Quotes of the Day:

"Government is instituted for the common good: for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men."

– John Adams

Thomas Friedman defines information arbitrage in the context of globalization as the ability to leverage information from various dimensions to gain a comprehensive understanding of global dynamics. This multi-dimensional approach allows him to see the interconnectedness of global events and trends, thereby performing information arbitrage by synthesizing information across these varied dimensions to provide deeper insights into globalization. Friedman's "6-D" concept refers to the six dimensions he believes are essential for understanding the complexities of globalization. In his book Friedman describes how he evolved from a "2-D" journalist, focusing only on politics and culture, to a "6-D" journalist by adding new lenses to his vision. These six dimensions are:

1. Politics and Culture: Initially, Friedman focused on these two dimensions, particularly relevant in the Middle East where culture heavily influenced politics.
2. National Security: Added during the Cold War, this dimension helped him understand the global power dynamics between the US and the Soviet Union.
3. Financial Markets: Introduced in 1994, this dimension allowed Friedman to see the interplay between finance and politics and understand the economic decisions of leaders and nations.
4. Technology: As technology advanced rapidly, Friedman included this dimension to stay updated with innovations, particularly by visiting Silicon Valley regularly.
5. Environmentalism: Recognizing the impact of globalization on ecosystems, Friedman added this dimension to understand environmental challenges.
6. Globalization: This overarching dimension encompasses the interconnectedness of the previous five, providing a holistic view of global dynamics.

By integrating these six dimensions, Friedman aims to offer a comprehensive perspective on how various factors interact and shape the world in the era of globalization.

– Thomas Friedman, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" 

"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world."

– Hannah Arendt

1. Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich

2. US Military Doctrine Treats Information and Influence as the Same Thing—and That’s a Problem

3. Bomb Smuggled Into Tehran Guesthouse Months Ago Killed Hamas Leader

4. New tech will make tomorrow’s wars more dangerous to troops, Army says

5. 499. The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations

6. US Army captain becomes first female nurse to graduate from the Army’s elite Ranger Course

7. Will new child care plans help these Army Special Forces families?

8. Wearable tactical gateway developed for USSOCOM by Viasat

9. Decoding Trump’s Foreign Policy (interview with Elbridge Colby)

10. Trump splits with GOP lawmakers on national security, raising alarm

11. Waging the Wrong War in Yemen

12. The Limits of a U.S.-Saudi Security Deal

13. How the historic Russia-West prisoner swap happened: Secret talks, a hitman and Biden's fateful call

14. 18th Airborne at center of major Pacific exercise for the first time

15. DoD 'exploring' options for nuclear buildup as part of strategic review

16. Historic Prisoner Swap Marks a Win for Biden’s Focus on Alliances

17. RIMPAC ends summer-long run that featured sinking of 2 former warships

18. Pentagon renews $16.5 million contract to support Japan’s command-and-control network

19. Top U.S. special ops units held a major exercise off Alaska, 45 miles from Russia

20. Opinion Coming home after being a hostage abroadOpinion Coming home after being a hostage abroad

21. Biden team blows off deadline for Ukraine war strategy

22. Shifting the U.S.-Japan Alliance from Coordination to Integration

1. Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich

An excellent read. Obviously the Wall Street Journal has been developing this very long read for a long time wiring for this very happy moment to publish it.

It is great to see our friend and Special Forces brother recognized for his outstanding behind the scenes work.

Working for both Trump and Biden (and rarely meeting either) I would describe Roger as a non-partisan professional despite being a political appointee. We need more like him in government regardless of who is the President.

Excerpts:

In Washington, Gershkovich’s arrest had landed on President Biden’s daily brief while analysts at the CIA headquarters ran an “equities check” to be sure that he wasn’t somehow working for the U.S. government.

It quickly came back negative, and within two weeks Gershkovich was officially listed as “wrongfully detained.” That opened the door for a little-known federal entity to take his case, offering access to a network of government structures meant to quietly resolve kidnapping crises. 

A man with the title of special presidential envoy for hostage affairs met Ella at a Philadelphia restaurant, welcoming her to the “tragic community” of families he served. Roger Carstens was a former Green Beret lieutenant colonel who’d appeared in a reality TV show before being appointed by President Trump. He told her of the faraway countries where he had freed hostages, finding ways to trade prisoners, lift sanctions, or drop prosecutions in return. His enthusiasm for retrieving U.S. citizens, even at steep costs, proved so popular among families of missing Americans that they persuaded President Biden to keep him on.

A veteran of six wars, Carstens would remove his glasses when talking to prisoners’ families to wipe away tears before quoting passages from the Bible or ancient Greek texts he thought spoke to the pain of hostage-taking. He liked to say he “only hired optimists.” His admirers—drawn to his ardor for the job—and detractors—who considered him a bit of a showboat—both referred to him by the same nickname: “Captain America.” 

Studying Carstens as he pledged to move heaven and earth to retrieve her son, Ella intuited that he held little authority at the highest level and no swift solution. Ella dialed other Americans who’d made it home from Russia. Griner wasn’t available but the basketball player’s agent was. She learned Carstens rarely met the president, and had to work in the margins to advance ideas. Instead, her son’s file, wrapped up with Russian affairs, would be tightly controlled by Jake Sullivan, a more cautious and calculating career policymaker, a contrast in personalities she would have to navigate.

The youngest national security adviser since the Camelot cabinet of John F. Kennedy, Sullivan had quietly become the most powerful holder of the role since Henry Kissinger. A policy prodigy who’d won the Rhodes, Marshall and Truman scholarships, the 47-year-old only somewhat facetiously called himself “the most rational man on the planet.” Hillary Clinton, who read a Bible verse at his wedding, called him a “once-in-a-generation talent.” 

Carefully measuring the weight of each word, he could debate the minutiae of Chinese biotechnology subsidies or Iran sanctions, while dissecting Ukraine’s ongoing battle in Bakhmut down to the city block. On his otherwise bare desk, he kept buttons and postcards from the families of Americans held wrongfully overseas, and several mediators working with him to free them came away impressed by how deeply, if dispassionately, he knew each case. Yet they also used the same phrase to describe a frequent hitch in his decision-making: “paralysis by analysis.”

Sullivan regularly carved out time to decode the moral calculus of negotiating with kidnappers and countries that behaved like them—none so complicated as Russia. The puzzle would be to free Gershkovich, honoring the president’s duty toward an unlawfully detained American, without encouraging autocrats to grab some other reporter, somewhere. For now, the White House would send the Kremlin a straightforward message: Gershkovich was not a spy and must be released immediately. 

Inside the Secret Negotiations to Free Evan Gershkovich

The effort to bring home The Wall Street Journal reporter and others unfolded on three continents, involving spy agencies, billionaires, political power players and his fiercest advocate—his mother

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/evan-gershkovich-prisoner-exchange-ccb39ad3

By Joe ParkinsonFollow, Drew HinshawFollow, Bojan PancevskiFollow and Aruna ViswanathaFollow | Illustrations by Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ

Aug. 1, 2024 11:21 am ET

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Evan Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, arrived for an urgent 10:30 a.m. meeting at the White House with President Biden on Thursday, the 491st day of her son’s detention. She had been told to bring her husband Mikhail and her daughter Danielle in a three-minute call that ended with a strict instruction: Tell no one.

Five thousand miles away, Evan Gershkovich was in his final hours in Russia’s custody, aboard a Tupolev-204 government jet bound for a Turkish airport where orange-vested security personnel were waiting nervously. The Wall Street Journal reporter, 32 years old, had been documenting Russia’s descent into repression when agents grabbed him from a steakhouse and turned him into the story he’d been trying to cover. Now he was set to be a central component in one of the most complicated prisoner swaps in history.

Across Europe, planes were ferrying the other human pieces of a fragile puzzle: among them, two other Americans and eight Russians who had together served decades in political prisons and penal colonies. They ranged from hardened dissidents who had braved poisoning and hunger strikes to ordinary Americans who found themselves reduced to bargaining chips in a yearslong geopolitical tug of war with Vladimir Putin.

The price for their freedom was being flown in handcuffs and a bulletproof helmet from Germany on a Gulfstream jet, landing near the Turkish VIP terminal where Russia would collect him. Vadim Krasikov was a professional hit man who had gunned down an exile in broad daylight in a Berlin park. He was the man the Russian president wanted to bring home. 

“The Russian Federation will not leave me to rot in jail,” the murderer once told a guard.

For 16 months, Ella Milman had studied the assassin’s case, daunted that such a man could be the key to unlocking her son’s freedom. She was one of an extraordinary cast of characters who worked in the shadows to advance the swap. Her son’s fate rested not just on messages ferried by diplomats and spies, but years of secret interventions drawn from the ranks of prime-time TV hosts, Silicon Valley billionaires and Russian oligarchs. An unlikely duo of Tucker Carlson and Hillary Clinton had each played walk-on roles to propel talks forward.

Evan Gershkovich’s parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich, at The Wall Street Journal’s offices in New York. Photo: Natalie Keyssar for WSJ

Gershkovich stands in an enclosure for defendants at a court hearing in Moscow to consider an appeal against his pretrial detention on espionage charges last October. Photo: Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters

At the center of the struggle were the U.S. and Germany, two allies grappling with the moral and strategic calculus of freeing guilty prisoners to bring their innocent citizens home. If the U.S. once claimed a “no concessions” policy, that principle has been steadily eroded by one precedent after the next. To respond to Putin and other hostage-taking autocrats, the State Department staffed an entire office of roughly two dozen personnel, led by a former Green Beret who jetted around Europe and the Middle East to explore prisoner trades that might free Gershkovich and others.

Somehow along the way, a mother living in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia found herself stuck between the two most powerful governments in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance, ferrying messages that she hoped could free her son. 

While Gershkovich was just released on Thursday morning, the Journal has been reporting on his fate from the moment he was seized. This account is based on more than a year of interviews with dozens of U.S., Russian, European and Middle Eastern national security officials, diplomats, spies, and prisoners’ families. Reporters reviewed classified Russian legal documents, security camera footage from arrests and unpublished photos of previous prisoner swaps to identify key players in the drama. A Journal reporter was on-site in Ankara to watch as Gershkovich stepped out into freedom.

Journal reporters were also, unavoidably, part of the story, followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington and, in one case, summoned for questioning by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. Reporters crisscrossed Western capitals, sitting with intelligence officials who insisted that no electronic devices be brought into the meetings and in some cases, communicating through handwritten notes to avoid leaving a data trail. 

The newspaper had, in fact, been investigating the story of Russia’s hostage-taking spree since early 2023, when its Russia correspondent Evan Gershkovich encouraged his colleagues to investigate Putin’s brazen strategy of seizing Americans on spurious charges and trading them as hostages. “It’s totally undercovered,” he said then.

‘Have you been in touch with Evan?’

Evan Gershkovich’s phone had stopped pinging. 

His colleagues hadn’t heard from him since the morning, when he arrived in Yekaterinburg, east of the Urals. It was March 29, 2023, and he was there to interview a source about Russia’s astonishing pace in refurbishing tanks bound for Ukraine. They planned to meet at the Bukowski Grill, off Lenin Avenue, by 4 p.m.

Russia’s defense production was a topic pro-government newscasters had reported openly, with pride, as their country defied foreign sanctions to rev up a war economy. But in Putin’s 23rd year in charge, new threats to the international press were emerging.

Weeks earlier, a reporter friend of Gershkovich from another news organization had sat statue-still in a Moscow flat, the lights out, waiting for a police team banging on the door to leave. A few hours later, a lawyer helped the reporter slip out of Russia. It was, in hindsight, a warning shot.

“Hey buddy, good luck today,” a colleague had messaged Gershkovich the morning he arrived in Yekaterinburg.

“Thanks brotha,” replied Gershkovich. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

The American son of Soviet Jewish exiles, the reporter was flourishing in the land his parents had fled. A cook for a catering company inspired by Anthony Bourdain to chase the life of a roving correspondent, he arrived in 2017 to a Russian capital still open to inquisitive foreigners. The New Jersey native known to his Russian friends as “Vanya” sought out its dive bars and pop-up restaurants, soaking up stories and jumping at any chance to explore Russia’s 6.6 million square miles.

He had camped with firefighters for four days near a raging Siberian wildfire—long after other reporters had jetted back to Moscow—telling friends, “I just want to get the story right.” At night, he practiced typing then recrafting the first paragraph, or lede, of news stories, a routine he referred to as “doing reps.” He wore baggy faded bluejeans to news conferences and charmed suited ministers who weren’t accustomed to being addressed in the informal, colloquial Russian Gershkovich had spoken since childhood.

Gershkovich, right, in September 2019 in Moscow with Polina Ivanova, a Financial Times correspondent and Pjotr Sauer, a reporter for the Guardian. Photo: Francesca Ebel

But as the war in Ukraine unfolded, officials turned hostile, friends fled, and sources he had known were being jailed. Unidentified men had followed him through the streets as he churned out front-page scoops that challenged the Kremlin’s official narrative of the Ukraine invasion. Still, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs kept renewing his press cards and three-month visas with no complaint. The trip to Yekaterinburg, his second in a month, was meant to be short.

That evening, his phone was still off.

“Have you been in touch with Evan?” a Journal reporter texted a security manager at 10:12 p.m. Yekaterinburg time, 1:12 p.m. in Washington.

From London, New York and Warsaw, Journal staff logged on to video calls and dialed up contacts in Yekaterinburg and Moscow. Another notified the paper’s publisher, Almar Latour, who was touring Robben Island, the Alcatraz-style jail off Cape Town where Nelson Mandela served 18 years in prison. One reporter managed to reach Gershkovich’s driver, who stopped by the apartment he had booked, but found only dark windows: “Let’s hope for the best,” he said. Another repeatedly called a local journalist Gershkovich had hired to help arrange some interviews, who now appeared to be drunk and mumbling.

As midnight passed in Moscow, the Journal called government contacts in Washington, sending notes to the State Department and the White House. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken called back, he pledged, “We will get him back.”

Meanwhile, the paper had to inform his mother, Ella. At 6:16 p.m. at her home in Philadelphia, she got a text from Managing Editor Liz Harris asking her to call. Her son, Harris said, was missing.

Ella was in shock: “What do I do?” she asked.

Soon, her instincts took hold. A skeptical and intuitive mother of two raised in Soviet Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—Ella began scrolling through Russian and American news sources for clues on what had happened to him. He had been charged with espionage, she read, as the news broke around 3 a.m. She learned her son had last been seen at a restaurant 900 miles east of Moscow.

Thumbing out a message to the managing editor, she asked: “Can you give the name of the restaurant please.”

Inside the operation to seize Gershkovich

Over an encrypted video link, Vladimir Putin was also taking a call.

The mustachioed head of the First Service of Russia’s FSB security agency, Gen. Vladislav Menschikov, was briefing the president on Gershkovich’s arrest, down to the minor details. 

Menschikov had once been in charge of Putin’s nuclear bunkers, but now ran the sprawling FSB division that included the Department for Counter Intelligence Operations, or DKRO, a secretive unit that surveilled Americans and had led the operation to seize Gershkovich. Its officers would send up intel on exactly which stories foreign reporters were pursuing, compiled into memos for Putin marked “Personal, Secret,” that described unflattering articles as “anti-Russian actions” orchestrated by Washington. Days earlier, Menschikov had given Putin a briefing on the plan to arrest Gershkovich. Now the president wanted to know how his security services had performed.

The Russian president was raising the stakes in a geopolitical poker game he believed the Americans started. In 2008, in a Bangkok hotel suite, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sent informants posing as Colombian terrorists to buy surface-to-air missiles from Viktor Bout, an arms trafficker with alleged links to Russia’s security services immortalized in the Nicolas Cage film “Lord of War.” The informants explained the missiles would be useful for shooting down U.S. helicopters. When he agreed to the sale, agents burst in to arrest him. In 2010, the DEA conducted another sting to arrest a former Russian air force pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko, this time using informants in Liberia who were working with him to smuggle cocaine.

To the DEA, these were successful arrests of dangerous criminals in keeping with the new post-9/11 imperative to snuff out transnational threats. Putin felt Bout and Yaroshenko had been entrapped by a superpower without jurisdiction to arrest Russians in faraway Asia or Africa. Russian diplomats called for their release but were rebuffed by the administrations of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. 

Putin, a former KGB officer and FSB director himself steeped in the dark arts of entrapment, revealed his response in 2018. The FSB arrested Paul Whelan, a former Marine visiting Moscow for a friend’s wedding, and charged him with espionage, which the Michigan native and his government both denied. If America wanted Whelan home, it should free Bout, Putin’s foreign-policy adviser told a U.S. ambassador days later. When the Trump administration balked, Russian police struck again eight months later, arresting another former Marine, Trevor Reed, on assault charges that both he and the U.S. government denied. Reed had once served on Vice President Biden’s Camp David protective guard.

When Biden became president, Putin met him by the fireplace of a lakeside Geneva mansion and proposed the two sides’ intelligence services create a channel to explore prisoner trades—a throwback to the Cold War, and a way to circumvent the State Department diplomats Russians found preachy. Biden, eager to free Americans and ease tensions with Russia, agreed. Even as Putin invaded Ukraine just months later, negotiations in that channel led to the trading of Reed for Yaroshenko, and later Bout for Brittney Griner, a WNBA star caught at Moscow airport in early 2022 with vape cartridges containing less than a gram of medically prescribed hash oil, illegal in Russia. 

From left, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, President Biden, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the U.S.-Russia summit in Geneva in 2021. Photo: Denis Balibouse/Associated Press

Grabbing Americans, Putin had proved, freed Russians. And there was another prisoner Putin wanted, a 58-year-old serving a life sentence in Germany. 

Vadim Krasikov’s crime was murder.

Since 2021, Putin had been pushing his national security council officials on secure video calls to bring back the aging veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war. The two of them had been so close that they visited a gun range together. Putin “shoots well,” Krasikov had told his family.

The president seemed so loyal to the twice-married father of three that Western intelligence officials speculated that he had been Putin’s personal bodyguard; close Russia analysts suspected their ties dated back to the president’s time as deputy mayor of mafia-plagued St. Petersburg. Dressed in designer clothes, Krasikov earned $10,000 monthly, plus bonuses for what he told his family were business trips. His wife, housed in an upscale Moscow flat, complained to family members that he bought Porsches and BMWs so frequently that she never had time to get accustomed to driving them. He washed his hands compulsively and manicured his nails. 

In 2019, Krasikov had slipped into Berlin using a Russian passport for “Vadim Sokolov.” Then, in broad daylight, as dozens of park goers, servers and diners at a nearby restaurant watched, he fatally shot a rebel exile near a playground. Arrested while trying to change out of a wig and flee on an electric scooter, the bald and goateed gunman hardly spoke a word throughout his entire murder trial. He didn’t even tell investigators his name, which remained a secret until a Bulgarian investigative journalist named Christo Grozev helped uncover it.

The killer acted on his own, Putin would later suggest, “due to patriotic sentiments.”

In 2022, Russia had offered to free Whelan, the former Marine, if America would get Germany to give up Krasikov. The White House had notified Berlin of the idea, but neither government was eager to free a professional killer for an ordinary American prisoner. It was, on the surface, an inconceivable demand. But in March, two weeks before Evan’s arrest, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov told CIA Director William Burns that Putin remained intent on trading Krasikov for Whelan. Days later, Gershkovich himself texted a colleague: “They keep stupidly asking for him,” he wrote. “The Germans obviously won’t go for that.”

And yet Russia’s president was convinced otherwise. A young Putin had served in Dresden with the KGB, when West Germany was still an American satellite. Now at the pinnacle of his power, he had never reconciled himself to the notion that unified Germany, Europe’s powerhouse, couldn’t be swayed by U.S. pressure. 

If the Biden administration wouldn’t exchange Krasikov for Whelan, then perhaps they would for the correspondent of a major U.S. newspaper.

Seeking help from ‘the most rational man on the planet’

Ella hadn’t slept for days, receiving so many calls she’d lost her voice, while incessantly googling the case of the first foreign reporter charged with espionage since the Cold War. Her son was now facing up to 20 years in prison. With her husband Mikhail, she was reading everything she could about the cases of former Marine Paul Whelan, still in a jail somewhere east of Moscow, and basketball player Brittney Griner, who had been traded for an arms dealer. She started to log her meetings and the contacts of people who might help her in a green reportorial notebook. In her research, she noticed the name of a convicted murderer in Berlin who seemed to be close to Vladimir Putin. Had Evan been taken to try to bring him back? 

Raised in the same Leningrad as Putin, around the same time, Ella was raised by a Jewish mother who had treated Holocaust survivors as a wartime nurse in Poland. Her father, a Soviet army medic, had reached Berlin in 1945. As a girl, she’d noticed her mother never cried, and when her father died young, found a way to game the arcane Soviet housing system to keep the family apartment. Now Ella would have to show the same resolve and ingenuity if she was going to help her son.

In Washington, Gershkovich’s arrest had landed on President Biden’s daily brief while analysts at the CIA headquarters ran an “equities check” to be sure that he wasn’t somehow working for the U.S. government.

It quickly came back negative, and within two weeks Gershkovich was officially listed as “wrongfully detained.” That opened the door for a little-known federal entity to take his case, offering access to a network of government structures meant to quietly resolve kidnapping crises. 

A man with the title of special presidential envoy for hostage affairs met Ella at a Philadelphia restaurant, welcoming her to the “tragic community” of families he served. Roger Carstens was a former Green Beret lieutenant colonel who’d appeared in a reality TV show before being appointed by President Trump. He told her of the faraway countries where he had freed hostages, finding ways to trade prisoners, lift sanctions, or drop prosecutions in return. His enthusiasm for retrieving U.S. citizens, even at steep costs, proved so popular among families of missing Americans that they persuaded President Biden to keep him on.

Roger Carstens in the family room of the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. Photo: Kent Nishimura for WSJ

A veteran of six wars, Carstens would remove his glasses when talking to prisoners’ families to wipe away tears before quoting passages from the Bible or ancient Greek texts he thought spoke to the pain of hostage-taking. He liked to say he “only hired optimists.” His admirers—drawn to his ardor for the job—and detractors—who considered him a bit of a showboat—both referred to him by the same nickname: “Captain America.” 

Studying Carstens as he pledged to move heaven and earth to retrieve her son, Ella intuited that he held little authority at the highest level and no swift solution. Ella dialed other Americans who’d made it home from Russia. Griner wasn’t available but the basketball player’s agent was. She learned Carstens rarely met the president, and had to work in the margins to advance ideas. Instead, her son’s file, wrapped up with Russian affairs, would be tightly controlled by Jake Sullivan, a more cautious and calculating career policymaker, a contrast in personalities she would have to navigate.

The youngest national security adviser since the Camelot cabinet of John F. Kennedy, Sullivan had quietly become the most powerful holder of the role since Henry Kissinger. A policy prodigy who’d won the Rhodes, Marshall and Truman scholarships, the 47-year-old only somewhat facetiously called himself “the most rational man on the planet.” Hillary Clinton, who read a Bible verse at his wedding, called him a “once-in-a-generation talent.” 

Carefully measuring the weight of each word, he could debate the minutiae of Chinese biotechnology subsidies or Iran sanctions, while dissecting Ukraine’s ongoing battle in Bakhmut down to the city block. On his otherwise bare desk, he kept buttons and postcards from the families of Americans held wrongfully overseas, and several mediators working with him to free them came away impressed by how deeply, if dispassionately, he knew each case. Yet they also used the same phrase to describe a frequent hitch in his decision-making: “paralysis by analysis.”

Sullivan regularly carved out time to decode the moral calculus of negotiating with kidnappers and countries that behaved like them—none so complicated as Russia. The puzzle would be to free Gershkovich, honoring the president’s duty toward an unlawfully detained American, without encouraging autocrats to grab some other reporter, somewhere. For now, the White House would send the Kremlin a straightforward message: Gershkovich was not a spy and must be released immediately. 

A Navalny strategy takes shape

Carstens that month stepped into a Georgetown restaurant, the reservation discreetly booked under another name, to meet an unusual guest proposing an alternative path forward: Christo Grozev, the Bulgarian journalist who had revealed Krasikov’s identity after the Berlin murder. The soft-spoken 55-year-old was one of the world’s leading investigators of Russian clandestine operators. Often, the evidence he plumbed to track their movements was hiding in plain sight, including the photos they clumsily left on social media, or in bulk-purchased smartphone data normally sold to advertisers. This way, he had unmasked so many agents that intelligence services in Vienna, his home of over 20 years, said they couldn’t protect him. Wanted in Russia, but residing in America, he was guarded by Austria’s elite Cobra forces and transported in an armored car whenever he visited Vienna to see his wife and children. Visiting the country of his birth, he wouldn’t even leave the airport.

Pulling out a cocktail napkin, the journalist jotted Carstens a two-column list of Russian prisoners who the U.S. could trade for Gershkovich and Whelan, the incarcerated Marine. But these low-ranking Russian nobodies would be decorative adornments tacked onto the big ticket exchange that Grozev had been championing for a year. The German government would release the hit man Krasikov, in return for one of Grozev’s dearest friends, Russia’s most famous dissident: Alexei Navalny. 

Weeks earlier, Grozev had accepted a best documentary Oscar, for “Navalny,” as the celebrity crowd cheered wildly. Navalny’s life was the stuff of Hollywood legend: a protest leader slowly dying in a Siberian prison. Navalny had dared to uncover Putin’s personal wealth, the corruption at the heart of the regime. He’d identified Putin’s secret, $1.2 billion palace on the Black Sea coast, in a riveting YouTube video seen by more than a quarter of all Russian adults. Putin loathed him.

Tall and handsome with bright blue eyes, Navalny was a folk hero in Germany, whose government had helped him leave Russia, saving his life in 2020, after a nerve-agent poisoning left him in a coma. Berlin, Grozev explained, was open to freeing Krasikov in return for this death-defying dissident. The other Russian prisoners on the napkin—of no particular importance—could be bundled with imprisoned Americans into one big deal.

The problem, in Grozev’s telling, was that the U.S. and Germany were both more willing to press ahead with this morally complex trade than the other fully appreciated. He had helped persuade Hillary Clinton to lobby the German government, to articulate the possibility of a deal. But a year had passed since then. Shortly after Gershkovich’s arrest, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt had spoken to President Biden and explained that Germany would be amenable to a possible prisoner exchange for Navalny. There was a pathway, Grozev told Carstens, who would relay the idea to Blinken and Sullivan. But it would be fraught with misgivings in Washington and Berlin at the thought of freeing a professional killer. They would have to devise ways to advance it informally.

A Berlin police photo of Vadim Krasikov; forensic experts gathering evidence at the spot where Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was killed in Berlin on Aug. 23, 2019.

Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

Sullivan, the national security adviser, had also reached out to his Berlin counterpart, Jens Plötner, to discuss the Navalny idea, which Plötner warned was a complicated ask. The country’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, was aghast at the precedent of freeing a career murderer sent by Putin to kill an exile in a country that prided itself on providing safe haven to refugees. Justice, intelligence, and law-enforcement officials shared her revulsion. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s polling numbers were low, inflation was high, and his coalition was weak. But Plötner pledged to take it up to Scholz.

The chancellor discussed it that month with top aides, in the office where he kept a framed congratulatory letter from President Biden. There were no phones, laptops or smartwatches allowed: The Russians had perched a nest of electronic surveillance systems on the roof of their Stalin-era embassy nearby, which looked directly down onto his spartan workplace. 

Freeing Krasikov for Navalny would be politically difficult, Scholz said, but possible and for him, personal. Scholz had gone to shake the hand of the dissident in 2020, back when the nerve agent survivor was still learning to speak and walk again yet already vowing to return to Russia to contest Putin. Scholz had become emotional afterward, telling an aide that Navalny was “a man of immense courage.”

Releasing Krasikov, however, would mean overriding the legal opinion drafted by his own government lawyers arguing against a swap. What Berlin needed was political cover—for America, the superpower that protected Germany, to submit an official request. Meanwhile, to preserve their bargaining strength, Russia couldn’t know how open the chancellor was to freeing Putin’s hit man.

That same month, Scholz’s chief of staff, Wolfgang Schmidt, met a group of Journal reporters and editors, at an office about a mile from the murder site, and relayed the message. “It may not be easy for us, but it’s possible,” he said.

How to survive in a Russian prison

Gershkovich’s first letter arrived in April, running two pages, in handwritten Russian.

“Mom…I am trying to write. Maybe, finally, I am going to write something good.” 

He signed off: “Until we meet soon. Write me.”

The reporter was spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in a 9-foot-by-12 foot cell in the infamous jail where Stalin’s henchman once tortured thousands of enemies of the state. Set in a pastel yellow complex off a leafy street on Moscow’s outskirts, Lefortovo was run by the FSB and designed to make its inmates feel entirely alone. Its sterile corridors were unnervingly quiet save for the echo of slamming cell doors and the jangling of guards’ keys. 

Barred from seeing U.S. Embassy officials, Gershkovich maintained contact with the outside world from letters that arrived after passing through censors. Friends were writing to keep his spirits up and sending him care packages with some of the things he didn’t have: dried food, coffee and sugar. A journalist who had been detained in Africa wrote with some tips the former cook quickly adopted: never eat rotten food, establish a routine, look after your body, and keep your space immaculately clean.

When not in his cell, Gershkovich was called to the interrogation room of chief investigator Alexei Khizhnyak, the same FSB interrogator who had once questioned the former Marine, Whelan. Khizhnyak faced prisoners across a T-shaped wooden table, in a room watched over by Che Guevara, Soviet security services’ founder Felix Dzerzhinsky and two portraits of Vladimir Putin. Whelan had said during his pretrial investigation that Khizhnyak had threatened to kill him and asked for him to be taken off the case, a request that was denied. 

But as their interrogations stretched for hours, Gershkovich learned that Khizhnyak also shared his passion for soccer and literature. The interrogator was a fan of English Premier League club Liverpool, while Gershkovich, a high school state soccer champion, supported rival club Arsenal. Gershkovich was reading “Life and Fate,” the World War II epic by Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman, and Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” followed by dozens of other books, which he and Khizhnyak discussed. He was determined to leave prison a better writer than he’d arrived. 

Gershkovich at a court hearing in Moscow in April 2023. Photo: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA/Shutterstock

Ella was writing weekly letters to Evan, recounting the history of a family that had survived the Russian Civil War, World War II, Soviet antisemitism—“and now this is our turn,” she wrote. In April of last year she had rushed up to President Biden at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and grabbed his hands before imploring him: “You are the only one who can bring my boy home.”

Appearing on “Good Morning America,” she recalled Evan joking that Russian prison gruel reminded him of the porridge she’d raised him on. She was worried he was reading too many dark and voluminous tomes drawn from Russia’s tragic past, and suggested he swap out the Stalin-era literature for lighter reads.

In June, Ella and her husband Mikhail traveled to Moscow to attend her son’s appeal hearing, ignoring the advice of the FBI that they might also be arrested. The court camera captured a brief conversation: mother standing next to her son in the glass cage, Gershkovich tilting his head in laughter as she admonished him to be more careful in what he was writing in his letters. “He was making fun of me. It is always his way,” she said.

Like his mother, Gershkovich was building a wall to cope with his ordeal, but as she studied him she could also see he was pacing in the cage, biting his lip and full of nervous energy.

To attest to her son’s good character, Ella, who’d grown up hearing haunting stories of the Soviet secret services, agreed to be interrogated. Alone in the waiting room, she could see people were watching her behind a tinted pane of glass. She saw a cat in the corridor, confiscated, she was told, from a woman jailed for supporting Ukraine. She was escorted to the office of her son’s interrogator, Khizhnyak, who was sitting behind a T-shaped table. Ella had pinned a large badge on her green cardigan: “Free Evan.”

Khizhnyak began with pro forma questions: 

“Do you have any head injuries? Are you taking medication?”

Over four hours and 15 minutes, he moved onto Gershkovich’s background. The reporter was working for the U.S. government, he said. He was recruited as a spy at university, he added. No he wasn’t, Ella retorted. Was her son a homosexual? Why didn’t she know the name of his girlfriend? It felt, she later said, “totally bizarre.”

At one point, Ella was distracted by a smell she hadn’t detected for about 40 years, the waft of a cabbage soup popular during Soviet times when rationing was still in force. “Is that Shchi?” she asked. It was, Khizhnyak confirmed. That was her son’s lunch.

When Ella emerged from the prison, Mikhail said she’d been so long he was worried she’d been arrested. 

Before their flight back to the U.S. from Moscow, the couple was stopped, then asked to turn in their passports. Their Russian visas were being annulled. 

An immigration official dismissed them with a wave of the hand: “Go to New York.” 

Ella meets the German chancellor

The campaign to free Gershkovich appeared to be firing on all cylinders. His face looked down from a 10-story digital billboard on Times Square and banners at the stadiums of the New York Mets and Arsenal. In the Senate, leaders from both parties had demanded his release, backed by parliaments in the U.K. and continental Europe. Blinken had shown Ella a list in his jacket pocket, of Americans color-coded black for those still jailed and red for those retrieved. 

“Free Evan,” read pins on the blazers of reporters across the U.S. and Europe.

Yet so far, more Americans were vanishing into Russian jails than coming home. In June, Russia took two more U.S. citizens, including another journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor at Radio Free Europe, later charged with spreading “false information” about Russia’s military. Biden weighed in the next month, telling reporters “I’m serious about a prisoner exchange, I’m serious about doing all we can to free Americans being illegally held in Russia or anywhere else.” 

In Philadelphia, Ella and her husband Mikhail were regularly stepping out to neighborhood restaurants to strategize with the Journal’s legal and executive team. By late summer, Ella had built up a contact network of sympathetic sources in the government. One Justice Department official had opened up to her after she’d sat down next to him on a train and asked for help. Another source kept her apprised when Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, took a meeting regarding her son. In prison letters, mother and son traded Kremlinology, using a coded nickname for the hit man Krasikov: “the German.” The Journal’s general counsel, who now turned to her for info, dubbed her “Ella the Reporter.” 

Seeing her as an obvious asset, Journal leaders encouraged her networking. In September, Latour, the Journal’s publisher, helped her access the Very Very Important Persons section at a gala dinner at Cipriani in Manhattan thrown by the Atlantic Council think tank, where he was a board member. Her plan was to buttonhole Germany’s ambassador to Washington, but as she swiped through Google Image results to be sure she’d recognize him, she looked up to see Scholz himself.

The chancellor was hobnobbing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. As he stepped aside, Ella walked up and pleaded for help freeing her son, Scholz understood immediately who she was, but had to quickly leave.

“We are helping. We are doing something,” he replied. The brief meeting left her confused about what was happening behind the scenes. She relayed the encounter to Carstens’s office. The special envoy, in turn, asked Grozev, the Bulgarian journalist, for the email address to Scholz’s chief of staff. Carstens had been asked to hold off on contacting Berlin, but he spoke German, had lived there and wasn’t always inclined to obey orders. He connected to the chancellery, which said a deal was possible. It would require a formal request. Carstens fed that up to Blinken. 

In October, Sullivan, the national security adviser, called Plötner, his German counterpart. There was still no consensus in the German government, as Germany’s foreign minister and other government departments remained apprehensive. Berlin was hoping a formal, legal request from the U.S. would break the deadlock.

Meanwhile, the White House tried to see if Russia would accept a bundle of Russians convicted of nonviolent charges. The problem was, the U.S. penitentiary system was holding very few Russians the Kremlin might conceivably want. At one point, Carstens’s staff, scrounging for stock to trade, became so desperate that they haphazardly searched for Russian names on PACER, a publicly-available database of federal court records. Swept up onto the list: a U.S. citizen with a Russian-sounding name, who was only removed when an official pointed out the U.S. couldn’t send its own citizens to Russia.

In November, Washington offered the Kremlin four undercover operatives for Russia’s military and foreign intelligence agencies, held in Europe: so-called “illegals” who spent years creating a legend, or false identity. Two of them had been arrested in the tiny Alpine nation of Slovenia living as “Maria and Ludwig,” on false Argentine passports, who spoke to their children, and each other, in Spanish. In their suburban home, police found hundreds of thousands of euros in a hidden refrigerator compartment and specialized computer hardware to communicate securely with Moscow. 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, center, prepares to make a press statement after meeting with President Biden in the Oval Office in February. Photo: Michael Kappeler/Zuma Press

There was a third—a Russian military intelligence officer using the identity of a Brazilian academic called “Jose”—in Norway. Poland had arrested the fourth, born in Moscow with a Spanish passport, on espionage charges near the Ukraine border.

Washington’s offer, meant to keep talks going, left Moscow frustrated. A prominent Russian intelligence officer backchannelled in texts to Grozev to ask why they couldn’t just trade Gershkovich for Krasikov? Russia had already decided to sentence him to 16 years, why not plead guilty and be swapped? 

To Ella, Washington’s proposals were unserious. She decided to go on Fox News and throw a hand grenade.

“It’s been 250 days and Evan is not here, and the effort to do whatever it takes hasn’t been done,” she said in a slow, deliberate sound bite she’d rehearsed in her head. 

Carstens, the special envoy, applauded the move and said he would show it to other families as an example of how to pressure the White House. But, to some in the administration, the interview was received as friendly fire. That afternoon, a State Department spokesman broke the secrecy around prisoner talks and told reporters that the U.S. had sent Russia “a number of proposals” for Gershkovich, none of them accepted. The Russians, who insisted such talks take place beyond public scrutiny, recoiled at the breach of protocol.

Ella had wanted to try to shake something loose, but scrolling through Russian media, she feared she had caused the talks to collapse. 

”The U.S. government has literally turned on a kind of megaphone,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry complained days later. “The U.S. campaign in support of Gershkovich is literally drowning and discrediting him.” 

Putin names his price

Staring out into an auditorium packed with reporters, his shoulders slouched, Putin was about to signal publicly the same demand he had been reiterating privately since 2021: He wanted his hit man back.

Hundreds of journalists were waving placards in the air in the hopes of being called on. The president, who had rarely taken questions since invading Ukraine two years earlier, was finally facing the press at a December year-end conference. Though the moderator promised “a direct, honest, and open conversation,” the Kremlin had screened and approved the overwhelmingly flattering questions in advance. A New York Times reporter and friend of Gershkovich managed to get in an unscreened question: Why hadn’t Evan been freed?

Putin began his response by saying he didn’t know details of the journalist whose arrest he’d ordered on a video call months earlier—“your colleague was from an Austrian agency?”—before delivering a cryptic message, aimed at the Biden administration.

“I hope that we will find a solution,” he said. “But I repeat, the American side must hear us and make an appropriate decision. One that suits the Russian side as well.”

The subtext was clearly received in Berlin and Washington. When Sullivan again asked his German counterpart if Krasikov could be put on the table, he received word: not yet. But in Berlin, Scholz started moving pieces into place, telling cabinet members that he would, eventually, receive a formal request from America to discuss a trade involving Krasikov, and whatever their misgivings, he would take responsibility. Germany’s foreign minister Baerbock worried freeing Krasikov would invite Putin and every autocrat who admired him to snatch more hostages—but Blinken was speaking to her at length to persuade her of the moral logic. 

In January, Ella flew into the World Economic Forum in Davos to meet Schmidt, Chancellor Scholz’s chief of staff, to ask for help: “You have the key,” she said. Schmidt was quiet, then pledged to help. That same day, Scholz and Biden spoke by phone about a meeting, to discuss the matter, in the White House. By Feb. 2, the train was in motion.

“For you, I will do this,” Scholz told Biden.

Just as Berlin and Washington outlined how a deal would work, Moscow was dealing with an unexpected new interlocutor, Tucker Carlson. 

The former Fox News host was hammering out terms for an interview with Putin for his new straight-to-social-media talk show. Carlson told the president’s aides that he planned to request Putin free Gershkovich on the spot, during the interview. If all went well, he would take Evan home on his flight. An official close to Putin told the TV host it would be a “great idea” and could generate a positive response.

Near the end of his two-hour conversation, Carlson pushed his point: “This guy is obviously not a spy, he’s just a kid.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin is interviewed by Tucker Carlson in Moscow in February. Photo: Sputnik/Reuters

“He’s being held hostage in exchange…Maybe it degrades Russia to do that.”

Putin demurred, then specified publicly for the first time the person he wanted in return: “a person serving a sentence in an allied country of the U.S.,” he said, leaning forward with an eyebrow arched.

After the interview, as Putin led Carlson on a tour of the Kremlin that stretched near midnight, the TV commentator returned their conversation to Gershkovich: “Why are you doing this?…It’s hurting you.”

Putin complained the problem lay in Washington. Russia had made its demand for the reporter clear, he said. Putin lamented that America didn’t do more to bring home its alleged spies.

The same day the interview aired, chalking up 200 million views, Scholz flew into Washington, heading straight to the Oval Office, with no notetakers and no aides. At the end of an hourlong meeting with Biden, the leaders formally agreed: Their countries would explore Krasikov as the centerpiece of a deal that would free numerous prisoners, including Navalny, Gershkovich, and the former Marine Whelan. Russia would get its spies held in Slovenia and Norway.

Word of the Navalny idea had already reached Putin, months earlier. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had been asking to see Carstens, although the special envoy had been discouraged from taking the meeting. When both men found themselves in Tel Aviv after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, they met and Carstens broached the idea of a larger trade involving Navalny. 

A couple of weeks after that meeting, Abramovich messaged with a surprising response: Putin was open. Carstens told the White House, which asked him to stop dealing with Russia cases.

On Feb. 16, heads of government, top security advisers, and intelligence chiefs from the U.S. and its NATO allies were arriving to the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering in the Bavarian city. Vice President Kamala Harris would brief the Slovenian officials involved in the still-nascent deal. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray, also briefed on the coming trade, would hold talks with intelligence chiefs from across the West. Putin’s loathing of the event was well known—he had used it as a platform to lecture Western leaders about a post Cold War order in which America was the “one master, one sovereign.”

Grozev was in town, meeting German officials to understand the contours of the emerging deal. With him were members of Navalny’s inner circle, at turns excited for his release and anxious that Putin might, at this last minute, finally murder him. Carstens, though not officially on the attendee list, was in Munich as well, holding meetings on the margins to push matters along.

Western spy chiefs were just about to be served appetizers at a working lunch, when phones around the table started pinging. Navalny had abruptly died, at 47, of unclear causes in Russia’s “Polar Wolf” prison camp. The Kremlin didn’t explain the death.

Blinken’s staff scrambled to reach Navalny’s newly widowed wife, Yulia, and bring her through security for an emotional meeting, then to the auditorium to make a statement. She had been in Munich to discreetly push for the final details of her husband’s release. Now she was giving his eulogy in front of the world’s press. 

“I want Putin, his entire entourage, Putin’s friends, his government, to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband,” she said. “And this day will come very soon.”

Afterward, Grozev sat with Carstens in a coffee shop outside the conference, mourning the death of his friend and a deal he had pushed for years in the shadows. The special envoy was blaming himself. Maybe, Carstens said, if he could have helped sew up a deal sooner, Navalny would be alive and free. 

‘I can see a pathway’

Ella and Mikhail were rushing for the Amtrak train to Washington for a White House briefing on the emerging deal to free their son, when she looked at her phone and saw a cascade of text messages: The centerpiece of the exchange had died. She was shocked—then hopeful it could somehow create new urgency. Like her mom, she couldn’t allow herself despair.

“Unfortunately, whatever happened, happened,” Putin would later say, publicly uttering the name Navalny for the first time, and calling his chief opponent’s death a regrettable incident of the sort that also occurs in American prisons.

“It’s life.”

In the White House meeting, Sullivan, the national security adviser, had his head lowered toward the floor, avoiding eye contact. Carefully measuring every word, he explained to Ella and her husband Mikhail that he had always been skeptical that a deal involving Navalny would work out. But it wasn’t all lost, he said. Germany had already agreed to participate. “I can see a pathway,” he said. 

On the world stage, Biden, Scholz and leaders of the European Union were condemning Putin. At Langley, CIA officers and analysts tried to make sense of the death and what it meant for an exchange.

The Biden administration was divided on whether and how to keep pushing forward. Returning quickly to the negotiating table could make the U.S. look too eager for a deal. 

And did they need to give Germany time before rushing into a prisoner swap with a dictator accused of killing his most famous opponent?

People pay tribute to Alexei Navalny at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression in St. Petersburg, Feb. 16, 2024. Photo: Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press

National security adviser Jake Sullivan at a Washington event last month celebrating NATO’s 75th anniversary. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

By May, the German Federal Intelligence Service opened its own negotiation track with Russia, introducing its own stipulations: If they were going to release Krasikov, Berlin was going to want as many political prisoners and Germans facing draconian sentences in Russia as possible. Its chief pointman, former prosecutor Philipp Wolff, had become known in Berlin for an odd, if charming, negotiating tactic: Whenever talks grew testy, he would open up his briefcase and offer a chocolate.

Ella was at her second White House Correspondents’ Dinner that month and joined Biden’s handshake line to deliver another backchannel message, this time with more specificity. An official from Carstens’ office had told her to ask Biden to call the German leader to move things forward. And one of her sources had told her that it would be bad for Scholz to back out after making a commitment. To make her case, she’d have only seconds. 

“We need more,” she said to the president. “Can you please call Chancellor Scholz?” Biden said he had made that call. Blinken, standing next to the president, looked down, then gently clarified, saying they would make the call. “I promise, I promise, I promise,” Biden said, before the handshake line moved on. 

Two days later, President Biden sent a letter to Scholz, a formal request that gave the Chancellor the mechanism he needed to formalize a deal.

“Something like this has never been done before,” said Schmidt, the German chief of staff.

Through June and July U.S. intelligence officials met with their Russian counterparts in Middle Eastern capitals, while German negotiators held their own meetings. In Washington, Sullivan scrambled to sew up the deal just as an open insurrection erupted by Democrats hoping Biden would end his bid for a second term. Biden was hosting a July NATO summit, hoping a lively performance would quell doubts. At the summit, Sullivan seized the chance for a private word in person with European allies the U.S. was asking to free Russian spies. “We are almost there, you are doing an excellent job,” he told one delegation. The plan was set, and ready to “operationalize.”

Two days later, President Trump took a semiautomatic rifle shot to the ear, a quarter inch from his skull. Trump’s team had heard a deal was coming together. He had repeatedly said Putin would only free Gershkovich after he had won November’s election. 

From self-quarantine in his Delaware home, Biden, testing positive for COVID-19, was tuning out frenzied speculation about his future to push the deal over its finish line. Slovenia still needed to tick through the final legal arrangements to ship back the spies it held—and time was running out. One Slovenian official texted a Journal reporter to say he was “shitting bricks.” Biden called Prime Minister Robert Golob to nudge things along, adding wistfully: “I’ve really got to get to Slovenia.” About an hour later, he announced he was leaving the presidential race.

The final deal coming together was unprecedented in its scale and complexity. It included Gershkovich and Krasikov, but also two other jailed journalists, Russian political prisoners, four Germans and the deep cover spies from Slovenia, Norway and Poland. The CIA director flew to Ankara, the site of the exchange, to discuss the logistics with Turkey’s spy chief. The agreement with Russia was fragile and one errant leak could blow the whole thing up.

Gershkovich at the court hearing where he is sentenced to 16 years in prison in Yekaterinburg, Russia July 19, 2024. Photo: Dmitry Chasovitin/REUTERS

Ella knew a trade was imminent when she went back to meet with Sullivan and noticed the national security adviser was looking her in the eyes. When Russia suddenly sped up her son’s trial into a three day process she understood. She stayed up all night on July 19, until the first images of his conviction came in, standing in the glass box of a packed Yekaterinburg courtroom, gaunt and tired, his head shaved as required by the Russian penal system. He stared out passively as a judge sentenced him to 16 years. Then, through his lawyers, he relayed a joke that reached his mother: He was expecting more. 

The Russian Federation had a few final items of protocol to tick through with the man who had become its most famous prisoner. One, he would be allowed to leave with the papers he’d penned in detention, the letters he’d scrawled out and the makings of a book he’d labored over. But first, they had another piece of writing they required from him, an official request for presidential clemency. The text, moreover, should be addressed to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 

The pro forma printout included a long blank space the prisoner could fill out if desired, or simply, as expected, leave blank. In the formal high Russian he had honed over 16 months imprisonment, the Journal’s Russia correspondent filled the page. The last line submitted a proposal of his own: After his release, would Putin be willing to sit down for an interview?

Evan Gershkovich is greeted by his Wall Street Journal colleagues after arriving at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Thursday. Photo: Kent Nishimura for WSJ

Yaroslav Trofimov contributed to this article.

Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com, Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com, Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 2, 2024, print edition as 'Putin Wanted His Hit Man Back. A Mother Wanted Her Journalist Son to Come Home.'.

2. US Military Doctrine Treats Information and Influence as the Same Thing—and That’s a Problem

Yes, Yes, Yes. The author is telling the emperor (the US military) that he is wearing no clothes. This may be one of the most important essays I have come across lately.

We spend more time trying to come up with some pithy new name than we spend on understanding (And I agree with Frank Hoffman that understanding should be a strategic principle despite the obviousness of the need for understanding). I can describe the "failed drug deal" between a former CSA and a former SOCOM CDR that changed caused psychological operations (PSYOP) to military information support operations (MISO)

Graphics at the link. We need experts who are well educated and trained in the art and science of influence and know who to use all the information tools. Those who are well educated and trained in employment of the information tools do not necessarily have sufficient education and training in the art and science of influence.

And YES, YES, YES - transformation to an influence paradigm will face resistance. He is absolutely right. I see resistance whenever and wherever influence is mentioned (as well as political warfare which relies on influence) - nowhere is this more exemplified turn with the statement from some PSYOP officers I know that it is easier to get permission on the forehead of a terrorist that it is to get permission to put an idea between his ears.

Excerpts:

US military culture has an affinity for new terms, acronyms, and buzzwords. In the case of influence, the mislabeling of a vital function inhibits clear understanding of what influence capabilities contribute to military operations. An important outcome of clear terms would be a sharp distinction between information-focused activities and influence-focused activities. Information and influence are not synonyms, so the two activities are not the same. To achieve clarity, there is a need for an influence paradigm.

A transition to an influence paradigm will face formidable resistance. Over the last eighty or so years, political and military leaders have directed various name changes to allay concerns about using terminology that is believed to be problematic—like psychological. However, a necessary result of a paradigm shift would be to establish an influence function equal to the other joint functions and a corresponding Army warfighting function. It is in terms of function that the most important difference between information and influence emerges.

Information is inherent to all the Army’s warfighting functions; therefore, it should not be a separate function. Influence of foreign individuals and groups, by contrast, is not inherent to most Army warfighting functions—except for fires and movement and maneuver, but even in those functions, influence is not a primary focus. Influence is an operational activity and ultimately focuses on the human dimension rather than the information dimension. These facts sharply and clearly distinguish influence from information. DoD policy, Army doctrine, and operations do not currently reflect this distinction. It is time they are changed to do so.

US Military Doctrine Treats Information and Influence as the Same Thing—and That’s a Problem - Modern War Institute

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/us-military-doctrine-treats-information-and-influence-as-the-same-thing-and-thats-a-problem/

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Ian Courter · August 2, 2024

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Within the Department of Defense there is growing emphasis on information-related concepts intended to combat adversary influence efforts and the threat they pose to US national security. The problem? Emphasis on information as an overarching concept predisposes leaders to view information as a capability rather than as a tool that capabilities use. Information is merely a multidiscipline enabler—while influence consists of operations that affect adversary thinking, decision-making, and behavior. And yet despite the fact that information and influence are separate and distinct, military terms and phrases with the word information are commonly treated as substitutes for influence activities. Until policy and doctrine reflect that fundamental reality, US military efforts to employ influence capabilities will continue to fall short.

DoD Usage

Historically, DoD described information as a tool that enabled analysis, planning, decision-making, and the execution of operations. That is the context in which information operations (IO) developed as an integrating staff function. That context was the basis for Army usage in the 1996 edition of Field Manual (FM) 100-6, Information Operations, which described a global information environment, or GIE, as “all individuals, organizations, or systems, most of which are outside the control of the military or National Command Authorities, that collect, process, and disseminate information to national and international audiences.”

Within the GIE, there was the military information environment, or MIE, defined as “the environment contained within the GIE, consisting of information systems (INFOSYS) and organizations—friendly and adversary, military and nonmilitary, that support, enable, or significantly influence a specific military operation.” The MIE explicitly described influence as being part of an information environment.

The 1996 Army approach to describing information evolved in subsequent editions of FM 3-13, which replaced FM 100-6. The FM 3-13 title even changed from Information Operations to Inform and Influence Activities in the 2013 edition before reverting back in the 2016 edition. The Army’s growing focus on information coincided with a similar change in joint doctrine.

The 1998 edition of Joint Publication (JP) 3-13, Joint Doctrine for Information Operations defined IO as “actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own information and information systems.” That simple definition did not mention influence, but various sections of the publication used such phrases as “influenced by IO,” “offensive IO,” “favorably influence the populace,” and “defensive IO.” It was unclear even then how a coordinating staff function could be offensive or defensive, much less how a staff element conducted operational activities.

The 2014 edition of JP 3-13 redefined IO as “the integrated employment, during military operations, of IRCs [information-related capabilities] in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.” This definition listed influence as an IO activity although IO was supposed to be solely an integrating staff function. The joint staff even renumbered several previously distinct joint publications to be subordinate IO publications. For example, JP 3-53, Doctrine for Joint Psychological Operations was renumbered to JP 3-13.2. In 2022, JP 3-04 superseded JP 3-13 and replaced the IO construct with a much broader one that focused not just on information operations but on information itself. JP 3-04 also replaced IO with operations in the information environment (OIE), which it defined as “military actions involving the integrated employment of multiple information forces to affect drivers of behavior by informing audiences; influencing foreign relevant actors; attacking and exploiting relevant actor information, information networks, and information systems; and protecting friendly information, information networks, and information systems.” When JP 3-13 became obsolete, JP 3-13.2 officially renumbered back to JP 3-53 for its upcoming revision.

Previously, influence activities were “information-related.” The new paradigm removes the qualifier “related” and collectively refers to the disparate activities and organizations like psychological operations, cyberspace forces, electromagnetic spectrum operations, and combat camera as “information forces.” Information became something far larger and more broadly conceptualized. The profound change in perspective shows in the DoD definition for the information environment (IE), which is “the aggregate of social, cultural, linguistic, psychological, technical, and physical factors that affect how humans and automated systems derive meaning from, act upon, and are impacted by information, including the individuals, organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or use information.” Between 1996 and 2022, the definition of the information environment fundamentally changed, reflecting a deep transformation in how DoD views information. Analysis of usage throughout JP 3-04 resulted in figure 1, which depicts an interpretation of the new information-centric paradigm, illustrating the depth and breadth of the new concept rather than a comprehensive listing.

Figure 1. The new information-centric DoD paradigm

The changed perspective is an acknowledgement that information is vital to operations. This is undoubtedly true, but that acknowledgement has gained momentum that has carried the shift too far. By 2010, there was an attempt to address the need to influence foreign individuals, groups, and populations without using what were deemed to be problematic terms like psychological operations. Then Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates formally directed a change in terminology, noting that “although PSYOP [psychological operations] activities rely on truthful information, credibly conveyed, the term PSYOP tends to connote propaganda, brainwashing, manipulation, and deceit.” As a substitute term for activities intended to influence, DoD chose MISO, or military information support operations.

The word information now covers a huge variety of functions, specialties, and systems like computers and networks, data collection and storage, data for planning, and, of course, influence activities. Figure 2 lists the most numerous terms in current, approved joint and Army doctrine containing the word. Figure 3 lists uses of the word in the most recent publications—JP 3-04 and ADP 3-13 (2022 and 2023, respectively).

Figure 2. Joint and Army uses of information in titles and terms

Figure 3. Emerging additional joint and Army uses of information in terms

While use of the word information continues to expand, there are patterns. The twelve broad categories shown in Figure 4 all touch upon information in some way. The relationships are not so close as to be logically under one overarching construct, yet DoD lumps disparate functions, activities, and operations under information, forming an incongruent mix of square pegs and round holes.

Figure 4. Example categories for information-based terms

Information Versus Influence

The Secretary of Defense–directed change to the function from psychological operations to military information support operations is an excellent example of the problems overuse of the word information causes. Military information support operations is a confusing hodgepodge of misapplied terms. First, DoD defines military information as “information under the control or jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, its departments, or agencies, or of primary interest to them.” Second, the term information support is also an issue because it is an information technology term for enabling services. Even minus the redundant word “military” (which can be presumed for any subject discussed in military doctrine), “information support operations” could be interpreted as general computer-related support or knowledge-management activities. The name change would have achieved greater clarity if MISO stood for military influence and shaping operations, as that clearly reflects what the function does. The announcement of the department-wide shift from PSYOP to MISO stated that the latter term “more accurately reflects the nature of these activities.” As a term and acronym, MISO does no such thing.

Moving to Clarity

The foundation for DoD information activities resides in the information joint function, which “encompasses the management and application of information and its deliberate integration with other joint functions to influence relevant actor perceptions, behavior, action, or inaction and to support human and automated decision making.” The OIE conceptually aligns with the joint function, despite the IE being a notional construct devised “to help identify, understand, and describe how those often-intangible factors may affect the employment of forces and bear on the decisions of the commander.” Since the IE is notional, then operations cannot occur in it.

A fundamental problem with the overarching information construct is that derivative terms lack clear definitions and obvious meanings—as in the Army’s use of “information effect” in Army Doctrine Publication 3-13, Information. At least JP 3-04 uses “psychological effect” to denote the changes influential messaging can elicit. Aside from long-established use, a reader can easily conclude that psychological indicates a reference to the mind or thinking and effect means some impact or change. There is no comparable clear chain of reasoning for information effect. It could apply to numerous fields like computer science, communications, and network operations. Logically, any term with the word psychological does not apply to any of those specialties.

Whereas information activities is vague and ill-defined, influence activities can be simply and clearly defined as actions executed to change or reinforce how people think, feel, and act. There is no mention of information in this proposed definition because information is an enabler of and a tool for influence; it does not define influence. There are many ways to influence human behavior, information being one means to do so.

US military culture has an affinity for new terms, acronyms, and buzzwords. In the case of influence, the mislabeling of a vital function inhibits clear understanding of what influence capabilities contribute to military operations. An important outcome of clear terms would be a sharp distinction between information-focused activities and influence-focused activities. Information and influence are not synonyms, so the two activities are not the same. To achieve clarity, there is a need for an influence paradigm.

A transition to an influence paradigm will face formidable resistance. Over the last eighty or so years, political and military leaders have directed various name changes to allay concerns about using terminology that is believed to be problematic—like psychological. However, a necessary result of a paradigm shift would be to establish an influence function equal to the other joint functions and a corresponding Army warfighting function. It is in terms of function that the most important difference between information and influence emerges.

Information is inherent to all the Army’s warfighting functions; therefore, it should not be a separate function. Influence of foreign individuals and groups, by contrast, is not inherent to most Army warfighting functions—except for fires and movement and maneuver, but even in those functions, influence is not a primary focus. Influence is an operational activity and ultimately focuses on the human dimension rather than the information dimension. These facts sharply and clearly distinguish influence from information. DoD policy, Army doctrine, and operations do not currently reflect this distinction. It is time they are changed to do so.

Ian J. Courter is an analyst and doctrine developer for the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. He holds a BA from Murray State University and an MA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Courter is a prior service psychological operations soldier and linguist with numerous deployments to South America, Europe, and the Middle East to conduct influence activities in counterinsurgency, major combat operations, and peacekeeping.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of Army, the United States Department of Defense, or the US Government. The appearance of external hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement of the linked websites or the information, products, or services contained therein.

Note: While all cited material for this article is unclassified, some sources reside only on CAC-enabled sites. However, the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review cleared for publication all content in this article, as did the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School public affairs and G2.

Image credit: Esercito Italiano, via Wikimedia Commons

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Ian Courter · August 2, 2024

3. Bomb Smuggled Into Tehran Guesthouse Months Ago Killed Hamas Leader

Presence, patiences, persistence.

An operation at the time and place of someone's choosing.

Bomb Smuggled Into Tehran Guesthouse Months Ago Killed Hamas Leader

An explosive device hidden in a heavily guarded complex where Ismail Haniyeh was known to stay in Iran was what killed him, according to a Times investigation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/world/middleeast/how-hamas-leader-haniyeh-killed-iran-bomb.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm

By Ronen BergmanMark Mazzetti and Farnaz Fassihi

• Aug. 1, 2024Updated 9:39 a.m. ET

Leer en español阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

Ismail Haniyeh, a top leader of Hamas, was assassinated on Wednesday by an explosive device covertly smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying, according to seven Middle Eastern officials, including two Iranians, and an American official.

The bomb had been hidden approximately two months ago in the guesthouse, according to five of the Middle Eastern officials. The guesthouse is run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and is part of a large compound, known as Neshat, in an upscale neighborhood of northern Tehran.

Mr. Haniyeh was in Iran’s capital for the presidential inauguration. The bomb was detonated remotely, the five officials said, once it was confirmed that he was inside his room at the guesthouse. The blast also killed a bodyguard.

The explosion shook the building, shattered some windows and caused the partial collapse of an exterior wall, according to the two Iranian officials, members of the Revolutionary Guards briefed on the incident. Such damage was also evident in a photograph of the building shared with The New York Times.

Mr. Haniyeh, who had led Hamas’s political office in Qatar, had stayed at the guesthouse several times when visiting Tehran, according to the Middle Eastern officials. All of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details about the assassination.

Image

Mourners gathered for the funeral in Tehran on Thursday for the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Iran said Israel was behind his assassination.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Iranian officials and Hamas said Wednesday that Israel was responsible for the assassination, an assessment also reached by several U.S. officials who requested anonymity. The assassination threatened to unleash another wave of violence in the Middle East and upend the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Gaza. Mr. Haniyeh had been a top negotiator in the cease-fire talks.

Israel has not publicly acknowledged responsibility for the killing, but Israeli intelligence officials briefed the United States and other Western governments on the details of the operation in the immediate aftermath, according to the five Middle Eastern officials.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said that the United States had received no advance knowledge of the assassination plot.

In the hours after the killing, speculation immediately focused on the possibility that Israel had killed Mr. Haniyeh with a missile strike, possibly fired from a drone or a plane, similar to how Israel had launched a missile on a military base in Isfahan in April.

That missile theory raised questions about how Israel might have been able to evade Iranian air defense systems again to execute such a brazen airstrike in the capital.

As it turns out, the assassins were able to exploit a different kind of gap in Iran’s defenses: a lapse in the security of a supposedly tightly guarded compound that allowed a bomb to be planted and to remain hidden for many weeks before it would eventually be triggered.

Image

A billboard in Tehran in April depicting missiles.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Such a breach, three Iranian officials said, was a catastrophic failure of intelligence and security for Iran and a tremendous embarrassment for the Guards, which uses the compound for retreats, secret meetings and housing prominent guests like Mr. Haniyeh.

How the bomb was stashed in the guesthouse remained unclear. The Middle Eastern officials said that the planning for the assassination took months and required extensive surveillance of the compound. The two Iranian officials who described the nature of the assassination said they did not know how or when the explosives were planted in the room.

Israel decided to carry out the assassination outside Qatar, where Mr. Haniyeh and other senior members of Hamas’s political leadership live. The Qatari government has been mediating the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over a cease-fire in Gaza.

The deadly blast early Wednesday shattered windows and collapsed a portion of the wall of the compound, photographs showed and the Iranian officials said. It appeared to do minimal damage beyond the building itself, as a missile probably would have done.

At around 2 a.m. local time, the device exploded, according to the Middle Eastern officials, including the Iranians. Startled building staff members, the officials said, ran to find the source of the tremendous noise, leading them to the room where Mr. Haniyeh was staying with a bodyguard.

Image

A satellite image taken on July 25 shows no visible damage or a green tarp on the building, suggesting that the image with the visible damage was taken more recently.Credit...Maxar Technologies

The compound is staffed with a medical team which rushed to the room immediately after the explosion. The team declared that Mr. Haniyeh had died immediately. The team tried to revive the bodyguard, but he, too, was dead.

The leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, was staying next door, two of the Iranian officials said. His room was not badly damaged, suggesting precise planning in the targeting of Mr. Haniyeh.

Khalil al-Hayya, the deputy commander of Hamas in the Gaza Strip who was also in Tehran, arrived at the scene and saw his colleague’s body, according to the five Middle Eastern officials.

Among the people immediately notified, said the three Iranian officials, was Gen. Ismail Ghaani, the commander in chief of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of the Revolutionary Guards, which works closely with Iranian allies in the region, including Hamas and Hezbollah. He notified Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the middle of the night, waking him up, the officials said.

Four hours after the blast, the Revolutionary Guards issued a statement that Mr. Haniyeh had been killed. By 7 a.m., Mr. Khamenei had summoned the members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council to his compound for an emergency meeting, at which he issued an order to strike Israel in retaliation, according to the three Iranian officials.

Tehran had already been under heightened security because of the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, with senior government officials, military commanders and dignitaries from 86 countries gathering at Parliament in central Tehran for the ceremony.

Mr. Haniyeh had looked cheerful and triumphant on Tuesday during the swearing in, hugging the new president after he delivered his inaugural speech, and the two men raised their hands together, making the victory sign.

Image

Ismail Haniyeh, center left, and Masoud Pezeshkian raised their hands together after Mr. Pezeshkian was sworn in as Iran’s president in Tehran on Tuesday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

In Iran, the method of assassination was the subject of rumor and dispute. The Tasnim News Agency, the media outlet for the Guards, reported that witnesses said an object like a missile had hit the window of Mr. Haniyeh’s room and exploded.

But the two Iranian officials, the members of the Guards briefed on the attack, confirmed that the explosion had taken place inside Mr. Haniyeh’s room, and said that an initial investigation showed that the explosives had been placed there sometime in advance.

They described the attack’s precision and sophistication as similar in tactic to the remote controlled A.I. robot weapon that Israel used to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020.

Israeli assassination operations outside of the country are primarily carried out by Mossad, the country’s foreign intelligence service. David Barnea, the head of Mossad, said in January that his service was “obliged” to hunt down the leaders of Hamas, the group behind the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.

“It will take time, as it took after the massacre in Munich, but our hands will catch them wherever they are,” Mr. Barnea said, referring to the killing of Israeli athletes by terrorists at the 1972 Olympics.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization, and also covers Iran and the shadow war between Iran and Israel. She is based in New York. More about Farnaz Fassihi

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 2, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bomb Laid Months Earlier Killed a Leader of Hamas. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Israel-Hamas War News, Hamas, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (Quds Force)

4. New tech will make tomorrow’s wars more dangerous to troops, Army says

See the next message for the new operating environment document from TRADOC G2.

New tech will make tomorrow’s wars more dangerous to troops, Army says

New sensors and long-range weapons may force the service to rethink doctrine.

Sam Skove | August 1, 2024 11:40 AM ET

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

The Army may need to rethink its traditional emphasis on maneuver warfare in the face of new weapons and other technology that will make tomorrow’s wars “increasingly lethal,” the service’s Training and Doctrine Command says in a new report.

The report specifically focuses on “large-scale combat operations,” a term of art used to refer to combat similar to that seen in World War II, rather than the insurgencies the Army has fought in recent decades.

Part of the shift is due to the increasing importance of fires, a term most frequently associated with the use of indirect fire like artillery, rockets, and missiles, but which may also refer to drones and other assets. These weapons will “be the center of gravity, making protection a priority and maneuver difficult,” according to the report.

These changes to the battlefield “may require a reassessment of our approach to maneuver, fires, and protection,” the report added.

The Army has long emphasized maneuver warfare, in which lightning attacks are used to disorient and ultimately shatter enemy formations. Maneuver warfare stands in contrast to positional warfare, where artillery and other forms of fires are used to push an enemy out.

The report echoes comments made by Army Futures Command chief Gen. James Rainey.

“When you are maneuvering, it's going to be to emplace fires,” Rainey told reporters in May. “If it’s an Army formation, their big advantage is going to be fires: rockets, cannons, joint fires, attack helicopters.”

The change is driven in part by the ubiquity of drones and other forms of sensors, which mean that enemies can find and hit U.S. troops with artillery, rockets, and missiles with greater precision than before. Drones are “transforming target acquisition and engagement,” according to the report, with long-range fires more lethal as a result.

Deep sensing and strike means logistics nodes and command posts are also increasingly under threat, the report adds. As a consequence, command posts and sustainment depots will likely need to be placed further back, which in turn will affect communications and logistics.

Ukrainian forces report a battlefield where any forces in the open are regularly hit, with troops often suffering the most as they leave cover to rotate away from the front line. In July, the Washington Post reported that Ukraine’s missiles had forced Russian units to stop massing, and its sensors had turned a movement of just a few miles into a risky, days-long affair.

Such wars are also likely to go on for lengthy periods of time, the report adds. “Quick annihilation in the initial phases of a war is unlikely in a [large scale] conflict with a near-peer adversary operating on their periphery.”

As a consequence, the U.S. will need to embrace a World War I-type ability to churn out munitions and soldiers.

Large-scale combat operations will “require firing and sustaining massive amounts of munitions,” thereby “challenging the Army’s magazine depth and range” even as U.S. units must travel long distances to resupply, the report says.

A protracted war will also require training new soldiers to replace those lost and to provide the larger forces needed to prevail. “Even if industry can keep pace, the Army will probably have to contend with the training requirements for new soldiers and leaders to learn these systems in combat,” the report says.

The report also portrays a Russia that is bloodied but not defeated.

“Russia is gaining combat lessons and proving that simply outlasting an enemy is a potentially valid military option,” according to the report. “They've essentially been able to replace an army on the fly,” said Ian Sullivan, TRADOC’s top intelligence officer, in an interview with Defense One. “They’re going nowhere as a threat.”

China is also taking lessons from the war, according to the report, which states that China is likely to develop more short range air defense to defend against drones and improve tactical medical care. China has also noted Russia’s struggle with establishing effective command.

“They've seen difficulties that the Russians have had in terms of leadership at the mid-grade and junior-grade levels,” Sullivan said.

The report is likely the first operational environment update from TRADOC’s intelligence section to address large-scale combat, said Sullivan.

The work is in part the result of weekly meetings, prompted by Russia’s war in Ukraine, in which TRADOC analysts compared their expectations about adversary behavior to what they were seeing on the battlefield.

“We would do these series of internal scrums,” Sullivan said. “We did this, really, for every week of the war — we had a database of thousands of observations of things that we’ve noticed that interested us as we looked at the operational environment.”

How these lessons filter down to Army units is ultimately for the service’s doctrine-writers, equippers, trainers, and others to decide; the TRADOC report is an intelligence product, and does not directly prescribe how the U.S. should react.

The Army writ large appears to be thinking similarly, though.

Chief of Staff General Randy George has spoken regularly about the impact of constant surveillance, munitions depth, and other topics listed in the TRADOC report. The Army’s top training centers, meanwhile, are being adjusted to adapt to lessons learned from Ukraine and elsewhere.

The Army has a “real sense of urgency” when it comes to re-learning how to fight against enemies who can easily track U.S. movements, George said in a January interview.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

5. 499. The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations

Download the 34 page document here,  https://g2webcontent.z2.web.core.usgovcloudapi.net/OEE/Story%20Posts/TRADOCG2_2024JUL30_OE_2024_2035_Lg_Scale_Comb_anonymous.pdf

The Mad Scientist blog entry is below.

---------- Forwarded message ---------

From: Kersey, Ian G CTR USARMY TRADOC (USA) 

Date: Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 09:04

Subject: The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations

To:

Please find the attached files for The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations and associated 1-page handout synopsizing its contents -- FOR MAXIMUM DISTRIBUTION & DISSEMINATION!

The mission of Army Mad Scientist is to explore the Operational Environment (OE) and the changing character of warfare on behalf of the U.S. Army. The OE underpins how the Army is organized, trained, equipped, and operates — it is foundational in ensuring the Army’s mission success — fighting and winning our Nation’s wars.

The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence, G-2, has just published its new OE assessment.  The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations explores the twelve conditions likely to influence how the Army trains for and operates in Large-Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) during the period of 2024-2034. Given these LSCO conditions, TRADOC G-2 also identified five implications of modern LSCO that will likely affect how the Army adapts across its capabilities related to doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P).

In today’s post, we excerpt this assessment’s Foreword by General Gary M. Brito, Commanding General, TRADOC, and its Executive Summary to provide our readers with a preview of this seminal document – check it out at: https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/499-the-operational-environment-2024-2034-large-scale-combat-operations/

… then read the complete assessment at The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations.

August 1, 2024 by iankersey3

499. The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations

[Editor’s Note:  The mission of Army Mad Scientist is to explore the Operational Environment (OE) and the changing character of warfare on behalf of the U.S. Army. The OE underpins how the Army is organized, trained, equipped, and operates — it is foundational in ensuring the Army’s mission success — fighting and winning our Nation’s wars.

T4e U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence, G-2, has just published its new OE assessment.  The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations explores the twelve conditions likely to influence how the Army trains for and operates in Large-Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) during the period of 2024-2034. Given these LSCO conditions, TRADOC G-2 also identified five implications of modern LSCO that will likely affect how the Army adapts across its capabilities related to doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P).

In today’s post, we excerpt the Foreword by General Gary M. Brito, Commanding General, TRADOC, and the Executive Summary to provide our readers with a preview of this seminal document — check out the comprehensive assessment via the link at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!]

Foreword

The U.S. Army is facing new and increasingly perilous challenges compared to only a few years ago because of a rapidly modernizing pacing threat and an acute threat engaged in protracted large-scale combat operations on NATO’s doorstep. During two decades of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, these traditional adversaries have watched as our Forces faced violent extremist organizations that had limited objectives and resources and used improvised weapons and tactics. Now, many of these threats have receded while our traditional adversaries with substantial defense budgets and global ambitions have reasserted themselves. They studied us as we executed operations and are using those lessons in their defense and strategic planning. To achieve victory in the Operational Environment of the 21st century, the U.S. Army must know these enemies like it knew the Soviets in the 20th century.

China, the pacing threat, is building defense systems to attain its global ambitions. It has the largest military in the world by personnel and the ability to execute a whole-of-nation approach to conflict that can quickly galvanize its industrial base. China’s modernization process has seen rapid technological transformation toward its vision of “informationized” and “intelligentized” warfare. It is also advancing an ambitious professional military education system with the aim of building a strong NCO corps.

Meanwhile, Russia, the acute threat, has been mired in an invasion of Ukraine since 2022. While not seeing the success it had hoped for initially, Russia is gaining combat experience in large-scale combat operations and proving that simply outlasting an enemy is a potentially valid military option. The war in Ukraine has shown that the next fight will prominently feature information warfare and focus on multidomain effects. Fires will be the center of gravity, making protection a priority and maneuver difficult.

In its mission to describe the Operational Environment, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command must distill all its observations and research into insights that the Army can apply. That is what this document endeavors to do, but it is only a first step. The information contained herein should be transmitted to, and understood by, U.S. Army Soldiers of every rank and at every echelon. Our Soldiers—our people—are our greatest strength and we must do everything we can to strengthen the profession of warfighting. Competence as an Army professional starts with understanding the threat, but it does not end there. Every Leader has the obligation of being a continuous and self-reflective learner outside of traditional professional military education and training.

GARY M. BRITO

Commanding General, U.S. Army

Training and Doctrine Command

“To achieve victory, we must know the enemy. Knowing the enemy starts with the Operational Environment.”

Victory starts here!

Executive Summary

The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G-2, through its continuous observation and assessment of the Operational Environment (OE), identified 12 conditions that are likely to influence how the U.S. Army trains for and operates in large-scale combat operations (LSCO) during the period of 2024-2034. Given these LSCO conditions, TRADOC G-2 also identified five implications of modern LSCO that will likely affect how the U.S. Army adapts across its capabilities related to doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P). These implications are relevant, but not limited, to how the Army applies the OE to training and Leader development to establish the best conditions to succeed in LSCO. This document focuses on LSCO and does not cover the totality of Army operations in the OE over the next 10 years.

The key conditions that are likely to drive LSCO in the next 10 years include:

• LSCO will feature all-domain competition and warfare as competition and conflict extend beyond physical battles and increasingly involve multiple interconnected domains and dimensions.
• Mass and precision complement one another in LSCO, and combatants will need to identify the right mix of these factors to gain advantages.
• The increase in the production, employment, and success of uncrewed systems means the Army can expect to encounter these systems across the breadth and depth of LSCO.
• LSCO will require firing and sustaining massive amounts of munitions against adversaries likely to enjoy the initial advantage of interior lines, challenging the Army’s magazine depth and range.
• LSCO will be marked by the democratization and proliferation of advanced technologies and hyperconnected global communications, creating an increasingly transparent battlefield that makes it difficult to hide from the enemy.
• LSCO will be increasingly lethal due to the intersection of sensor ubiquity, battlefield automation, precision strike, and massed fires.
• In LSCO, U.S. Forces will face adversaries’ anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) efforts focused on denying our deployment into theater and preventing our freedom of action once deployed.
• The increased logistics requirements of LSCO will challenge Army sustainment operations, and adversaries will target those same operations from the Homeland to the battlefield.
• LSCO will feature Homeland defense requirements as adversaries will have conventional, hybrid, and irregular capabilities to conduct operations against the Homeland.
• An increasingly urban OE means LSCO will include dense urban warfare in environments with challenging warfighting conditions.
• The ability of adversaries to rapidly influence the information and human dimensions will challenge the Army’s ability to achieve information advantage in LSCO.
• Adversaries view weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as an asymmetric advantage that has an outsized impact on U.S. operations and will likely seek to employ WMD in LSCO.

These LSCO conditions will have several likely implications for how the U.S. Army approaches a future LSCO conflict:

• LSCO is likely to require combatants to understand the dichotomy between the art and science of war to strike a balance that best exploits an adversary’s vulnerabilities and minimizes an adversary’s strengths.
• The human and materiel costs of LSCO suggest combatants will benefit from a clear understanding of how they view annihilation vs. attrition as a LSCO objective before hostilities commence.
• Increased transparency, lethality, and challenges to movement in LSCO may require a reassessment of our approach to maneuver, fires, and protection.
• People are the advantage in LSCO, and the U.S. Army will need to maintain its overmatch in effectively recruiting, training, and developing world-class Soldiers and Leaders.
• The combatant in LSCO that makes rapid adaptation a fundamental part of its approach to warfighting will be better able to exploit fleeting opportunities on the battlefield.

These conditions and implications illustrate the complexity of LSCO in a dynamic OE. They provide the U.S. Army with much to consider as it adapts its doctrine, trains its Soldiers, and develops its Leaders to execute LSCO in support of national security objectives.

If you enjoyed this brief excerpt, check out the complete assessment at The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations. 

6. US Army captain becomes first female nurse to graduate from the Army’s elite Ranger Course

Excerpts:

As of Wednesday, 143 women have graduated from the US Army Ranger Course, also called Ranger School, since the first women graduated in 2015, the Army told CNN.

...

Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, commander of US Army Special Operations Command, said last year that having women in special operations is “not a nice to have, it’s a must.”

“If you just take the protection of United States and the most critical threats we have out there, we need everybody when you talk about defense of our nation, not just in the Army but at a macro scale. … It’s critical to our mission,” he said.

Murphy told CNN it was clear what kind of advantages women can bring to the table. For example, she excelled at the combat techniques training involving operational orders — what unit commanders send down to subordinate units outlining the mission they’re undertaking — so she would take on the brunt of that task while her teammates got a little more sleep.

Men and women working together “complement each other,” she said, “and that’s what makes us such a good team.”

US Army captain becomes first female nurse to graduate from the Army’s elite Ranger Course | CNN Politics

By Haley Britzky, CNN

 6 minute read

Updated 7:22 AM EDT, Thu August 1, 2024

CNN · by Haley Britzky · July 31, 2024

Capt. Molly Murphy treating a "casualty" at Best Medic Competition in 2023.

Courtesy Capt. Molly Murphy

CNN —

For US Army Capt. Molly Murphy, the hardest part of the Army’s grueling Ranger Course was the very first day.

“I did not sleep at all the night before, I was so scared, way in over my head,” she told CNN.

Murphy, who currently works as a pediatric intensive care unit nurse at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, graduated from Ranger School on July 19, becoming the first female Army nurse to ever complete the course.

Over roughly 60 days of the school the Army hails as its “toughest course,” students “train to exhaustion,” completing arduous physical and mental exercises across three intense phases, taking them from the mountainous terrain of Georgia to the swampy conditions in Florida.

As of Wednesday, 143 women have graduated from the US Army Ranger Course, also called Ranger School, since the first women graduated in 2015, the Army told CNN. Murphy’s accomplishment is all the more notable given her nursing background, which stood in stark contrast to the majority of her Ranger School counterparts who served in combat.

“I was like, ‘I did these tactics eight years ago at ROTC, and I thought I would never hear the word “ambush” ever again, I am so lost,’” Murphy recalled, laughing. “But I’m a very good note taker, super type-A, you know, like any critical care nurse is. And so I was just writing everything anyone said down, and I had this, like, crazy notebook that the boys would flip through whenever they were freaking out.”

The first women to graduate Ranger School were Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver, just two years after many combat roles in the military were opened up to women. Just months after their graduation, in December 2015, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced he was clearing the way for women to serve in the roughly 220,000 remaining military jobs that were limited to men, including some in special operations.

Capt. Molly Murphy with Lt. Cmdr. Ellie Mae, a service dog, at Walter Reed, November 2023.

Courtesy Capt. Molly Murphy

Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, commander of US Army Special Operations Command, said last year that having women in special operations is “not a nice to have, it’s a must.”

“If you just take the protection of United States and the most critical threats we have out there, we need everybody when you talk about defense of our nation, not just in the Army but at a macro scale. … It’s critical to our mission,” he said.

Murphy told CNN it was clear what kind of advantages women can bring to the table. For example, she excelled at the combat techniques training involving operational orders — what unit commanders send down to subordinate units outlining the mission they’re undertaking — so she would take on the brunt of that task while her teammates got a little more sleep.

Men and women working together “complement each other,” she said, “and that’s what makes us such a good team.”

‘Keeping up with the boys’

Murphy’s journey to Ranger School began when she was a child, she said. Her mother died in an accident when she was young, leaving her and her two brothers to be raised by their father, who served in the National Guard. Her whole life, she said, she was “keeping up with the boys,” constantly competing and carving out a place for herself.

That also led her to go into the ROTC program at the University of Nebraska, after her father encouraged her to serve as an officer to help pay for school.

From there, she continued to excel. While working as a nurse at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, she attended the Army’s Air Assault and Jungle Schools, and at the end of the latter she was encouraged to go to Ranger School for the first time by a teammate.

“I was like ‘No, that’s crazy!’ A girl like me, I’m a nurse, Jungle School is the furthest I’ll ever go,” Murphy recalled saying.

She was again told to consider it while competing in the Army’s Best Medic Competition last year, which tests competitors not just on their medical prowess but physical fitness and endurance, land navigation and more. As one of two women there, she said, more senior officers were regularly talking to her about her career. While she didn’t win the competition, she recalled that multiple colonels told her after watching her compete that she “needed to go to Ranger School,” she said, even going so far as to tell her leadership back in Hawaii to send her.

Her biggest hesitation, she joked to CNN, was knowing she’d have to shave her head. But just months later, her former Jungle School teammate began helping her train.

The first phase of Ranger School, called the Darby Phase, focuses on physical and mental stamina. It takes soldiers on ground patrols, foot marches, physical assessments and requires them to receive positive peer evaluations. It’s the phase where roughly half of students will drop out, according to the Army.

Capt. Molly Murphy at Ranger School graduation on July 19, 2024.

Courtesy Capt. Molly Murphy

It’s not uncommon for students to recycle, or repeat, phases in Ranger School. And at first, Murphy was one of them — she had to repeat Darby Phase. Not having experience in combat arms like her teammates originally had her at a disadvantage, but she poured herself into studying and training for the 10 days in between retrying the Darby Phase, which she successfully completed.

Just hours after completing the first phase, soldiers move to the second — Mountain Phase — where they train on leading platoons on combat patrol operations across rugged terrain where the “stamina and commitment of the Ranger student is stressed to the maximum,” according to the Army.

Finally, in the Florida Phase, students continue training on leading small units during things like airborne and dismounted patrol operations, conducting 10 days of patrols during “a fast paced, highly stressful, challenging field exercise.”

While Murphy said she was surprised by how little medical training played a role in the course, being a nurse prepared her in different ways. Being on her feet for 12 hours a day, often skipping meals and having to be “100% sharp at all times, because someone’s life is in your hands … definitely gave me a one-up,” she said.

Because of a worsening infection in her foot, Murphy was forced to leave the competition on the last two days for surgery at a hospital in Florida. She traveled back to Georgia for graduation afterward but was hospitalized again for pain the day before. She begged her doctors to let her attend graduation and they eventually agreed — sending her on crutches, with nerve blocks to try to limit the pain.

“I was just so excited about how many of us from my platoon made it. … It’s just so exciting to be able to celebrate with them, that we were all able to pull each other there,” she said, emphasizing repeatedly that being able to lean on one another throughout the course made all the difference.

Now, going back to nursing, her biggest takeaway has been the leadership skills she learned, particularly how to keep pushing in the midst of chaos.

“It is so hard to lead in an environment where everyone is starving, and everyone is tired,” she said, “and my goal was to see if I could stay positive in those moments where you are at your lowest. … And I want to help people understand that your most difficult times are where you grow the most.”

CNN · by Haley Britzky · July 31, 2024

7. Will new child care plans help these Army Special Forces families?

Will new child care plans help these Army Special Forces families?

militarytimes.com · by Karen Jowers · August 1, 2024

A long-awaited military child development center is officially in the works for Army Special Forces and other service families in the Florida panhandle north of Eglin Air Force Base, Air Force officials announced.

Due to the lengthy military construction process, the center won’t be completed until the end of 2028. In the meantime, Army and Air Force officials are working on interim child care solutions.

For years, soldiers in the 7th Special Forces Group at Camp “Bull” Simons and their families, along with Navy and Air Force members in the area, have faced a child care shortage.

RELATED

Special Forces soldiers in NW Florida still awaiting child care center

A decision on whether Special Forces families will get a child development center at Camp "Bull" Simons, Florida, may arrive in the coming weeks.

It’s a decision Army families have long anticipated — and fought for — but it’s not exactly the best solution for everyone, said Molly Tobin, the wife of an Army Special Forces officer. The center will be built about 20 minutes northeast of Camp “Bull” Simons in the Crestview civilian community, where 60% of the 7th SFG families live, but families have been fighting for it to be built on the actual compound.

Tobin, who was formerly the family readiness group leader for the 7th SFG’s 3rd Battalion, and her husband relocated to another base in Florida a year ago. Despite the move, she continues to advocate for families at Camp “Bull” Simons.

Families are worried about the security of children at an off-base location and the inconvenience for soldiers not living in Crestview. Although the Air Force will build the center to strict military construction guidelines, the absence of guards at an installation entrance raises questions about security. Information about specific plans for the security of the center wasn’t immediately available from Eglin Air Force Base.

“The Air Force plans to construct the Crestview CDC in accordance with DOD child care facility integrated base standards,” said Gabe Myers, spokesman for the 96th Test Wing at Eglin, in an email to Military Times. “Commanders and the Crestview CDC program coordinators will ensure it meets the emergency, operation, unit readiness, and training mission requirements.”

Air Force officials are working on the process to acquire land for the future center, and the funding for the center will be part of the fiscal 2026 budget request.

Camp “Bull” Simons, an Army installation that is technically part of Eglin Air Force Base, has faced disagreements between Army and Air Force officials over the construction of a child care center.

In October 2022, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth announced plans to build a child care center on the camp. Specifically, Army officials and 7th SFG families wanted the center near the chapel out of convenience for soldiers. Air Force officials, however, have raised safety concerns due to the post’s proximity to Eglin’s active bombing range.

The camp, which was carved out of a remote area of Eglin as part of the 2005 Base Closure and Realignment action, includes a chapel, troop clinic, barracks and an AAFES shopette but lacks family housing and a commissary. About 2,600 military and civilian workers live and work there.

Finding affordable, high-quality child care has long been a challenge for many military families, with issues varying by location. For the 7th SFG — one of the Army’s most elite units handling covert missions across Central and South America and the Caribbean — child care has been a persistent struggle since the group relocated from then-Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2011.

RELATED

How bad is the lack of child-care? Ask these Florida military families

The 7th Special Forces Group families' child care crisis "is endemic of the retention and recruiting problem we’re having right now."

Aside from the 60% of families living in the Crestview community, many others reside south of Camp “Bull” Simons, meaning they would need to drive past the camp and then back south to drop off and pick up their children at a Crestview CDC, Tobin said.

“The convenience factor is gone for anyone outside Crestview,” Tobin said.

It’s uncertain what civilian housing availability in Crestview will be by 2028.

“Families are upset the center won’t be on the compound,” Tobin said. “There are parents who are very frustrated. It’s not the convenience we requested, the security we requested, the number of spaces we requested.”

The Air Force’s Crestview center will offer 250 spaces for military children, but, according to the most recent count, there are over 400 children of child care age in the 7th SFG alone. While not all need child care, the exact number is unclear because some families have given up on finding child care, Tobin said.

In the interim, other options

Meanwhile, most families with young children living there now will miss the chance to enroll their kids in the CDC, as their children will be too old by the time the center opens in 2028.

In response, Air Force and Army officials have explored other options to improve child care options in the area. Despite ongoing child care worker shortages, they increased staffing at the current Eglin CDC and opened two more classrooms. The Air Force is also restoring a CDC on Eglin to care for 118 children. While this will assist some families south of Camp “Bull” Simons, it still will require additional driving time, Tobin said.

The Air Force has doubled the number of Air Force-certified family child homes in the last year — to a total of 17 homes — with the capacity to provide care for up to 102 children. Another 13 homes are in the certification process.

The Army is initiating a one-year pilot program to provide hourly, part-time and intermittent child care support for up to 100 active-duty Army families beginning in the fall.

The Air Force and Army are also in contact with a local commercial child care provider that plans to open a new facility in the Crestview community by late 2025.

Still, Tobin said some families feel the solutions are falling short. She said one Army parent who attended a recent town hall detailing the decision told her, “The Air Force said they’d take care of us. They’re just trying to shut us up.”

“Once again, our child care has been pushed to the side,” said Tobin. “My 7th Group family lives there. Just because I moved doesn’t mean I don’t still have heartstrings back there. I have friends who are giving birth to babies. I have friends whose kids are 2, 3, 4 years old. They’re still hurting because there’s no child care,” she said, adding that inflation has made a dual income even more of a necessity.

“If you’re a service member who is concerned about the child care provided for the family … the mind is going to be somewhere else,” she said, rather than focused 100% on the mission.

7th SFG leaders understand that completely, and have been supportive of their soldiers and families, Tobin said.

“The 7th Group command team has excelled at that and advocated for families consistently, whether it’s [attending] meetings, surveys requested or any other hoops that the Air Force has thrown at them to slow processes of taking care of our families.”

About Karen Jowers

Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book "A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families." She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.

8. Wearable tactical gateway developed for USSOCOM by Viasat

Wearable tactical gateway developed for USSOCOM by Viasat - Military Embedded Systems

militaryembedded.com · by OpenSystems Media

News

July 31, 2024

Dan Taylor

Technology Editor

Military Embedded Systems

Image via Viasat

CARLSBAD, California. Viasat introduced the Secure Wireless Hub (SWH), a wearable tactical communications system that was developed "as part of a multi-phase effort with U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) to identify and develop advanced tactical communications capabilities for mobile ground forces," the company announced in a statement.

The SWH is Viasat’s first wearable tactical gateway, featuring a design that integrates with body armor and weighs less than one kilogram, the company says, adding that it was designed to meet tactical edge compute and networking requirements. The system includes Viasat’s mobile software-defined networking platform, NetAgility, to support various tactical transports and advanced networking capabilities, the statement adds.

The company says the modular SWH system supports LTE and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connections and includes a Secure Wireless Hub App for integrated configuration management.

Viasat and USSOCOM conducted full customer tests and user assessments of the SWH system during the Strategic Level Joint SOF Fires Exercise last fall, according to the statement.

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militaryembedded.com · by OpenSystems Media

9. Decoding Trump’s Foreign Policy (interview with Elbridge Colby)

"My strategy."  Decoding Trump's foreign policy or giving us "his" strategy?

I think his entire DOD experience (except for a short stint with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003) is barely a year (2017-2018) as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development in which he says he played a key role in the development of the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy, which, among other things, shifted the U.S. Defense Department's focus to challenges posed by China's rise. :-) 

Excerpts:

RA: But two things can be true at the same time. So, America can ask Europe to do a lot more, and it seems like it is. But second, America can continue to support Europe. Because with the policy you’re describing and suggesting, what if Ukraine falls?

EC: My own view is that we should remain in NATO and the European pillar should take lead responsibility. So far our conversation has been focusing on Europe, which is a symptom of the problem that we face in the foreign-policy debate. Europe is a fraction of Asia, and Russia is a 10th the size of China [in population]. Why are we spending all this time dealing with Europe? Of course, I don’t want to abandon Europe, but I’m dealing with the reality that we’re facing. There simply are constraints. China is the largest state we have dealt with. It’s the first time that we are not by far the largest state in the international system for about 150 years. So that, just by necessity, imposes constraint.

My strategy is the one that will save NATO. The people who are saying hosannas to NATO and refuse to depart from the shibboleths are the people who are going to put NATO right into the iceberg and sink it, because it’s going to stretch it too far. And that’s sort of the approach that I take. And I think, actually, we’re seeing it happen.

Decoding Trump’s Foreign Policy

Former Pentagon policymaker Elbridge Colby makes the case for a more transactional, common-sense approach to the world.

By Ravi Agrawal, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by Ravi Agrawal

July 31, 2024, 2:04 PM

FP-Live-podcast-functional-tag

Prefer to listen? Follow the FP Live podcast for the entire conversation, plus other in-depth discussions, wherever you get your podcasts.

The race for the White House seems transformed by the immense public energy and excitement around U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris as the new presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. With Joe Biden now officially a lame-duck president, change is in the air. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that Donald Trump still has reasonable odds to win.

The race for the White House seems transformed by the immense public energy and excitement around U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris as the new presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. With Joe Biden now officially a lame-duck president, change is in the air. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that Donald Trump still has reasonable odds to win.

What might a second Trump White House foreign policy look like? It can be difficult to find a signal in the noise of the former president’s scattergun pronouncements. Elbridge Colby, a former Pentagon policymaker who is often touted as someone who could have a significant role in a Republican White House—perhaps even as national security advisor—has long been arguing for the United States to focus more on Asia than Europe. While he doesn’t speak for the Trump campaign, Colby’s views have gained currency among mainstream GOP politicians, including Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, the party’s vice presidential nominee.

I spoke with Colby on FP Live and quizzed him about trade-offs in foreign policy, and how he envisions a conservative framework for Washington’s engagement with the world. Colby served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development under the Trump administration, during which time he led the development of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy. Subscribers can watch the full conversation on the video box atop this page. What follows is an edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You have popularized the argument that there is a trade-off between aiding Ukraine and deterring China. And you’ve said quite clearly that Asia is more important than Europe when it comes to U.S. national security. Why?

Elbridge Colby: I approach this from the standpoint of a colloquial realism, a pragmatic realism, focused on Americans’ practical interests. Traditional American foreign policy was basically designed to prevent potentially hostile states from dominating the most important market area, the basis for a great power to use that strength to undermine our way of life. And if you look at it that way, there’s really no question that Asia is the most important area. I think it’s about half of the global population, and it’s where growth is concentrated.

RA: Yes, but if the White House makes clear to European leaders that it is less important, doesn’t that hurt America’s most important alliances? Don’t alliances matter?

EC: Alliances absolutely do matter. My view is alliances are so important that we actually expect people to do their part.

Stepping back, the implicit understanding, if I may be forgiven, behind what you’re saying is that alliances are feel-good operations. Biden describes them as kind of sacred. I don’t think that’s how we should look at alliances. I think we should look at them as, frankly, in a business-like way, that they’re supposed to serve both sides’ interests. Obviously, they have those very deep connections. But at the end of the day, these alliances are meant to do something for us and for others.

If people are not doing that, which has been the case, for instance, in Germany, Japan, and Taiwan, then there really needs to be consequences for that. Otherwise, we’re actually not taking alliances seriously. I do take alliances seriously. And so if Trump-proofing NATO leads European countries and Canada to actually spend more and meet their defense commitments there, that’s actually the thing they should be doing anyway. So that’s good for them.

RA: But if the White House says Asia is more important, Moscow might get the signal that it can be more aggressive in policies toward Europe. The critique of what you’re saying is that words and signals matter in diplomacy.

EC: Sure, but actions matter more. And at the end of the day, we need to reconcile actions with reality and the words implicit behind what you’re saying. For many years, very high American officials of both political parties were politely ignored when they plaintively and nicely made arguments to the Europeans and others. In my view, if we’re not communicating a costly signal that this is very serious and there are real dangers, that’s actually not being good allies.

I actually don’t think Biden, who released the pressure on European allies in a lot of ways, has done them any favors. Let’s look at the record. I mean, the largest war in Europe happened under President Biden’s watch. So you want to talk about words and actions? The beginning of the uptick in spending happened under President Trump’s presidency.

Yes, you’re right that there are risks to being frank. But I think what’s been clear to me is there’s no costless or riskless course of action. And the people who say we need to be polite and so forth are smothering the reality and not doing our friends and allies any favors. I believe that it’s much better, especially in democracies like our own and that of most of our allies, to be clear and generate the political urgency and will for action. And that’s generally how things have moved in the last few years. We would have been better off, though, if we’d adapted earlier.

RA: But two things can be true at the same time. So, America can ask Europe to do a lot more, and it seems like it is. But second, America can continue to support Europe. Because with the policy you’re describing and suggesting, what if Ukraine falls?

EC: My own view is that we should remain in NATO and the European pillar should take lead responsibility. So far our conversation has been focusing on Europe, which is a symptom of the problem that we face in the foreign-policy debate. Europe is a fraction of Asia, and Russia is a 10th the size of China [in population]. Why are we spending all this time dealing with Europe? Of course, I don’t want to abandon Europe, but I’m dealing with the reality that we’re facing. There simply are constraints. China is the largest state we have dealt with. It’s the first time that we are not by far the largest state in the international system for about 150 years. So that, just by necessity, imposes constraint.

My strategy is the one that will save NATO. The people who are saying hosannas to NATO and refuse to depart from the shibboleths are the people who are going to put NATO right into the iceberg and sink it, because it’s going to stretch it too far. And that’s sort of the approach that I take. And I think, actually, we’re seeing it happen.

RA: There’s an argument that Beijing is taking lessons from global support for Ukraine. If the U.S. pulls back in its support for Ukraine, [Chinese leader] Xi [Jinping] may read that as a signal that America could also step back from its support for Taiwan in a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Are you concerned about the signal that less support for Europe sends to Xi Jinping?

EC: I think it’s a factor, but I would say it’s like a tertiary factor. I think a lot of the discussion has a kind of liberal internationalist frame. Frankly, it’s almost like a pedagogical sort of idea about how international relations works. That Xi Jinping is going to learn a lesson, as if he’s sitting in class and waiting to be instructed about the behavior of the United States.

I think much more significant for Xi Jinping rationally, and I don’t know what’s in his mind, is the military balance in Asia and our perceived resolve in a potential contest with China in Asia. And that, of course, is interrelated because the more resources we have available, the less costly it will be. And so the demands on our resolve will be lower.

If the Chinese actually believed that the future of Taiwan and the Western Pacific was going to be resolved in Ukraine, they would intervene directly. Because nobody cares more about Taiwan than they do. And at a minimum, they would provide large-scale lethal support to the Russians, which they’re not doing. Instead, what they’re doing is they’re bleeding us out and they’re letting the war go on. They’re not even giving the Russians enough for a decisive victory. And at the same time, they’re building up their forces relative to the first island chain. So unfortunately, they’re acting as I would advise, which is much more practical and much more dangerous.

RA: You’ve long said that the United States doesn’t have a military that can fight two wars. And a new bipartisan review of U.S. defense strategy ordered by Congress says that the Pentagon should go back to resourcing and planning to fight wars in multiple parts of the world. Do you think the report is wrong?

EC: Well, here’s the most important part of that study. Their analysis of the American military may even be harsher than my own. They say we’re not prepared to fight even China. Their current assessment is that readiness is at historic lows, that the United States is not equipped to fight China, let alone multiple major wars, and that our defense industrial base is in terrible shape. So that’s their empirical assessment today. Their prescription is for the United States to dramatically increase defense spending to resource a multi-theater military.

Now my basic response to this commission report is I do not believe it’s a viable basis for a defense strategy going forward. Why? If our military is in such bad shape, how can we be in a position where we can be expansive or aggressive in three theaters? A number of these commissioners are people who’ve called for a military action against Iran, for no-fly zones in Ukraine—which, of course, would very realistically risk war with Russia—and for aggressive policies toward China and North Korea. How is that possible? To me, the basic criterion of a strategy is coherence, right? That you have to match the resources that are available with the strategy you’re proposing. And I think that this commission report, as far as I can tell, does not do that. So anybody who comes into office in January of next year (and I hope it’s President Trump) can’t run their playbook. The very fact that they are calling for such a radical change indicates that, if anything, they should be calling for even more laser focus than I am.

So one of my great frustrations in the defense and geopolitical debate is that the same people who’ve been saying for 20 years that we’ve been underspending on defense are now saying “we can’t afford not to be a global power.” Well, how does that even make sense? It’s incoherent! If it were true what they were saying, then, if anything, they should be far more dovish than I am. Looking forward, I see no discussion in the national political debate of dramatic increases in defense spending.

I believe that we will need to spend more, but I think we’re going to have to be pretty realistic, and we’re going to have to focus just to keep up with the Chinese.

RA: In The Strategy of Denial, one of your points is that Washington needs to deny China the opportunity to attack Taiwan. Is it your contention that this White House isn’t doing a good enough job on that front?

EC: I don’t think that’s really up for question. I think there’s phenomenal things happening. There’s progress. But somebody said to me, “Bridge, you got to give more credit. We’re putting points on the board.” And I said, “Well, they’re putting a lot more points on the board.” So, to quote Top Gun, “There’s no points for second place.” And that’s the problem.

There’s all kinds of triple-bank-shot logic arguments about how the capabilities needed in Ukraine are different than the ones in the first island chain. That’s not really true. We know air defense is very relevant. We have to assume that the PLA [Chinese People’s Liberation Army] would get ashore. So a lot of capabilities would be very similar. Moreover, the defense industrial base is stretched. Subcomponents are in demand. And, of course, money. Two-hundred billion is a lot of money that could have gone to first island chain defense.

And, of course, the Taiwanese themselves are woefully inadequate to the threat they’re facing. I mean, China has 1.4 billion people. The Journal was reporting last week that they may be ahead of us in supercomputing. Huawei has survived and is actually now doing pretty well, according to the Journal. And the Taiwanese are spending 2.4 percent of GDP on defense. That’s wildly inadequate.

RA: Is there a danger to thinking that war with China is preordained? And doesn’t that risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy?

EC: Absolutely. I’ve tried to be super scrupulous that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and that war is not inevitable. However, we do know that the Chinese are preparing for a war, not only militarily in terms of conventional forces and exercises, but also nuclear forces. They are also economically preparing for large-scale sanctions, stockpiling, the “Delete A” campaign, and politically conditioning the population. So I think the only prudent assessment is to assume that they could go to war, and that our best chance to avoid a war is deterrence.

I think the worst policy is to not recognize the constrained situation we’re in, hand tons of money and weapons to Europe and the Middle East and then support an independent Taiwan or call Xi Jinping “Hitler” or call the government of China “evil.” People who are representing the United States, in my view, should adopt a much more prudent approach. My view is we should seek a balance of power. And we should deal with the Chinese government as it is.

RA: Where does human rights fit into this? Where does soft power fit into this? I recently conducted an interview with Singapore’s defense minister at the Aspen Security Forum. He asked me and the audience whether we thought that the United States can sustain its presence in Asia solely predicated on military power. In other words, does soft power not matter? What about the interests of all these other countries in Asia that are quite uncomfortable with America’s China policy?

EC: I think implicit in what you’re saying is a moral critique, which I reject, and here’s why. And I wrote an article in First Things about two years ago called “The Morality of a Strategy of Denial.” It’s a sort of Morgenthau-style argument; I’m not a pure consequentialist, but I think foreign policy should be judged on the reasonable anticipation of results. So the best thing for democracy, frankly, and certainly the best thing for the American people, for others, is peace and a situation in which there’s a decent peace and the ability to trade in some ways without a large war.

I think the opposite point of view that you’re pointing to, expressed by [U.S. Secretary of State] Tony Blinken or [USAID Administrator] Samantha Power, would be a foreign policy of intentionality. Are we expressing ourselves? I actually think the results are worse, and they can be anticipated to be so. And that’s really what should be measured in a model of stewardship or of trusteeship, which is what our foreign policy should be. I actually think moralism is inferior to the morality of a realistic foreign policy. Not an aggressive, conquering foreign policy, but a realistic one. You skipped over an important part that I surmise the Singaporean defense minister was pointing to, which was economics, not really soft power. I would say the bulk of American engagement in Asia should be economic and then very focused and capable military power.

RA: Since we’re talking about realism, FP columnist Stephen Walt, who teaches at Harvard University and is known as one of the world’s leading realist scholars, recently wrote an essay for us, in which he points out that the realists who have embraced the Trump-Vance ticket are basically being shortsighted. His point is that the Trump-Vance worldview overestimates the United States’s ability to do whatever it wants on the world stage, but it also underestimates how rising middle powers—countries like India, Brazil, and Turkey—are less inclined to care about a unilateral American foreign policy. I know you don’t speak for Trump or Vance, but how would you respond to that?

EC: I don’t think President Trump or Sen. Vance are at all talking about a unipolar or unilateral approach. President Trump’s approach is essentially saying, “We’re not going to be able to do everything; we expect others to step up.”

Realists have come to dominate the academy, but they’ve had almost no traction in foreign policy and here in the imperial capital. And that’s a big problem because politics is reality and it’s OK to, in fact, you need to be, political. It doesn’t mean you subordinate your principles. But you have to politically engage. And we’re in an exceptionally dangerous period. And the idea of realists of all people sitting in the ivory tower and casting thunderbolts is absurd, right? Realists should understand that it’s important to get in there and deal with the world as it is.

I mean, I am very happy to support President Trump and Sen. Vance. But even if you don’t, realists for years and years have been talking about the need to get NATO to recalibrate and to do more and to reduce our forces in the Middle East. President Trump was the first major candidate, certainly on the Republican side, who was really calling for that.

RA: Why is it so hard to define a Trump doctrine? Robert O’Brien was Trump’s fourth national security advisor and may well take up a role again if he wins. He wrote recently that Trump “adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts.” You can see that as nimble, but it’s also unpredictable and unreliable. It’s transactional. And if you are purely transactional, then you’re basically stepping away from the international system that, all things considered, has served the world order pretty well for eight decades.

EC: I would say we don’t want to be completely transactional, but we want more transaction to reinstate some balance. Biden talking about alliances as sacred is an absurdity. Nothing is sacred in American politics. So we need to be a bit more transactional, like people need to do their part. And it’s sort of grubby, but actually, if you take alliances seriously, they need to do that.

A thought about the doctrine. Most of these doctrines are artificial. But there’s a general theme that I can ascertain in President Trump’s approach. I thought it was not a coincidence, and it was compelling, that the central term in the Republican platform was common sense. There’s a practicality: Is this in our interests? Does this make sense?

Foreign Policy · by Ravi Agrawal

10. Trump splits with GOP lawmakers on national security, raising alarm

And Vance too.

Excerpts:

“I think Trump goes in and tries to negotiate a deal [to end the war in Ukraine] where they cede certain territory to Putin knowing that Putin can’t walk away a loser. Putin’s only graceful exit from this is Zelensky and company ceding some territory, the Russian-speaking parks of Ukraine,” the senator said, predicting that Trump will lean on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“My guess is that doesn’t sit well with McConnell, at all. But Trump and McConnell have had a pretty rocky relationship,” the source said.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), an outspoken advocate for supporting the war in Ukraine and a McConnell ally, told reporters Wednesday he thinks Trump is open to continued U.S. support for Ukraine.

“If you take a look at the fact that we passed a $60 billion-plus supplemental package [for Ukraine], the House passed it, I’ve got to believe there was some tacit support from Trump … or he could have blocked it,” Tillis said. “It’s on us to convince President Trump why it’s in our best national interest to support Ukraine.”

But other GOP senators are skeptical that Trump will support sending tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine if he returns to the White House.

“His instinct is always toward nonintervention, caution. I don’t know that there’s well-formed philosophy about this is. It’s just his gut. He kind of does this by gut, and his gut is nonintervention,” said a fifth GOP senator who requested anonymity.

Trump splits with GOP lawmakers on national security, raising alarm

by Alexander Bolton - 08/01/24 6:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4804488-republicans-alarmed-trump-war-ukraine/

National security-minded Republican lawmakers are alarmed by what they see as a growing split between themselves and former President Trump on key issues, including the war in Ukraine, preserving the NATO alliance and protecting Taiwan from Chinese aggression.

Trump’s actions over the past three weeks have stirred confusion and concern among Republican senators who voted earlier this year to approve tens of billions of dollars to contain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to deter China from attacking Taiwan, an important U.S. ally and trading partner.

Defense-minded GOP senators viewed Trump’s invitation to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to visit him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the NATO summit in Washington as a worrisome development, given Orbán’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his efforts to undermine NATO’s support for the defense of Ukraine.

GOP senators who support U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine were dismayed when Trump selected Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who led the opposition to the Ukrainian assistance package, as his running mate.

And Senate Republicans are feeling uneasy about Trump’s assertion that Taiwan should pay more for its defense and refusal to commit to defending the island. 

One Republican senator, who requested anonymity, said “it’s a big question” whether Trump will support the war in Ukraine or would come to Taiwan’s defense if attacked by China.

“I don’t think he desires to be in conflict or to pay for conflicts around the world,” the senator observed.

“There’s no question where JD Vance is,” the lawmaker said of Trump’s selection of the Ohio senator as his running mate.

And the senator called Trump’s meeting with Orbán at Mar-a-Lago “concerning.”

“I can’t tell you why he’s doing it,” the lawmaker remarked.

‘Turned the corner’

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) answers a question during a press conference after the weekly policy luncheon on Tuesday, July 30, 2024. (Greg Nash)

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) argued earlier this year that the Republican Party has “turned the corner on the isolationist movement” within its ranks when a majority of GOP senators voted for a $95 billion foreign aid package, which included $61 billion for Ukraine.

But that’s now in doubt after Trump picked Vance to join him on the GOP ticket.

Opponents of continued funding for the war in Ukraine cheered the selection and touted it as a sign Trump would change course if elected in November.

“JD is probably one of the most outspoken individuals about continuing to fuel the flames of that bloody stalemate. I happen to agree with him. I think President Trump does as well,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who opposes sending more funding to Ukraine.

Johnson said Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate “kind of confirms the position of, hopefully, the next administration.”

“The president said he’d end that thing in 24 hours,” Johnson said, referring to Trump’s comments on the war.

Vance told The Hill in April that the $61 billion approved for Ukraine would be the last major assistance package of its kind to get through Congress.

“If Ukraine thinks that it’s getting another $60 billion supplemental out of the United States Congress, there’s no way,” Vance said.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) speaks during a campaign event in Reno, Nev., July 30, 2024. (Jae C. Hong, Associated Press)

McConnell told reporters he will support the GOP ticket with Vance on it but insisted he’s going to keep arguing for the importance of stopping Russia’s invasion.

“I support the ticket. I also support Ukraine, and I’m going to be arguing, no matter who gets elected president” for deterring Russian aggression, McConnell said. “It’s not just Ukraine, we’ve got worldwide organized authoritarian regimes talking to each other — China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and Iran’s proxies.

“This is a serious challenge,” he warned. “This is the single largest problem facing the democratic world, no matter who wins the election. And that’s what I’m going to be working on the next couple years.”

McConnell didn’t explicitly criticize Trump for meeting with Orbán in Florida but made it clear he views the Hungarian strongman as NATO’s “weakest” member and someone who has undermined U.S. security interests in Europe.

“He’s the one member of NATO who’s essentially turned his country over to the Chinese and the Russians. [He’s] been looking for ways to undermine NATO’s efforts to defeat the Russians in Ukraine. So Viktor Orbán, I think, has now made Hungary the most recent problem in NATO,” McConnell said.

McConnell also spoke out about the need to stand with Taiwan and other Far East allies when asked about Trump’s reluctance to commit to defending the island nation, which is a major source of semiconductors for U.S. industry.

“We don’t know yet who’s going to be the new administration. But it’s pretty clear that our allies in Asia, and now you can add the Philippines to the group, are all concerned about Chinese aggression. They are watching what happens to Russia in Ukraine carefully,” he said.

“This is the clearest example of the democratic world needing to stand up to these authoritarians,” he said. “Reagan had it right. There’s one thing that works. Peace you get through strength.”

Blame for Carlson

Former President Trump greets Tucker Carlson as he arrives to the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis., on Monday, July 15, 2024. (Greg Nash)

Other Republican senators are balking at Trump’s pick of Vance as his running mate and outreach to Orbán.

A second GOP senator who requested anonymity voiced hope that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump, would serve as Defense secretary in a new Trump administration and convince him to stay the course in supporting Ukraine.

The lawmaker blamed the influence of conservative media personality Tucker Carlson in pushing Trump toward Vance and Orbán.

“Not the way I would do it,” the senator said.

A third Republican senator said McConnell and other GOP colleagues aren’t happy with how Trump’s recent moves telegraph how he might run foreign policy out of the White House if he’s elected in November.

“I think Trump goes in and tries to negotiate a deal [to end the war in Ukraine] where they cede certain territory to Putin knowing that Putin can’t walk away a loser. Putin’s only graceful exit from this is Zelensky and company ceding some territory, the Russian-speaking parks of Ukraine,” the senator said, predicting that Trump will lean on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“My guess is that doesn’t sit well with McConnell, at all. But Trump and McConnell have had a pretty rocky relationship,” the source said.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), an outspoken advocate for supporting the war in Ukraine and a McConnell ally, told reporters Wednesday he thinks Trump is open to continued U.S. support for Ukraine.

“If you take a look at the fact that we passed a $60 billion-plus supplemental package [for Ukraine], the House passed it, I’ve got to believe there was some tacit support from Trump … or he could have blocked it,” Tillis said. “It’s on us to convince President Trump why it’s in our best national interest to support Ukraine.”

But other GOP senators are skeptical that Trump will support sending tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine if he returns to the White House.

“His instinct is always toward nonintervention, caution. I don’t know that there’s well-formed philosophy about this is. It’s just his gut. He kind of does this by gut, and his gut is nonintervention,” said a fifth GOP senator who requested anonymity.

11. Waging the Wrong War in Yemen

"Counter messaging."

Excerpt:

Other kinds of counter-messaging could also blunt the impact of the Houthi attacks. The efforts of Captain Chris Hill, commander of the U.S.S. Eisenhower, provide a striking example that could become a model for broader campaigns. During a nine-month deployment of the aircraft carrier in the Red Sea, Hill launched a social media initiative whose messages were relentlessly upbeat, highlighting the men and women who serve on his ship and humanizing his crew. He proved particularly effective in combating Houthi disinformation. In June, false claims that the Houthis had struck or even sunk the U.S.S. Eisenhower proliferated on social media, amplified by pro-Russian and Chinese accounts. By simply serving as a trusted voice portraying everyday life on the Eisenhower, Hill demonstrated that the ship was just fine. Although his messages are no doubt intended for an American audience, they still circulate in the same social media environment that much of Houthi propaganda does. By rebutting the messages sent by the Houthis and by supporters, including Russia and China, such posts can play an important role in countering disinformation.

Social media messaging can also be effective in demonstrating the harm wreaked by Houthi attacks, highlighting a Houthi pattern of repression and hypocrisy and showing that the group is not helping people but harming them. Images of the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group coming to the aid of the multinational crew of the Tudor, a ship sunk by the Houthis, show how the Houthis are targeting not just commercial vessels but also the ordinary people from around the world who work on them. U.S. messaging could also relay how the Houthis arrested employees of the UN and nongovernmental organizations in June and in the process made life even harder for the many Yemeni families who rely on humanitarian assistance to survive.

Houthi attacks on commercial vessels are also driving up the cost of shipping, making essential goods like food and fuel more expensive for Yemenis. A Houthi attack in July on the Chios Lion, an oil tanker , led to a 125-mile-long oil slick along the Red Sea coast, with severe economic consequences for Yemenis employed in the fishing industry, a major source of employment and food security. Sharing information on social media about the harm done by the Houthis to ordinary Yemenis would help demonstrate the group’s hypocrisy.10Such attacks will continue as long as the Houthis believe that the campaign is benefiting them by spreading the messages they want to send to their domestic constituents, their partners in the Iranian axis of resistance and the West. A U.S. counterinformation campaign could substantially reduce those benefits and make it less worthwhile for the Houthis to continue striking furiously around the region.

Waging the Wrong War in Yemen

Why the Houthis Cannot Be Bombed Into Submission

By Alexandra Stark

August 2, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East · August 2, 2024

The Iranian-backed Houthis are proving to be a stubborn problem for the United States and its allies. Ever since Hamas’s October 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent offensive in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis, a Shiite rebel group that controls a substantial portion of Yemen after a nearly decade-long civil war, have lashed out at Israel and tried to use their perch on the Red Sea to disrupt business as usual. They have attacked commercial and military ships in the region, stirring a U.S.-led coalition to try to rein them in. But the best efforts of this coalition have failed to deter the Houthis. After a brief slowing in April and May, the pace of Houthi attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea ratcheted up dramatically in June, posting the largest total since last December. July’s barrages have only underlined the tenacity of a group that does not seem ready to relent.

On July 19, the Houthis successfully struck Tel Aviv with an Iranian-manufactured drone, killing one person and injuring at least ten others. It was the first time the Houthis had been able to hit Israeli territory after months of trying to do so. The Houthis have also claimed responsibility for attacks on the port of Eilat in southern Israel. Shaken, Israel retaliated by targeting oil tanks and other infrastructure in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, killing nine people and injuring dozens more. In previous months, U.S. and British forces have hit Houthi military targets in attacks meant to punish the militants and prevent them from launching attacks of their own.

Bombing the group into submission will not work: the Houthis can endure significant punishment and continue to launch attacks against Red Sea shipping and against Israel. Moreover, the Houthis are not all that worried about losing some of their military capabilities. In fact, they likely believe that they are winning—not necessarily the war on the ground, but the information war. Fighting against the United States and Israel is a key part of how the Houthis define themselves (their slogans include “Death to Israel, death to America!”), and their support for the Palestinian people resonates widely in Yemen and across the Middle East. The Houthis have therefore been able to successfully use violence to portray themselves as the defenders of the Palestinians, bolster their legitimacy at home and abroad, and demonstrate their importance as a key member of Iran’s “axis of resistance”—a network of largely Shiite state and nonstate military organizations that stretches from Iraq to Lebanon and that Tehran uses to spread its influence in the region.

Houthi leaders have calculated that they gain more adulation and support in the region by staging these attacks than they lose from having to absorb bombardments. They see their war as a public relations initiative, and so far, in their eyes, it has been worth every ounce of blood and treasure.

HEARTS AND MINDS

Since November 2023, the Houthis have targeted over 70 vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in attacks that have killed four sailors, sunk two ships, and involved the hijacking of a third. This uptick in violence has burnished the Houthis’ image as the champion of the Palestinians and as a courageous opponent to the West. The United States and its allies have not been able to stem the tide of attacks or check the group’s propaganda campaign.

The Houthis claim that their attacks are a response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza and have promised to continue until Israel and Hamas agree to a cease-fire and humanitarian aid can freely enter the devastated territory. The attacks have had substantial repercussions for international trade in the Red Sea—in the first three months of 2024, shipping traffic through the area declined by half. Commercial ships passing through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea handled an estimated 15 percent of global trade in 2023, including 25 to 30 percent of all container shipping. A U.S.-led multinational coalition has sought to protect ships in the Red Sea by shooting down Houthi missiles and drones and by striking Houthi military assets in Yemen. But these efforts have clearly been insufficient in protecting global commerce.

The problem for the United States is that it has focused too much on the military dimensions of the conflict. Before October 7, the Houthis were struggling to consolidate their authority over the territory they control and distract attention from their poor governance record. Their subsequent strikes against Israel and Red Sea shipping have significantly bolstered their legitimacy within Yemen and in the broader region. Thousands of Yemenis took to the streets in January in pro-Palestinian protests organized by the Houthis, highlighting the popularity of the cause and the Houthis’ role as its standard bearer. This vocal support for Palestinians has also put the Houthis’ domestic enemies—the already-fractured anti-Houthi coalition in Yemen—on the defensive as they scramble to thread the needle of condemning Houthi actions while still echoing the Houthis’ rhetorical support for the Palestinians. And the Houthis insist that their striving on behalf of a besieged Gaza has swelled their ranks. They claim that they have recruited over 100,000 new fighters (a figure that may also include child soldiers) since October 7.

The Houthis believe their war has been worth every ounce of blood and treasure.

Houthi media, including Al Masirah, a digital Beirut-based media platform produced in English as well as Arabic, and the televised speeches of the group’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, provide a good sense of the spirit of this propaganda campaign. Houthi messaging has consistently framed the group’s attacks as part of a fight against Israel and a bid to force de-escalation in Gaza. They also claim to be targeting only ships that are linked to Israel, although many of the vessels they have attacked appear to have no connection to the country. The Houthis cast themselves as brave and intrepid champions of the Palestinian cause and one of the few actors in the Middle East willing to stand up to the West.

The Houthis have also emphasized their ties to Iran and other members of that country’s “axis of resistance.” They even claim to have carried out a joint military operation with an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq to target the Israeli port of Haifa. Houthi media outlets have also delighted in the praise the group has received from its partners in Tehran. In January, Iranian leaders lauded the Houthis for their “strong and authoritative position in support of the oppressed people of Palestine.”

The Houthis believe that the elevation of their profile in the region makes the costs of the U.S.-led campaign against them much easier to bear. In fact, they have embraced the idea that they are “under attack” from the United States and are facing down imperialism, a tried-and-true message deployed, often to great effect, by repressive authoritarian regimes. Indeed, their leader has insisted that it is “a great honor and blessing to be confronting America directly.”

To be clear, one does not need to be sympathetic to the Houthis’ aims to understand what the group is trying to accomplish with their information campaign. Houthi rule is violent and oppressive, and the Houthis have no legitimate claim to represent the Yemeni people. Indeed, their attacks on Red Sea shipping are making life even harder for the people of Yemen, who are already enduring the humanitarian fallout of a devastating war that has wracked their country for a decade. But understanding what the Houthis are trying to achieve—and why they think they are winning—could help the United States develop an effective policy to counter them.

THE MESSAGE

Unfortunately, the United States has few good options when it comes to responding to the Houthis. So far, military strikes, sanctions targeting the Houthi leadership, and efforts to interdict weapons smuggling have all failed to stop attacks. Ratcheting up the scale and intensity of American-led strikes would not likely change the Houthis’ calculus or substantially alter the military dynamics of the conflict. Scaled-up military action could degrade the Houthis’ high-end military capabilities in the short term, but the Houthis would be able to replenish those capabilities with missiles smuggled from Iran. (So far, the U.S.-led coalition has not been able to halt the transit of these weapons into Yemen). At the same time, the Houthis can use low-cost technology, including drones in the air and the sea. After decades of insurgent warfare, they are adept at moving and concealing their assets. Even if the American-sponsored coalition dropped bombs all over Houthi territory, such an offensive would not reduce the Houthis’ military capabilities to the point where the group could not launch its own attacks.

Even worse, an accelerated bombing campaign would increase the risk of escalation and miscalculation. U.S. strikes in Yemen have sought to minimize civilian casualties and humanitarian fallout by narrowly focusing on specific kinds of military infrastructure. An expansion of the air strikes would in all likelihood end up killing more civilians and damaging civilian infrastructure, returning the United States to the same mess it faced when it supported a Saudi-led coalition’s intervention in Yemen in 2015. Many countries and international institutions condemned that intervention—and the U.S. role in enabling it—for its horrific toll of civilian casualties and the humanitarian disaster that followed. A more concerted U.S. bombing campaign now would not only hurt Yemenis and deepen their domestic crisis but also give the Houthis, their backers in Iran, and the Iranian axis of resistance a greater impetus to stage attacks against U.S. assets in the region. Washington does not want to invite such escalation.

The best chance the United States has to deter Houthi attacks is to find ways to conduct an information campaign of its own to counter Houthi messaging. As long as the Houthis believe they are winning the information war, they will likely continue their attacks. Neutralizing Houthi propaganda is the best way to deter the group’s attacks. The most straightforward way to blunt their message would be to reach a sustainable cease-fire in Gaza. Although there is no guarantee that the Houthis would end their attacks once a cease-fire was in place, it would greatly diminish the power of their messaging by eliminating a huge source of popular grievance and angst.

The Houthis are adept at moving and concealing their assets.

Other kinds of counter-messaging could also blunt the impact of the Houthi attacks. The efforts of Captain Chris Hill, commander of the U.S.S. Eisenhower, provide a striking example that could become a model for broader campaigns. During a nine-month deployment of the aircraft carrier in the Red Sea, Hill launched a social media initiative whose messages were relentlessly upbeat, highlighting the men and women who serve on his ship and humanizing his crew. He proved particularly effective in combating Houthi disinformation. In June, false claims that the Houthis had struck or even sunk the U.S.S. Eisenhower proliferated on social media, amplified by pro-Russian and Chinese accounts. By simply serving as a trusted voice portraying everyday life on the Eisenhower, Hill demonstrated that the ship was just fine. Although his messages are no doubt intended for an American audience, they still circulate in the same social media environment that much of Houthi propaganda does. By rebutting the messages sent by the Houthis and by supporters, including Russia and China, such posts can play an important role in countering disinformation.

Social media messaging can also be effective in demonstrating the harm wreaked by Houthi attacks, highlighting a Houthi pattern of repression and hypocrisy and showing that the group is not helping people but harming them. Images of the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group coming to the aid of the multinational crew of the Tudor, a ship sunk by the Houthis, show how the Houthis are targeting not just commercial vessels but also the ordinary people from around the world who work on them. U.S. messaging could also relay how the Houthis arrested employees of the UN and nongovernmental organizations in June and in the process made life even harder for the many Yemeni families who rely on humanitarian assistance to survive.

Houthi attacks on commercial vessels are also driving up the cost of shipping, making essential goods like food and fuel more expensive for Yemenis. A Houthi attack in July on the Chios Lion, an oil tanker , led to a 125-mile-long oil slick along the Red Sea coast, with severe economic consequences for Yemenis employed in the fishing industry, a major source of employment and food security. Sharing information on social media about the harm done by the Houthis to ordinary Yemenis would help demonstrate the group’s hypocrisy.

Such attacks will continue as long as the Houthis believe that the campaign is benefiting them by spreading the messages they want to send to their domestic constituents, their partners in the Iranian axis of resistance and the West. A U.S. counterinformation campaign could substantially reduce those benefits and make it less worthwhile for the Houthis to continue striking furiously around the region.

• ALEXANDRA STARK is an Associate Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation and the author of The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East. 

Foreign Affairs · by The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East · August 2, 2024

12. The Limits of a U.S.-Saudi Security Deal

Excerpts;

Riyadh has also sought to reduce tensions with Iran, as part of MBS’s Vision 2030 mandate to encourage greater foreign investment in the country. A Middle East constantly on the verge of regional war, even if it is not actually engulfed in one, is hardly a place conducive to foreign investment. The Saudis have thus swallowed their misgivings about Iran, which they still see as a major security threat, in an effort—so far unrealized—to reduce regional tensions.

As president, Kamala Harris would likely sustain the Biden administration’s economic pressure on Russia and its efforts to contain China through measures such as tariffs and export controls. A second Trump administration would likely ratchet up the pressure on Iran and China. Each option presents challenges to Saudi Arabia and its desire to maintain strong security ties with the United States while also extending economic relations with China and Russia and trying to ease Middle Eastern tensions. There might be a slight preference in Riyadh for a second Trump administration, given how accommodating Trump was in his first term on issues such as human rights. But memories have not faded of his inaction in the face of the Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities. Saudi Arabia is wisely staying out of U.S. domestic politics this election year, having learned a lesson from its overly public embrace of Trump earlier. The very public Saudi courting of Trump during his first term in office alienated Democrats, setting the stage for the Biden administration’s early distaste for dealing with Riyadh. The Saudis are not repeating that mistake this time.

Regardless of who is in the White House come 2025, Riyadh will be willing to sign on to an ironclad security relationship with Washington as long as the United States meets its price. The question for the United States, as it considers a new level of security commitment with Saudi Arabia, is whether it can tolerate a security ally in Riyadh that goes its own way in economic and political dealings with China, Iran, and Russia.

The Limits of a U.S.-Saudi Security Deal

Don’t Expect Riyadh to Take Washington’s Side Against China and Russia

By F. Gregory Gause III

August 2, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by F. Gregory Gause III · August 2, 2024

For some time, the United States has worked to consolidate Saudi Arabia’s position in the American geopolitical orbit; even the war in the Gaza Strip, which has divided officials in Riyadh and Washington on the question of Palestinian governance, has not dimmed the Biden administration’s desire for a security treaty and nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. In fact, Washington has continued to pursue those deals with Riyadh, which would also include Saudi recognition of Israel, as a potential lever to move Israel toward a political solution to the Palestinian issue. A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty and agreement on civil nuclear cooperation appears to be in the final stages. As the White House has pushed for a cozier relationship with Riyadh, it has become clear what the Biden administration is seeking to gain from the expanded U.S. commitment to Saudi Arabia: not just movement toward a more stable Middle East but also the foreclosure of any possibility that China might lure the Saudis into its sphere of influence.

At a time when many countries are hedging their bets amid the emerging great-power competition among China, Russia, and the United States, why would the Saudis double down on their historic reliance on Washington? In short, they want what neither China nor Russia can provide: security. The Saudis have grave doubts about the U.S. commitment to their country and their region, and they want to nail that down as best they can through a treaty that would not change from administration to administration. The problem for Riyadh is that when the United States makes a security commitment to a country, most Americans expect that country to back Washington on the whole range of international issues—economic and political, as well as military. That is where the Saudis might disappoint. They do not want to hedge on security. They want to be part of the American team. But they also want to maintain some flexibility on the economic and political fronts given the crucial importance of China as an energy customer and Russia as an energy producer.

Both a potential Harris and a potential Trump administration will need to reckon with Riyadh’s independent ties to Beijing and Moscow should a U.S.-Saudi agreement move forward. It may prove to be a harder pill for a Democratic administration to swallow, given Trump’s embrace of autocrats the world over. But regardless, Washington should go into the final stages of negotiations with Riyadh with a full understanding of Saudi Arabia’s intentions—or it will set the relationship up for unnecessary strife.

THE VIEW FROM RIYADH

Saudi leaders, along with their counterparts in other Persian Gulf monarchies, have worried about Washington’s commitment to their security for the past three U.S. administrations. The American public’s evident weariness and frustration with the lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were manifested in a succession of presidents—Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—who vowed to reduce the U.S. presence in the Middle East and pivot attention to East Asia in response to the rise of China. The fact that all three found themselves unable to ignore Middle Eastern upheavals—such as the fight against the Islamic State (or ISIS) in the 2010s and, more recently, the war in Gaza and Israel’s conflicts with Hezbollah and Iran—hardly quieted the Saudis’ fears.

In the eyes of the Saudis, each president made a singular decision—or nondecision—that seemed to confirm that Washington could not be counted on. Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran, which the Saudis saw as their biggest threat, without consulting Riyadh and without including any measures aimed at limiting Iran’s regional influence. Trump, who in his early days in the White House had put on a splashy public embrace of Saudi Arabia, failed to act when Iran launched a missile and drone attack on Abqaiq and Khurais, two of the most important oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, in September 2019. And Biden made it clear at the outset of his administration that he intended to keep Riyadh at arm’s length.

Saudi Arabia wants what neither China nor Russia can provide: security.

Harsh geopolitical realities, however, quickly flipped the script on the Biden administration. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the concomitant rise in oil prices led to a 180-degree turn in Biden’s approach toward Riyadh. Good relations with the world’s largest oil exporter suddenly seemed much more central to U.S. interests than the concerns over authoritarianism and human rights that had fueled Biden’s earlier stance. Moreover, the administration saw the possibility of doing Trump one better in the Middle East, getting the Saudis to join the Abraham Accords by recognizing Israel. When China played mediator in the restoration of Iranian-Saudi diplomatic relations—a diplomatic coup for Beijing—in March 2023, it gave Washington the added incentive of securing Saudi Arabia on the United States’ side of the emerging U.S.-Chinese cold war.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is the kingdom’s de facto leader, had been open to diplomatic relations with Israel for some time before the war in Gaza. He has made clear to Washington that his price for this dramatic move is an end to the uncertainty about the United States’ commitment to his country’s security through a Senate-ratified defense treaty. MBS has also called for U.S. support for the development of Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear infrastructure—without the stringent limitations on the reprocessing and export of nuclear material currently required by U.S. law. Getting such agreements through Congress would be difficult given the widespread suspicion of Saudi nuclear ambitions and the distaste for the Saudi human rights record among House and Senate members. And considering the current geopolitical environment, it would require, in the view of the administration, not just Saudi recognition of Israel but also active Israeli support for Washington’s upgraded commitment to Saudi Arabia.

The war in Gaza has upped the ante for Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel. Before the conflict, there were indications that Riyadh would take that step if Israel made some concrete gestures toward improving the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. But the Saudis are now demanding a firm Israeli commitment to a timetable for independent Palestinian statehood in those territories—something that the current Israeli government will not give. Momentum toward a triangular U.S.-Israeli-Saudi deal, which has been the centerpiece of Biden’s Middle East policy, has thus slowed. The regional and global power realities that underlie that momentum, however, are not going away. If and when Gaza recedes from the headlines, it is likely that the next U.S. presidential administration will seek to seal the deal.

OIL COMES FIRST

There is no guarantee, even if Gaza no longer occupied such a prominent place in the global news cycle, that the triangular deal envisaged by the Biden administration could be achieved by a successor. Israel and Saudi Arabia might not be able to find common ground on the Palestinian question. Since the onset of the war in Gaza, public support for negotiations on Palestinian statehood has cratered in Israel. Even if Israel supported the deal, Congress might not agree to the new commitments from Washington that are preconditions for Saudi participation given the long-held antipathies toward the kingdom on Capitol Hill. If, however, all the pieces did fall into place and the triangular deal was achieved, the United States would want to be clear-eyed about what it can expect from the Saudis in return. Riyadh would have no problem signing on to a monogamous marriage with Washington on military and security issues. That is what it wants. But it also wants the flexibility to deal with China and Russia and even Iran on political and economic issues of importance to Saudi Arabia. Americans generally expect their security allies to fall in line on the entire range of foreign policy issues and tend to feel ill used if allies chart their own course; in the case of Riyadh, they would need to temper this reaction.

Despite their ongoing conversations with Washington on these issues, the Saudis have already taken some distance from certain U.S. initiatives, even within the region. Riyadh, for instance, has been keen to extricate itself from its failed military intervention in Yemen, where a years-long conflict between a Saudi-backed military coalition and Houthi rebels has devolved into an intractable stalemate. As such, it has not joined the U.S. campaign against the Houthis, who continue to fire missiles and drones at commercial ships in the Red Sea and even, more recently, at Israel. Saudi Arabia has not joined the diplomatic and economic boycott of Russia orchestrated by the Biden administration in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Riyadh maintains an extensive economic relationship with China and turned to Beijing to mediate a resumption of diplomatic relations with Iran in 2023.

Saudi Arabia sees China and Russia as central to its future for one overarching reason: oil. These days, the driving force behind Saudi foreign and domestic policy is MBS’s economic development blueprint, known as Vision 2030, which emphasizes changing the Saudi economy and reducing its dependence on oil over the long term. Accomplishing the goals set out in Vision 2030, however, requires huge amounts of capital in the short term, which essentially requires maintaining relatively high oil prices now and sustaining Saudi Arabia’s share of sales in the global oil market. Russia is key to the Saudi strategy on prices; it is the world’s second-largest exporter of oil, and Moscow’s cooperation is essential to production agreements aimed at sustaining the price of oil. China, as the world’s leading importer of oil, is essential to the Saudis maintaining their market share—a position that has grown more vulnerable now that Russia is seeking a greater share of the Chinese market, having been shunned by its historic European customers. For this reason, Riyadh will be loath to hew to Washington’s political and economic policy toward the United States’ global rivals.

THE BUSINESS OF FRIENDSHIP

Beijing and Moscow are imperfect partners for Riyadh, but they are nonetheless essential to the kingdom’s economic strategy. The Saudis know that they cannot hope to keep oil prices up without Russian cooperation. That is why, at Riyadh’s insistence, the locus of international oil production negotiations has shifted from OPEC to OPEC+, which includes Russia and other non-OPEC producers. The Russians have been reluctant, though, to cut their production and potentially sacrifice some of their market share in order to raise prices. In both 2015 and 2020, Russia refused to go along with Saudi-proposed production cuts. Saudi Arabia increased production in both instances to drive oil prices down and put pressure on Russia to get on board, which Moscow eventually did. The dynamic between Russia and Saudi Arabia, at least in terms of the oil market, is fraught; the two can best be characterized as “frenemies.” But it is a relationship that Riyadh must sustain for its own self-interest.

China, on the other hand, is Riyadh’s largest customer. Sustaining Saudi Arabia’s place in the Chinese energy market is essential. Saudi Aramco has invested billions in refineries and other infrastructure in China to lock in its access there. Given the dramatic changes in world energy markets following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia has overtaken Saudi Arabia as China’s leading source of energy imports—a position Riyadh is likely desperate to reclaim. The Saudis will do what they need to do to maintain and increase their economic relationship with China.

Beijing and Moscow are imperfect but essential partners for Riyadh.

Riyadh has also sought to reduce tensions with Iran, as part of MBS’s Vision 2030 mandate to encourage greater foreign investment in the country. A Middle East constantly on the verge of regional war, even if it is not actually engulfed in one, is hardly a place conducive to foreign investment. The Saudis have thus swallowed their misgivings about Iran, which they still see as a major security threat, in an effort—so far unrealized—to reduce regional tensions.

As president, Kamala Harris would likely sustain the Biden administration’s economic pressure on Russia and its efforts to contain China through measures such as tariffs and export controls. A second Trump administration would likely ratchet up the pressure on Iran and China. Each option presents challenges to Saudi Arabia and its desire to maintain strong security ties with the United States while also extending economic relations with China and Russia and trying to ease Middle Eastern tensions. There might be a slight preference in Riyadh for a second Trump administration, given how accommodating Trump was in his first term on issues such as human rights. But memories have not faded of his inaction in the face of the Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities. Saudi Arabia is wisely staying out of U.S. domestic politics this election year, having learned a lesson from its overly public embrace of Trump earlier. The very public Saudi courting of Trump during his first term in office alienated Democrats, setting the stage for the Biden administration’s early distaste for dealing with Riyadh. The Saudis are not repeating that mistake this time.

Regardless of who is in the White House come 2025, Riyadh will be willing to sign on to an ironclad security relationship with Washington as long as the United States meets its price. The question for the United States, as it considers a new level of security commitment with Saudi Arabia, is whether it can tolerate a security ally in Riyadh that goes its own way in economic and political dealings with China, Iran, and Russia.

• F. GREGORY GAUSE III is Professor of International Affairs and John H. Lindsey ’44 Chair at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Foreign Affairs · by F. Gregory Gause III · August 2, 2024

13. How the historic Russia-West prisoner swap happened: Secret talks, a hitman and Biden's fateful call

Excerpt:

In the end, Biden secured the key piece of the puzzle on Jul 21 - the very day that the 81-year-old Democrat stunned the world by announcing that he would no longer stand in November's election.

Holed up in his Delaware beach home with COVID-19, he was about to release his shock statement. Yet before that, he had one more bit of work on the prisoner deal to do.

"I'm not making this up - literally an hour before he released that statement, he was on the phone with his Slovenian counterpart, urging them to make the final arrangements and to get this deal over the finish line," a senior US official told reporters.

Slovenia later freed two of the Russians, who had been convicted by a court of spying.

How the historic Russia-West prisoner swap happened: Secret talks, a hitman and Biden's fateful call

02 Aug 2024 05:12AM

(Updated: 02 Aug 2024 12:35PM)

channelnewsasia.com

WASHINGTON: The historic prisoner swap with Russia that freed US journalist Evan Gershkovich and 15 other Westerners was the fruit of painstaking, secret talks - and one crucial phone call from President Joe Biden an hour before he dropped his re-election bid.

Biden welcomed the families of the three US citizens and one US resident to the White House Thursday (Aug 1), just as the release was taking place in Ankara.

After placing an emotional phone call to their loved ones from the Oval Office, they appeared with the president in front of journalists.

Asked what he'd told the newly liberated Americans, Biden answered: "I said, 'Welcome almost home.'"

But the smiles hid the pain of waiting during long months of feverish negotiations.

The White House had worked desperately - and largely out of public view - to free Wall Street Journal reporter Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan, Radio Liberty reporter Alsu Kurmasheva, and US green card holder Vladimir Kara-Murza, an outspoken Putin critic.

This meant high-level talks with Russia at a time when East-West relations were in open conflict over the Ukraine war.

But it also meant, say US officials, leaning hard on European allies reluctant to give into Moscow's demands for getting back a string of Russian citizens imprisoned in the West for serious crimes.

In this image made from video provided by Russian Federal Security Service via RTR on Thursday, Aug 1, 2024, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich sits inside an airplane at an airport outside Moscow, Russia. (Photo: Russian Federal Security Service/RTR via AP)

In this image taken from video, employees at the Wall Street Journal in New York applaud at the news that reporter Evan Gershkovich, pictured top left, has been released as part of a prisoner swap with Russia, the United States and several other countries, Thursday, Aug 1, 2024. (Photo: Vaughn Sterling/The Wall Street Journal via AP)

In the end, Biden secured the key piece of the puzzle on Jul 21 - the very day that the 81-year-old Democrat stunned the world by announcing that he would no longer stand in November's election.

Holed up in his Delaware beach home with COVID-19, he was about to release his shock statement. Yet before that, he had one more bit of work on the prisoner deal to do.

"I'm not making this up - literally an hour before he released that statement, he was on the phone with his Slovenian counterpart, urging them to make the final arrangements and to get this deal over the finish line," a senior US official told reporters.

Slovenia later freed two of the Russians, who had been convicted by a court of spying.

"CROSSED OUR FINGERS"

But no one knew for certain that the deal would go through until the very end.

In a sign of the strain on negotiators and families alike, Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan choked up on the White House podium as he welcomed what he called a "good day."

"We held our breath and crossed our fingers until just a couple of hours ago," he said.

The process leading to Thursday's news began all the way back in 2018 when Whelan was arrested and Donald Trump was US president.

Not only was Whelan not freed, but then Gershkovich was arrested while reporting in Yekaterinburg in March, 2023. Suddenly "these efforts were obviously made more complicated," Sullivan said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, foreground right, walks with released Russian prisoners and relatives upon their arrival at the Vnukovo government airport outside Moscow, Russia, on Thursday, Aug 1, 2024. (Photo: Mikhail Voskresensky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In what critics describe as state-sponsored hostage-taking, Moscow's biggest condition was the release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian jailed in Germany for brazenly assassinating a former Chechen rebel commander in Berlin in 2019.

Germany baulked at giving up a hitman who had carried out such a brazen murder on its soil.

To persuade Berlin, Sullivan said, "required extensive diplomatic engagement with our German counterparts, starting at the top with the president."

Then in February this year, the tense diplomatic to-and-fro took another dark turn when Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny - who Sullivan revealed Thursday had also been on the US wish list for release -- died in a Russian prison.

"The team felt like the wind had been taken out of our sails," the senior US official added.

By coincidence, Gershkovich's mother and father were meeting with Sullivan at the White House that same day. It's "going to be a little bit more of a rocky path," he told them.

The breakthrough came during Oval Office talks between German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Biden in April.

"Chancellor Scholz responded to the president saying, 'For you, I will do this,'" added the US official.

Biden on Thursday thanked Scholz, praising the "bold and brave" decisions by allies.

And once the deal was outlined, a careful choreography ensued.

Russia fast-tracked a trial for Gershkovich, which ended with him receiving a 16-year jail sentence - but which behind the scenes indicated that Russia was preparing for the swap.

Finally, the White House ceremony on Thursday brought this diplomatic - and intensely personal journey -- to a head.

Noting that it was the 13th birthday of Kurmasheva's daughter, Biden asked the assembled family members and journalists to sing "happy birthday" - perhaps the happiest possible.

US-RUSSIA TIES WILL NOT IMPROVE: EXPERT

While lot of work clearly went into getting the deal done, the situation between the US and Russia will likely continue to deteriorate, said strategic analyst Malcolm David.

The Russia-Ukraine war continues to be a “real threat” to Western security, and there is “real concern” of a direct Russian attack on NATO in the next few years – a prospect which key decision-makers are preparing their countries for, added the senior analyst from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

As for the deal itself, David said it is significant in terms of scale and those involved in the prisoner exchange.

“(The motivation behind the deal) is really uncertain because the Russians don't have any real credibility or influence in Western circles after their invasion of Ukraine and how they're conducting that invasion,” he told CNA’s Asia First programme.

“So it's a bit of a mystery as to why this has happened now, but I think we should all be pleased and see this is a very positive development.”

However, David expressed concerns that Russia will see the exchange as “an opportunity to do the same thing again”.

“American citizens in Russia are at risk of being aggressively grabbed off the street and thrown into prison on spurious charges, because the Russians will feel they can try and gain benefits from hostage diplomacy,” he warned.

“In that sense, I think the Russians’ perspective on this is that they are probably going to try this again. And certainly, if I were the US government, I would be getting my citizens out of Russia for that reason.

14. 18th Airborne at center of major Pacific exercise for the first time

So good to see this after decades of neglect as they focused on the Middle East and ABTAP (anywhere but the Asia Pacific). They are going to have somewhat of a learning curve to operate throughout the Asia Pacific region, though I am sure there are some paratroopers who have served in the 25th ID as well as I Corps from JB Lewis McChord. Hopefully the leadership will be paying attention to those with experience in the region (though my previous experience seeing some of these units in places like Korea make me somewhat pessimistic (I am sure there will be statements like " this is the we did (or didn't do) it in Afghanistan or Iraq"). 

18th Airborne at center of major Pacific exercise for the first time

armytimes.com · by Todd South · August 1, 2024

The Army kicked off a massive, simulated war-fighting exercise Thursday that, for the first time, uses the Army’s premier quick-response division in a scenario focused on the Pacific region.

The 18th Airborne Corps out of Fort Liberty, North Carolina, which includes the 82nd Airborne Division, 10th Mountain Division, 3rd Infantry Division and 101st Airborne Division, will fall under the U.S. Army Pacific theater as leaders practice deploying a corps-sized force across vast distances.

A trio of commanders, Gen. Andrew Poppas, over Forces Command; Gen. Charles Flynn, over U.S. Army Pacific; and Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, over 18th Airborne Corps, laid out the “warfighter” exercise in a media call Thursday.

The Army conducts five to six warfighter exercises each year. They use command posts from various levels, such as brigade, division and corps, to simulate moving central units around a vast battle space.

In June, the 38th Infantry Division, an Army National Guard unit out of Indiana, conducted a 9-day warfighter with an estimated 600 soldiers participating, according to an Army release.

RELATED

Top Army general in the Pacific warns of China’s military threat

The threat looms, so soldiers must be prepared.

That exercise prepared the soldiers for their upcoming deployment to the U.S. Central Command region as part of the ongoing Operation Spartan Shield rotation.

During the current warfighter with the 18th Airborne Corps, an Army Pacific, Hawaii-based, theater-level headquarters will coordinate the simulated movement of the corps’ units in North Carolina over 10 days.

Flynn said those distances replicate what soldiers would experience in a real-world conflict with a Hawaii-based command directing units across the Pacific into the first and second island chains that parallel the China coast and operational regions.

The first island chain stretches from the upper reaches of Russian territory in the north, along Japan and Okinawa, down into the western side of the Philippines and into the South China Sea. The second island chain lies east of the Philippines and touches the eastern side of stretches of Indonesia, encompassing Palau and Guam.

Many U.S. bases and assets are situated within the first island chain, including forces stationed in South Korea, mainland Japan and Okinawa.

“I think it’s really important that we continue to train at echelon — wargames, [combat support] training exercises and command post exercises like this that allow us to test concepts, allows us to rehearse our wartime functions, update our plans,” Flynn said.

The 18th Airborne Corps has the global response force mission for the Army, meaning a rapid deployment of up to an entire brigade on short notice. The airborne and air assault capabilities also give the corps more ways to reach their target than nonairborne capable units.

Donahue pointed to those skillsets and ongoing work on maritime insertion, including the corps’ recent work operating the floating pier off the shore of Gaza in the Israel-Hamas conflict, as ways the corps is preparing to respond anywhere it’s needed.

Perhaps as important is the corps’ recent work on a project known as Scarlet Dragon. The project seeks to integrate various communications and control equipment and networks across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.

The integration would allow units in the corps to identify and strike targets with minimal delay.

“Right now, all of our networks, all of our systems we’re using are exactly what we would use in combat,” Donahue said.

That allows commanders to test what they have on hand even as the Army seeks a significant upgrade to its networks and high-tech gear in the coming years.

At the same time, Flynn said, warfighter exercises also allow command posts and senior leaders to work on new concepts and approaches, simulating systems that have yet to arrive, such as future vertical lift, or FVL.

The FVL program is the Army’s answer to replacing legacy rotary-wing aircraft with longer-range aviation assets that can deliver troops, fires and complex payloads such as electromagnetic warfare tools where they’re needed.

Next up will be a Europe-focused warfighter.

Poppas said that a near-term warfighter exercise will tie a corps-sized unit in the United States under the U.S. Army Europe and Africa theater command.

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

15. DoD 'exploring' options for nuclear buildup as part of strategic review

DoD 'exploring' options for nuclear buildup as part of strategic review - Breaking Defense

Vipin Narang, DoD's top nuclear policy official, explained that while current modernization plans — estimated by the Government Accountability Office last October to cost at least $350 billion over the next two decades — are "necessary," they "may well be insufficient" to meet current and future threats. 

breakingdefense.com · by Theresa Hitchens · August 1, 2024

An Air Force Global Strike Command unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test Oct. 29, 2020, at Vandenberg AFB, Calif. (US Air Force photo by Michael Peterson)

WASHINGTON — In the face of growing threats from Russia, China and North Korea, the Defense Department is considering options to increase the number of nuclear weapons launchers and warheads at its disposal as part of a year-long strategic review, according to a senior Pentagon policy official.

“We have begun exploring options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on the land, sea and air legs that could offer national leadership increased flexibility, if desired, and executed,” Vipin Narang, acting assistant secretary for space policy, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Project on Nuclear Security Issues today.

Narang, who also is responsible for nuclear, missile defense and cyber policy, explained that his office for the past year has been undertaking a “strategy-driven review of the implications of the new security environment for strategic deterrence and US nuclear posture.” The process, he noted, is “overseen at very senior levels of the government and includes interagency stakeholders.”

His comments expanded on remarks made June 7 by Pranay Vaddi, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation, at the Arms Control Association annual meeting — with Narang echoing Vaddi’s statement that while still pursuing diplomatic avenues, the Biden administration is now pursuing “a more competitive approach.”

Narang explained that the threat environment has significantly expanded since the Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review. In particular, he said: Russia not only has been saber rattling in Ukraine, but also “is developing” a satellite to carry a nuclear weapon; China, using Russian-supplied fuel, has “accelerated” its nuclear building up and “likely” will have “1,000 operational warheads” with silo loading already commencing; and, North Korea “continues to expand, diversify and approve its nuclear, ballistic missile and non nuclear capabilities.”

Thus, the DoD review “began with the principal question, what capabilities and posture do we need to credibly deter attack on the US homeland as well as our allies and vital regional interests, not just today, but tomorrow. If adjustments to our hardware and software are necessary, how do we prioritize them? How do we avoid additional risk to our existing plans and the nuclear production complex?

“As part of this we’re taking a fresh look at the US nuclear modernization, including examining the underlying assumptions of the modernization program, which was conceived at a time when we assumed we would only have to deter a New START-compliant Russia,” he added.

New START, inked in 2010, is the only remaining US-Russian treaty capping both sides’ nuclear arsenals, and will expire in February 2026. The treaty limits Russia and the US each to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 deployed strategic delivery vehicles (meaning ICBMs, submarines and bombers). Moscow has refused to enter into negotiations with Washington to renew the treaty, after suspending its compliance in February 2023, citing US and Western support of Ukraine in the ongoing war. The US has continued to abide by the limits.

Narang explained that while current nuclear modernization plans — estimated by the Government Accountability Office last October to cost at least $350 billion over the next two decades — are “necessary,” they “may well be insufficient” to meet current and future threats.

He stressed, however, that at the moment DoD is confident in its ability to deter nuclear threats.

“Let there be no doubt we are confident in our current forces and posture today, we will also abide by the central limits of new start for the duration of the treaty, as long as we assess that Russia continues to do so. But in an uncertain world, preserving the option to change course tomorrow requires that we make necessary decisions and investments today,” he said.

16. Historic Prisoner Swap Marks a Win for Biden’s Focus on Alliances

I have criticized much of the Administration's foreign policy (particularly the "prime directive" of "there shall be no escalation" which has hamstrung our actions in key conflicts and has sent the wrong messages to our competitors and adversaries).

But I strongly commend the Administration for its focus on alliances and making our alliances as strong if not stronger than they have ever been. And you can never tell when the investment in alliances may pay off in unexpected ways at unexpected times. I hope the next President, whomever he or she may be, will sustain the focus on alliances based on trust and shared values and common adversaries versus a transnational relationship.

Historic Prisoner Swap Marks a Win for Biden’s Focus on Alliances

Prisoner exchange that freed Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and others was negotiated over months by senior U.S., Russian, German and other European officials

https://www.wsj.com/world/what-prisoner-swap-means-biden-4bd00e7a?mod=latest_headlines

By David S. CloudFollow and Lara SeligmanFollow

Aug. 2, 2024 5:00 am ET

WASHINGTON—When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich arrived at an Air Force base outside Washington late Thursday, it marked at least a partial vindication for President Biden’s beleaguered foreign policy in his waning months in office.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris greeted Gershkovich and two other Americans in a homecoming celebration at Joint Base Andrews. Hours earlier they had been handed over in a multicountry prisoner swap with Russia painstakingly negotiated over months, sometimes by Biden himself, drawing on friendships and allies nurtured over decades.

The prisoner deal highlighted Biden’s long-espoused faith in allies, an approach that he has insisted would produce far greater foreign policy gains than former President Donald Trump’s constant attacks on America’s overseas friends. The approach has yielded fewer successes for the White House in war-ridden Ukraine and the Middle East in the past four years.

“Multiple countries helped get this done. They joined a difficult complex negotiation at my request,” Biden said, announcing the prisoner swap at the White House Thursday, calling it “a feat of diplomacy and friendship.”

WSJ Reporter Evan Gershkovich Freed From Russian Prison: A Timeline

WSJ Reporter Evan Gershkovich Freed From Russian Prison: A Timeline

Play video: WSJ Reporter Evan Gershkovich Freed From Russian Prison: A Timeline

Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter wrongfully detained in Russia since March 29, 2023, is free. Here’s a look back at the fight for his release. Photo: Associated Press/The Wall Street Journal

He hailed the contribution of U.S. allies and his relationships with foreign leaders—drawing an implicit contrast with Trump, who recently claimed he would free Gershkovich after the election without any concessions.

Lawmakers from both parties applauded the prisoner swap, though Trump didn’t, claiming in a social-media post without evidence that the deal might have included secret money payments: “Are we releasing murderers, killers, or thugs? Just curious because we never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps.”

Robert O’Brien, who served in Trump’s administration as the special envoy for hostage affairs and later as his final national security adviser, applauded that Gershkovich, Whelan and the other prisoners can now return to their families, but said the deal came at “a very heavy price.” 

“Putin has shown that he has got the back of his arms dealers and his assassins and that improves his standing within the regime,” O’Brien said. “It removes the risks for his operatives to go overseas in the West, kill people, take any kind of malign action and they know he will bring them home.”

O’Brien said the Trump administration never traded “terrorists or killers for innocent Americans” and “never paid a dime in ransom,” despite bringing 55 hostages home.

“We would’ve gotten them home in other ways,” he said of the current exchange. 

Evan Gershkovich hugs his mother, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan exits a plane and journalist Alsu Kurmasheva embraces her family after arriving at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

Kent Nishimura for WSJ; Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Shutterstock; Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Several senior Republican lawmakers applauded news of the release, while also expressing worries that the deal may embolden Putin in the future.

“I remain concerned that continuing to trade innocent Americans for actual Russian criminals held in the U.S. and elsewhere sends a dangerous message to Putin that only encourages further hostage taking by his regime,” Republican Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Thursday in a statement.

The deal freed 16 people held by Moscow, including Gershkovich, fellow Americans Paul Whelan, a former Marine, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist for the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as well as U.S. resident Vladimir Kara-Murza. Each had been convicted on charges in Russia that the U.S. called false or unjust.

In return, the U.S. and four other European countries returned eight Russians serving prison terms for espionage, murder and other crimes to Moscow—a deal worked out in painstaking negotiations over months that U.S. officials described as one of the largest prisoner swaps ever

Putin drove a steep bargain in negotiations, insisting on the release of Vadim Krasikov, a convicted assassin employed by the Kremlin to kill a rival in the West who was serving a life sentence in Germany.

But Biden focused more on the contribution that U.S. allies made in putting the complex deal together.

Thursday’s swap was negotiated by senior U.S., Russian, German and other European officials. It came together because of a confluence of interests, including Putin’s willingness to deal with a lame-duck president, rather than wait until after the U.S. elections when the prospects for a trade would be less certain.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a news conference following the deal. Photo: Christoph Reichwein/PRESS POOL

Biden personally worked on the Gershkovich deal with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser. Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, met with both Scholz and the Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob separately with only a few aides present during the Munich Security Conference in February to urge both leaders to push the agreement through, according to a White House official.

Germany’s decision to release Krasikov, a key Kremlin demand, was the linchpin of the deal, Biden said, one that Scholz initially rebuffed.

“The demands they were making of me required me to get some significant concessions from Germany which they originally concluded they couldn’t do because of the person in question,” Biden said.

For Biden, the release of Gershkovich and other Americans is a rare clear-cut success. He has fallen short on other major foreign policy goals, including halting the war in Gaza, restoring a nuclear deal with Iran and helping Ukraine expel Russia from its territory.

Sullivan said that the deal’s complexity made it unlike any previous prisoner deal with Moscow.

“There has never been an exchange involving this number of countries, this number of people changing hands,” he said. “The degree of complexity and number of participating countries in this exchange is unprecedented, not just in the post-Cold War era but in the history of U.S.-Soviet and U.S.-Russian relations.”

Since 2021, the Biden administration has brought home more than 70 such hostages from countries around the world, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Russia, Venezuela and West Africa, Sullivan said. But securing the release of Americans detained in Russia has been “uniquely challenging” due to the invasion of Ukraine and the deterioration in U.S.-Russia relations, he said.

The White House, in 2023, reached a similar deal to free five Americans who had been imprisoned in Iran in return for a commitment to make available billions of dollars in revenue from Iranian energy sales that had been frozen under sanctions—a concession that Trump at the time called “dumb” and that made the U.S. a “laughing stock.”

The agreement restricted Tehran to using the funds for purchases of food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. But Tehran’s access to the funds was halted after the outbreak of the Gaza war last October over its support for Hamas.

During Trump’s term as president, he faced the dilemma of how much to give up for the 54-year-old Whelan, who had been arrested by Russian authorities in late 2018. At the time, White House officials saw Moscow’s demands to trade him for Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer then in U.S. prison, as a one-sided deal that would only encourage Putin to take more Americans as hostages. 

But as Whelan’s case languished, Putin stockpiled his prisons with more Americans to swap for the very few Russians abroad he cared to bring back.

After Russia sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in prison in July, Trump vowed that he would get him out after the U.S. election “for no compensation,” warning in a post on X that Biden would only be able to do so “for a king’s ransom.”

Asked Thursday if he had a response to the former president’s claim that he would free the hostages without giving up anything, Biden said of Trump: “Why didn’t you do it as president?”

Write to David S. Cloud at david.cloud@wsj.com

17. RIMPAC ends summer-long run that featured sinking of 2 former warships

We cannot even reach a 355 ship Navy. I recall some years ago that there was a concept for a "600-ship" navy but that it was a 600 ship alliance navy and not 600 US ships. Perhaps as we have rebuilt our alliances we should develop (and publicize) more combined naval concepts (and there are a lot of combined operations taking place around the world as a matter of routine already). 

RIMPAC ends summer-long run that featured sinking of 2 former warships

Stars and Stripes · by Wyatt Olson · August 2, 2024

The decommissioned amphibious transport dock USS Dubuque smokes after taking a direct hit with a missile off Hawaii during the Rim of the Pacific exercise on July 11, 2024. (Perla Alfaro/U.S. Army)

FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii — The biennial Rim of the Pacific maritime exercise ended its six-week run Thursday in Hawaii, a span that included the sinking of two decommissioned warships by numerous weapons systems wielded by a multinational force.

The exercise, which began in late June in waters off Hawaii, is touted as the world’s largest international series of naval drills.

Twenty-nine nations participated this year’s RIMPAC, which included 40 ships, 150 aircraft, three submarines, 14 land-based armed forces and 25,000 personnel.

The sinking of two warship “hulks” is twice the number sunk in previous RIMPAC exercises.

The decommissioned USS Dubuque, an amphibious transport dock, was sunk July 11. A week later, the 820-foot-long former USS Tarawa, an amphibious assault ship the size of a small aircraft carrier, was sunk July 19.

The ships went down in waters 15,000 feet deep about 50 nautical miles off the northern coast of Kauai, the westernmost island in the Hawaiian chain.

The decommissioned USS Tarawa, an amphibious assault ship, is escorted out of Pearl Harbor to the open sea during the Rim of the Pacific exercise on July 16, 2024. (Courtney Strahan/U.S. Navy)

“Using advanced weapons and seeing the professionalism of our teams during these drills shows our commitment to keeping the Indo-Pacific region safe and open.” Vice Adm. John Wade, commander of the exercise’s Combined Task Force and of 3rd Fleet, said in a July 23 news release.

The release makes no mention of China in describing the “long-planned” sinking exercises, but that nation’s growing military might is regarded by the Pentagon as America’s “pacing challenge.”

One aspect of the sinking exercise demonstrated that warships anywhere in the world could be vulnerable to a quick and devastating attack by U.S. forces in the event of a conflict.

In a test dubbed Quicksink, an Air Force B-2 stealth bomber delivered a guided bomb on the Tarawa, which displaced 38,900 tons.

The demonstration proved that the B-2 provides a “low-cost, air-delivered method for defeating surface vessels,” the Navy said in its release.

The official China Military Online took note in a July 24 article by Yang Zhen, the deputy director of the Northeast Asia Research Center, Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. Zhang wrote that this year’s RIMPAC clearly aimed to demonstrate the joint forces’ ability to target Chinese assets.

China’s Type 075 amphibious assault ship has a displacement similar to the Tarawa, and some counties participating in the exercise “didn’t bother to conceal the fact that RIMPAC 2024 is highly targeted at China, which has surprised many,” Zhang wrote.

Japanese soldiers fire a Type 12 surface-to-ship missile during a Rim of the Pacific sinking exercise on Kauai, Hawaii, on July 12, 2024. (Perla Alfaro/U.S. Army)

Quicksink was funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and aimed “to provide options to neutralize surface maritime threats while demonstrating the inherent flexibility of the joint force.”

Given the B-2’s stealth, range and payload capacity, the bomber could play a significant role in any future naval conflict with China. It can fly 6,000 miles without refueling, cruise about 560 mph at 50,000 feet and carry roughly 50,000 pounds of bombs.

“This capability is an answer to an urgent need to quickly neutralize maritime threats over massive expanses of ocean around the world at minimal costs,” the Navy news release states.

A Navy F/A-18 jet also hit the Tarawa with a Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, or LRSAM, which the news release described as “a precise, stealthy and survivable cruise missile.”

The missile carries a 1,000-pound warhead and can reach targets more than 200 miles distant.

Air Force B-1B bombers also routinely deploy with LRSAMs.

U.S. Army units teamed with the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force’s 5th Surface-to-Ship Field Artillery Regiment to sink the Dubuque, the Army said in a July 11 news release.

The Army’s 1st Multi-Domain Task Force fired on the ship using High Mobility Army Rocket System, or HIMARS, launchers deployed at Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands on Kauai.

The Japanese forces fired on the ship from the same location with Type 12 surface-to-ship missiles, the Army news release states.

Units from Australia, Malaysia, the Netherlands and South Korea also participated in the sinking exercise.

“The power of RIMPAC is in how it strengthens relationships between participating nations by challenging us to conduct realistic and relevant training together,” Royal Australian Air Force Air Commodore Louise desJardins, commander of the exercise’s Combined Force Air Component, said in the news release.

Stars and Stripes · by Wyatt Olson · August 2, 2024

18. Pentagon renews $16.5 million contract to support Japan’s command-and-control network

Some may question this but if you want a combined command with combined capabilities you must invest in communications interoperability and connectivity.

Pentagon renews $16.5 million contract to support Japan’s command-and-control network

Stars and Stripes · by Joseph Ditzler · August 2, 2024

American and Japanese flags fly together during joint training on Ishigaki Island, Okinawa, in October 2023. (Jennifer Andrade/U.S. Marine Corps)

TOKYO — A U.S.-based IT defense contractor recently extended by five years its contract to maintain and improve Japan’s Central Command System, the digital network for information sharing within the country’s Self-Defense Forces.

Leidos Inc., of Reston, Va., obtained $16.5 million to continue providing system engineering, hardware, software, operation, maintenance and other services, according to a Department of Defense announcement July 22.

The contract continues a long relationship between Leidos and the Japanese military, said Rory Tibbals, director of Japan Programs for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Aerial Networks Division, at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., which administers the contract.

When America’s two globetrotting Cabinet secretaries — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken — met with their counterparts in Tokyo on July 28, they pledged to strengthen their military connections, including enhanced communication, to offset challenges from China’s growing presence in the region, according to a readout of their meeting.

The two allied militaries communicate with each other through high-level networks, including Japan’s Global Command and Control System, which links its Self-Defense Forces, a U.S.-Japan Network and the U.S. Joint Global Command and Control System.

This most recent contract award is no major upgrade, Tibbals said in responses provided July 29 by Hanscom spokeswoman Nicole Collins. But it gives an example of the ongoing ties that the U.S. and Japan agreed to draw even tighter.

“Leidos has supported this important Japanese program for over 10 years. The services are focused on maintaining, securing, and upgrading the existing systems in accordance with Japan’s Defense Buildup Plan,” Tibbals said in the July 29 email.

According to that plan, Japan intends to strengthen its defense capabilities by 2027 to take primary responsibility for dealing with invasions and threats “with the support of its ally and others,” according to a December 2022 copy of the 55-page document.

The Leidos contract provides a broad range of services that support U.S.-Japan coordination on “crisis planning, bilateral operations and exercises,” according to the contract announcement.

The Japanese Ministry of Defense declined comment on the contract renewal. A representative for Leidos did not respond to a July 23 email seeking further information.

The Foreign Military Sales program within the State Department pays $3.9 million of the contract cost, according to the DOD announcement. Work takes place at Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo, at the Japan Air Self-Defense Base in Tokyo and in Reston.

Leidos works in cybersecurity, digital modernization and artificial intelligence, according to its website, although AI is not part of this contract, Tibbals said. Leidos merged with the information systems subsidiary of Lockheed Martin in 2016 to create a separate company still affiliated with Lockheed.

Stars and Stripes reporter Hana Kusumoto contributed to this report.

Joseph Ditzler

Joseph Ditzler

Joseph Ditzler is a Marine Corps veteran and the Pacific editor for Stars and Stripes. He’s a native of Pennsylvania and has written for newspapers and websites in Alaska, California, Florida, New Mexico, Oregon and Pennsylvania. He studied journalism at Penn State and international relations at the University of Oklahoma.

Stars and Stripes · by Joseph Ditzler · August 2, 2024

19. Top U.S. special ops units held a major exercise off Alaska, 45 miles from Russia

Excerpts:

Several of the photos are described as in the Bering Sea, with some labeled as off the coast Gambell, Saint Lawrence. An Air Force C-146 is pictured on the airfield at Savoonga, a village on St. Lawrence, a remote island 104 miles off of the Alaskan mainland and just 45 miles from Russian shores.

The Air Force’s small fleet of C-146s, which are flown by the 524th Special Operations Squadron, keep a low profile in the aviation world.The pictures released for Polar Dagger do not even formally identify the plane. Based on a small commercial commuter airliner known as a Dornier 328, they fly without military markings to transport small teams to remote airfields, according to an Air Force website.

Alaska is the hub of the U.S.’s growing focus on the Arctic as a future flashpoint for conflict in the Pacific. The mainland of Alaska and Russia are separated by approximately 55 miles. The unforgiving nature of the Arctic can create unique problems with gear, aircraft, and ships, but the training is likely being observed by Russia — a different kind of threat.

Top U.S. special ops units held a major exercise off Alaska, 45 miles from Russia

Polar Dagger brought several top special ops units from the Army, Air Force and Navy to a small Alaskan island closer to Russia than the U.S. mainland.

Joshua Skovlund

Posted on Aug 1, 2024 7:38 PM EDT

6 minute read

taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund

Some of America’s elite special operations forces held a major exercise off the coast of Alaska from July 5 to Aug. 2, 2024, bringing together some of the most secretive units and equipment from the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Photos released by the Pentagon this week show that the exercise brought together stealthy MH-60 helicopters from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Naval Special Warfare SEALs, Combatant Craft Assault boats and ScanEagle drones and rarely seen Air Force C-146 Wolfhound transport aircraft. Officials with Northern Command told Task & Purpose that the exercise also included an Austere Resuscitative Surgical Team from the Army 528th Special Operations Sustainment Brigade.

“Special Operations Command North has discovered that in each location in which we operate there are unique challenges to overcome, especially in the extreme cold weather environments of the High North,” a NORTHCOM spokesperson said. “Some of these challenges include how to manage liquids, from water to medical supplies, and how to keep aircraft and other ground maneuver equipment functioning in sub-zero temperatures.”

As part of Operation Polar Dagger, U.S. Navy Special Warfare Combat Crewman (SWCC) conduct Maritime Interdiction Operations (MIO) off the USS John L. Canley (ESB 6), a U.S. Navy Expeditionary Sea Base ship that supports a variety of maritime-based missions, in the Bering Sea, July 25, 2024. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Johnny Diaz) Airman 1st Class Johnny Diaz

Officials said the exercise saw no interference from Russian military assets. But the troops assumedthey were being watched.

“Special Operations Command North operates under the assumption our activities are being observed,” the spokesperson said.

The pictures capture special operators training on and around the USS John L. Canley, a Navy Expeditionary Sea Base ship.. Built from the converted hull of a commercial cargo ship, the Chesty Puller-class ship is designed to host special ops and amphibious assault units, with a wide flight deck and specially designed launching berths for small raiding crafts. Several of the photos show Special Warfare Combatant Craft assault boats coming and going around the Canley.

U.S. East Coast-based Naval Special Warfare Operators (SEALs) await extraction from the beach of Gambell, Saint Lawrence Island, Alaska, by U.S. Army MH-60M Blackhawk helicopters assigned to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) as part of Operation Polar Dagger, July 22, 2024. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Johnny Diaz/ Airman 1st Class Johnny Diaz

Several of the photos are described as in the Bering Sea, with some labeled as off the coast Gambell, Saint Lawrence. An Air Force C-146 is pictured on the airfield at Savoonga, a village on St. Lawrence, a remote island 104 miles off of the Alaskan mainland and just 45 miles from Russian shores.

The Air Force’s small fleet of C-146s, which are flown by the 524th Special Operations Squadron, keep a low profile in the aviation world.The pictures released for Polar Dagger do not even formally identify the plane. Based on a small commercial commuter airliner known as a Dornier 328, they fly without military markings to transport small teams to remote airfields, according to an Air Force website.

Alaska is the hub of the U.S.’s growing focus on the Arctic as a future flashpoint for conflict in the Pacific. The mainland of Alaska and Russia are separated by approximately 55 miles. The unforgiving nature of the Arctic can create unique problems with gear, aircraft, and ships, but the training is likely being observed by Russia — a different kind of threat.

The Special Operations Command and Northern Command did not respond to Task & Purpose questions about the exercise.

Members from the 492nd Special Operations Wing meet with the Savoonga community on Saint Lawrence Island during Operation Polar Dagger, July 18, 2024. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Johnny Diaz) Airman 1st Class Johnny Diaz

The Army’s 160th helicopters are pictured practicing touch and go’s on the USS John L. Canley’s deck. Though 160th pilots are among the best trained in the millitary, the unit is not often assigned to ships, where flying requires specific procedures and qualifications.

The photos also show a ScanEagle drone being launched and recovered from the deck of the Canley. The ScanEagle is used by SEAL teams and other Navy special ops unit for tactical reconnaissance. The ScanEagle was used by SEALs during the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips after pirates siezed the Maersk Alabama container ship off the coast of Somalia in 2009.

One series of photos show Special Warfare Combatant Craft Assault boats — the smallest of the Navy’s special warfare SWCCs — are shown speeding across the surface in formation. The boats carry SEALs and other operators on long open-water assaults. SEALs were ferried on the boats in operations in the Red Sea last year, including one in which two SEALs died while climbing from a SWCC boat onto a ship the team was boarding.

A West Coast Based Naval Special Warfare Unit prepares to deploy an asset to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, during Operation Polar Dagger, Pacific Ocean, July 8, 2024. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Johnny Diaz. Airman 1st Class Johnny Diaz

In the 2023 exercise, forces trained with the Alaska Native people on St. Lawrence Island to learn about their subarctic terrain survival techniques. The 17th Special Operation Squadron deployed an AC-130J Ghostrider aircraft for the first time in the remote location. The joint SOF personnel trained on helicopter insertion and extraction, carried out simulated search and rescue capabilities, and providing close air support.

“The ability for our forces to look each other in the eyes, in real-time, provides unmatched value, especially in the austere environment of the Arctic,” said Chief Master Sgt. Clint Grizzell, the former SOCNORTH command senior enlisted leader. “We’ve had some great lessons learned but it is about how we work together, joint SOF and total force, to evolve from the previous operation. We already found lessons that we’re going to build upon for the next iteration.”

The latest on Task & Purpose

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• NORAD sent 3 different fighters to intercept Russian and Chinese bombers

Joshua Skovlund

Staff Writer

Joshua Skovlund is a contributor for Task & Purpose. He has reported around the world, from Minneapolis to Ukraine, documenting some of the most important world events to happen over the past five years. He served as a forward observer in the US Army, and after leaving the service, he worked for five years in paramedicine before transitioning to a career in multimedia journalism.

20. Opinion Coming home after being a hostage abroad

The hard work for the former hostages has already begun. We should consider the difficulties they face.

I think this photo of the group in the aircraft will become an iconic one (even though it is "property of the US government).

Photos a the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/01/russia-gershkovich-whelan-karamurza-trade/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/01/russia-gershkovich-whelan-karamurza-trade/

Opinion  Coming home after being a hostage abroad

Reintegrating into society is difficult. We should try harder to make it easier.

In this image released by the U.S. government, U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich (left), former Marine Paul Whelan and U.S.-Russian journalist Alsu Kurmasheva are seen on a plane after their release from Russia on Aug. 1. (U.S. Government/AFP/Getty Images)

4 min

216

By Jason Rezaian

August 1, 2024 at 4:19 p.m. EDT

I’m thrilled and relieved that Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva and my Post colleague Vladimir Kara-Murza have been released from Russian prisons. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know members of the extraordinary families of these brave individuals. This is a moment for them to rejoice and celebrate their loved ones’ safe return.

After the euphoria wears off, though, a new set of challenges will inevitably emerge. Having been cut off from society for months or years, the returning hostages will face difficulty returning to ordinary life.

When I returned home from Iran in 2016 after being imprisoned for nearly a year and a half, I found that the IRS had charged me with thousands of dollars in penalties for not filing my taxes on time. The usual penalties had compounded. I was sleeping less than three hours a night, repeatedly waking from nightmares that I was back in prison. During the day, I was distracted and having trouble concentrating. So I neglected to sit down and address the problem.

While I was locked up, my foreign-born wife’s immigration papers that had been approved before we were arrested in 2014 expired. We had to start from scratch with a new application when we got back to San Francisco.

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My credit rating was also shattered. Many bills that had been set for autopay were declined and sent to collection while I was away. My credit score fell so low that renting or buying a home through traditional avenues was out of the question until I was able to rehabilitate my credit. This took many months to accomplish — and only with the assistance of people who volunteered their expertise to solve the problem.

Those returning from Russia now will face their own backlogs of work and life management. And at the same time, reporters will be clamoring for their stories. In my case, the terms of the deal that resulted in my release became a subject in all three presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Instant celebrity — even notoriety — is something most people aren’t equipped to manage. I certainly wasn’t.

From working with others who have gone through the same ordeal, I know many have had even rougher experiences. My wife and I were lucky. Our family and my employer were sources of support and strength, and we managed to right our lives. But it was challenging — and it need not have been so hard.

The U.S. government can do more to support the social reintegration of returned hostages. It can, to start, provide point people to help clear the burdens that have piled up — from renewing expired driver’s licenses and accessing health care to dealing with back taxes and financial liabilities.

Both Democrats and Republicans recognize the problem and are working to address it. In May, the Stop Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act introduced by Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) passed the Senate unanimously. The House should approve the legislation without delay.

More broadly, partisanship needs to take a back seat on this issue. For example, when basketball superstar Brittney Griner was freed in exchange for a Russian arms dealer, political backbiting was muted. That’s thanks in large part to a handful of Republican lawmakers persuading colleagues not to criticize the safe return of Americans.

Countries like Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela detain Americans solely because of their citizenship to enable them to engage in transactional hostage-taking. They ruin innocent people’s lives to extract something of value from the U.S. government. To do this, they mobilize the entire machinery of the state: law enforcement, courts, penal systems, intelligence units, and even their pliant domestic media.

As a free society, we owe the victims of this abuse more than our support and empathy. Considerable resources were expended in the effort to negotiate their release. It is important now to invest more to return them to normal life.

21. Biden team blows off deadline for Ukraine war strategy

From the Quincy Institute.

Biden team blows off deadline for Ukraine war strategy

Perhaps the administration can't admit it doesn't have one.

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Anatol Lieven · August 2, 2024

quincyinst.org

Perhaps the administration can't admit it doesn't have one.

1. ukraine war

Aug 02, 2024

Almost 100 days have now passed since the Congress passed $61 billion in emergency funding for Ukraine, a measure that included a condition that required the Biden Administration to present to the legislative body a detailed strategy for continued U.S. support.

When the funding bill was passed with much fanfare on April 23, Section 504, page 32 included the following mandate:

“Not later than 45 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the heads of other relevant Federal agencies, as appropriate, shall submit to 18 the Committees on Appropriations, Armed Services, and Foreign Relations of the Senate and the Committees on 20 Appropriations, Armed Services, and Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives a strategy regarding United States support for Ukraine against aggression by the Russian Federation: Provided, That such strategy shall be multi-year, establish specific and achievable objectives, define and prioritize United States national security interests…”

It is now August and There is still no sign on the part of the Biden Administration of any intention to submit such a strategy to Congress. This inevitably leads to the suspicion that no such strategy in fact exists. It also suggests that without a massive change of mindset within the administration, it is not even possible to hold — let alone make public —serious and honest internal discussions on the subject, as these would reveal the flawed and empty assumptions on which much of present policy is based.

This relates first of all to the requirement “to define and prioritize United States national security interests.” No U.S. official has ever seriously addressed the issue of why a Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine that was of no importance whatsoever to the U.S. 40 years ago (when Soviet tank armies stood in the center of Germany, 1,200 miles to the West) should now be such a threat that combating it necessitates $61 billion of U.S. military aid per year, a significant risk of conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia, and a colossal distraction from vital U.S. interests elsewhere.

Instead, the administration, and its European allies, have relied on two arguments. The first is that if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine, it will go on to attack NATO and that this will mean American soldiers going to fight and die in Europe. In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever of any such Russian intention. Russian threats of escalation and (possibly) minor acts of sabotage have been outgrowths of the war in Ukraine, and intended to deter NATO from intervening directly in that conflict — not actions intended to lay the basis for an invasion of NATO.

Western commentators like to state Russian public ambitions beyond Ukraine as a given fact, but when asked to provide actual statements to this effect, they are unable to do so. Nor, at least judging by Putin’s latest statement, does he intend (or believe it possible) to “wipe Ukraine off the map.” The top official Russian goals include limited territorial gains, Ukrainian neutrality, and Russian language rights in Ukraine — all questions that can legitimately be explored in negotiations.

Moreover, given the acute difficulties that the Russian military has faced in Ukraine, and the Russian weaknesses revealed by that conflict, the idea of them planning to attack NATO seems utterly counter-intuitive. For Russia has been “stopped” in Ukraine. The heroic resistance of the Ukrainian army, backed with Western weapons and money, stopped the Russian army far short of President Putin’s goals when he launched the war. They have severely damaged Russian military prestige, inflicted enormous losses on the Russian military, and as of today, hold more than 80% of their country’s territory.

The Biden administration has issued partly contradictory statements about the purpose of U.S. aid to Ukraine: that it is intended to help Ukraine “win”, and that it is intended to help “strengthen Ukraine at the negotiating table.” They have not however fulfilled their legal obligation to define to Congress what “winning” means, nor why if the war will end in negotiations, these negotiations should not begin now — especially since there is very strong evidence that the Ukrainian military position, and therefore Ukraine’s position at the negotiating table, are getting worse, not better.

As Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro have written in response to the latest US despatch of weapons to Ukraine:

“[A]daptation and adjustment do not constitute strategy, and reactive escalation absent a strategy is not sound policy. Escalating U.S. involvement in this conflict—or any conflict—should be guided by an idea about how to bring the war to an end.”

As with U.S. campaigns in Vietnam and elsewhere, the administration and its allies have tried to play the “credibility” card: the argument that it is necessary to defeat Russia in Ukraine because otherwise, China, Iran and other countries will be emboldened to attack the United States or its allies. But like the line about Russian ambitions beyond Ukraine, this is simply an assumption. There is no actual evidence for it at all.

It can, with equal or greater validity, be assumed that the governments of these countries will make up their minds according to calculations of their own interests and the military balance in their own regions.

The final administration line of argument is a moral one: that “Russian aggression must not be rewarded” and that “Ukrainian territorial integrity must be restored.” Since, however, any realistic negotiations towards a peace settlement will have to involve de facto recognition of Russian territorial gains (not de jure recognition, which the Russians do not expect and even the Chinese will not grant), this statement would seem to rule out even the idea of talks. On the face of it therefore, the Biden administration would appear to be asking the American people to spend indefinitely tens of billions of dollars a year on an endless war for an unachievable goal.

If this is a mistaken picture of the administration’s position, then once again, it has a formal obligation under the bill passed by Congress in April to tell the American people and their elected representatives what their goals in Ukraine in fact are. Then everyone will be able to reach an informed judgment on whether they are attainable, and worth $61 billion a year in American money.

Unfortunately, it seems that the administration’s actual position is to kick this issue down the road until after the presidential election. Thereafter, either a Harris administration will have to draw up new plans, or a Trump administration will do so. But given the length of time it takes a new administration to settle in and develop new policies, this means that we could not expect a strategy on Ukraine to emerge for eight months at best.

If the Ukrainians can hold roughly their present lines, then this approach could be justifiable in U.S. domestic political terms (though not to the families of the Ukrainian soldiers who will die in the meantime). There is however a significant risk that given the military balance on the ground, and even with continued aid, Ukraine during this time will suffer a major defeat. Washington would then have to choose between a truly humiliating failure or direct intervention, which would expose the American people to truly hideous risks.

There is an alternative. Since President Biden will in any case step down next January, he could take a risk and try to bequeath to his successor not war, but peace. In terms of domestic politics, to open negotiations with Russia now would deprive Donald Trump and JD Vance of a campaigning position, and would spare a future Democrat administration (if elected) from a very difficult and internally divisive decision.

The first step in this direction is for the Biden administration clearly to formulate its goals in Ukraine, and — as required by law — to submit these goals to the American people.

Anatol Lieven

Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden greet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Mrs. Olena Zelenska of Ukraine at the South Portico of the White House. (Photo by Allison Bailey/NurPhoto)

Not leaving empty handed: Zelensky gets his ATACMs

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Anatol Lieven · August 2, 2024

22. Shifting the U.S.-Japan Alliance from Coordination to Integration

Although Japan did not get the US four star it wanted, it appears to be getting something of a combined command. Will it be along the lines of the ROK/US Combined fForces COmmand that it has long envied and desired? That remains to be seen.

The authors make an excellent point about shifting from informing to genuine consultations with allies.

Excerpts:

If the United States is interdependent on its allies for its own strategy to succeed, it would benefit Washington to consider finding opportunities to include those allies and partners in their own strategy development processes. To overcome these hurdles, Washington will have to shift from informing its key allies of national strategies to genuinely consulting them early on in the drafting process. U.S. leaders would need to give key allies enough voice to let them suggest changes to elements of the strategies that rely on these allies for success. American officials might not always accept these suggestions, but they must take them seriously in order for allies to feel that they have enough say in the process, particularly if the United States relies on those allies’ compliance to succeed. If U.S. leaders are unable to embrace these adjustments, allies will constantly worry about having the rug ripped out from under them.

Integrated Deterrence in Action?

The joint statement released by the allies this week was truly historic in nature. As important as this agreement is, it is critical to remember that the United States and Japan can no longer simply discuss how to better coordinate with one another. Instead, they should discuss how the American and Japanese systems can work together to address bureaucratic obstacles and political constraints that could hamper deeper integration. The challenges outlined here on command and control, industrial cooperation, regional networking, and long-term strategies are only a handful of the issues that require new approaches. In many ways, these four areas will serve as a test of whether the Biden administration’s “integrated deterrence” strategy is turning from a fashionable buzzword into concrete deliverables. The security situation in the Indo-Pacific demands deeper alliance integration, so the time to deliver is now.

Shifting the U.S.-Japan Alliance from Coordination to Integration - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Jeffrey W. Hornung · August 2, 2024

This week, Tokyo hosted the U.S.-Japan Security Consultative Committee, which brought together the two countries’ defense and foreign ministers. Although these “2+2 meetings” are fairly mundane and routine occurrences, this one had unusual importance: accelerating the shift from coordination to integration. This was the basic task set forth at the April summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio. It represents a significant evolution of the U.S.-Japanese alliance.

For the majority of the alliance’s existence, the United States and Japan had largely separate roles, missions, and capabilities. Japan’s Self-Defense Forces served as the alliance’s defensive “shield,” while the U.S. military provided the offensive “spear.” This shield and spear division of labor gave each ally different tasks, putting the onus on alliance managers to coordinate these distinct lines of effort.

The agreements announced at this spring’s Washington summit and detailed this week in Tokyo signal a turning point toward a more integrated alliance. This includes command and control, defense industrial production and maintenance, and cooperation with other U.S. allies. Alliance integration, in turn, necessitates deeper bureaucratic entanglement on everything from military operations to defense acquisitions to strategic engagement. This is a brave new world that could eventually lead to a fundamental transformation of the U.S.-Japanese alliance.

These integration efforts represent a significant step forward, and, as stated in Tokyo, they are historic. At the same time, they pose the most significant test for the alliance in decades as it seeks to become more robust. In particular, the United States and Japan are likely to confront several challenges that could limit both the speed and scope of their desired vision. If successful, addressing these challenges could fundamentally change the nature of the alliance.

Aligning new American and Japanese command and control arrangements will require the allies to agree on, among other things, the regional scope of U.S. operational commanders in Japan. Deeper defense industry cooperation will likely require the allies to address political and corporate incentives or risk co-production and co-maintenance. Strengthening regional security networks will require discussions with key partners, including Taiwan, which have heretofore been approached with trepidation by Japan. And truly integrating strategies calls for a bureaucratic change in how the United States conceives of allies’ roles in Washington’s strategy development process. While none of these challenges are insurmountable, openly acknowledging them will be vital if the allies are to overcome them.

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Upgrading Alliance Command and Control

A few years ago, Japan stated its intent to create what was then called a permanent joint headquarters to strengthen the effectiveness of joint operations among each of Japan’s Self-Defense Force services. In the subsequent years, that nomenclature changed into what is now called the Japan Self-Defense Forces Joint Operations Command, and many of its details were fleshed out in May 2024. These include establishing it by March 2025 and manning it with roughly 250 people under a four-star flag officer at Japan’s defense ministry in Ichigaya.

Even though that staff size is likely far too small for the Joint Operations Command to be truly effective, its establishment is long overdue. Japan has a chief of staff of its joint staff who oversees the Self-Defense Forces, but he fulfills the military advisory role akin to the U.S. chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, providing strategic-level guidance and advising the prime minister and the defense minister. In peacetime, he is not responsible for day-to-day command decisions, but in wartime, he takes on the added responsibility of operational command of joint operations.

The Joint Operations Command has no U.S. analogue in Japan. At the moment, U.S. Forces Japan is a sub-unified command led by a three-star general without any operational command authority. Instead, it is largely responsible for engaging the Japanese government on all issues that arise under their status of forces agreement. Nevertheless, the Joint Operations Command’s imminent creation has given rise to the need for the United States to revise its command and control framework. The inclusion of command and control adjustments in the April joint statement was therefore widely lauded, carrying the potential to better coordinate bilateral operations.

The challenge, however, lies in what the United States intends to do. Many permutations have been discussed, and many people thought it could take years to conclude the new framework. But in a lightning-short three months, the allies settled on a new command and control structure for the United States. The option endorsed this week will increase U.S. Forces Japan’s operational command authority, allowing it to become something akin to U.S. Forces Korea. It remains to be seen whether this upgraded U.S. Forces Japan will be led by a new four-star commander; for the time being, it will be a three-star. Should a new four-star billet ever be created, that move could invite some level of interservice rivalry and would require Congressional approval. Even the new command idea is likely to encounter some of these challenges. These are real complications, but they could be overcome by deft leadership from the secretary of defense and engagement with members of Congress. They are not insurmountable.

Possibly more difficult are those issues with firmer restrictions. Efforts to make U.S. Forces Japan’s more robust will likely require significant increases in personnel and resources — as well as dedicated forces — all of which could encounter significant resistance due to budgetary realities. Importantly, any U.S. commander responsible for defense of both Japan and the broader region could invite political and legal problems in Japan. The United States will likely want to give this commander an expanded area of operations and flexibility to respond to threats across the theater, which could clash with Japan’s exclusive self-defense policy.

Deepening U.S.-Japan Defense Industry Cooperation

One long-overdue area of cooperation agreed upon in April and reiterated by the ministers this week is more closely integrating the American and Japanese defense industrial bases. Key announcements in this regard covered jointly developing and producing advanced weapons as well as establishing maintenance and repair capabilities in Japan for U.S. ships. In June, the allies held their inaugural Defense Industrial Cooperation, Acquisition, and Sustainment Forum, a newly established group that will identify areas for closer industrial cooperation. The U.S. military-industrial base cannot meet all the requirements for peacetime and wartime, so this approach could help the alliance expand production and sustainment in Japan.

Working together on some mutually beneficial projects should be relatively easy. For example, expanding production of jointly fielded weapons systems that the United States cannot make in sufficient numbers (such as Patriot missiles) makes good sense. Convincing relevant stakeholders, especially defense companies and members of Congress, to adopt this new approach and support production capacity in Japan will still require a substantial political push. One need look no further than the Australia-U.K.-U.S. agreement to see the legal and political challenges facing even the closest U.S. allies on technology sharing and co-production efforts.

Another obstacle is ensuring sufficient manufacturing capacity in Japan. The country’s large defense firms are not accustomed to having defense contracts be a major portion of their business models. Without adapting to the new demands, these firms will remain constrained. This, in turn, could limit the capacity to rapidly expand production for new alliance projects. Moreover, few smaller sub-contractors have the experience or knowledge to work on defense contracts with overseas partners.

An even harder challenge is more administrative in nature. Leveraging Japan’s private sector for dual-use technology and getting civilian researchers to work on defense-related projects have been historically difficult. While this is changing, ongoing information security concerns and a still nascent security clearance system mean the ability to do cooperative alliance work will remain limited for the time being. The 2022 economic security legislation passed by the government and the recent mishandling of classified information show that forward progress is likely to be filled with both positives and negatives. This could inhibit agreement on which advanced technologies or capabilities can be co-developed and co-produced, slowing down progress in these areas.

Bolstering Regional Security Networks

The United States and Japan have made remarkable headway in recent years working with other partners in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. These minilateral arrangements now include the leader-level Trilateral with South Korea, the Trilateral Security Dialogue with Australia, the Quad with India and Australia, and new quadrilateral structures involving the Philippines and Australia. In fact, several of these minilaterals were not only included in the joint statement, they also will be on display this week when the foreign and/or defense ministers from these countries meet in a variety of configurations.

Japan’s involvement in the G7, the Indo-Pacific 4 with NATO, and semiconductor policy cooperation with the United States and the Netherlands is also crucial. Together, these minilaterals demonstrate Japan’s deep integration into the “latticework” the Biden administration has tried to build to connect key democracies on a range of security issues. The next steps will be more difficult, however, since they will require Japan to go beyond traditional areas of cooperation.

Foremost, from an American perspective, is the need to better coordinate with Taiwan on security issues. The military contingency of greatest concern to the United States is one involving China, most likely over Taiwan. Although Japan is pressing ahead with Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines on a variety of initiatives, including security, cooperation with Taipei still lags. There are many reasons for Tokyo’s reticence, including legal constraints and historical precedent. Yet, Japan’s proximity to the Taiwan Strait will require a more forward-leaning approach if maintenance of regional peace and security is Tokyo’s dominant concern. Quiet, substantive, closed-door efforts are more important than loud public signals, but either way, they will require policymakers in Japan to move beyond their comfort zone.

Another area that demands more cooperation is real-time information sharing on air and missile defense. At their recent Trilateral Defense Ministers’ Meeting in Hawaii, leaders from Japan, Australia, and the United States reaffirmed their commitment to missile defense information sharing. Advancing these efforts requires going beyond the old hub-and-spokes model, in which allies share information bilaterally with the United States, and Washington then distributes that data to other allies and partners. Unfortunately, many “trilateral” sharing arrangements have essentially relied on the United States as an information conduit. Direct sharing of information among U.S. allies — without the United States as a middleman — will necessitate cultural changes in Tokyo and other allied capitals, as well as U.S. technical support to establish information sharing networks. As part of this process, Tokyo will have to continue addressing concerns about its information security practices.

Integrating Long-Term Strategies

Perhaps the most difficult challenge the United States and Japan face is truly integrating their long-term strategies, which have heretofore been inter-related but not inter-dependent. Here there is a fundamental asymmetry. Japanese leaders often look to and consult with their counterparts in the United States before devising key strategic documents. On the other hand, while American leaders certainly consider allies when developing strategies, they seldom involve those allies directly in strategy development in the truly formative phases. There are exceptions, such as the U.S. adoption of Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific concept. But American strategists usually develop the core concepts on their own and inform allies afterward. As Washington relies more on allies and partners, especially in a potential Indo-Pacific contingency like a Taiwan invasion, it behooves the United States to more deeply involve allies like Japan early in the conceptual development stages.

Here, the challenges for the United States and Japan are both political and bureaucratic. American strategic documents are usually developed at the beginning of a new administration, which means that they change every four years. If the alterations are marginal, it is possible for allies to adjust their own strategies quickly without a fundamental reimagining. But if the changes are more substantial, allies can get whiplash. This challenge is compounded by bureaucratic obstacles. The authors of the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy are often secluded even from their own American colleagues, given the sensitivity of the strategies and a desire to avoid having “too many cooks in the kitchen.” Opening up these processes to key allies is therefore no easy task. It would require a fundamental shift in not just mindset, but also practices that have been in place for decades, allowing allies into the tent at the strategy formulation stage, not just the final polishing phase.

If the United States is interdependent on its allies for its own strategy to succeed, it would benefit Washington to consider finding opportunities to include those allies and partners in their own strategy development processes. To overcome these hurdles, Washington will have to shift from informing its key allies of national strategies to genuinely consulting them early on in the drafting process. U.S. leaders would need to give key allies enough voice to let them suggest changes to elements of the strategies that rely on these allies for success. American officials might not always accept these suggestions, but they must take them seriously in order for allies to feel that they have enough say in the process, particularly if the United States relies on those allies’ compliance to succeed. If U.S. leaders are unable to embrace these adjustments, allies will constantly worry about having the rug ripped out from under them.

Integrated Deterrence in Action?

The joint statement released by the allies this week was truly historic in nature. As important as this agreement is, it is critical to remember that the United States and Japan can no longer simply discuss how to better coordinate with one another. Instead, they should discuss how the American and Japanese systems can work together to address bureaucratic obstacles and political constraints that could hamper deeper integration. The challenges outlined here on command and control, industrial cooperation, regional networking, and long-term strategies are only a handful of the issues that require new approaches. In many ways, these four areas will serve as a test of whether the Biden administration’s “integrated deterrence” strategy is turning from a fashionable buzzword into concrete deliverables. The security situation in the Indo-Pacific demands deeper alliance integration, so the time to deliver is now.

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Jeffrey W. Hornung is the Japan lead for the RAND National Security Research Division and a senior political scientist at RAND. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University

Zack Cooper is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a lecturer at Princeton University.

Image: Japanese Prime Minister’s Office via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Jeffrey W. Hornung · August 2, 2024

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