray zone)Victory through further escalation to a large-scale conventional war or a conflict involving nuclear arms (beyond the gray zone)U.S. Maintains the Strategic Advantage The U.S. maintains the strategic advantage around the globe, successfully contesting adversary power projection and securing strategic assets in theater—preserving the action potential to prevail in future eras when and where it is needed most. The U.S. successfully counters rival great powers, limiting Chinese and Russian efforts to project military, political, and economic power globally at the expense of U.S. interests and regional security. The U.S. prevents adversaries from gaining access to military basing, ports, strategic trade routes, rare earth reserves, or other assets of strategic value. The U.S. maintains the technical edge over adversaries and successfully counters adversary exploitation of new technology.U.S. Deters the Outbreak of Armed Conflict The U.S. deters the outbreak of armed conflict, recognizing that this protects U.S. allies and vital interests abroad—but also more importantly recognizes that the outbreak of war among great powers, let alone further escalation, amounts to an unacceptable risk.U.S. Support to Partner Nations Deters Aggression The U.S. military strength dissuades adversaries from aggression against U.S. allies; with a U.S. commitment to protecting allies and international partners, China and Russia do not resort to conventional or nuclear conflict above the gray zone.U.S. Integrated Deterrence Achieves Results U.S. integrated deterrence succeeds, precluding the emergence of large-scale conventional war or nuclear conflict. The U.S. limits the development of a nuclear arms race, or the emergence of technology that could radically alter the nuclear balance or incentivize adversaries to consider the use of nuclear weapons.U.S. Maintains the Technical Edge, Preserving America’s Ability to Fight and Win The U.S. competes with Russia and China in research, development, test & evaluation (RDT&E), authoritatively maintaining the technical edge—ensuring that the U.S. military could prevail in an armed conflict, or other forms of conflict such as cyber war.

1: Objectives in a New Era

As Russia and China compete with the U.S., they will leverage technologies designed to bolster state security and counter terrorism. Smart Cities and Safe Cities include biometric and identity technologies that impose some limits on U.S. activities, especially in urban areas. Ultimately, USSOCOM must grasp how technology will shape the future of war and the nature of strategic competition. Broadly, SOF can expect to operate in denied environments and will likely observe changes in how strategic competition unfolds in the gray zone. Meanwhile, USSOCOM also needs to become increasingly integrated with the Joint Force. At the outset of this new era, SOF must ensure interoperability with conventional forces—as well as identify the geographic regions or types of operational environments most likely to require seamless integration with conventional forces to win on the battlefield or in the gray zone. As theorists of special operations point out, concepts of special operations have evolved over time. The present day is a critical time to understand how boundaries between SOF and conventional military forces may be changing—and moreover, what mission, authorities, and capabilities these new challenges demand. SOF’s integration with the Joint Force may also prove helpful for improving joint operational concept development within the Department, a current DoD priority.

The Joint Operating Environment 2035 identifies features of the operating environment that will introduce new challenges for SOF and DoD: violent ideological competition, threatened U.S. territory and sovereignty; antagonistic geopolitical balancing, disrupted global commons; contest for cyberspace; and shattered and re-ordered regions. To sum up, considerable change is taking place, bringing unpredictable developments in world affairs—Russian military losses in Ukraine, as a recent example. SOF’s shift to strategic competition and the scaled-back counterterrorism (CT) mission are situated within this broader context. New challenges will abound.

Applying SOF Capabilities

SOF dedicated to Direct Action (DA) will continue to excel in this role; meanwhile, the enterprise will shift to a new focus on countering Russia and China. While placing renewed emphasis on maritime capabilities and technology, the broader objective would be a full return to the range of capabilities employed before the global war on terror. Ultimately, as the new era unfolds, several SOF core activities may take on a greater role.

Security Force Assistance, Foreign Internal Defense. USSOCOM continues to emphasize the importance of supporting partner nations and U.S. allies. Security Force Assistance (SFA) and Foreign Internal Defense (FID) each support allies while helping to maintain U.S. access, placement, and influence. Each core activity plays an important role in developing host nation capability to counter internal threats or defend against rival states. They also demonstrate U.S. resolve in support of allies, deterring adversaries from initiating armed conflict; they may also dissuade rival states from engineering a “fait accompli” in the gray zone.
Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD). USSOCOM should prioritize action to counter state and non-state efforts to acquire, develop, and deploy high-consequence chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. Monitoring proliferation by China and Russia may become a greater focus; the U.S. may also seek to limit the diffusion of Chinese and Russian capability to non-weapons states or state sponsors of terrorism. Securing high-risk materials, technologies, and expertise—particularly in regions experiencing high levels of violent extremist activity and accelerated competition with near peer adversaries—would do a great deal to address important challenges. Concerns persist about high-risk material that may exist in Ukraine following the 2022 Russian invasion and passage through Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia.
Civil Affairs. Special Operations Forces on Civil Affairs teams help build robust civil societies through interaction with community-level organizations and non-governmental groups. With language skills appropriate to their area of expertise, they often operate with considerable freedom of action. In addition to preparing the future operating environment, SOF can build resilience against Russian or Chinese aggression and create friendly networks in advance of anticipated armed conflict. Certain civil affairs initiatives have the capacity to reach key interest groups in critical regions.
Military Information Support Operations (MISO). The U.S. can leverage MISO for strategic effect in priority geographic regions—targeting key populations whose changing perceptions could have a notable impact in altering the operating environment to U.S. advantage. With expansive reach across the digital domain and at relatively low cost compared with other core activities, MISO could provide opportunities to counter China and Russia in new ways. Ultimately, the deciding factor for any MISO campaign would naturally be the extent to which it can generate strategic impact.
Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief. U.S. humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) delivers critical aid to populations worldwide while also advancing U.S. interests, including promoting the rule of law, human rights, and stable democratic governance. Humanitarian assistance is one more realm where the U.S. and SOF can outcompete Chinese and Russian bids for global influence—while also strengthening partnerships with U.S. allies in critical regions or limiting the radicalization of vulnerable populations.
Preparing the Environment. USSOCOM’s leadership continues to stress the value of SOF in preparing the environment for future armed conflict—an established role from the early days of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s effort to stand up a paramilitary force and intelligence agency. Surveillance and reconnaissance can generate intelligence on the future operating environment— vitally important in advance of a conflict. Other efforts to prepare the future operating environment might include a cyber component. Finding ways of operating effectively in a new 5G environment will be crucial—not only for countering Violent Extremist Organizations (VEOs), but also for competing with Russia and China. Preparing the environment also adds value for USSOCOM’s CWMD mission—for example, through partner capacity building or direct action.
Counter Threat Finance. The U.S. can also leverage sanctions and trade policy. The efficacy of sanctions in the Ukraine crisis to limit Russian aggression is a useful test case that may galvanize greater global cooperation. Moreover, USSOCOM, as the lead DoD component for synchronizing Counter Threat Finance (CTF) activities, is well positioned to bring these capabilities to bear. USSOCOM leadership has alluded to the usefulness of leveraging U.S. CTF capabilities not only as a non-kinetic, finish agnostic CT win, but also in strategic competition with Russia and China. For enforcing sanctions, SOF has had a longstanding role in performing high-risk Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS).
Emerging Technology. USSOCOM proactively identifies and counters technical challenges in the future operating environment. With a record of success in rapidly fielding technology solutions, USSOCOM is well equipped. USSOCOM has already prioritized developing communications technology for austere environments. SOF will also benefit from new approaches and technologies for operating successfully under adversary radars. Other challenges include developing options for defeating the biometric systems enmeshed with adversary technology for counterterrorism and state security, including Smart Cities. Broader security vulnerabilities associated with the global expansion of 5G technology might also pose a concern. To fully adapt and win in a new era of strategic competition, both DoD and USSOCOM must compete with Russia and China across technical domains identified in the 2018 and 2022 NDS.

Key Topics in a New Era

Fortunately, the U.S. can improve prospects for success. At the very least, policymakers can (1) focus on discerning strategic value, (2) set U.S. policy on gray zone competition and develop expertise, and (3) leverage strategic reviews and net assessments.

Strategic Value
Regions and Assets. Prioritizing key geographic regions and assets according to their intrinsic strategic value will position SOF to outcompete China and Russia when and where it is needed most—whether for maintaining a robust posture in the gray zone, successfully deterring the outbreak of armed conflict, supporting U.S. allies, or preparing for future conflict with China and Russia. To strategists, this amounts to an opportunity to truly understand where and over which gray zone strategic assets it is most important to ‘fight and win.’
Data and Dashboards in Strategic Context. Better interpreting and contextualizing data and dashboards on strategic competition is vitally important. Doing so requires an understanding of U.S. national interests, grand strategy, and foreign and defense policy priorities at the regional and country levels—as well as the hierarchical concepts of strategic value just noted. Experts well versed in these concepts can be found across the interagency, to include in the Offices of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, the Department of State, and U.S. embassies overseas. Their joint expertise is rarely leveraged systematically to interpret changing levels of political, economic, and military power in the gray zone as China and Russia expand their global influence. In written form, the NDS, various regional strategies and campaign plans, and embassies’ mission strategic plans each provide invaluable guidance. The more that strategists at all levels of government can develop a common framework to place data in strategic context, the better. Taking this approach synchronizes understanding across the interagency, while enabling strategists at all levels to quickly identify and respond to new trends that pose a serious concern.
Gray Zone
Set Policy on Strategic Competition in the Gray Zone. USSOCOM would be wise to further define acceptable competition in the gray zone, particularly related to economic influence, natural resources, rare earth reserves, and control of global supply chains. Specifically, clarifying the extent of U.S. government activities in this realm, including SOF, would be highly advantageous—and beyond that, clarifying when SOF should or should not take specific action to support U.S. interests. Having a clear guiding vision for top priorities and specific conditions—including adversary advances or economic exploitation—that merit the use of SOF would be useful to leadership, strategists, and operators in country.
Develop Expertise on Strategic Competition and Escalation in the Gray Zone. Better understanding the gray zone already represents a priority for USSOCOM and the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU); many scholars are also writing on these topics. USSOCOM must develop a better understanding of escalation potential at the limits of the gray zone. USSOCOM must also make it a top priority to better evaluate, influence and assess victory in an ongoing competition below the threshold of war—a challenging task with no clear start date and end date for analytic assessments. The emphasis on the gray zone has arisen in response to the surprising success that China has had in accumulating influence through a long-term effort to place private citizens, overseas diplomats, and economic interests abroad.

3. Strategic Reviews and Net Assessments

Return on Investment. Success requires analysis of resource allocation and return on investment. This is not pure strategy, but rather strategy translated into resource allocation. Solving or optimizing the resource challenge would go a long way toward achieving success, simply due to the massive resources required to counter both Russia and China on a global scale, over several decades.
Success of the Strategy. Taking a hard look at the strategy’s level of success is essential. To foster this, leaders must remove organizational obstacles to sound analytic assessments and provide appropriate settings for innovation—approaches SOF has already established. Even so, an evaluation that poses new questions about strategic impact can add real value.

Evaluating Strategy

When evaluating strategy, the key is to have a broad set of questions that can show how well the strategy is achieving the desired ends—and to course correct as needed.

Key Questions. Policymakers will benefit from developing a robust and varied set of questions that give strategists and practitioners the latitude to directly address uncertainty—taking into account important considerations about which no data is available—but nonetheless regularly factor into leadership decisions.

One starting point for this endeavor would be to consider whether the strategy advanced DoD’s effort to achieve NDS-level objectives for strategic competition. These objectives are shown in Table 3 (Did the Strategy Achieve its Ends?). Similarly, strategists might consider the extent to which SOF advanced specific lines of effort called for in the Special Operations Forces Vision and Strategy, while limiting the risks it called on USSOCOM to avoid; these considerations are shown in Table 4 (SOF Vision and Strategy: Evaluation) and Table 5 (SOF Vision and Strategy: Risks).

Hierarchy of Objectives. Establishing a hierarchy of strategic objectives will be crucial. USSOCOM should be able to identify highest-priority ‘wins’ across each combatant command—’no fail’ missions that deliver strategic impact, without which U.S. national security at the regional level would suffer critical setbacks. These can be differentiated from objectives of lesser importance. In the gray zone, that means understanding the value of maintaining the strategic advantage across different dimensions of national power—not only identifying highest priorities but also comparing the relative efficacy of wielding each.

Demarcating the Arena for Strategic Competition. USSOCOM will benefit from delineating the key challenges of contesting the adversary (1) in the gray zone, (2) after the outbreak of armed conflict, and (3) after the escalation to large-scale conventional war or nuclear conflict. These zones are shown in

Table 2 (Arena for Strategic Competition). Strategists should specify SOF’s role in each zone, quickly identify NDS and USSOCOM strategic objectives, and choose resources to apply as a means to these ends.

Regional Analysis. Taking the additional step of integrating frameworks and objectives of subsidiary USG strategies and plans at the regional and country levels will also add value—a useful approach to synchronize the wide range of USG and partner nation priorities, a crucial first step for effective cooperation.

Arena for Strategic CompetitionPurposeGray ZoneDeny adversary victory in the gray zoneAfter the Outbreak of Armed ConflictDeny adversary victory after the outbreak of armed conflictFurther escalation to large-scale conventional war or nuclear conflictDeny adversary victory through further escalation to a large-scale conventional war or a conflict involving nuclear arms

Table 2: Arena for Strategic Competition

To Conclude: Achieving Success in a New Era

To succeed in a new era of strategic competition, USSOCOM must establish the ends its strategy will strive to accomplish, characterize the strategic setting, and select the means to achieve desired ends. USSOCOM must articulate the strategic value of U.S. access, placement, and influence across geographic regions based on broader U.S. national security priorities in the NDS. Discerning the strategic value different policy options offer for U.S. national security will prove invaluable. For example, as USSOCOM seeks to gain the strategic advantage, events will unfold that advance U.S. interests by different degrees and through various forms of national power. These could include gaining access to ports vital to global trade, investing in global markets important to U.S. national security, strengthening diplomatic ties with key partners, or maintaining a productive role in a regional security organization that supports partner nations and advances U.S. interests. Developing a keen ability to compare strategic value across forms of national power will prove especially advantageous. Even more important, USSOCOM must embark on a new effort to place data and dashboards in strategic context, in a way that allows strategists and commanders to weigh all important considerations and make sound decisions that shape the operating environment to their advantage. This involves recognizing that data will not exist for many factors leaders must consider when making vitally important decisions in the gray zone and on the battlefield. Finally, USSOCOM must make it a priority to conduct strategic reviews and net assessments that take a hard look at whether a strategy has achieved its ends.

Evaluating Strategy

Topics for Strategic ReviewDescriptionVision: U.S. Advances National InterestsThe U.S. secures vital national interests. The U.S. maintains the American way of life, including democratic governance and a free civil society. The U.S. advances national interests and goals as described in the 2018 and 2022 NDS. This includes a commitment to allies and partners; countering rival great powers in critical realms; and maintaining the strategic advantage over adversaries, including in direct conflict with Russia and ChinaMaintain the Strategic AdvantageThe U.S. maintains the strategic advantage around the globe, successfully contesting adversary power projection and securing strategic assets in theater—preserving the action potential to prevail in future eras when and where it is needed most. The U.S. successfully counters rival great powers, limiting Chinese and Russian efforts to project military, political, and economic power globally at the expense of U.S. interests and regional security.

The U.S. prevents adversaries from gaining access to military basing, ports, strategic trade routes, or other assets of strategic value.

The U.S. maintains the technical edge over adversaries and successfully counters adversary exploitation of new technology.Deter the Outbreak of Armed ConflictThe U.S. deters the outbreak of armed conflict, recognizing that this protects U.S. allies and vital interests abroad—but also more importantly recognizes that the outbreak of war among great powers, let alone further escalation, amounts to an unacceptable risk.Offer Support to Partner Nations that Deters Russian or Chinese AggressionThe U.S. commitment to protecting allies and international partners, and its military strength dissuade adversaries from aggression against U.S. allies; China and Russia do not resort to conventional or nuclear conflict above the gray zone.Successfully establish integrated deterrence to limit escalation to conventional war or nuclear conflictU.S. integrated deterrence succeeds, precluding the emergence of large-scale conventional war or nuclear conflict. The U.S. limits the development of a nuclear arms race, or the emergence of technology that could radically alter the nuclear balance or incentivize adversaries to consider the use nuclear weapons.Maintain the technical edge, preserving America’s ability to fight and winThe U.S. competes with Russia and China in research, development, test & evaluation (RDT&E), authoritatively maintaining the technical edge—ensuring that the U.S. military could prevail in an armed conflict, or other forms of conflict such as cyber war.

3: Did the Strategy Achieve its Ends?

To what extent did …SOF support priority missions in critical locations as part of integrated deterrence?SOF reduce strategic risk?SOF facilitate integration with conventional forces during high-end conflict?Changes to concept, capabilities, and doctrine add unique value to integrated deterrence?A talented workforce enable SOF to innovate, compete, and win?Newly improved readiness better enable SOF to execute critical missions? (Crisis response missions, Priority CT missions, CWMD missions)SOF use Information Warfare capabilities in deterrence campaigns?SOF support the Joint Force in high-end conflict?New or stronger partnerships increase global understanding? Bolster deterrence? Create opportunities for shared successes?

4: SOF Vision and Strategy: Evaluation

To what extent did SOF avoid …?Loss of access, placement, or influence in critical areas of operation or with key partners or organizations?Budgetary shortfalls that directly affect development or advancement of critical capabilities?Degradation of agreements and relationships with critical partners that impact our shared strategic awareness and operational effectiveness?Insufficient investment in force development and design not yielding necessary SOF capabilities?Authority shortfalls/gaps limiting SOF’s ability to support national security interests?Force structure/posture that is insufficient or misaligned in achieving SOF’s strategic aims?Loss of trust in SOF by decision makers and the American people to manage resources, prepare the environment, or execute priority missions ethically in politically sensitive environments?

5: SOF Vision and Strategy: Risks

Annex

5G in the Future Operating Environment

Cellular 5G networks bring greater access to data and faster browsing—but these 5G networks also pose security concerns in the future operating environment. This occurs partly because more data resides closer to the user; as China and Russia expand to new geographic regions, they will have increasing access to data being transmitted on local 5G networks. The establishment of 5G networks also means that a greater number of users, over a broader geographic area, have access to the digital domain—creating new markets. In fact, in pursuit of these new markets, Chinese giants like Huawei have increased their global market share, power, and influence. China’s global infrastructure development campaign extends to its Digital Silk Road Initiative, a relatively recent effort to expand Chinese influence in tandem with greater network connectivity and digital infrastructure.

Finally, while not specific to 5G, it is important to note that both SOF and Russian and Chinese adversaries are equipped to compete in the cyber realm. Russian hacking and cyber operations are expansive—and remain a major concern for NATO countries like Estonia, which suffered a major network outage due to Russian hacktivists. At present, it is not fully known how adversaries are currently—or might in the future—exploit security vulnerabilities in 5G networks. But such activities could limit or shape the way the U.S. operates in the digital domain. Understanding how 5G and the Digital Silk Road will impact SOF remains advantageous.

Safe Cities

With the expansion of the digital domain, 21st century cities are turning to technology solutions to organize and secure their municipalities. Chinese tech giant Huawei is a leading provider of Safe City technology. In Safe Cities, police and other first responders are connected in real time, improving response to emergencies, natural disasters, and crime. Safe Cities are increasingly including a digital identify dimension—enabled by cameras distributed throughout the streets. The inclusion of biometric technology provides new capability to screen and track citizens. While reductions in crime are generally welcome, this innovation can be a double-edged sword. Experts in Western countries continue to express concern about the privacy and civil liberties implications, as well as the implications of the growing power of municipal authorities and the nation state.

Biometric technology and next generation technical tracking enable ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS). This allows states to precisely identify citizens as they move throughout the city. The technology provides persuasive surveillance of urban environments, an important realm where SOF must operate in the coming decades. Moreover, Chinese tech giants such as Huawei are actively marketing Safe City technology to geographic regions where they are developing a greater diplomatic, military, and economic foothold.

As a result of Safe City technology, SOF will face greater challenges operating clandestinely in urban environments—whether establishing a presence, preparing the environment, or engaging in kinetic operations.

Denied Environments

Fully understanding the future operating environment involves understanding the technical challenges of operating in denied environments. As Russian and Chinese adversaries seek to exert greater influence in new regions, military presence, in particular, produces a more denied environment. Therefore, the U.S. would be wise to identify strategic regions and modes of action it would be beneficial to preserve—well in advance of the Chinese or Russian encroachment.

There are several notable technical features of an adversary-controlled environment. In general, this is likely to mean a future operating environment where the U.S. and its allies must contend with challenges including:

Radar jamming technology
GPS denied environments
Integrated Air Defense Systems (IADS)
Anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems

Developing a robust understanding of the resultant operational constraints, in consultation with technical experts, would be highly advantageous.

The Information Environment

Another way that adversaries define the future operating environment is by controlling or shaping the information environment. This ranges from formal information operations—where China and Russia, as non-democracies, have the advantage—to less formal cultural campaigns or public affairs initiatives. Adversaries may also have the power to curtail the information space, depending on the extent of their control; for example, they may limit access to the open internet or encroach on freedom of the press. Within the broader information environment, adversary MISO are a topic of considerable interest to U.S. strategists. In general, it will be useful to know the adversary’s overall strategy for MISO, as well as its practical application by region or by country. The cyber domain, also linked to the broader information environment, may also be contested. In a new era of strategic competition, MISO—especially in the digital realm—has unique reach for targeting adversaries and their proxies anywhere around the globe, often at relatively low cost.

U.S. Congress, Senate Armed Services Committee, Statement for the Record by Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, 25 March 2021.

U.S. Congress, House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, Statement for the Record, 21 July 2021.

“Fact Sheet: 2022 National Defense Strategy,” Department of Defense, 28 March 2022; Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge, Department of Defense, 2018.

Jeffrey Becker and John DeFoor, “Exploring the Future Operating Environment,” JFQ 89, 2nd Quarter 2018; Future Operational Environment: Forging the Future in an Uncertain World, 2035-2050, U.S. Army Futures Command, AFC PAM 525-2.

“Fact Sheet: 2022 National Defense Strategy,” Department of Defense, 28 March 2022.

Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning, 16 March 2018; Kimberly Amerson and Spencer B Meredith III, “The Future Operating Environment 2050: Chaos, Complexity, and Competition,” Small Wars Journal, 31 July 2016; Jim Thomas and Christopher Dougherty, Beyond the Ramparts: The Future of US Special Operations Forces (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2013).

This is a massive and long-term effort designed to ensure that the US can deter future wars—or win if conflict cannot be averted.

This table reflects goals outlined in the NDS, in USSOCOM Congressional Testimony and official documents such as the Special Operations Forces Vision and Strategy, which is available at: https://www.socom.mil/sof-vision-and-strategy.

USSOCOM leadership has remarked on the increasing prevalence of denied environments. For example, General (Ret.) Clarke recently made a comparison between (1) the recent U.S. raid in Syria targeting a leader of ISIS, and (2) the raid on UBL in Pakistan several years earlier. General (Ret.) Clarke remarked that the mission in Syria proved far more challenging, simply because navigating Russian-controlled Syrian air space introduced new challenges above and beyond what SOF had faced for Neptune Spear, the raid on UBL in Pakistan. Furthermore, in Syria, the greatest challenge was not the direct action portion of the mission, but rather navigating Syrian airspace without detection.

Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning, Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Department of Defense, 16 March 2018.

Tom Searle, Outside the Box: A New General Theory of Special Operations (Tampa: JSOU Press, 2017), JSOU Report 17-4; Joe Osborne, “Advancing a Strategic Theory of Special Operations,” Small Wars Journal, 16 May 2016; Richard Rubright, A Unified Theory for Special Operations (Tampa: JSOU Press, 2017), JSOU Report 17-1; Peter McCabe and Paul Lieber, eds, Special Operations Theory (Tampa: JSOU Press, 2017), Vol. 3 of 3, JSOU Report 17-6; Eric Olson, “USSOCOM and SOF: Ward Around The Edges,” Journal of National Security Law & Policy, Vol. 12:71 (71-80), 2021.

The Joint Operating Environment 2035: The Joint Force in a Contested and Disordered World, Joint Chiefs of Staff, US Department of Defense, 14 July 2016.

Stew Magnuson, “SOFIC NEWS: Special Operations Command Turns Attention to Indo-Pacific,” National Defense, 15 May 2022.

Jim Thomas and Christopher Dougherty, Beyond the Ramparts: The Future of US Special Operations Forces (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2013).

Security Force Assistance (SFA) and Foreign Internal Defense (FID) initiatives include a wide variety of military exercises, training and capacity building partnerships, including well established programs like Joint Combined Exchange Trainings (JCETs).

Troy White, Growing SOLO: Expanding the Spectrum of SOF Advisory Capabilities (Tampa: JSOU Press, 2018); Stephen Biddle, “Does Building Partner Military Capacity Work?” Irregular Warfare Podcast, 19 June 2020.

John Deni, “Making Security Cooperation Part of the Army’s ‘Win’ Set,” Small Wars Journal, 7 September 2012; James Micciche, “Competing through Deception: Expanding the Utility of Security Cooperation for Great Power Competition,” Small Wars Journal, 25 June 2021; Joe Gould, “Pentagon Chief Stresses Security Cooperation as Key to Stopping Russia’s Black Sea Aggression,” Defense News, 26 October 2021; Stephen Biddle, “Does Building Partner Military Capacity Work?” Irregular Warfare Podcast, 19 June 2020; “When Security Force Assistance Works—and When it Doesn’t,” Modern War Institute Podcast, 16 December 2021; “The Practice and Politics of Security Force Assistance,” Irregular Warfare Podcast, 23 January 2021.

U.S. Congress, House, Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, FY23 Hearing to Review Department of Defense Strategy, Policy, and Programs for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2021; Jonathan Hillman, The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future (New York: Harper Collins, 2021).

Lonnie Carlson and Margaret Kosal, “Preventing Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation—Leveraging Special Operations Forces to Shape the Environment,” (Tampa: JSOU Press, 2017); Loveday Morris, Ievgeniia Sivorka, and John Hudson, “Inside Ukraine’s Captured Nuclear Plant, Explosions and Constant Fear,” Washington Post, 15 August 2022; “Ukraine’s President Condemns ‘Russia’s Nuclear Terrorism’ in Call with Macron,” Reuters, 16 August 2022; Guy McCardle, “Russians Strike Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant,” SOFREP, 13 August 2022; Bea Karnes, “UC Berkeley Engineers Send Equipment, Expertise to Ransacked Chernobyl,” Patch, 10 August 2022; “Russia Demands Ukraine Surrender Azot Chemical Plant and Severodonetsk,” SOFREP, 16 June 2022; Andrew Carey, Kostan Nechyporenko and Jack Guy, “Russia Destroys Chernobyl Radiation Monitoring Lab, Says Ukraine,” CNN, 23 March 2022; “Ukraine War: Chernobyl Power Supply Cut Off, Says Energy Operator,” BBC News, 9 March 2022; Zachary Evans, “Russian Forces Capture Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, Airport Outside Kyiv,” National Review, 24 February 2022.

Travis Clemens, Special Operations Forces Civil Affairs in Great Power Competition (Tampa: JSOU Press, 2020), JSOU Report 20-4.

MISO can also shape the view of mission critical target audiences in a variety of settings—primarily at the tactical level. A primary objective is simply to identify, at the regional level, how near peers are shaping the information environment via MISO. Fully leveraging expert knowledge of the ‘Digital Silk Road’ for example, ought to be a primary line of effort. As resources are available, the U.S. should seek to counter adversary MISO that could have strategic effects throughout the region, or decisively define the future operating environment in ways disadvantageous to the United States.

Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); “Information Operations for the Information Age: IO in Irregular Warfare,” Irregular Warfare Podcast, 24 September 2021.

In the regions, the first step toward countering near peer adversaries seeking to bring about a fait accompli in the gray zone is to take note of Chinese and Russian attempts to shape the information environment, that is, all adversary MISO. The information environment can be a crucial battleground—because dominating it enables an adversary to shape the perceptions of regional states and can induce them to bandwagon with regional hegemons if they believe that their US ally cannot deter aggression or wavers in resolve. Understanding the aim and effectiveness of adversary MISO is crucial; if adversary MISO has the potential for strategic impact, SOF may need to consider developing US MISO initiatives designed to discredit it.

Even so, the US as a democracy generally lacks the acumen of its adversaries in conducting information operations—MISO being one way that the US can exert a presence in the information space. Fortunately for the US, sharing accurate openly available information with populations around the globe often adds considerable value—especially when Russian and Chinese adversaries seek to obscure the truth.

“Back to the Future: SOF in an Era of Great Power Competition,” Irregular Warfare Podcast, 2 July 2021.

General Richard Clarke, “The Future of Special Operations Forces,” moderated by Michèle Flournoy, Aspen Security Forum, 4 November 2021.

“New USSOCOM J35 Counter Threat Finance (CTF) Curriculum,” Joint Knowledge Online, 4 August 2022.

Lonnie Carlson and Margaret Kosal, Preventing Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation—Leveraging Special Operations Forces to Shape the Environment (Tampa: JSOU Press, 2017); “Back to the Future: SOF in an Era of Great Power Competition,” Irregular Warfare Podcast, 2 July 2021.

“USSOCOM Commander GEN Richard D. Clarke,” SOFCAST, 23 February 2022.

The Modernization Quandary: Emerging Technologies Institute Report, Emerging Technologies Institute, 26 July 2021.

General Richard Clarke, “The Future of Special Operations Forces,” moderated by Michèle Flournoy, Aspen Security Forum, 4 November 2021.

SOFWERX is a platform designed to help solve challenging Warfighter problems at scale through collaboration, ideation, events, and rapid prototyping. Additional information available at: https://www.sofwerx.org/.

Stew Magnuson, “SOFIC NEWS: Special Ops Tech Priorities Include Protected Comms, Counter-UAS,” National Defense, 17 May 2022.

United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission Hearing on “US–China Competition in Global Supply Chains,” 9 June 2022.

Joint Doctrine Note. 1-15: Operation Assessment, US Department of Defense, 15 January 2015.

The Joint Doctrine Note 1-15 is focused on Operation Assessment rather than strategy but has many useful and transferrable concepts, to include considerations at the strategic level, specific questions for assessment, and the use of data to shape leadership’s understanding of the operational environment and guide decision-making.

This is a massive and long-term effort designed to ensure that the US can deter future wars—or win if conflict cannot be averted.

Graham Allison, Kevin Klyman, Karina Barbesino, and Hugo Yen, “The Great Tech Rivalry: China vs. the US,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, December 2021; The 5G Ecosystem: Risks & Opportunities for DoD, Defense Innovation Board, April 2019.

Huawei, “Safe Cities: Using Smart Tech for Public Security,” BBC, accessed March 2015.

Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013).

Former Deputy CIA Director for Science and Technology Dawn Meyerriecks on “Intelligence Matters,” CBS News, 26 January 2022.

Chris Dougherty, “Moving Beyond A2/AD,” CNAS, 3 December 2020.

interpopulum.org · by ByLauren Hickok & Larson Miller

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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