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Quotes of the Day:
"Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though t'were his own."
– Johann von Goethe
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
– John Stuart Mill
"If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice."
– Learned Hand
1. Is Putin’s Inner Circle Wobbling?
2. Cracks Are Showing in Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ Strategy
3. Collisions Tear Holes in U.S. Ally’s Ships as Tensions Flare in South China Sea
4. Tariffs Are on the Table for U.S. Importers, Whatever the Election Outcome
5. Combatant commands must think globally, outgoing Army North chief says
6. US intelligence officials say Iran is to blame for hacks targeting Trump, Biden-Harris campaigns
7. US soldier indicted for lying about association with group advocating government overthrow
8. Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia
9. Kyiv didn't disclose preparations for Kursk operation because of West's fear of Russian 'red lines,' Zelensky says
10. Ex-Trump adviser warns Hezbollah could strike on U.S. soil, Biden has lost ability to deter attacks
11. National Security Decisions for the Next President
12. A Double Funeral: The last great commandant of the Marine Corps was buried in July. by WIlliam S. Lind
13. U.S., Philippines reach deal to assist Afghan allies
14. Taiwan conducts live-fire missile drills as China ramps up military threats
15. Irregular Warfare at Sea: Using Privateers To Seize Chinese Commerce
16. The Perils of Isolationism: The World Still Needs America—and America Still Needs the World By Condoleezza Rice
17. Mark Cuban Says 'Everybody's Chasing Power, And Nothing Will Give You More Power Than Military And AI'
18. Rethinking the Role of a Systems Integrator for Artificial Intelligence
19. 10th Annual Future Security Forum - ASU & New America
20. Is China conducting 'gray zone' warfare for Russia?21.
1. Is Putin’s Inner Circle Wobbling?
What will this mean for Putin's reign and are we ready for what comes next? Are we shaping that future?
Is Putin’s Inner Circle Wobbling?
A prominent oligarch is publicly critical of the war. He likely isn’t alone.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/is-putins-inner-circle-wobbling-russia-critics-war-1eb59e51?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s
By Amy Knight
Aug. 19, 2024 4:19 pm ET
Vladimir Putin leads a meeting with members of the Security Council outside Moscow, Aug. 16. Photo: aleksey babushkin/sputnik/kremli/Shutterstock
Vladimir Putin isn’t new to leadership crises. The first came 24 years ago this month, when Russia’s Kursk submarine sank in the Barents Sea, killing 118 crew members. Mr. Putin was vacationing on the Black Sea and slow to respond—a public-relations disaster.
Yet the latest crisis—Ukraine’s unanticipated invasion of Russia’s Kursk district and the forced evacuation of thousands of civilians—may test his grip on power as never before. Pro-Kremlin military bloggers have begun to question Moscow’s defense establishment, and at least one oligarch has publicly denounced the war.
Mr. Putin has had to deal with discontent since the conflict began. His security team, including then-security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev, was noticeably uneasy when the president previewed his Ukrainian invasion at a televised meeting in February 2022. The posse got in line, but discontent emerged again when Mr. Putin failed initially to rein in Wagner Group mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in June 2023.
Mr. Patrushev gave a speech in November discussing Mr. Putin only in the past tense, which spawned rumors of the Russian leader’s death. Around the same time he lamented the exodus of scholars and scientists from Russia because of the war. Mr. Patrushev got his due in May, when Mr. Putin removed him from his security council leadership post and gave him the ignominious job of advising the president on shipbuilding.
Yet the choir of discontent gained a new member this month when Oleg Deripaska—one of Russia’s richest businessmen—spoke up. In an Aug. 5 interview with Nikkei Asia, he criticized the Kremlin’s defense spending, called the Ukraine war “mad,” and urged an “immediate, unconditional cease-fire.”
This isn’t the first time Mr. Deripaska has criticized the war. Shortly after the invasion, he wrote on Telegram that “we need peace as fast as possible.” According to Nikkei Asia, however, he hasn’t been as “publicly critical since Russian authorities seized a hotel complex he owned in Sochi in December 2022.”
His recent comments, coming as the Kremlin was caught off guard by Ukraine’s invasion, thus caused a stir on Russian social media. Alexander Dugin, a Russian political philosopher and activist, wrote on Telegram on Aug. 9: “Previously, Deripaska’s position on the SVO”—a Russian acronym for “special military operation,” as Moscow refers to the Ukraine war—“was ambiguous. Now he has made up his mind. He is on the other side. This is a stab in the back of our people and assistance to the Ukrainian Armed Forces terrorists who invaded the Kursk region. What an oligarchy we have here.”
Mr. Deripaska rose to prominence in the ’90s, founding the investment group Basic Element in 1997 and Rusal, an aluminum company, in 2000. He married—and later divorced—the daughter of Valentin Yumashev, Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law and former chief of staff. Mr. Deripaska earned Mr. Putin’s favor when Basic Element did much of the construction for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Robert Mueller later investigated him as part of the probe into Russia’s potential involvement in America’s 2016 election, owing to his connections with Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. The U.S. Treasury in 2018 imposed sanctions against him—along with Basic Element and several of his other companies—“in response to Russia’s worldwide malignant activity.”
Mr. Putin likely won’t dispose of Mr. Deripaska as he might other figures, say, in a plane crash or a push out of a window. As Mr. Deripaska told Nikkei Asia, “[The Kremlin] don’t touch me, and we [businessmen] stay out of politics.” He likely wouldn’t have spoken so candidly if other members of the business and political elite didn’t agree with him. As political analyst Abbas Gallyamov observed on Telegram, “Deripaska is a very analytical person, so before saying such things, he always absorbs the mood of other elites.” “This is not the voice of Deripaska alone.”
Mr. Patrushev, popular among Russian security and intelligence circles, may be among those elites. In a November meeting with security officials he expressed concern with Ukrainian sabotage in the Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk regions. He noted that damage from attacks had cost more than seven billion rubles and advocated systematic measures to protect these regions. One can imagine Mr. Patrushev uttering “I told you so” under his breath when Mr. Putin discussed Ukraine’s surprise attack at a security council meeting this month.
Russia has made only modest military progress after 2½ years of conflict, which has spread across Russia’s borders. It has suffered around 500,000 casualties and is draining its coffers. Ordinary Russians, fed a steady stream of propaganda about defending their country against the “evil” West, are unlikely to protest. But Mr. Putin’s support among elites, essential to his remaining in power, is less certain. He shouldn’t assume they will always back a war with no end in sight.
Ms. Knight is author, most recently, of “The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud With the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia.”
2. Cracks Are Showing in Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ Strategy
We need to take away the Axis of Resistance moniker from Iran. It is the axis of tyranny. Do not allow them to legitimize their maling activities by using resistance.
And there is escalation dominance by Israel which contributes to undermining the legitimacy of the axis of tyranny.
If cracks are showing what does that mean for Iranian leadership. Again, are we ready for what comes next and are we shaping the condition for what comes next?
Excerpts:
The so-called Axis of Resistance was born in the 1980s after Iran, a Persian nation in an Arab-dominated Middle East, found itself isolated in its war with Iraq. Since then, Iran has funded and armed militias in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria as well as the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 set off the chain of events that has now brought the region close to war.
...
Iran is facing the same challenge with Iraqi allies, the Popular Mobilization Forces, whose main focus has been attacking U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria as it seeks to expel American forces from the region.
Finding the right response to the killing of Haniyeh will be crucial, both to avoid a reprisal from Israel’s better-equipped forces and to maintain the respect of its allies.
“Israel has called Iran’s bluff now multiple times this summer and Israel has demonstrated escalation dominance—the ability to credibly out-threaten Iran and Hezbollah,” said Michael Knights, co-founder of the Militia Spotlight platform, which looks at Iran-backed militias in the Middle East. “Iran will have to demonstrate a new level of effectiveness or precision.”
Cracks Are Showing in Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ Strategy
Unpredictable allied militias and weak air defenses mean Iran must walk a fine line if it wants to avoid an attack on its own territory
By Benoit FauconFollow
Aug. 19, 2024 11:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/cracks-are-showing-in-irans-axis-of-resistance-strategy-7db4199f?mod=latest_headlines
Iran projects power through a web of allied militias that it influences with money and weapons. But as the region sits on the brink of a wider conflict, the degree to which it can rely on its partners will be tested as never before.
Isolated and subject to international sanctions, Iran has aimed to exert influence by building up a coalition of militias ideologically aligned with Tehran’s anti-Western agenda and designing low-cost missiles and drones to make up for its limited air defenses. These allied militias fight directly against Israel, the U.S. and other Western interests, allowing Iran to avoid direct responsibility that would encourage a response targeting its own soil.
But cracks are now beginning to show in the strategy.
Iran blamed an attack that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Israel, and its vow to retaliate has put the entire region on edge. It marked the second time this year that Israel attacked Iran directly—Israel targeted an air-defense system near a key Iranian nuclear facility in Isfahan after Iran sent more than 300 missiles and drones into Israel in mid-April.
A woman in Zanjan, Iran, walks near a billboard depicting Iranian missiles above an anti-Israel message; earlier this year Israel targeted an air-defense system near an Iranian nuclear facility in Isfahan, and a satellite image of the site appeared to show burn marks around what analysts identified as radar equipment for a Russian-made S-300 defense system.
Rouzbeh Fouladi/ZUMA Press; Planet Labs PBC/AP (2)
Now, as Iran weighs how it responds to Haniyeh’s killing, it needs to figure out how to hit Israel enough to establish deterrence without encouraging a reprisal on Iranian soil. The varied interests of various allied militias—including those in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen—could complicate things.
“Iran’s doctrine is premised on pushing insecurity away from its borders, aiming for violence to remain contained, bleeding out its adversaries but avoiding all-out war,” says Thomas Juneau, an Iran-focused professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
An attack on Iran proper could cause significant damage, as Tehran has struggled to demonstrate its defenses can respond to a break into its airspace.
In January, after Tehran struck jihadist targets in Pakistan, Islamabad responded with an airstrike of its own on Iran’s border areas. Then came Israel’s attack on Isfahan in April.
Most combat aircraft and air-defense systems were bought in the 1970s before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. As a result, the DIA says, Tehran concentrated on equipping its armed forces with niche capabilities emphasizing asymmetric tactics such as using drones and missiles that can target Israel but are of no use to protect its airspace.
Hezbollah supporters attend the funeral of militants in Beirut. Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ
Hezbollah supporters marching in Sidon, Lebanon. Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ
“Most of [Iran’s] combat aircraft and their weapons are obsolescent,” said Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. In addition, “given the large area of the country, providing complete air defense of all potential targets isn’t possible.”
In a rare foreign-defense import, Iran was able to purchase a small number of Russia’s S-300 defense systems in 2016, which provided Iran with its first capability to defend against a modern air force. But even that seems to be insufficient. The air base in Isfahan, where Israel struck in April, was equipped with S-300s, according to the IISS.
The so-called Axis of Resistance was born in the 1980s after Iran, a Persian nation in an Arab-dominated Middle East, found itself isolated in its war with Iraq. Since then, Iran has funded and armed militias in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria as well as the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 set off the chain of events that has now brought the region close to war.
The stakes of a regional war would be particularly high for the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which sits on Israel’s northern border. The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, meanwhile, whose survival largely depends on Iran and its militias, has told Iran it doesn’t want to get dragged into a war, according to a Syrian government adviser and a European security official. Damascus has been battling an economic crisis brought by years of sanctions, which has led to protests and discontent among large segments of its population, and has its leadership has lost control of vast enclaves in the north and east of the country.
But Iranian-allied militias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen appear to be itching for a more aggressive approach, not only toward Israel but toward U.S. troops stationed in the region and other Western interests. This seems to be unsettling Tehran.
Houthi supporters attended an anti-Israel and anti-American rally in San’a, Yemen, on Friday. Photo: Osamah Abdulrahman/Associated Press
Houthi officials say they want strikes on U.S. warships and Israeli ports, partly in revenge for Haniyeh’s killing. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Iran “is a bit like a chariot drawn by a band of unruly horses,” says Andrew Tabler, a former Middle East director at the White House’s National Security Council. “Iran is holding the reins but its allies often disagree on the pace and direction of travel and that could lead to crashes.”
Yemen’s Houthis have been wanting to carry out massive strikes on U.S. warships and Israeli ports not just in revenge for Haniyeh’s killing but also for an Israeli strike on a key port last month, according to Houthi and European officials. That strike by Israel came after the Houthis launched a drone that killed one person in Tel Aviv.
The Yemeni faction has launched a campaign of harassment on commercial shipping sailing through the Red Sea, which it says is in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
“The Houthis are very reckless and ambitious,” said Osamah Al Rawhani, a director for the Yemen-focused Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. “They are emboldened by the fact they are in full control of their territory and sit in a strategic location that has been causing harm to the global trade through their hostilities against the shipping routes.”
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Iran-backed groups form a land bridge across the Middle East and connect in an alliance that Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance.” Here’s what to know about the alliance that includes Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Photo Illustration: Eve Hartley
Iran is facing the same challenge with Iraqi allies, the Popular Mobilization Forces, whose main focus has been attacking U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria as it seeks to expel American forces from the region.
Finding the right response to the killing of Haniyeh will be crucial, both to avoid a reprisal from Israel’s better-equipped forces and to maintain the respect of its allies.
“Israel has called Iran’s bluff now multiple times this summer and Israel has demonstrated escalation dominance—the ability to credibly out-threaten Iran and Hezbollah,” said Michael Knights, co-founder of the Militia Spotlight platform, which looks at Iran-backed militias in the Middle East. “Iran will have to demonstrate a new level of effectiveness or precision.”
Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com
3. Collisions Tear Holes in U.S. Ally’s Ships as Tensions Flare in South China Sea
The global board game of Go/Baduk is getting pretty complicated. Territory everywhere is disputed in different ways from Ukraine to the Middle East to East Asia among others.
Collisions Tear Holes in U.S. Ally’s Ships as Tensions Flare in South China Sea
Fresh encounters in the South China Sea bring dangers closer home for the Philippines
https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/collisions-tear-holes-in-u-s-allys-ships-as-tensions-flare-in-south-china-sea-f39a497b?utm_medium=social
By Niharika Mandhana
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Updated Aug. 19, 2024 10:24 pm ET
A photo taken and released by the Philippine Coast Guard on Monday that it says shows the damage to its ship following a collision with a Chinese coast guard vessel near Sabina Shoal in the South China Sea. Photo: ted aljibe/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
New flashpoints are emerging in the volatile South China Sea—bringing confrontations involving Beijing closer to the shores of a key U.S. ally in the region.
In the dead of the night Monday, between the hours of 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. local time, at least three collisions occurred between coast guard ships belonging to China and the Philippines. The first tore a hole 3.6 feet in diameter on the starboard side of a Philippine coast guard vessel, the Philippines said.
About 16 minutes later, a Chinese coast guard vessel rammed another Philippine coast guard ship twice, ripping a gap 2.5 feet long and 3 feet wide on the port side, according to the Philippines.
TAIWAN
CHINA
SOUTH CHINA SEA
PHILIPPINES
Second Thomas Shoal
Palawan
Sabina Shoal
BRUNEI
200 miles
MALAYSIA
INDO.
200 km
The incidents occurred near Sabina Shoal, an uninhabited reef which sits just 75 nautical miles from the Philippines’ west coast.
The Philippines said the collisions resulted from aggressive maneuvers by China’s coast guard—a large and potent force on the front lines of Beijing’s efforts to enforce its claims in the South China Sea. China accused the Philippines coast guard of deliberately colliding with its ship in a dangerous way.
“We can fairly say that this is the biggest structural damage we have incurred as a result of the dangerous maneuvers carried out by the Chinese coast guard,” said Jay Tarriela, a spokesman for the Philippine coast guard.
Monday’s incidents marked an escalation in tensions that have run high over the past 18 months, at times threatening to spiral into conflict that could draw in the U.S., Manila’s treaty ally. They are especially noteworthy because they unfolded near Sabina Shoal, a location close to the Philippines that is fast becoming a new source of friction.
Confrontations since last year have largely centered on a different reef called Second Thomas Shoal, which is located 30 nautical miles west of Sabina Shoal—and about 100 nautical miles off the Philippines west coast. Second Thomas Shoal is a military outpost for a small detachment of Filipino marines. In July—after a series of risky encounters over months, in which China tried to disrupt Manila’s resupply missions to the outpost—the Philippines and China said they had reached an agreement to ease tensions.
A video still released by the China coast guard via Weibo on Monday that it says shows a Philippine coast guard vessel and a Chinese coast guard vessel during an incident in the South China Sea. Photo: china coast guard via weibo/Reuters
Differences quickly emerged in each side’s interpretation of the deal and Monday’s confrontation—albeit at a different location—raises new questions over its fate.
As Manila has taken a stronger stance against China’s claims in the South China Sea and moved closer to the U.S., it has come under intense pressure from Beijing—both diplomatically and at sea. Chinese vessels have used a host of forceful tactics around Second Thomas Shoal, from spraying water cannons and ramming Philippine ships to threatening Filipino military personnel with axes and knives. China’s coast guard ships often come with maritime militia boats, outnumbering the Philippines.
Unlike Second Thomas Shoal, Sabina Shoal isn’t a military outpost and wasn’t seen as a flashpoint, but tensions have been bubbling there for months. China claims both sites—which lie within the Philippines’ 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone—as it does much of the South China Sea. A 2016 ruling by an international arbitral tribunal held that China’s claims have no legal basis, which Beijing rejected.
Mid-April, the Philippines sent a large coast guard ship, the BRP Teresa Magbanua, for a prolonged deployment to Sabina Shoal. The reason, it said, was that China had dialed up the presence of its maritime militia boats at the site and also sent research vessels. In a May briefing to journalists, the Philippines coast guard reported the presence of three Chinese research vessels at Sabina Shoal.
A satellite view of Sabina Shoal, an uninhabited reef which sits just 75 nautical miles from the Philippines’ west coast. Photo: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Getty Images
The research vessels were sending out divers who appeared to be using instruments to take measurements and make assessments of the area, the Philippines said at the time. The Philippines, in response, sent small inflatable boats to monitor the activities more closely, and on at least one occasion was blocked by China’s coast guard.
Overall, the Philippines coast guard said in the May briefing that it recorded a heavy Chinese presence at the site, including visits by Chinese navy vessels and helicopters, coast guard ships and maritime militia boats.
Philippine divers tasked with studying the area also discovered what looked like dead and crushed corals, dumped underwater at various locations around the shoal, the Philippines coast guard said. That, it said, could be a precursor to possible land reclamation. China has a history of building artificial islands in the South China Sea, some of which are now military bases.
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WSJ’s Feliz Solomon joined a resupply convoy to a remote Philippine outpost in the disputed South China Sea. The mission would end in one of the most significant confrontations between China and the Philippines in recent years. Photo: WSJ
“If we don’t monitor and guard this, maybe in the following months, we’ll be shocked again that in Sabina Shoal, they’ve expanded the island,” Tarriela, the Philippine coast guard spokesman, said in the May briefing.
At the time, China’s Foreign Ministry called the assertion “sheer rumor spread by the Philippines, which is an irresponsible claim designed to vilify China and mislead the international community.” Over subsequent months, China accused Manila of creating new tensions in the South China Sea and asked it to withdraw the vessel from Sabina Shoal.
On Monday, the two Philippine coast guard ships that were involved in the collisions were headed to resupply a different Philippine site in the South China Sea, but were passing by the vicinity of Sabina Shoal, when they encountered the Chinese coast guard. The collisions took place 21 to 23 nautical miles southeast of Sabina Shoal. Despite being damaged, the ships continued their missions, the Philippines said.
Bella Perez-Rubio contributed to this article.
Write to Niharika Mandhana at niharika.mandhana@wsj.com
Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the August 20, 2024, print edition as 'Crashes Fan South China Sea Strife'.
4. Tariffs Are on the Table for U.S. Importers, Whatever the Election Outcome
Is this one area of some political unity: Tariffs?
Tariffs Are on the Table for U.S. Importers, Whatever the Election Outcome
U.S. companies are pulling away from China as Democrats and Republicans increasingly impose duties on Beijing
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tariffs-are-on-the-table-for-u-s-importers-whatever-the-election-outcome-6a99e707?mod=latest_headlines
By Paul Berger
Follow
Aug. 20, 2024 6:00 am ET
Illustration: Thomas R. Lechleiter/WSJ
Until a few years ago, Chinese factories supplied the world with Sharpie retractable pens and Oster blenders.
No more.
Consumer giant Newell Brands now makes those products, and more, at its own plants in the U.S. and Mexico. Many of its other products are made in factories in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand.
Chris Peterson, Newell’s chief executive, said the company’s shift reduces its dependence on China at a time when both the Democratic and Republican parties “are getting more protectionist in terms of trade policy.”
Tariffs are becoming an entrenched tool tying together geopolitics and trade, and they are playing a bigger role in long-term manufacturing and sourcing decisions. Nowhere are they hitting harder than in China, where importers and exporters are navigating an increasingly complicated regime of levies on goods ranging from semiconductors to mattresses.
“Tariffs have always existed and they’ve always been regarded as a cost of doing business,” said Simon Geale, executive vice president of procurement at supply-chain consulting firm Proxima. “But they’ve been getting much more teeth in the last five or six years.”
The new era of tariffs kicked off under the Trump administration with duties on imports from a swath of countries and a focus on Chinese products ranging from truck chassis to consumer goods.
The Biden administration kept most of the tariffs in place, and then added further duties on Chinese steel, semiconductors and electric vehicles, citing national security concerns and an industrial policy aimed at reviving American manufacturing.
The two candidates in this year’s presidential election look set to continue the trend, as trade, manufacturing and the tools to tie them together take a prominent role in the campaign.
Former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has said he would roll out new tariffs with a potential 10% across-the-board duty on imported goods and a 60% tariff on goods from China.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, so far hasn’t indicated a desire to deviate much from President Biden’s trade policies.
Retail industry trade groups and some executives warn that escalating tariffs will raise consumer prices and fuel inflation. Photo: Tim Rue/Bloomberg News
Before becoming vice president, Harris diverged from Biden on Trump’s revised North American Free Trade Agreement, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement. As a senator, Harris joined some Democratic lawmakers, saying it didn’t do enough to address climate change, suggesting Harris may have more of a focus on social justice issues when considering trade pacts.
Harris has been in lockstep with the president in the Biden administration.
At an electronics factory in Wisconsin last summer, Harris said she and Biden want to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. At a campaign event in North Carolina on July 18, she said Trump’s proposed universal 10% tariff “would increase the cost of everyday expenses for families.” She didn’t criticize current tariffs on Chinese goods.
Both Trump and Harris opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the expansive multination trade deal that was designed to expand alternatives to trading with China. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement immediately on taking office in 2017.
The trade policies pose a conundrum for companies. Do they continue sourcing from China and risk the potential impact of escalating tariffs? Or do they look outside China, where costs are higher, but duties and other geopolitical risks are lower?
Trump’s threat of universal tariffs has even spooked supporters. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, said he would delay a decision on a new plant in Mexico until after the election because “it doesn’t make sense” if Trump wins and puts “heavy tariffs” on vehicles produced there.
Shifting supply chains to other countries is complex. Companies must find new suppliers of raw materials and finished goods. Suppliers and sub-suppliers must be vetted to make sure they don’t violate increasingly stringent U.S. rules on issues such as forced labor.
Anne van de Heetkamp, a vice president of product management at supply chain and logistics technology company Descartes, said when trade tensions started ratcheting up five years ago companies weren’t in a hurry to shift supply chains. Now that the duties appear more permanent, Descartes’s customers are mapping out new global supply networks.
Vice President Kamala Harris tours the QCells solar equipment factory in Dalton, Ga., last year. Photo: Natrice Miller/Zuma Press
Surging exports out of Southeast Asia, India and Mexico suggest Newell isn’t alone in its desire to reduce reliance on China. The shifts are fueling new logistics investments in factories, warehousing and transportation operations around the world.
DHL Express U.S., a parcel unit of German logistics giant Deutsche Post, added a new direct flight between Vietnam and the U.S. in 2022 to cater to rising exports that used to reach the U.S. via Hong Kong. CEO Greg Hewitt said the unit is also looking at expanding its networks along the U.S. -Mexico border to serve surging demand there.
Hewitt cautioned that China remains the world’s top supplier of manufactured goods and will likely hold that position because of its streamlined supply chains and low costs for raw materials and labor.
Retail industry trade groups and some executives warn some items can’t be produced anywhere else in the world and that escalating tariffs will simply raise consumer prices and fuel inflation. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that every percentage point increase in the overall U.S. tariff rate would increase core consumer prices by just over 0.1%.
“The problem is the best place to make shoes is China,” said Ronnie Robinson, chief supply chain officer at Designer Brands, parent company of footwear retailer DSW.
Robinson said for every dollar the government adds in tariffs, consumers pay an extra $2 to $4 at the checkout. “The reality is that you and I are paying for the tariffs as part of the ticket price when you go into the store and buy,” he said.
Robinson said Designer Brands sources about 70% of its footwear from China, down from 90% several years ago. He said the company aims to reduce its reliance further to about 50%, but China will remain the company’s largest single source of shoes.
Peterson said just 15% of Newell’s goods rely on products made in China today, down from more than 30% several years ago. He expects that by the end of next year the share will fall below 10%.
He said that when the company is searching for new Chinese suppliers one of its first questions is whether they have capacity or plan to add capacity outside the country.
“If a supplier doesn’t have manufacturing capability outside of China, we will not select them as a vendor for us,” he said.
Write to Paul Berger at paul.berger@wsj.com
5. Combatant commands must think globally, outgoing Army North chief says
This is an important point. Can we continue the "luxury" of being able to only think regionally anymore? Does our geographic command structure help or hinder our national security? How do we integrate and coordinate strategy, campaigns, and national security activities on a global basis? Are our structures and processes the most effective they could be? Can they be modified or do we need new structures and processes to deal with the complexity of today's (and tomorrow) global strategic environment?
Combatant commands must think globally, outgoing Army North chief says
militarytimes.com · by Todd South · August 19, 2024
U.S. Army North is one of the commands essential to protecting U.S. citizens but is often one of the last mentioned publicly when soldiers and citizens think of the Army.
The command oversees all U.S. Army activity in the United States and works alongside Canada’s and Mexico’s military forces on U.S. Army activity in those countries. When called, it supports civil authorities such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The outgoing commander of ARNORTH, Lt. Gen. John Evans, assumed command leadership at a pivotal time in September 2021. He relinquished command Aug. 13, 2024, and retired after 36 years in the Army.
Evans arrived at the post having previously led U.S. Army Cadet Command from 2018 to 2021.
From the moment he took command of ARNORTH, Evans faced a flood of missions from ongoing COVID-19 response efforts to accommodating 76,000 Afghan evacuees who fled the country after the U.S. military’s withdrawal in 2021.
At the same time, the command has also had to modernize along with the rest of the Army, shifting its training, equipment and formations toward a great power competition fight with potential adversaries such as China or Russia and away from smaller footprint counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations of the past few decades.
Evans spoke with Army Times before his retirement, reflecting on the command’s past and future. The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
As commander of U.S. Army North, Lt. Gen. John Evans, left, oversaw a range of missions from COVID-19 response efforts to accommodating Afghan evacuees following the U.S. military's withdrawal. (Lance Cpl. Zachary Zephir/Marine Corps)
Army Times: While ARNORTH plays a significant role, many career soldiers may not have had much experience with the command. What was your experience when you took command?
John Evans: As a special operations guy most of my career I didn’t do much in the homeland. So, I didn’t know a whole lot about how we were approaching homeland defense. I also didn’t know and had not really touched defense support and the civil authorities in any meaningful way. Coming into command in 2021 we were right at the backend of COVID, kind of going into phase two of COVID response. Our team was weary when I got here. There had been incredible work to support all our civil authorities. And right then we started seeing the withdrawal from Afghanistan and knowing we were going to have people we needed to get out of Afghanistan. That was one of the largest single-event immigration events in the history of the United States.
What’s different about working in the homeland (the United States) as compared to other combatant commands?
For so many soldiers who are used to being in a forward deployed theater, particularly considering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military is always the lead organization, so they’re used to having a certain autonomy in decision-making. But the military is never the lead organization in the homeland for response. It’s a complete reversal when you’re in the homeland. So that takes some depth management. It takes some understanding of how you’re building that organizational dynamic.
Army Lt. Gen. John Evans, former commander of Army North, stands with his family at his retirement ceremony on Fort Sam Houston, Texas, Aug. 13, 2024. (Sgt. Andrea Kent/Army)
The idea of an attack on the homeland has changed in recent years, especially with the advance of interconnected technologies. What’s ARNORTH able to prepare for?
I don’t think we’re ever going to see a “Red Dawn” situation where we’ve got enemy paratroopers jumping into the wheat fields of Kansas or whatever the setting was for the movie. But I do think it’s very reasonable and feasible to think that we might see cyberattacks, space domain-based attacks, things that will get into our decision cycle that would stop us from being able to deploy rapidly. We count on our ability to deploy rapidly, and it’s unique to the United States; nobody else has it. So, we must look at where are our vulnerabilities and what can we do to better prepare ourselves now so that if we face conflict, we can assure our projection for the forward commanders.
What lies ahead for combatant commanders as the United States refocuses its efforts on peer adversaries and a wide range of potential threats?
We’ve got to keep doing what we’re doing with modernization. But we really have looked at the world kind of regionally. We look at Asia, we look at Europe, we look at Africa, we look at South America and we look at North America. But the bottom line is we are globally interconnected. What happens in one command affects what happens in the homeland. What happens in the Indo-Pacific Command can affect what happens in Central Command. I think as we move forward, we’ve got to be careful because law and policy are set up to support the regional construct. But I think we have to broaden that aperture a little bit and look at things much more globally and holistically.
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.
6. US intelligence officials say Iran is to blame for hacks targeting Trump, Biden-Harris campaigns
Can we and will we hack back? How do we respond to these malign activities to prevent future attacks?
US intelligence officials say Iran is to blame for hacks targeting Trump, Biden-Harris campaigns
By ERIC TUCKER
Updated 9:04 PM EDT, August 19, 2024
AP · August 19, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence officials said Monday they were confident that Iran was responsible for the hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, casting the cyber intrusion as part of a brazen and broader effort by Tehran to interfere in American politics and potentially shape the outcome of the election.
The assessment from the FBI and other federal agencies was the first time the U.S. government has assigned blame for hacks that have raised anew the threat of foreign election interference and underscored how Iran, in addition to more sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China, remains a top concern. Besides breaching the Trump campaign, officials also believe that Iran tried to hack into the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.
The hacking and similar activities, federal officials said, are meant to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and possibly to influence the outcome of elections that Iran perceives to be “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests,” officials said.
“We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting Presidential campaigns,” said the statement released by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations denied the allegations as “unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing,” saying that Iran had neither the motive nor intention to interfere with the election. It challenged the U.S. to provide evidence and said if the U.S. does so, “we will respond accordingly.”
The FBI statement was released at a time of significant tensions between Washington and Tehran as the U.S. hopes to halt or limit a threatened retaliatory strike on Israel over the assassination of Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. In addition, an Israeli strike last month in southern Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top commander, but while Tehran and Iran-backed Hezbollah have vowed to retaliate, they have not yet launched strikes as diplomatic endeavors and Gaza cease-fire talks continue in Qatar.
The U.S. did not detail how it reached the conclusion that Iran was responsible, nor did it describe the nature of any information that may have been stolen from the Trump campaign. But it said the intelligence community was confident “the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the Presidential campaigns of both political parties.”
At least three staffers in the Biden-Harris campaign were targeted with phishing emails, but investigators have uncovered no evidence the attempt was successful, The Associated Press reported last week.
“Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the U.S. election process. It is important to note that this approach is not new. Iran and Russia have employed these tactics not only in the United States during this and prior federal election cycles but also in other countries around the world,” the statement said.
U.S. officials have been on high alert in recent election cycles for foreign influence campaigns and outright interference as in 2016, when Russian military intelligence operatives hacked the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and orchestrated the release of politically damaging emails through the website WikiLeaks.
What to know about the 2024 Election
Iran has more recently emerged as an aggressive threat to American elections. In 2020, U.S. intelligence officials say, Iran carried out an influence campaign aimed at harming Trump’s reelection bid that was probably approved by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and was the subject of an unusual evening news conference featuring FBI Director Christopher Wray and other officials.
U.S. officials also have expressed alarm about Tehran’s efforts to seek retaliation for a 2020 strike on an Iranian general that was ordered by Trump.
The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets — Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post — were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.
Politico reported that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — passed along what appeared to be a research dossier the campaign had apparently done on the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The document was dated Feb. 23, almost five months before Trump selected Vance as his running mate.
The U.S. government’s assessment aligns with the findings of private companies.
Earlier this month, Microsoft issued a report on Iranian agents’ attempts to interfere in this year’s election. It said Iran had impersonated activists and created fake news targeted to voters on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The report also cited an instance of an Iranian military intelligence unit in June sending “a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”
In a separate report, Google said an Iranian group linked to the country’s Revolutionary Guard has tried to infiltrate the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen people linked to President Joe Biden and Trump since May.
____
Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
AP · August 19, 2024
7. US soldier indicted for lying about association with group advocating government overthrow
Remember that question on every security clearance investigation: have ever been a member of an organization that advocates the overthrow of the US government? Or something along those lines. This is why they ask that type of question.
Of course it is a question of damned if you do or damned if you don't. If you answer yes you will not be granted a security clearance and if you lie you will be indicted.
Excerpt:
The indictment alleges Nix made a false statement in 2022 on his security clearance application by stating he had never been a member of a group dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the U.S. government and that engaged in activities to that end. Nix knew he had been a member of such a group, the indictment reads. Neither the indictment nor the news release provided details on the group.
US soldier indicted for lying about association with group advocating government overthrow
AP · by Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · August 19, 2024
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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — An active-duty soldier based in North Carolina has been indicted on charges of having lied to military authorities about his association with a group that advocated overthrowing the U.S. government and of trafficking firearms.
Kai Liam Nix, 20, who is stationed at Fort Liberty, made his first federal court appearance Monday on the four criminal counts, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina said in a news release.
A grand jury returned the indictment against Nix — also known as Kai Brazelton — last Wednesday, and he was arrested the next day, the release said. A magistrate judge ordered Monday that Nix be held pending a detention hearing in Raleigh later this week.
The indictment alleges Nix made a false statement in 2022 on his security clearance application by stating he had never been a member of a group dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the U.S. government and that engaged in activities to that end. Nix knew he had been a member of such a group, the indictment reads. Neither the indictment nor the news release provided details on the group.
The indictment also accuses Nix of one count of dealing in firearms without a license and two counts of selling a stolen firearm. These counts identify activities that occurred late last year and early this year. The types of firearms weren’t identified.
Nix was appointed a public defender on Monday, but a lawyer wasn’t listed in online court records late Monday. An after-hours phone message was left with the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Raleigh.
Nix faces a maximum of 30 years in prison if convicted, the release from U.S. Attorney Michael Easley Jr.'s office said. Easley and the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section are prosecuting the case.
The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Department are investigating the case.
AP · by Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · August 19, 2024
8. Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia
A very long and troubling read from ProPublica.
The security clearance question:
"Have you ever been a member of a group that advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?"
Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia
ProPublica · by Joshua Kaplan
This story discusses threats of violence and contains a racial slur.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Reporting Highlights
- Militias After Jan. 6: Internal messages reveal how AP3, one of the largest U.S. militias, rose even as prosecutors pursued other paramilitary groups after the assault on the Capitol.
- Organized Vigilantism: AP3 has already sought to shape American life through armed vigilante operations — at the Texas border, outside ballot boxes and during Black Lives Matter protests.
- Close Ties With Police: AP3 leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement around the U.S. Internal files reveal their strategies for building these ties and where they’ve claimed success.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday, the men went camping in the snow-speckled mountains outside Spokane, where they grilled rib-eyes and bacon-wrapped asparagus over a bonfire.
They also engaged in more menacing activities. They assembled regularly — sometimes wearing night-vision goggles in the dark — to practice storming buildings together with semiautomatic rifles. Their drills included using sniper rifles to shoot targets from distances of half a mile. And they belonged to a shadowy organization whose members were debating, with ever more intensity, whether they should engage in mass-scale political violence.
They were among the thousands of members of American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Its ranks included cops and convicted criminals, active-duty U.S. soldiers and small-business owners, truck drivers and health care professionals. Like other militias, AP3 has a vague but militant right-wing ideology, a pronounced sense of grievance and a commitment to armed action. It has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations: AP3 members have “rounded up” immigrants at the Texas border, assaulted Black Lives Matter protesters and attempted to crack down on people casting absentee ballots.
Now with the presidential election less than 100 days away, AP3 members see the fate of their country turning on a turbulent, charged campaign. They’re certain that Democrats will try to steal — not for the first time, in their view — the White House from Donald Trump. “The next election won’t be decided at a Ballot Box,” an AP3 leader wrote several months ago in a private Telegram chat. “It’ll be decided at the ammo box.” He has said he is ready to force his way into voting centers if need be, or “whatever it takes.”
The public’s impression of American militias is dominated by Jan. 6, 2021. Groups such as the Proud Boys had plotted to prevent the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. They formed the vanguard of the mob that stormed the Capitol that day, according to the Department of Justice. Media coverage since has centered on the prosecutions of participants, with hundreds of rioters sent to prison.
But despite the riot and its fallout, militias are far from extinct. AP3 has expanded at a dramatic pace since Jan. 6, while keeping much of its activity out of view. This rise is documented in more than 100,000 internal messages obtained by ProPublica, spanning the run-up to Jan. 6 through early 2024. Along with extensive interviews with 22 current and former members of AP3, the records provide a uniquely detailed inside view of the militia movement at a crucial moment.
The messages reveal how AP3 leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement around the country and show the ways in which, despite an initial crackdown by social media, they have attracted a new wave of recruits. A change in the political climate has also helped: In a matter of months after Jan. 6, rioters went from pariahs to heroes in the rhetoric of prominent Republican politicians. By the summer of 2021, people were enlisting in AP3, saying that Jan. 6 inspired them to join.
A portrait emerges of a group alternating between focused action and self-destructive chaos and facing a schism over whether political engagement can still address our nation’s problems — or whether violence is the only option. It can be hard to discern the line between bluster and imminent threat in the messages, a perennial struggle for FBI agents who monitor paramilitary groups. But some senior AP3 members grew so alarmed that they quit, scared by the number of people, even high-level leaders, advocating acts of terror.
The materials also shed light on what former national security officials say is the most urgent question regarding militias: Will Jan. 6 prove the high water mark of the movement’s violence or merely a prelude to something more catastrophic? AP3 leaders have sometimes characterized the storming of the Capitol as a botched job, a failure of ill-formed plans that didn’t go far enough. “The Jan 6 event made the movement look weak and uncommitted,” one wrote a year and a half after the riot in a secret channel. “Had the house been taken for real and held we would all be in a different world.”
This is the story of a militia fighting for its survival, determined not to make the same mistake twice.
AP3 members train in Washington state. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
“Life Is Too Fucking Short”
On a Thursday afternoon in February 2021, Scot Seddon, national commander of AP3, sent an audio message to his deputies in a channel open only to the group’s leadership. A former Army reservist, Seddon had founded AP3 when he was in his 30s and shaped it into a national force. Now he was 50, with a receding hairline, his beard overtaken by gray. In videos from this time, typically recorded in his kitchen, Seddon favored baseball caps and tight shirts that revealed his bulky shoulders and trapezius muscles. He looked like an aging bro who had just returned from the gym. “I hate this movement more every day,” Seddon said that February day, “and I really don’t even want to be a part of it anymore.”
It had been a few weeks since the Capitol riot. The FBI was already arresting leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two of AP3’s prominent counterparts. Another militia was about to dissolve. One of Seddon’s lieutenants had issued a dark forecast: The reaction to Jan. 6 could destroy our movement. Everyday Americans will recoil.
Seddon on the Capitol Riot
AP3 national commander Scot Seddon, in a video posted on Jan. 6, 2021, claimed that left-wing antifa protesters infiltrated the crowd at the Capitol that day, an assertion dismissed by experts. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
At least Seddon didn’t have to fear going to prison. AP3 had spent weeks preparing to go to Washington, D.C., for Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, with one of his top deputies promising to “mad max this shit.” Whether through luck, foresight or miscalculation, Seddon had decided to save his forces for that event rather than deploy them at the Jan. 6 rally. Plenty of his members went anyway; some fought with police officers on the Capitol steps. But they were under orders not to wear AP3 insignia, according to two former lieutenants to Seddon, and the organization was never publicly linked to the rioters.
That did not save AP3 from the fallout. Membership plummeted. AP3ers lost friends and business. Active-duty police officers quit out of fear of losing their jobs.
What’s more, AP3’s best recruiting tool was essentially gone: Facebook had cracked down on paramilitary organizing. “Facebook has been our greatest weapon. It’s gotten us where we are today,” Seddon told his troops. He later described those months as a period of personal “misery” and self-doubt. “I had a drinking problem,” he would confide to the group. “The bottle was consuming me.”
By the middle of 2021, some AP3 leaders were ready to give up. In July, the head of its Arizona chapter announced he was stepping down. “My life is too fucking short to beg people to do what’s right,” he said. He had hardly any members left in his state, and rebuilding was proving impossible. Still, he added, “It has been a great honor to me to have been here (and stayed here) through some of the most trying times this movement has seen since April 19, 1995.”
Seddon displays the hand signal of the Three Percenters, a loose confederation of right-wing groups that AP3 is affiliated with, in a photo posted in 2023. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Nobody needs to explain the significance of that date to a militia member. It was the day a Gulf War veteran with militia ties named Timothy McVeigh blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. The modern militia movement — loosely speaking, a wide variety of groups whose shared traits are military-style training, an affinity for guns and a belief that they are the last line of defense against the excesses of the government and the left — started in the early 1990s and had been growing rapidly. But after the bombing, the movement crumbled. It didn’t recover until 2008, when a financial crisis and Barack Obama’s presidential election kindled a new generation of leaders like Seddon.
But the political climate after Jan. 6 would be very different from the period after McVeigh’s attack. Soon, Seddon’s group would have momentum back on its side.
Lions and Men
Seddon seems like an unlikely commander of a paramilitary organization. Raised in the suburbs of Long Island, he bounced between jobs through his early 40s, including stints as the manager for a small-time rapper and as a model. Seddon appeared on book jackets, including a vampire romance novel titled “Love’s Last Bite.” And there he was, in an awkward shirtless pose with a woman in lingerie, on the cover of “How to Handle a Younger Man: A Collection of Five Erotic Stories.”
It was in internet forums for models, during the latter years of the George W. Bush administration, where Seddon’s right-wing politics started to emerge publicly. He would engage in lengthy sparring with his peers, heckling them with insults: “we dominate you libs” and “you SOUND LIKE A FRENCHMEN need I say more?”
Seddon during his days as a model Credit: Screenshot taken by ProPublica via Bookmate.com
Seddon grew increasingly alienated — he would later say that he felt “very alone” after Obama was elected — and engaged. He became active on a Facebook page to support Iraq War veterans. And then, during Obama’s first term, he used that as a launchpad to create AP3. At the time, Seddon did not yet own a firearm, according to one of his first recruits.
Like many militias, AP3 was suffused with a military ethos. It adopted the hierarchy and nomenclature, with ranks such as “command sergeant major.” One credential most conferred authority: military service.
Seddon described himself as a veteran and, in a public resume, stated that he had served in Operation Desert Storm. He would tell Army stories to AP3 members and show them a photo of himself as a young soldier. Even his closest confidants in the group were left with the impression that he had substantial military experience.
But Seddon did not, in fact, serve in a combat zone. He joined the Army Reserve, without any prior stint in the military, more than a year after Desert Storm was over, according to his discharge papers and military personnel records. His active-duty tenure lasted for five months, the documents say, and ended when he finished his initial training.
Seddon’s Army discharge papers, along with military personnel records, show he was on active duty for five months. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica. Redacted by ProPublica.
Seddon declined to be interviewed for this article. Presented with an extensive list of written questions, he responded, “Lions do not concern themselves with the opinions of men.”
“J6 Made Me Want to Join”
Seddon’s vision for AP3 was novel for the time: a national organization, with chapters across the country operating under his command. After Obama announced a plan for tougher gun control in his second term, membership exploded, former leaders said. One told ProPublica that their local chapter grew from four or five people to over 200 in less than a year.
By 2016, AP3 had an active presence in 48 states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — larger than any other organization the anti-extremism watchdog was tracking. AP3 was part of the loose confederation known as the Three Percenters, a set of right-wing groups that take their name from the claim that only 3% of colonists fought in the American Revolution. At its peak, by Seddon’s likely exaggerated count, AP3 had 40,000 to 50,000 members. After the Jan. 6 riot, insiders and experts estimate the total was, at most, in the low thousands.
Seddon set about rebuilding the group in 2021. It was difficult initially and made even harder by his own struggles. When the pandemic started, he had a job as a doctor’s technician in New York City, but he refused to get vaccinated and left the medical field. He tried to get licensed as a realtor, then as a personal trainer, and found gig economy work near Scranton, Pennsylvania. He often recorded video directives to his troops from his car while driving between deliveries for Uber Eats.
He began reinvigorating the remnants of his command. His communications offered a mix of elements that his followers found compelling. There was lots of posturing: “Fuck the federal government,” he offered as an opener in one video. “These rats, these devils,” he said in another, “the only way they’re going to start listening is fear.” But Seddon also hailed his members as patriots, heroes, and praised their deeds with an “awesome job bro.” Seddon traveled the country. He would drop by at AP3’s training exercises, where veterans might teach close-quarters gun combat at an abandoned car dealership or lead sniper rifle practice at a suburban ranch.
“You Should Be a Monster”
An excerpt from an AP3 recruiting video Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Recruiting new members and unifying the old ones — a disparate roster that brought together men with white nationalist ties and Black military vets — demanded constant effort. Seddon avoided getting pinned down on one controversial question: what precisely his group’s purpose was. “Resisting all efforts to undermine our constitution and the American way of life,” AP3’s mission statement read, at once lofty and vague. “Together we will return our country to the glory it once was.” Many members were furious about COVID-19 restrictions and the “LGBTQ agenda.” Gun control, they thought, was an injustice that might be worth dying over. But Seddon imposed no litmus test. “We have some [members] that are fixated on Muslims,” as one leader put it. “Most are fixated on Antifa and BLM.”
Under Seddon, AP3 was both an armed right-wing resistance group and something akin to a Rotary Club; camaraderie was as important a draw as ideology. AP3 members patrolled city streets with AR-15-style rifles and baseball bats during Black Lives Matters protests. They practiced attacking dummies with knives. But they also taught each other how to save money on groceries through gardening and organized seminars where they wrote reports on each Constitutional amendment. One member said the group dispatched trucks filled with clothes and furniture to his family after a wildfire destroyed their house. AP3 had its own monthly magazine, with militia news in the front pages and word games for kids in the back.
AP3 is both an armed right-wing resistance group and something akin to a Rotary Club; camaraderie is as important a draw as ideology. In chats, members shared images of everything from their weapons to their gardening successes. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica. The photo of a person with an American flag on his chest was cropped.
By August 2021, Seddon’s lieutenants noticed that the backlash to the Capitol riot was starting to dissipate. A new type of member was signing up. “J6 made me want to join,” a recruit wrote that month in a Telegram channel. He hadn’t been part of a militia before, he explained, but seeing how “true Patriots” were being treated, “it was time to actually do something.”
Seddon sought ways to capitalize on the improving political climate. In Alabama, members fanned out to shops around the state, where they dropped off stacks of business cards encouraging patriots to “do your part.” “The APIII Alabama Recruitment line has rang non stop today,” a leader reported back afterward. “I honestly wasn’t expecting it to get this big.”
In Washington state, AP3 members in the military reserves touted the militia to fellow reservists during their units’ regular monthly drills. One chapter looked into purchasing billboard ads. In internal chats, many members agreed the “best place to recruit” is Veterans Affairs facilities.
By the fall, they had arrived at a more efficient method. Facebook’s public posture hadn’t wavered. AP3 was still on its list of banned “dangerous organizations.” Again and again in press releases, the company said its efforts to combat militias were stronger than ever.
Inside AP3, though, leaders were seeing something different: The social media giant was gradually loosening its controls.
A Meta spokesperson said Facebook was still actively working to keep AP3 off its platform. “This is an adversarial space,” she said, “and we often see instances of groups or individuals taking on new tactics to avoid detection and evade our policies and enforcement.”
Seddon would soon tell leaders there were “huge opportunities to recruit using Facebook” again. AP3 experienced such an influx of aspiring members that leaders struggled to keep up. “GUYS WE REALLY NEED SOME HELP,” one of Seddon’s deputies wrote in a typical appeal in an internal chat. “GOT 175 PEOPLE WAITING TO GET IN.”
It was a sorely needed shot of adrenaline.
“Our Force Multiplier”
The cover of the February 2022 issue of AP3’s magazine Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
In the view of many AP3 leaders, their chances of success hinged on building alliances with another heavily armed sector of society: police and sheriffs’ departments. If they couldn’t get the agencies to fight alongside them, they at least needed the cops to leave them alone. Many organizations like AP3 share this approach; a leaked FBI counterterrorism guide from 2015 noted that investigations of “militia extremists” often find “active links to law enforcement officers.” The details of those efforts rarely come into public view.
One test of that strategy occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse was winding to a close in 2021. When Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest overtook Kenosha the year before, Rittenhouse had ventured into the scrum with a semiautomatic rifle and killed two people. Prosecutors called it murder; Rittenhouse called it self-defense. Within AP3, he’d become a folk hero. “Kyle represents every one of us,” one leader said.
In September 2021, with Rittenhouse’s trial two months away, AP3 leaders were preparing for what would happen after the verdict. If he were acquitted, there might be riots in Kenosha. And if there were riots, the militia might deploy a team that could be in the same position as Rittenhouse had been in, walking armed into a volatile situation. They wanted local law enforcement on their side.
The head of AP3’s Wisconsin chapter, a truck driver, had already contacted the Kenosha County sheriff. He’d invited a couple of local officers over for beers, too. The sheriff wasn’t interested in help from a militia, the chapter head reported in an internal chat. (The sheriff did not respond to attempts to seek comment.) Seddon told him he wasn’t trying hard enough: “I hate these kind of excuses.”
A man wears an AP3 patch at a rally with the Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon, in 2020. Credit: Maranie R. Staab/AFP/Getty Images
On Sept. 20, Seddon recorded a speech with more full-throated instructions for courting law enforcement. He already had officers as members: One AP3 leader in Alabama would send video messages while driving in his police uniform. Seddon wanted to move up the chain of command. “We need to pick the good apples and we need to have them infiltrate the minds of those on the inside that stand on the fence,” he said. “It’s like building an army.”
He knew that was harder to achieve when you’re seen as anti-government extremists. So Seddon had created a playbook for presenting AP3 as a misunderstood club for good Samaritans. Leaders encouraged members to get local police departments involved in AP3’s food drives for homeless people. Seddon emphasized that these community service projects, a source of pride for many members, were invaluable public relations coups.
His members distributed brochures — “WE ARE NOT A MILITIA!!!!!” they declared — at rallies and to police officers. This was a branding decision to make people like cops feel comfortable supporting or joining AP3, Seddon said in internal messages, even though “we all know better.”
Seddon pushed members to contact sheriffs in their regions and had his deputies send Excel spreadsheets to the militia’s rank and file. The documents listed every sheriff in each member’s state, with columns to mark whether they were Republicans and “friendly.”
Sometimes it came easily. During the 2022 election, the county where Burley Ross, head of AP3’s North Carolina chapter, lived had an open seat for sheriff. In an interview with ProPublica, Ross said he approached both candidates and asked: If the federal government wanted you to take someone’s guns, what would you do?
“I’m 100% not taking someone’s guns,” Scott Hammonds, the Republican candidate, responded, according to Ross. When his Democratic opponent said he’d enforce the law, Ross suggested that if he tried that, someone would leave the encounter in a body bag.
Hammonds won. Then as sheriff, he became an “off the books” member of AP3, according to messages Ross sent in internal chats. Some of Hammonds’ deputies started training with the group, Ross wrote. “For us to train with the deputies, that’s a plus for us,” he told ProPublica, “because we understand how they work.” ProPublica could not independently confirm Hammonds’ relationship with the group. Hammonds did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Burley Ross was head of AP3’s North Carolina chapter. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Police officers weren’t the only ones quietly allying with AP3. Some lawmakers did, too. Among them was a North Carolina state legislator who was an off-the-books member, Ross wrote in an internal chat. It was Keith Kidwell, leader of the state House Freedom Caucus. (Ross asked ProPublica to make clear he did not name Kidwell or Hammonds in interviews and that ProPublica identified them using the AP3 messages it obtained. Kidwell did not respond to requests for comment.)
AP3’s “commanding officer” in Oklahoma, Ed Eubanks, took an especially calculated approach to cultivating ties with police. A competitive shooter who said he’d been a sniper in the Special Forces, Eubanks was older than most in the militia, in his 60s and retired. He was an “outcast” in his liberal family, he wrote to a group of about 100 militia members, echoing a common theme in the group. He had a lot of time to dedicate to AP3.
Eubanks announced in a 2021 internal chat that he was setting up “a PR team to start making inroads” with law enforcement across Oklahoma. He let officers use shooting ranges on his property. He built a barbecue smoker with “APIII” on the side to use for meet-and-greets with police departments. It was just the sort of creativity Seddon was hoping for.
The barbecue smoker (as it was being constructed) that Ed Eubanks built to use for meet-and-greets with police departments Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
Eubanks would claim success with multiple law enforcement agencies, particularly the Oklahoma City police force. Messages from 2020 show the courtship in its beginnings. Eubanks described his plans to stage a counterprotest at an upcoming “defund the police” rally in Oklahoma City in order to “build a better relationship with the OKCPD.” After the rally, Eubanks reported that he had made connections with city police officers who would be giving him intel (and barbecue — they’d invited AP3 members to a cookout at police union headquarters after the event).
In the years that followed, the invitations to functions at the union lodge continued, according to messages from Eubanks and another AP3 member. Eubanks said police notified him when rallies were happening and that the militia got “minute by minute updates” from officers at some events.
A spokesperson for the Oklahoma City police department said it was “going to pass” on a request for an interview and did not respond to detailed written questions. Mark Nelson, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police, said that AP3 was never invited to an official union event, but that officers can host private events at the union lodge and he would “have no idea” who was invited. In response to detailed questions, Eubanks declined to comment.
One of Eubanks’ members said he pretended to be a Black Lives Matter supporter at one protest in the city because police had asked AP3 to embed a member inside BLM and report back. “The demonic presence there when the leaders showed up,” the member wrote, “was downright oppressive.”
ProPublica could not determine the full extent of AP3’s ties to the Oklahoma City police, but Eubanks contended in a message that his efforts were “worth every second.” As he put it in another message, “This will be our force multiplier when the time arises.”
AP3 members, left, foreground, at a county GOP dinner in Washington state in late 2021 Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
AP3 on Patrol
By mid-2022, Seddon was growing ebullient. He’d toned down his drinking, he told his comrades. In videos, he looked clean cut and slimmed down. Recruiting was booming, with as many as 50 people applying each day. His members were providing security details for county GOP events again. And the militia’s first major operation since the Capitol riot was well underway.
Seddon had sounded a call to arms in late 2021. Illegal border crossings were surging, and the Texas governor had declared that his state was “abandoned” by the federal government. “Our country is being invaded at the Southern border,” Seddon said. “Haitians, Middle Easterners, South American invaders that are coming in.” He had about 20 members preparing to deploy to Quemado, Texas, he said, and was seeking more volunteers.
Anyone interested would need to bring an AR-15-style carbine and a semiautomatic pistol. They would conduct vigilante patrols, a regular feature at the border since the 1970s. Another leader explained the rules. “It is a felony to detain these folks under Texas law,” he said. “We can only report to the authorities, but we are allowed to carry live rounds.”
Many members said they didn’t want to go if they couldn’t kill migrants. “The most heard comment I get” is “there is only one way to stop them,” one leader told Seddon. AP3 joined forces with another militia and soon had members in Quemado, sleeping at a Christian charity 1,000 feet from the Rio Grande.
The charity’s leaders, terrified of the Mexican cartels that helped transport some migrants, were initially grateful for the support. They put the militiamen up in twin bunk beds in little rooms that resembled a hospital ward. AP3 would keep a presence at the border for at least the next year and a half. Their members caught migrants and turned them over to the authorities. In time, messages claim, they were patrolling over 10,000 acres of land.
Eubanks helped lead the operation. At night, he’d split members up to cover more ground. Then he would don camouflage fatigues and venture alone into the pitch darkness, a shotgun in his hand.
First image: A room where AP3 members stayed in Quemado, Texas. Second image: Ed Eubanks near the border. Third image: A small vehicle used by AP3 members for their patrols. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
In internal chats, Eubanks bragged about the allies they’d cultivated, including Brad Coe, a cowboy-hat-wearing local sheriff who had publicly praised border militias and regularly discussed immigration on Fox News. Coe shared intel with him and discussed the idea of Eubanks “running a bush team to track the cartel,” Eubanks told Seddon and others. Eubanks complained in the chats that the Texas Department of Public Safety was “refusing to work with us” but said AP3 was collaborating with the Border Patrol and the National Guard, who installed “observation pads for us to use along the river.”
The partnerships didn’t always go smoothly. Once, an AP3 member got into an argument with a National Guardsman that turned physical. “He kicked the shit out of the national guardsman,” Ross, who helped coordinate the operation, told ProPublica. “I called him and said, ‘You cannot beat up the national guardsmen any more.’” (Local law enforcement arrived but decided not to make any arrests, according to Ross.)
Coe did not respond to requests for comment. A Border Patrol spokesperson did not address ProPublica’s questions about its agents but said that civilians “involving themselves in border security related activities” is “unlawful” and “dangerous.” In response to detailed questions, the Texas Military Department, which oversees the Texas National Guard, issued a one-sentence statement: “The Texas Military Department does not provide support to or operate with local militias.”
As the operation expanded, Eubanks sent back pictures of hundreds of migrants the militias had “rounded up,” huddled on the ground, often surrounded by Border Patrol or what appear to be National Guard members. The militiamen would return excited after stopping a group at gunpoint, according to Lorraine Mercer, the charity’s ministry director, who got to know the men over many months as their host. They didn’t always wait for government agents to arrive, Mercer said. “Some of them were trying to run them back into Mexico,” she told ProPublica. They’d say, “We’ll handle them, the Border Patrol doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
Seddon wanted the operation to get even more ambitious. And he had a scheme he thought could make that possible. “The bottom line is we need to start making money,” he told state leaders in July 2022. His answer was to create a nonprofit called American Community Outreach Network.
ACON’s website gave no indication of its ties to AP3. It was advertised as a charity that provided services in disaster zones and to disadvantaged youth.
But in internal chats, Seddon was explicit that ACON was a way to fund the militia. “I want every single one of us to fucking get rich,” he said in one video. “I want to be sitting on a yacht in two years with every one of you,” he said in another. Members would receive a 20% cut of any donations they brought in, he promised.
This was more than a get-rich-quick ploy, in Seddon’s telling. It could help AP3 thrive in the post-Jan. 6 era. “I feel reborn,” he said as the plan moved ahead. Imagine if people didn’t need to juggle militia duties with their day jobs, “if every single one of us had the ability to do this full-time,” he said. It’d be so much easier to mobilize troops to the border or anywhere else.
“It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”
“This election is do or die for us,” Seddon told his lieutenants in August 2022. The midterm elections were months away, and Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. If we can’t retake Congress now, Seddon said in a video, “we’re in real, real deep shit.” He had a plan to get involved.
Seddon wanted AP3 to fan out across the country, stake out ballot boxes and deter fraudulent voting, which he claimed was rampant during the 2020 election. “We’re trying to persuade these people maybe that’s not such a good idea,” Seddon said about supposed liberal ballot stuffers. “There’s a large group of what look like some pretty badass patriots outside.” The operation was shortly underway in Arizona, Colorado and Michigan, though it’s unclear how many members heeded Seddon’s call.
Absentee ballots had barely made it into voters’ mailboxes before it all went awry. Eubanks posted a handheld video of a television screen in an internal chat: “NBC Nightly News” was showing surveillance footage of a man in Maricopa County, Arizona. The man hadn’t been identified, but inside AP3, they knew who he was: a Marine veteran named Elias Humiston. Several years before, he had pleaded guilty to an illegal firearm discharge. Now he was at the center of a national news cycle.
Humiston was captured on camera outside a drop box for absentee ballots. His face was masked, and he had a handgun and wore a tactical vest. He had gotten into a confrontation with a woman who tried to record his license plate, prompting the sheriff’s department to arrive.
“Now the DOJ is involved,” Eubanks wrote four days after the incident. Government attorneys said such activities could constitute illegal voter intimidation. But the authorities didn’t appear to know that the anonymous vigilante was a part of AP3.
Humiston had held a leadership role in AP3 and had recently won an award from the militia for his work at the border. He promptly resigned “to protect” AP3, records show. He was never charged with a crime or publicly linked to the militia. (Humiston did not respond to requests for comment.)
Some leaders said that Humiston’s efforts “should be applauded.” Another camp saw the mission as a foolhardy mistake by Seddon. “Poorly planned and horribly executed,” one leader called it.
Seddon told everyone to stop acting like cowards. “If it’s not this, it’s the fact that we’re white, that we’re Christian,” he said. The DOJ is “going to come at us no matter what we do,” Seddon continued. “Communism — that’s where this country is leading if we don’t take a stand.”
Seddon had always had a short fuse. But he was becoming increasingly militant and inflammatory, according to several longtime members. In messages, he raged against “pedophilia” in schools and the “panels of blacks” “disrespecting white Americans” on MSNBC. When Congress increased the IRS’ budget, he declared that revenue agents were coming to “kill our kids.” Once, in a voice note he recorded while driving, he paused. “I almost ran over this nigger,” Seddon said. “I am not racist — just these dirty fucks walking these streets.”
Seven former leaders told ProPublica they became alarmed by how the rhetoric was shifting in AP3. In the days after Jan. 6, Seddon had suppressed calls for violence, telling members who wanted to assassinate politicians to stand down. But he had stopped acting as a voice of restraint, even as such talk increased.
One morning in August 2022, an ex-cop with at least 100 AP3 members under his command announced a mysterious initiative. He had previously said it was time to take a violent stand against Black Lives Matter: “We will have to suffer some and some will die,” he said, but he was “tired of waiting.” Now he said he planned to assemble a “Tac Team” of “those who will do what others won’t.”
A different afternoon, a different leader put forward his own proposal. “We havnt made any head way in the last 5 plus years,” he wrote. Let’s pick a date and descend on government buildings across the country, he suggested, and then kill the officials who’ve committed treason. “Time to stack body’s up.” (Two others told him to arrange a secret meeting offline.)
After the 2022 midterms, Ross made a plea in an internal chat. “APIII AND EVERY OTHER PATRIOT group seems to want a fight,” he wrote. “A war will leave no winners.” Ross, too, believed that civil war was inevitable, but he pushed for the group to focus on grassroots politics in the meantime. “There’s going to be a time to be violent,” he told ProPublica. “I’m the type of person who’s like, ‘Now is not the time.’” In AP3, that made him a moderate.
A growing faction had lost hope in the democratic process. Elections and activism are pointless, they maintained; even the midterms were rife with fraud. They felt out of alternatives. Their talk was now a steady drumbeat:
“Get it over with I’ll die with honor.”
“It’s going to be a blood bath.”
“When does AP3 as a whole say, that’s enough and stand up?”
First two images: AP3 members training in the light and in the dark. Third image: AP3 members with fellow militiamen from the Oath Keepers. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
“I Know Where You Live”
Seddon’s downfall started around the turn of this year. An AP3 member, increasingly suspicious, had obtained a copy of his military discharge papers. That was enough to cause an explosion. After years of touting his Army experience, Seddon’s secret was exposed.
He tried to suppress the uprising that ensued. He threatened a former leader who confronted him about the records in private. “I know where you live,” Seddon wrote on Facebook Messenger. “Tread careful.” Ross accused Seddon of stolen valor and was kicked out.
Seddon’s command quickly began to unravel. A rumor started to spread: Law enforcement was investigating the ACON scheme. The charity had never taken off. One of Seddon’s ex-deputies told ProPublica it raised less than $5,000. But its website falsely advertised it as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit authorized to accept tax-deductible donations, which the IRS said is not true.
Leaders who had spent months encouraging the initiative now condemned ACON as a scam to put money in Seddon’s pocket. “Not volunteering for a Rico trial,” one member wrote in a side chat, referring to the racketeering statute that prosecutors use to take down the mafia. In the spring, state chapters began to defect from AP3 in droves.
Soon Seddon had lost a significant majority of his organization. Former leaders estimate that about 10 state chapters stayed on, leaving him to try to rebuild the militia’s presence everywhere else.
Seddon appears undaunted. He’s lost a large chunk of his membership before and managed to recover. (Meanwhile, the instability in his career continues. Recently, he started a business that offers “fast cash” to cancer patients who sign over their life insurance policies.)
Seddon, left, at a 2024 training Credit: via Gab
His recent setbacks seem to have only made him more volatile. Toward the end of Trump’s criminal trial in May, Seddon wrote on Facebook that Judge Juan Merchan was treating the former president unfairly. “This guy needs to meet his maker,” Seddon said. He followed up by posting the judge’s home address.
Facebook shut down his account, which he’d long been using to promote the militia. The platform conducted a large enforcement action against AP3 in June, according to the Meta spokesperson, removing 40 pages, 15 groups and 600 accounts that “were mostly focusing on recruitment.” The spokesperson said Facebook strengthened its policies at the beginning of the year “to take an even stricter approach to enforcement against this group and other banned militia organizations.”
Seddon was back on social media, this time on TikTok, after the assassination attempt on Trump in July. “This was a direct attack on us,” he said. “We need to become fucking lions.”
AP3’s travails have not been unique. Since the Capitol riot, the militia movement has grown more fractured and decentralized. This may make it harder for one leader to spur mass action. It could also make it harder for one leader to prevent mass action and for law enforcement to track the groups and to intervene.
The presidential election could propel the militia movement in a darker direction. Experts worry that a Trump loss could spark violence from those who feel it’s their only option, especially if he once again refuses to accept the results. If Trump wins and then fulfills his promise to pardon Jan. 6 defendants, they fear the most radical wing of his party could take it as a license for more extreme action.
AP3 may have splintered, but its former members have mostly just moved to other militias. John Valle, Seddon’s former third in command, sees the movement’s future as consisting of state and local groups, operating independently but coordinating on secure messaging apps.
He said that the 286 members of his Washington chapter are now operating as their own independent group. They didn’t want to get caught up in AP3’s potential legal problems, but their mission remains the same. As Valle put it, “We’re just rebranding.”
Alex Mierjeski contributed research.
ProPublica · by Joshua Kaplan
9. Kyiv didn't disclose preparations for Kursk operation because of West's fear of Russian 'red lines,' Zelensky says
The US strategic weakness. The fear of escalation. Ironically few take US red lines seriously but we seem to be deathly afraid of others' red lines.
Rather than focusing on the fear of escalation we should be asking how we can achieve and sustain escalation dominance?
What is really troubling is that our fear of escalation affects our relationships with friends, partners, and allies as they question us and the alignment of our objectives and interests. This actually undermines the trust that is necessary between friends, partners, and allies as we address threats from common enemies.
Kyiv didn't disclose preparations for Kursk operation because of West's fear of Russian 'red lines,' Zelensky says
kyivindependent.com · by Kateryna Denisova · August 19, 2024
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Ukraine did not disclose preparations for an operation in Russia's Kursk Oblast to Kyiv's allies because the world might consider it crossing Russia's "strictest of all red lines," President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Aug. 19.
Two weeks into Ukraine's cross-border offensive in Kursk Oblast, Ukrainian troops control over 1,250 square kilometers of Russian territory and 92 settlements in the region while continuing to strengthen their positions, Zelensky claimed.
According to the president, the concept of so-called Russia's red lines, "which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners," had crumbled "somewhere near Sudzha."
"Just a few months ago, many people around the world, if they had heard that we were planning such an operation like the one in Kursk Oblast, they would have said that it was impossible and that it would cross the strictest of all the red lines that Russia has," Zelensky said.
"That is why, actually, no one knew about our preparations," the president said during a visit to the city of Dnipro.
Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi was considering several scenarios for an incursion into Russia's territories, The Economist reported citing military sources. The general shared his plans only with a selected few military and security officials and discussed them with Zelensky in one-on-one meetings to maintain maximum operational secrecy, the outlet's sources said.
Despite the ongoing fighting, Kyiv maintained a policy of silence on the incursion for several days after the operation's start.
"When our Ukrainian defenders act in this way, strongly, bravely, and when the operation is really well-prepared, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin has nothing to do," Zelensky said.
"And now the world sees that this is true, that it really works — not only on the temporarily occupied territory of our country, but also on the territory of Russia itself."
Zelensky called on Western partners to be "in sync" with Ukraine in their determination to force Russia to a just peace.
Kyiv said that rather than capturing Russian territory, the incursion aims to protect Ukrainian lives by preventing cross-border attacks and diverting Russian reinforcements.
Despite mounting reports that Russia is moving at least some forces to the sector, Kyiv's troops in the east of Ukraine say the situation there remains dire as Moscow continues its advance near Pokrovsk and Toretsk.
Ukraine’s ‘buffer zone’ in Kursk Oblast – here’s what you need to know
Ukraine aims to establish a buffer zone in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Aug. 18, as he outlined some of the strategic aims of the ongoing operation. “It is now our primary task in defensive operations overall to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and
The Kyiv IndependentChris York
kyivindependent.com · by Kateryna Denisova · August 19, 2024
10. Ex-Trump adviser warns Hezbollah could strike on U.S. soil, Biden has lost ability to deter attacks
Actually Rob is a retired Special Forces Officer who later served in senior intelligence positions and on the NSC.
Ex-Trump adviser warns Hezbollah could strike on U.S. soil, Biden has lost ability to deter attacks
Robert Greenway said Hezbollah's operations capabilities are even greater than Iran's.
justthenews.com · by Charlotte Hazard
Robert Greenway, a retired intelligence officer who advised former President Donald Trump, warned Tuesday the Biden administration is losing the ability to deter future attacks by Iran and that a strike on U.S.soil by the Tehran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah "is a very real possibility."
Greenway criticized President Joe Biden's failed efforts to secure an elusive nuclear deal with Iran as "appeasement," noting the administration had freed billions of dollars in oil sales and sanctions relief for Tehran only to see Iran ramp up its worldwide terrorist activities through proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.
“The access to resources completely predicates how much malignant behavior they’re going to engage in and we’re seeing this in full display and in real time,” he told Just the News. "...Deterrence has been dismantled by the Biden administration in order to pursue appeasement."
Greenway's comments during an interview with the Just the News, No Noise television show came days after the Customs and Border Protection agency warned its agents that Iran could dispatch operatives, money and materials across the U.S. border for an attack. The memo specifically cited Hezbollah's recent activities, including an attack on an Israeli soccer field, as warning signs.
Asked whether Hezbollah could attack on U.S.soil, something the FBI has long warned about, Greenway answered: "There's no question that this is a very real possibility."
Hezbollah's operations capabilities, "I would judge are better than Iran's. And so in this case, that may be a place where Iran, again, would have deniability, and they would employ Hezbollah to conduct an operation with or without criminal elements," he added.
Tension has been escalating in the Middle East among different countries amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza that was triggered by the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians last Oct. 7.
Lebanon and Iran threatened to attack Israel recently, after Israel allegedly killed senior leaders in Hezbollah and Hamas. The Hamas leader was killed in Tehran, Iran.
justthenews.com · by Charlotte Hazard
11. National Security Decisions for the Next President
A lot to discuss here. I will just mention the Korea section (of course) which seems like a section they had to add but could not provide anything substantive and just rehashes the old issues. I will give them the benefit of the doubt in that President Yoon's "8.15. Unification Doctrine" was just released. But had they examined their own orgnziations's reports to include one from 18 months ago (HERE) they could have realized that some have discussed the absolute necessity that the only acceptable durable political arrangement on the Korean peninsula to protect, sustain, and advance US interests on the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia is by establishing a free and unified Korea. Just because the 8.15 Unification Doctrine was just released does not mean that the idea of a free and unified Korea is something new. The key Korea decision for the next administration is how the US will support the 8.15 Unification Doctrine.
Chris Williams and Marc Berkowitz, National Security Decisions for the Next President, Issue No. 597, August 19, 2024
National Security Decisions for the Next President
https://nipp.org/information_series/chris-williams-and-marc-berkowitz-national-security-decisions-for-the-next-president-issue-no-597-august-19-2024/
Chris Williams
Chris Williams previously held senior positions in the U.S. Congress and Department of Defense. He also chaired the Defense Policy Board. He currently serves as an advisor to various U.S. Government organizations, Chair of the Moorman Center for Space Studies at the National Security Space Association, and an independent consultant.
Marc Berkowitz
Marc Berkowitz previously served as the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Space Policy and Vice President for Strategic Planning at Lockheed Martin Corporation. He is currently an advisor to various U.S. Government organizations and an independent consultant.
The next President of the United States will face an extraordinarily complex and dangerous international security environment which could rapidly deteriorate. America now confronts an unprecedented array of national, functional, and transnational threats. In particular, the United States is engaged in a geostrategic contest with a new entente of Axis powers. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are led by autocratic regimes with revisionist or irredentist political aims to change the international system at the expense of U.S. interests.
Within days of being sworn-in, the next President will be forced to make decisions that will determine the future direction of U.S. national security policy. Whether prepared or not, America could face multiple, potentially concurrent, crises or conflicts around the world involving vital or extremely important U.S. interests.[1] It would be imprudent to expect that the U.S. homeland will be a sanctuary in the event of a conflict. Indeed, it may be a prime target for attacks by America’s enemies.
The next President will also inherit a mismatch among the national security objectives (ends), ongoing courses of action (ways), and allocated resources (means) to protect and advance U.S. interests, including support commitments to allies and partners. This article examines key national security decisions that await the next President.
Russia and Ukraine
Since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has provided military and economic assistance as well as critical intelligence support and cyber defenses to Kyiv.[2i] Such aid has been essential to Ukraine’s survival. The next President will determine whether the United States continues to support the defense of Ukraine or instead seeks a negotiated settlement to that conflict, even if such an agreement is likely to yield a less than fully satisfactory outcome.
Recently, President Biden lifted some restrictions on the use of certain U.S.-supplied munitions that allows Kyiv to strike military forces in Russia that are attacking or are preparing to attack Ukraine.[3] Putin responded by striking a children’s hospital among other targets. Ukraine also has launched strikes against high-profile targets deep inside Russia.4] The Biden Administration has been publicly silent on whether it supports such Ukrainian attacks.
The next President must decide whether the United States will use its influence to promote a negotiated ceasefire and potential settlement to the conflict that would allow Russia to retain control over a portion of Ukrainian territory in exchange for an end to hostilities. Some will argue that such an outcome makes the best of a bad situation and note that Ukraine is not a NATO member country and therefore U.S. vital interests and treaty obligations are not at stake. Advocates for this position might also argue that the war in Ukraine is siphoning off critical U.S. financial resources and military equipment that could be used to bolster U.S. defenses in other important regions.
Supporters of Ukraine will argue that such an outcome amounts to a “sell out” of the brave Ukrainian people, rewards Russian aggression, encourages further provocations and undermines U.S. extended deterrence elsewhere, including the Indo-Pacific region. They might also note that the U.S. provided security assurances to Ukraine in exchange for its denuclearization, recommend increasing the flow of U.S. arms to Ukraine, and urge the President to permit Ukraine to expand attacks on high value Russian military targets. Furthermore, they may push for accelerated Ukrainian membership in NATO.
Only the President can make the decision on U.S. strategy for the conflict in Ukraine. Putin, however, could choose to escalate the conflict. Indeed, he has ramped up threats to use nuclear weapons. A decision for the next President is whether to sustain or increase support to Ukraine, and risk widening the war, to push for a diplomatic settlement or achieve a solution.
China
China is intensifying its aggressive behavior in the Indo-Pacific. Taiwan has come under unrelenting political, military, diplomatic pressure to capitulate to Beijing’s demands and faces a rapidly accelerating threat of a blockade or invasion.[5]
China’s military modernization program has produced an increasingly capable force that could make a campaign to defend Taiwan or other U.S. allies and partners in the region an extremely difficult and bloody affair.[6] Warning time of a potential PRC military attack on Taiwan has shrunk considerably, affecting the U.S. ability to mount a timely and adequate response.[7] Chinese air and naval forces are conducting increasingly aggressive and dangerous military operations against U.S. and other nations’ military and non-military vessels and aircraft throughout the region.[8]
China is taking similarly provocative actions in an attempt to intimidate the Philippines over disputed territory in the South China Sea. It is also helping to finance Russia’s war against Ukraine as part of a “no limits” alliance. China has exported critical dual-use technologies, enabling Russia’s defense industrial base reconstitution, which is being used, in turn, to provide Iran and North Korea advanced military capabilities.[9]
President Biden has repeatedly stated that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense; however, administration officials have immediately sought to walk-back those comments.[10] The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act established that the United States will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means…a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and a grave concern to the United States.”[11]
Decisions for the next President are whether to defend Taiwan against China, where Taiwan’s defense fits in terms of U.S. security priorities compared, for example, to Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, NATO, or Israel, and determining the steps necessary to ensure the United States can deter or, if necessary, defeat Chinese aggression.
Iran
Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism throughout the world. Tehran and its proxies have repeatedly attacked U.S. forces and interests in the Middle East and across the globe. In addition, Iran also may be within months of having one or more usable nuclear weapons.[12] Israel has indicated that it will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran and is already combatting Iranian proxies including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah.[13]
The United States has strongly supported Israel’s military campaign to defeat Hamas following the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack,[14] but has held back delivery of certain munitions and publicly pushed for a ceasefire.[15] The United States has loosened economic and other sanctions against Iran as inducements and continues to engage Iran via diplomatic channels, despite Tehran’s unresponsiveness. The transfer of missile and other deadly technology from Iran to the Houthis in Yemen has threatened international shipping in the Red Sea/Bab-el-Mandeb waterway. And Tehran has supplied Russia with drones and a factory to produce them for its war in Ukraine.[16]
Some officials have argued that the United States has lost deterrence against Iran. The commander of U.S. Central Command recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iranian actions have instigated a “convergence of crises” with its support to Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen, calling it “the most volatile situation in 50 years.”[17]
The next President must decide whether the United States should take military action to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons; whether the United States should actively support an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear, missile, and other targets through intelligence-sharing and/or use of U.S. refueling aircraft; what U.S. military actions should be taken if an Israeli attack leads to Iranian reprisals against Israel, Saudi Arabia, other friends in the region, as well as our forces deployed abroad; whether to support and promote an agreement to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia; and, what additional steps should be taken to strengthen deterrence of Iran and its proxies.
Korea
North Korea is undertaking an “exponential” expansion of its nuclear weapons and missile forces, including rockets with the range to strike American cities.[18] Kim Jong Un has rejected further negotiations with the United States and tensions with South Korea have escalated.[19] He has embraced Putin and is providing large quantities of artillery shells and other munitions for Russia’s war against Ukraine.[20]
In response, the United States has enhanced coordination with South Korea on military exercises, nuclear consultations, conventional-nuclear force integration, and U.S. bomber and submarine deployments.[21] A thaw in South Korea-Japan relations may enhance regional deterrence. The United States, Japan and South Korea recently signed a Trilateral Security Cooperation Framework that includes “senior-level policy consultations, information sharing, trilateral exercises, and defense exchange cooperation, to contribute to peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, in the Indo-Pacific region, and beyond.”[22] Additionally, polling indicates that a majority of South Koreans support Seoul developing its own nuclear deterrent.[23]
The next President must decide whether the United States will sustain the current approach to its security commitments to South Korea, including the stationing of almost 30,000 U.S. forces on the peninsula and expanding consultations on nuclear deterrence; what steps need to be taken to bolster South Korean and Japanese forces; and, what U.S. policy should be regarding Seoul developing its own nuclear arsenal.
NATO
The Atlantic Alliance is a cornerstone of international security. The European members of NATO, however, have often failed to meet their financial commitments for collective security.[24] Given the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s proximity to their borders, and U.S. interests beyond Europe, sustaining U.S. domestic political support for the Alliance will require them to assume a more equitable responsibility for the common defense.
Several NATO nations have recently increased their expenditures on defense.[25] The German government also announced plans for the “episodic deployment” of U.S. intermediate-range ballistic missiles and developmental hypersonic missiles capable of striking targets inside Russia.[26] In this regard, it is worth recalling the deployment of U.S. Pershing-2 and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles in certain NATO countries, associated widespread anti-nuclear protests, and the robust Soviet active measures campaign to block the deployments. President Reagan, German Chancellor Kohl, and British Prime Minister Thatcher deftly steered the Alliance to enable those deployments. This laid the foundation for President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev to negotiate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, from which President Trump withdrew following Moscow’s prolonged material violations.
Decisions for the next President include whether the United States will sustain the financial burden for collective defense if its European allies do not meet their financial commitments; how the U.S. President will work with European leaders to enable new missile deployments and force build-ups given domestic divisions and likely countervailing Russian military deployments and associated political warfare; whether and how the United States might reduce its military footprint in Europe as European nations strengthen their contributions to security; how the growing disparity of tactical nuclear forces between the United States and Russia should be addressed; and determining the best strategy for responding to Putin’s nuclear threats.
Outer Space
Successive Presidents have asserted that freedom of access to and operations in space are U.S. vital national interests.[27] Outer space reflects the terrestrial security environment and the geostrategic competition is extending across the Earth-Moon system. Both China and Russia are “regularly attacking U.S. satellites” with “non-kinetic weapons, including lasers, radio frequency jammers, and cyber-attacks.”[28] China seeks to supplant America as the preeminent space power by 2049 and control the natural resources in cislunar space, including on the Moon.[29]
The Biden Administration has primarily relied on diplomacy and passive countermeasures to address the threat to the freedom of space. Yet, diplomacy has not succeeded and Russia may deploy a space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapon in violation of the Outer Space Treaty.[30] The administration’s recent budget request reduces funds for national security space missions, just as the astropolitical competition is intensifying.[31] The U.S. Government has yet to fully leverage commercial and allied space assets for U.S. national security. Moreover, it has not issued a plan to counter China’s aim to win the space race and control access to the Moon and its resources.
Decisions for the next President include how to prevent conflict from beginning in or extending to space; under what circumstances the United States should resort to the use of force to protect and defend U.S. interests in space; and, whether and how the United States should more aggressively leverage the commercial space sector and international partners to advance our interests in space.
Cyberspace
Foreign cyberattacks against America can be expected in times of crisis or conflict. Adversaries possess cyber weapons that can disrupt or damage critical infrastructures such as electrical power generation and water supplies. They will aim to delay mobilization of U.S. military forces, cause economic disruptions and societal panic, and distract U.S. leaders. Indeed, reports indicate that Russia and China have penetrated key U.S. critical infrastructures.[32] China’s “Volt Typhoon” campaign to exploit vulnerabilities in such infrastructures is a particularly worrisome example of the increasingly sophisticated cyber threat America now faces.[33]
Current U.S. policy requires critical infrastructure owners and operators to improve cybersecurity on their own or face penalties; it also helps them assess and recover from such attacks. This approach is unlikely to produce significant near-term enhancements in cyber resilience nor will it deter attacks on critical infrastructures. Instead, a new public-private partnership and robust funding is needed to identify and fix the most glaring cyber vulnerabilities.[34]
Decisions for the next President include whether to ensure the United States has the capabilities and resources to defend against sophisticated cyberattacks on critical infrastructures; and, whether to establish public-private partnerships with U.S. critical infrastructure owners and operators and essential defense industrial base companies to strengthen our national cybersecurity posture.
Homeland Defense
America simultaneously confronts multiple nuclear-armed adversaries who are rapidly building up long-range nuclear delivery systems, while violating or abandoning arms control agreements and refusing to discuss new restraints. Concurrently, the United States lacks an effective integrated air and missile defense of the homeland. Long standing U.S. policy has been to tolerate homeland vulnerability to save money and reinforce flawed deterrence concepts such as a “balance of terror.” Yet adversaries never bought into the Western “logic” of mutual societal vulnerability as the basis for “stability.”
The morality of such willful vulnerability is questionable. Moreover, it may encourage attacks to “decapitate” the U.S. political and military leadership as well as nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) systems. Indeed, Russia and China have developed and fielded modern weapon systems, including new intercontinental ballistic missiles, long-range air- and submarine-launched cruise missiles, and hypersonic weapons that could be used in such attacks.
Key decisions for the next President include whether to rapidly modernize and harden NC3 systems as well as develop and field an effective integrated air and missile defense to protect the U.S. homeland; and, how much political capital should be expended to convince legislators to allocate the resources necessary to rapidly field such a defense.
Border and Homeland Security
Millions of foreign nationals have entered America illegally over the past several years and have dispersed around the country. The Director of the FBI informed Congress that many of these illegal aliens are dangerous individuals.[35] Illegal entrants associated with transnational criminal organizations, terrorist groups, and foreign intelligence and security services may have infiltrated America in preparation for direct action missions such as sabotage and assassination. They may have been sent here to attack high profile public targets and instill fear, contaminate water supplies, murder military personnel or assassinate political leaders, target U.S. critical infrastructures, or disrupt shipments from military bases. Indeed, there have been numerous recent instances of foreign nationals conducting surveillance or trying to enter U.S. military bases across the country.[36]
Similarly, NATO governments report that Russian-sponsored sabotage is growing and U.S. bases in Europe were recently placed on a higher alert security posture in anticipation of possible attacks.[37] A series of Russian-sponsored arson attacks and bombing plots have taken place in Riga, London, Warsaw, Prague, and Paris.[38] Iran also reportedly developed plans to assassinate former President Trump and other U.S. officials.[39] Putin’s intelligence services have attacked emigres in the West and China has harassed Chinese nationals in America.[40] Russia has also sent “illegals” to assimilate into American society and conduct espionage.41]
Key decisions for the next President include what actions should be taken and resources devoted to ensuring U.S. borders are secure and the homeland is safe against foreign espionage, sabotage, and terrorism; how to hold the perpetrators and their sponsors accountable; and, whether the United States should commit to aggressively targeting the financial backers and funding networks of these organizations?
Conclusion
The next President will face an international security environment with unprecedented dangers and a geostrategic contest with Axis powers and their proxies. Numerous national security issues will vie for the next President’s immediate attention. Fundamental considerations that cut across each are the risk of action versus inaction and what strategy, plans, force structure, and posture are required to advance and protect U.S. interests in multiple (potentially concurrent) crises or conflicts.
Today, the U.S. armed forces are sized to support one major regional conflict. Yet, there is a real prospect that several vital U.S. interests may be attacked simultaneously. Moreover, the United States faces major industrial base and supply chain challenges impeding rapid production of armaments and equipment. A multiple-conflict scenario would place a serious strain on U.S. weapons, equipment, and personnel. America’s enemies understand and may seek to exploit this fact.
The next President will be called upon to make fateful decisions about U.S. grand strategy and competing priorities among vital and extremely important national security interests. He or she will have to resolve the mismatch among the ends, ways, and means of U.S. national security strategy. Consequently, those seeking the high office of President must be clear with the American people as well as our friends and allies about their goals and strategies for safeguarding the nation and its interests in these perilous times.
[1] Chris Williams, “What If?” Real Clear Defense, August 3, 2023, available at https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/08/03/what_if_970441.html.
[2] See, for example, “U.S. Security Cooperation with Ukraine: Fact Sheet,” U.S. Department of State, July 11, 2024, available at https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-ukraine/#:~:text=To%20date%2C%20we%20have%20provided,invasion%20of%20Ukraine%20in%202014.
[3] David Sanger and Edward Wong, “Under Pressure, Biden Allows Ukraine to Use U.S. Weapons to Strike Inside Russia,” The New York Times, May 30, 2024, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia-weapons.html.
[4] Tom Balmforth, “Ukraine Drones Attacked Russian Bomber Air Base, Kyiv source says,” Reuters, March 20, 2024, available at https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-drones-attacked-russian-bomber-air-base-overnight-kyiv-source-says-2024-03-20/; and, Chris York and Oleksiy Sorokin, “Source: Ukraine hits Russia’s Engels air base: Can it change how Russia attacks?,” Yahoo News, April 5, 2024, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/source-ukraine-hits-russias-engels-163330387.html#:~:text=Engels%20is%20home%20to%20three,its%20first%20flight%20in%201952; and, Volodmyr Verbianyi, “Ukraine Says Its Drones Hit Strategic Jet in Russia’s Arctic,” July 27, 2024, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-27/ukraine-says-its-drones-hit-strategic-jet-in-russia-s-arctic.
[5] See, for example, Unhsin Lee Harpley, “INDOPACOM Boss on China: ‘Haven’t Faced a Threat Like This Since World War II’,” Air and Space Forces, March 21, 2024, available at https://www.airandspaceforces.com/indopacom-boss-china-threat-world-war-ii/.
[6] Brad Lendon and Oren Lieberman, “War game suggests Chinese invasion of Taiwan would fail at a huge cost to US, Chinese and Taiwanese militaries,” CNN, January 9, 2023, available at https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/politics/taiwan-invasion-war-game-intl-hnk-ml/index.html.
[7] “Taiwan monitors Chinese military surge, calls China a threat to stability: Taiwan’s defense ministry said it had detected 66 Chinese military aircraft around the island,” NBC News, July 11, 2024, available at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taiwan-eyes-chinese-military-surge-threatens-stability-rcna161303.
[8] Jim Garamone, “U.S. Accuses China of Conducting ‘Centralized, Concerted’ Campaign of Harassment of Aircraft,” DOD News, October 17, 2023, available at https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3560463/us-accuses-china-of-conducting-centralized-concerted-campaign-of-harassment-of/#:~:text=DOD%20officials%20believe%20the%20unsafe,Indo%2DPacific%20security%20affairs%20today.
[9] Dan DeLuce and Owen Hayes, “In Ukraine war, China is helping tilt momentum in Russia’s favor, top U.S. spy says,” NBC News, May 2, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/china-helping-russia-momentum-ukraine-war-top-us-spy-rcna150437.
[10] See, for example, John Ruwitch, “Biden, again, says U.S. would help Taiwan if China attacks,” NPR, September 19, 2022, available at https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123759127/biden-again-says-u-s-would-help-taiwan-if-china-attacks.
[11] Public Law 96-8 (93 STAT. 14), 96th Congress, enacted April 10, 1979, available at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-93/pdf/STATUTE-93-Pg14.pdf#page=1.
[12] David Albright, “How quickly could Iran make nuclear weapons today?,” Institute for Science and International Security, January 8, 2024, available at https://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/How_quickly_could_Iran_make_nuclear_weapons_today_January_8.pdf.
[13] “Israel’s Netanyahu says will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons,” Reuters, April 12, 2021, available at https://www.reuters.com/article/world/israel-s-netanyahu-says-will-not-allow-iran-to-obtain-nuclear-weapons-idUSKBN2BZ1GK/.
[14] Matt Surman, Michael Levenson, Christopher F. Schuetze, and Nick Bruce, “After $15 Billion in Military Aid, Israel Calls Alliance with U.S. ‘Ironclad’,” The New York Times, April 24, 2024, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/world/middleeast/israel-us-aid.html.
[15] Stephen Groves and Seung Min Kim, “House votes to require delivery of bombs to Israel in GOP-led rebuke of Biden policies,” Associated Press, May 16, 2024, available at .https://apnews.com/article/israel-aid-biden-congress-735c8d40c3ea9985c65f1b53cbf68fc3.
[16] Dalton Bennett and Mary Ilyushina, “Inside the Russian effort to build 6,000 attack drones with Iran’s help,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2023, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/08/17/russia-iran-drone-shahed-alabuga/; and, Hanna Notte and Jim Lawson, “The Uncomfortable Reality of Russia and Iran’s New Defense Relationship,” War on the Rocks, July 24, 2024, available at https://warontherocks.com/2024/07/the-uncomfortable-reality-of-russia-and-irans-new-defense-relationship/.
[17] John Grady, “Iran Has Put Middle East Into ‘Convergence of Crises’, CENTCOM Commander Tells Senate,” USNI, March 7, 2024, available at https://news.usni.org/2024/03/07/iran-has-put-middle-east-into-convergence-of-crises-centcom-commander-tells-senate.
[18] “North Korea’s Kim orders ‘exponential’ expansion of nuclear arsenal,” NPR, January 1, 2023, available at https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1146503945/north-korea-kim-nuclear-arsenal.
[19] Kelsey Davenport, “U.S. to Focus on Deterring North Korea,” Arms Control Today, April 2024, available at https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-04/news/us-focus-deterring-north-korea.
[20] “Putin signs pact with North Korea that could increase weapons for Russia’s war in Ukraine,” PBS Newshour, June 19, 2024, available at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/putin-signs-pact-with-north-korea-that-could-increase-weapons-for-russias-war-in-ukraine.
[21] See, for example, “Joint Readout for the ROK-U.S. Defense Ministerial Meeting,” DOD News, July 27, 2024, available at https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3852153/joint-press-release-for-the-rok-us-defense-ministerial-meeting/; and, “U.S.-South Korea Alliance, Deterrence Efforts Stronger Than Ever,” DOD News, June 10, 2024, available at https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3802445/us-south-korea-alliance-deterrence-efforts-stronger-than-ever/.
[22] Christopher B. Johnstone and Victor Cha, “South Korea and Japan Cement Bilateral Security Ties,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 4, 2024, available at https://www.csis.org/analysis/south-korea-and-japan-cement-bilateral-security-ties; and, “Japan-United States-Republic of Korea Trilateral Ministerial Joint Press Statement,” Department of Defense, July 24, 2024, available at https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3852146/japan-united-states-republic-of-korea-trilateral-ministerial-joint-press-statem/.
[23] Mark Green, “Seventy-one percent of South Koreans Now Support the Return of Nuclear Weapons to their Country — Even if it Means Developing Their Own,” Wilson Center, January 13, 2023, available at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/seventy-one-percent-south-koreans-now-support-return-nuclear-weapons-their-country-even.
[24] “Funding NATO,” NATO, July 10, 2024, available at https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm.
[25] “Secretary General welcomes unprecedented rise in NATO defence spending,” NATO, February 14, 2024, available at https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_222664.htm#:~:text=“In%202024%2C%20NATO%20Allies%20in,European%20Allies%20are%20spending%20more.
[26] “Joint Statement from United States and Germany on Long-Range Fires Deployment in Germany,” White House Press Statement, July 10, 2024, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/07/10/joint-statement-from-united-states-and-germany-on-long-range-fires-deployment-in-germany/.
[27] The Biden-Harris Administration reaffirmed this tenet of U.S. space policy in United States Space Priorities Framework, December 2021, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/united-states-space-priorities-framework-_-december-1-2021.pdf.
[28] Josh Rogin, “A Shadow War in Space is Heating Up Fast,” The Washington Post, November 30, 2021, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/30/space-race-china-david-thompson/.
[29] See, Marc Berkowitz and Chris Williams, “Strategic Implications of China’s Cislunar Space Activities,” National Security Space Association, August 21, 2023, available at https://nssaspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Strategic-Implications-of-Chinas-Cislunar-Space-Activities-8.21-final.pdf.
[30] See, for example, Marc Berkowitz and Chris Williams, “Russia’s Space-Based, Nuclear-Armed Anti-Satellite Weapon: Implications and Response Options,” National Security Space Association, May 16, 2024, available at https://nssaspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Russian-Nuclear-ASAT.pdf.
[31] Mike Tierney and Chris Williams, “Comments on the President’s Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2025,” National Security Space Association, May 23, 2024, available at https://nssaspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/FY2025-Budget-Analysis.pdf.
[32] See, for example, “Defending OT Operations Against On-going Pro-Russia Hacktivist Activities,” DHS/CISA, available at https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-05/defending-ot-operations-against-ongoing-pro-russia-hacktivist-activity-508c.pdf.
[33] See, for example, “The Chinese Communist Party Threat to the American Homeland and National Security,” Hearing of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, January 31, 2024, especially the testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray, available at https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/witness-testimony/chairman-gallaghers-opening-remarks-and-witness-testimony-13124.
[34] Chris Williams and Robert Metzger, “A Plan for National Cyber Hardening and Resilience,” Real Clear Defense, March 24, 2022, available at https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/03/24/a_plan_for_national_cyber_hardening_and_resilience_823487.html.
[35] “What They Are Saying: Hearing with Mayorkas, Wray Reveals Continuing National Security Crisis at the Border,” House Homeland Security Committee, November 17, 2023, available at https://homeland.house.gov/2023/11/17/what-they-are-saying-house-homeland-security-hearing-with-mayorkas-wray-reveals-continuing-national-security-crisis-at-the-border/.
[36] Adam Shaw, Griff Jenkins, and Bill Lelugin, “2 foreign nationals in ICE custody after alleged attempted breach at major Marine Base,” Fox News, May 16, 2024, available at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/two-foreign-nationals-ice-custody-after-attempted-breach-marine-base; and, “U.S. Navy Bases are Ejecting Foreign Nationals 2-3 Times a Week,” The Maritime Executive, May 26, 2024, available at https://maritime-executive.com/article/u-s-navy-bases-are-ejecting-foreign-nationals-2-3-times-a-week.
[37] Natascha Bertrand, “Intelligence on Russian sabotage threat prompted increases in security at US military bases in Europe,” CNN, July 9, 2024, available at https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/09/politics/intelligence-russian-sabotage-threat-us-bases-europe/index.html.
[38] See, for example, Souad Mekhennet, Catherine Belton, Emily Rauhala and Shane Harris, “Russia recruits sympathizers online for sabotage in Europe, officials say,” The Washington Post, July 10, 2024, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/10/russia-sabotage-europe-ukraine/
[39] Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Natascha Bertrand, Kylie Atwood and Kristin Holmes, “Exclusive: Secret Service ramped up security after intel on Iran plot to assassinate Trump; no known connection to shooting,” CNN, July 16, 2024, available at https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/16/politics/iran-plot-assassinate-trump-secret-service/index.html.
[40] See, for example, “Dangerous Compatriots: The Kremlin’s Intelligence Operations Versus Russian Exiles and Emigres,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 19, 2019, available at https://carnegieendowment.org/events/2019/10/dangerous-compatriots-the-kremlins-intelligence-operations-versus-russian-exiles-and-emigres?lang=en; and, “40 Officers of China’s National Police Charged in Transnational Repression Schemes Targeting U.S. Residents,” U.S. Department of Justice, Press Release, April 17, 2023, available at https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/40-officers-china-s-national-police-charged-transnational-repression-schemes-targeting-us#:~:text=Two%20criminal%20complaints%20filed%20by,Public%20Security%20(MPS)%20–%20to.
[41] See, for example, “Operation Ghost Stories: Inside the Russian Spy Case,” FBI, October 31, 2011, available at https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/operation-ghost-stories-inside-the-russian-spy-case; and, “Russian spies living among us: Inside the FBI’s ‘Operation Ghost Stories’,” CBS News, October 13, 2020, available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-spies-operation-ghost-stories-fbi-declassified/.
The National Institute for Public Policy’s Information Series is a periodic publication focusing on contemporary strategic issues affecting U.S. foreign and defense policy. It is a forum for promoting critical thinking on the evolving international security environment and how the dynamic geostrategic landscape affects U.S. national security. Contributors are recognized experts in the field of national security. National Institute for Public Policy would like to thank the Sarah Scaife Foundation for the generous support that made this Information Series possible.
|The views in this Information Series are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as official U.S. Government policy, the official policy of the National Institute for Public Policy or any of its sponsors. For additional information about this publication or other publications by the National Institute Press, contact: Editor, National Institute Press, 9302 Lee Highway, Suite 750 |Fairfax, VA 22031 | (703) 293-9181 www.nipp.org. For access to previous issues of the National Institute Press Information Series, please visit http://www.nipp.org/national-institutepress/informationseries/.
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12. A Double Funeral: The last great commandant of the Marine Corps was buried in July. by WIlliam S. Lind
A Double Funeral
The last great commandant of the Marine Corps was buried in July.
The American Conservative · by William S. Lind · August 12, 2024
On July 29, I attended the funeral and interment at Arlington cemetery of General Alfred M. Gray, Jr., the 29th Commandant of the Marine Corps. Many of us present feared we were also witnessing the funeral of the Marine Corps itself.
I met General Gray in the mid-1970s when he was a new one-star and I had just launched a campaign to change U.S. military doctrine from the French to the German model, under the rubric “maneuver warfare.” General Gray signed on at once. He did so not because I was so persuasive but because what I was advocating resonated with his own military experiences, experience that began when he arrived in Korea in 1950 as a Marine private.
In 1981, General Gray became the Commanding General of the 2nd Marine Division based at Camp Lejeune, NC. He promptly declared maneuver warfare the doctrine of his division, formed a Maneuver Warfare Board of young officers to make it happen (many were my former students) and began a series of free-play field exercises to develop and apply the new concepts. I attended many of those exercises and, at General Gray’s request, led the critiques. I made sure those critiques were Prussian, not the usual American variety where everybody leaves feeling good.
General Gray embodied the quality the old Prussian Army looked for most when considering officers for promotion, Verantwortungsfreudigkeit, “joy in taking responsibility.” Over and over throughout his career—and at great risk to it—“Al” Gray made decisions and acted as the situation dictated, not as his superiors wanted. Somehow, probably because of his superb troop leading ability, he survived and moved up in rank. In 1987, he became Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.
His commandancy was a time of exciting ideas, wide-open experimentation, intellectual ferment in a service not famous for that, and bright hope for the Marine Corps’ future. General Gray’s reforms, including making maneuver warfare official Marine Corps doctrine and choosing a captain, John Schmitt, to work directly with him to write the best doctrinal manual ever published by an American armed service, FMFM-1 Warfighting, brough the Marine Corps tremendous support from the public, the press, and Capitol Hill.
By his funeral and burial, it had all crumbled into dust. Warfighting still survives, but it is unread and ignored by a Marine Corps that has slumped back into French-style firepower/attrition warfare. Officer education is dog training in rote processes, and troop training is 18th century formal drill with Marines considered trained if they do a task right once. Combatant commanders are not requesting Marines because they are poorly trained. In Afghanistan, the Taliban called the Marine Scout/Snipers “the Marines who are well trained.” The last commandant, David Berger, responded by closing the Scout/Sniper school.
General Gray’s achievements had been fading for years, but under Berger the downward drift became a plunge. When he was announced but not yet confirmed as commandant, General Gray called me and said, “Finally, we’ve got a guy who is going to do what we’ve known all along has to happen to make maneuver warfare real: fix the education, the training, and the personnel system.” On being confirmed, Berger published his Commandant’s Guidance in the Marine Corps Gazette and it said exactly that. That was the last we heard of any of it.
Instead, the Marine Corps committed seppuku. It ripped its own guts out, getting rid of all its tanks, most of its artillery, infantry, aircraft—the list is endless. This was all in service of a bizarre concept called Force Design 2030, under which the Marine Corps, which has always been a general purpose force, was to focus solely on taking meaningless sand-spit islands from the Chinese in a war that won’t happen because nuclear powers don’t fight conventional wars with each other, then mounting anti-ship missiles on them to shoot at Chinese surface warships. Those ships, like our own, will all be on the bottom or running for port in the first 24 hours. Ironically, Force Design 2030 copies the Japanese Pacific strategy in World War II, with missiles replacing bombers and with the same fatal weakness that the islands cannot be resupplied. We just bypassed most of them, leaving the garrisons to starve.
General Berger thought the money he saved by gutting his own service would be his to spend on Force Design 2030. Of course, it all went back to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as the system dictates it must. He was told this many times but refused to listen.
General Gray retired as commandant in 1991, 33 years ago. He remains the last great commandant. The current commandant, General Eric Smith, appears to be an empty suit. The Corps still drifts toward Force Design 2030, leaderless and apparently brainless.
I was by no means the only one at General Gray’s funeral to feel disappointed with today’s Marine Corps. It doesn’t have to go that way. General Gray’s work can be revived. The Marine Corps can become the U.S.’s only service that can do maneuver warfare. It can take on the future threat we face, Fourth General war, war with enemies that are not states. But if the trumpet sound uncertain, who will follow? The Marine trumpet that played taps over General Al Gray’s grave has gone silent.
The American Conservative · by William S. Lind · August 12, 2024
13. U.S., Philippines reach deal to assist Afghan allies
U.S., Philippines reach deal to assist Afghan allies
Hundreds of Afghan refugees will be temporarily relocated to the Philippines as part of a new pathway to U.S. resettlement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/08/19/afghanistan-allies-refugees-us-philippines/?utm
A woman holds an Afghan passport in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2023. (Saiyna Bashir for The Washington Post)
By Dan Lamothe, Ellen Nakashima and Michael Birnbaum
Updated August 19, 2024 at 5:40 p.m. EDT|Published August 19, 2024 at 4:17 p.m. EDT
The U.S. and Philippine governments have reached a deal to create a new pathway to the United States for Afghan allies who assisted the American war effort, relying on temporarily relocating some of them to Southeast Asia as they await approval for U.S. visas and resettlement, U.S. and Philippine officials said.
The agreement was announced Monday evening, days after the third anniversary of the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, following President Joe Biden’s order that April to fully withdraw U.S. troops. The ensuing crisis remains a low point of the Biden administration and a persistent electoral cudgel for Republicans.
It was not immediately clear where the Afghans initially approved for transport to the Philippines are now. Tens of thousands of Afghans who are potentially eligible for U.S. visas are spread across the globe, often settling temporarily wherever they can get approval.
In the three years since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, the new government has reimposed strict religious controls, curtailing almost all rights for women and girls, while hunting and killing those who helped Americans. Human rights workers have warned that such revenge killings are a persistent problem.
The new plan will be part of Operation Enduring Welcome, the Biden administration’s effort to resettle Afghan allies. It calls for the Philippine government to process about 300 Afghans for resettlement as they await approval of special immigrant visas and resettlement in the United States, U.S. officials briefed on the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
U.S. officials anticipate that the program could be extended and possibly expanded after the initial few hundred Afghans move through the Philippines, effectively turning the island nation into another temporary “way station” for Afghans as they await resettlement in the United States.
“We’re going to continue to have ongoing discussions with the Philippines, and we’re really hoping that we can show we are good partners in this project,” a senior State Department official said.
The temporary nature of the arrangement is a key detail for the government in Manila, U.S. officials said, with the expectation that Afghans would remain for no more than a few months. Those moving through the Philippines have undergone vetting and received initial approval from U.S. officials. The U.S. government will provide the Afghans involved with food, housing, security, medical services and transportation at a facility outside Manila. In recent days, the senior State Department official said, land has been cleared for a soccer field for the Afghans — and an eight-foot python that was discovered was quickly relocated.
The Biden administration has resettled more than 160,000 Afghans in the United States since 2021, a figure that includes both those who directly supported the U.S. government and their spouses and children, the senior State Department official said. They made it to the United States through several different pathways, including Qatar and Albania, officials said.
The expanded effort comes three years after a U.S.-led evacuation mission in Kabul airlifted 124,000 people to safety from a single runway in 17 days, but it was marked by scenes of desperation and tragedy.
Tens of thousands of people eligible for relocation were left behind. An Islamic State suicide bombing at the outskirts of the Kabul airport killed 13 U.S. troops and more than 170 Afghans, and an errant U.S. drone strike a few days later killed seven children and three adult civilians.
U.S. officials said that Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan were among the senior U.S. leaders who helped close the deal with Manila. Biden raised the issue on several occasions, most recently during a meeting in the Oval Office on April 11, a senior administration official said.
Harris, now the Democratic nominee for president, suggested the idea to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on a visit to Manila in November 2022, a few months after he took office. She raised the proposal with him again in May 2023 when he visited Washington and in a November 2023 meeting in San Francisco, the senior administration official said.
Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who leads #AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations assisting the resettlement of Afghans, said Harris’s engagement was key.
“My understanding is that this thing was sort of stalled, and she got it reinvigorated,” VanDiver said. “I think that it’s really notable that three years into this, we’re still doing this.”
The Philippine ambassador to the United States, Jose Manuel Romualdez, called the agreement “very significant” and suggested it could be extended “if it’s something that we think is successful.” It grows out of a long humanitarian tradition dating to World War II, he said.
It was then, he said, between the late 1930s and 1941, that the commonwealth’s first president, Manuel Quezon, welcomed more than 1,200 Jewish refugees, most from Europe, to the Philippines. Not even the United States then was accepting Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, Romualdez noted.
During the Vietnam War, Marcos’s father, then-President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., opened a center in northern Luzon to process 30,000 Vietnamese people fleeing their country, Romualdez said.
“We’re doing what we can to contribute in our small way into helping people who are displaced,” he said. “I think the majority of people [in the Philippines] know that this is a good thing to do.”
The deal comes amid a backdrop of strengthened diplomatic and military ties between Washington and Manila. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently announced plans to deepen defense cooperation and contribute $500 million to modernize the Philippine armed forces.
The nations have a mutual-defense treaty and have grown closer since 2022, when Marcos Jr. took office, succeeding a populist, and drove Manila’s foreign policy sharply toward Washington. He has visited the United States four times, most recently in April.
“The fact that we’re able to do this at this point really reflects where we are in the U.S. bilateral relationship with the Philippines and how strong and good the partnership is right now,” a second senior State Department official said.
This was a “big ask” of Manila, the second official said, given domestic fears that what was framed as a temporary program could become permanent. The Philippines has for decades battled Islamist insurgencies, especially in its south.
U.S. officials assured their counterparts in Manila that the processing would be done swiftly and securely. The Afghans have provided “faithful, invaluable service” to the U.S. government in Afghanistan, officials said. They have gone through pre-travel security checks and medical screening at consulates and embassies around the world, the officials said.
“This does show how deep the trust and partnership is at the moment, extending beyond just the military components of the alliance to a willingness to cooperate politically, economically and diplomatically,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In the last year alone, officials noted, the two allies have strengthened people-to-people ties; a U.S. presidential trade mission resulted in $1 billion in investments in the Philippines; and Washington helped broker a trilateral summit with Japan and the Philippines to foster economic growth, including by launching an economic corridor on Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines.
But Manila is also mindful of China’s rising challenge, both economically and militarily. Numerous strains between the Philippines and China have emerged in recent years, including a confrontation in June in which Chinese coast guard personnel rammed their ships into Philippine vessels and then boarded them. On Monday, Chinese and Philippine vessels collided again, this time near Sabina Shoal.
Rebecca Tan contributed to this report.
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14. Taiwan conducts live-fire missile drills as China ramps up military threats
Taiwan conducts live-fire missile drills as China ramps up military threats
Updated 4:00 AM EDT, August 20, 2024
AP · by Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · August 20, 2024
Taiwan’s military on Tuesday conducted a live-fire drill, launching several anti-air missiles in response to growing military pressure from China.The exercise took place at the Jiupeng Military Base in Pingtung located in southern Taiwan. (AP Video shot by Johnson Lai)
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JIUPENG, Taiwan (AP) — Taiwan’s military launched surface-to-air missiles in live-fire drills conducted Tuesday in response to growing military pressure from China.
The exercises took place at the Jiupeng Military Base in a remote area in southern Taiwan. Among the missiles launched were Taiwan’s domestically made Sky Bow III anti-ballistic missiles along with the U.S.-made Patriot PAC II and surface-to-air Standard missiles.
China claims the democratically ruled island of Taiwan as its own territory, to be brought under its control by force if necessary and ramped up its military threat in recent years.
Beijing in particular dislikes Taiwan’s new President Lai Ching-te, who took office earlier this year and whom Beijing has called a separatist.
Taipei has boosted its deterrence capabilities in response. Missiles, both domestically built and U.S.-made, are key to its defense strategy.
Defense Ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang said all the missiles launched Tuesday hit their targets.
“This shows our training is very strict and solid,” he said.
Beijing did not immediately react to Taiwan’s drill. China sends military jets and vessels near Taiwan frequently in what critics call an intimidation tactic.
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said early Tuesday it spotted five Chinese military jets and 11 ships close to its shores over the previous 24 hours. One aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, an unofficial demarcation zone between the two sides.
While its military is dwarfed by China’s, Taiwan has bought high-tech weaponry from the United States, revitalized its domestic arms industry and extended the length of mandatory military service from four months to one year.
The U.S. is bound by its own laws to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself and considers all threats to the island as a matter of great concern.
AP · by Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · August 20, 2024
15. Irregular Warfare at Sea: Using Privateers To Seize Chinese Commerce
Excerpt:
Conclusion
The United States military may find itself overwhelmed and outgunned in any long-running attritional war against China. As China is uniquely dependent on bringing resources from overseas, pursuing maritime trade warfare provides another lever to manage horizontal escalation and a means to gradually strangle the PRC’s economy and war-making ability. Given deficiencies in its defense industrial base, the US will be hard-pressed to quickly generate new combat power. Recognizing this dilemma, the US should seek to identify new approaches and tools and seriously consider the revival of privateering as a potentially effective asymmetric strategy. While not without challenges, privateering offers a unique way to leverage private sector capabilities and capitalize on China’s vulnerabilities. Enlisting modern privateers to attack Chinese merchant shipping is a valid tool that deserves consideration to close the gap in a future existential conflict.
Irregular Warfare at Sea: Using Privateers To Seize Chinese Commerce - Irregular Warfare Initiative
irregularwarfare.org · by Christopher Booth · August 20, 2024
Editor’s Note I: This article is part of IWI’s Project Maritime, a series exploring the intersection of irregular warfare and the modern maritime dimension. Focusing on current events and their underlying geographical and historical patterns, we aim to contextualize the drivers of conflict in the maritime domain and inspire dialogue on integrated statecraft approaches. We warmly invite your participation and engagement. Please send submissions to Submit An Article with the subject line “Project Maritime Submission.” Follow us @proj_maritime and check out our Project Maritime Look Book.
Editor’s Note II: IWI is pleased to announce Christopher Booth and Walker Mills as the new directors of Project Maritime. Their extensive expertise in irregular warfare, national security, and the maritime domain will significantly enhance our ability to provide unique insights into contemporary maritime challenges. Both Chris and Walker have been non-resident fellows and have written extensively for IWI in the past. We’re thrilled to have them join IWI and Project Maritime in leadership roles.
Irregular Warfare at Sea: Using Privateers To Seize Chinese Commerce – Insider: Short of War
The ongoing war in Ukraine demonstrates that defense is ascendant in modern warfare. This observation challenges the conventional wisdom that twenty-first century warfare would be sharp, short, decisive, and favor the offense. Instead, it appears increasingly clear that conflict will likely devolve into a long-running war of attrition across multiple fronts – including the maritime domain. In studying the last 200 years of conflict, retired US Marine Corps colonel and strategist T.X. Hammes concluded that most great power conflicts lasted years rather than months. Considering this analysis, he proposed the strategy of maritime trade warfare in the context of a conflict with China—interdicting Chinese imports to starve it into economic exhaustion.
To address its military deficiencies in a potential conflict with China, the United States should consider asymmetric approaches, particularly the revival of privateering—commercial actors deputized by a Letter of Marque (as authorized by the U.S. Constitution) to raid enemy commerce on behalf of the United States government.
United States Military Vulnerabilities
Despite China being similarly vulnerable based on its reliance on imports, the US is poorly postured to take advantage of this fact in long-burn attritional conflict, which lends itself to approaches like maritime trade warfare. One major factor is how “single-threaded” (reliant on only one supplier or method) the US military’s supply chain is. The ongoing war in Ukraine demonstrates how dangerous the just in time method of uncontested logistics support has become. Large forward-deployed stockpiles and significant repair facilities staffed by contractors with the skills to fix sophisticated weapon systems have become emblematic of the American way of war in the twenty-first century. However, this increasingly vulnerable model will not survive in high-intensity conflict against a competitor like China.
Furthermore, America’s defense industrial base has atrophied. This is particularly evident in shipbuilding, ship repair, and ship maintenance capability and capacity. If the US cannot build new ships nor return ships to the fight vigorously, it will need new approaches to generate naval power. After the US and the People’s Republic of China have traded and absorbed blows in the initial rounds of conflict, the war will likely devolve into a melee more like a bar fight with parties desperately seeking any tools to pick up and use against the enemy. Therefore, to hedge against this vulnerability, the US should explore irregular and asymmetric approaches to achieve maritime superiority–from privateering to mining to inventive uses of emerging technology.
Lessons from Recent Conflicts
Ukrainian activity in the Black Sea and the Houthis’ irregular maritime campaign exemplify how asymmetric approaches can yield outsized effects. Advances in technology have democratized the battlefield. In Ukraine, tech-savvy and resourceful forces are overwhelming multi-billion-dollar Russian systems. On April 14, 2022 – less than two months after Putin’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine sank the Russian flagship Moskva in an ambush with an indigenously-produced missile. Now, more than two years later, in addition to uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), Ukraine boasts an adaptable fleet of uncrewed surface vessels (USVs), which have been able to rock the Russian Black Sea Fleet back on its heels, and it has largely retreated to Russian shores from its ports in Crimea.
The Houthis have had similar success recently in employing asymmetric approaches in and around the Red Sea. Their tactics—ranging from employing remote-controlled suicide boats, sea drones, and a heliborne assault against a merchant ship—have enabled them to influence marine traffic transiting the Bab al-Mandab strait. This strategic choke point links the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, where up to 20 percent of global trade passes—including goods from Asia to Europe. Since the Houthis began their campaign, trade through the Red Sea has declined by 80 percent or more.
By employing these tactics, the Houthis have compelled Western powers to dedicate significant resources to mitigate them. The Houthis have also gained access to relatively inexpensive Iranian-supplied ballistic missiles, further complicating the situation. In addition to the inherent operational risks to the fleet, these patrols have cost the US Navy approximately $1 billion in expended munitions as of June 2024—as ships like USS Carney engaged in the most sustained naval combat operations since the Second World War. Interestingly, recent reports suggest a merger of two major conflicts as Russia considers arming the Houthis with anti-ship missiles as an escalatory payback for Western aid to Ukraine.
The Case for Asymmetric Approaches
Borrowing from the effectiveness of these recent asymmetric approaches, disrupting Chinese merchant shipping represents a center of gravity that should be elevated among contingency planners and policymakers, given China’s dependence on imports. While reliance on imported energy is a longstanding challenge and vulnerability for the PRC, China increasingly relies on other imports, such as food.
While the Pentagon has embraced investing in asymmetric technologies and materiel approaches—as evidenced by the growing impact of efforts such as the Defense Innovation Unit—it should also prioritize asymmetric, non-materiel approaches. High-intensity attritional combat will quickly deplete existing assets. As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, the US defense industrial base is not well positioned to churn out weapon systems quickly. Instead, the US will need quick, scalable, off-the-shelf solutions similar to Ukraine’s development of commercial and racing drones as a strategic weapons force.
One such method that deserves serious consideration is a modern spin on a historic tool—naval privateers.
The Case for Privateering
The idea may not be as radical as it seems. The US military already outsourced many of its wartime tasks to private contractors for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—from logistics to maintenance to security functions. Similarly, during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the new American government relied upon privateers to attack enemy commerce. Privateers were private-sector actors operating on a profit motive, undertaking risky activities under government license for monetary gain. Given the lackluster state of shipbuilding and the potential need to regenerate naval power, privateering may be a sound approach to reconsider.
Maritime security firms with skilled sailors and operators—likely many former military personnel, as in Iraq and Afghanistan–could quickly be engaged as privateers. They already have vessels, weapons, drones, sensor technology, and other tools that put them on par with some state actors. There is a legacy of maritime law that establishes the bounds of privateering, including prize claims for seized ships. Resurrecting privateering from naval history may provide a means to mitigate US shipbuilding and readiness shortfalls to fight asymmetrically in a protracted modern conflict. While this idea might seem far-fetched, these creative and asymmetric dialogues are needed to moderate the defense industrial base’s clear deficiencies. As demonstrated by Ukraine, the scrappy “pick-up” approach illustrates the advantages to nimble actors not reliant on exquisite legacy weapon systems, who can envision new asymmetric means of warfare and not resigned to the status quo.
China’s Maritime Militia and US Warfighting Deficiencies
China has its maritime militia, the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militias (PAFMM), which shares some characteristics with privateers but, given their state nexus, more closely resembles an auxiliary paramilitary force, like Iran’s Basij militia. The PAFMM’s “commercial fishermen” serve as force multipliers, deliberately blurring the line between a constabulary force and a proper navy. Making them a gray-zone fleet similar to the Kremlin’s “Little Green Men” in the 2014 take-over of Crimea—in this case, “Little Blue Men.” Though the PAFMM has primarily engaged with neighboring maritime forces in the South China Sea—from the Philippines to Vietnam, they remain a useful tool for China in any protracted conflict in the Pacific with the US due to their ability to further horizontal escalation.
While the US has no similar maritime militia (it enjoys largely peaceful and productive relationships with its neighbors and no use for such a maritime militia), employing privateers in wartime is worth consideration. Privateers, by their nature, are best utilized against enemy commerce and could pursue it around the globe. Maritime security companies that may want to make themselves available for this role regularly operate in the Caribbean, African littorals, Arabian Gulf, and Indian Ocean – where they could raid Chinese shipping bringing needed raw materials, food-stuffs, and energy back to China.
Most strategists are aware of the dangers the US would face in a full-scale conflict with China, and multiple recent wargames have suggested either catastrophic losses, “pyrrhic victories,” or the potential that “we’re going to lose fast.” The US Navy already has fewer warships than the People’s Liberation Army – Navy (PLA-N). The ratio is expected to worsen as the US retires vessels more quickly than they are replaced. At the same time, the PRC continues its massive shipbuilding effort. A 2024 Congressional Research Service report predicts the PLAN will have a fleet of 435 surface hulls by 2030, and a 2023 report suggested that China will have 80 submarines by 2035.
China has invested heavily in its anti-access/aerial denial or A2AD capabilities, fielding missiles to keep US forces at great distances. Beijing may have between 500 and 1,000 Dong Feng (DF-26B) “carrier killers” and would happily trade a multi-million-dollar missile to damage or destroy a billion-dollar US warship. Even the mere threat of this weapons engagement zone provides an excellent deterrent and fundamentally alters US warfighting calculus. China has deployed hundreds of hypersonic missiles; in contrast, the US has fielded zero.
Influential strategists question whether the US is postured to contest the “air littorals,” pointing out how expensive the US Air Force’s exquisite fifth-generation fighters are in contrast to growing ubiquitous drone fleets. Marine and US Navy F-35s face the same issues—and thus, US forces may be threatened as the US loses the air superiority it has relied upon for seventy-five years. Drone swarms may imperil warships, overwhelming defenses through mass.
The Russo-Ukrainian war has forced the US to recognize that its weapons manufacturing capacity has atrophied. It may not support the US Department of Defense’s demand in a protracted, high-end conflict. Not only are weapon systems dated, but stockpiles have also been used and not replaced. Recent analysis posits that the US may exhaust its stockpiles of long-range precision-guided missiles within a week in conflict over Taiwan. Disturbingly, vital elements in US weapons supply lines have a single choke point, such as the sole black-powder factory in America—producing a crucial ingredient used in everything from artillery rounds to Tomahawk missiles.
In 2022, then US Fleet Forces Commander Admiral Daryl Caudle stated, “If I went into conflict, high-end conflict where I had to repair numerous ships simultaneously, I don’t have enough capacity. I don’t have enough dry docks, and I don’t have enough shipyards to get after that.” Chinese commercial shipbuilding accounts for more than 55 percent of all new orders for the global industry, while American manufacturers account for less than one percent. America’s commercial shipbuilding industry is dying. The lack of berths, skilled technicians, and an atrophy of infrastructure is epitomized by USS Boise (SSN-764), the Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine returned from deployment in 2015 that has been waiting seven years for overhaul. The inability to get ships back into the fight caused by a shortage of shipyards is exacerbated by the fact that the Navy has limited ability to conduct resupply and intermediate repairs at sea.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how poorly postured the American economy is for any long-running conflict that might endanger global trade. More than 70 percent of US trade is carried by maritime transport; the US had to import N95 masks due to US factories‘ inability to produce them. The United States would do well to diversify approaches as it may find itself the “weaker” party in a future conflict, forced to readjust and seek more asymmetric means of continuing the fight.
Legal and Ethical Considerations
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States grants Congress the power to issue Letters of Marque, deputizing private entities to raid enemy commerce. While a series of international naval treaties sought to outlaw privateering, the US did not sign on to the 1856 Paris Declaration. It rejected efforts during the negotiation of the Second Hague Convention in 1907 to make privateers illegal. Thus, privateering remains a lawful practice under US and international law. Furthermore, Article I, Section 8 stipulates that Congress can “define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas,” implicitly establishing a distinction between government-authorized privateers and pirates.
The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations differentiates piracy from state-sponsored privateering activity, stating, “To constitute the crime of piracy, the illegal acts must be committed for private end.” Recent scholarship reinforces the continued legality of privateering, with several arguing that private maritime security companies protecting shipping against piracy represent a defensive rather than offensive evolution of the historical paradigm. The reluctance to consider privateering as a viable strategy may stem from differing strategic perspectives or a shared perception that, like covert operations, it is disreputable or underhanded.
To fight asymmetrically against the superior naval forces of the British in both the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, Americans relied more frequently on attacks against enemy commerce vice, naval engagements between two battle fleets, and, in particular, via war by raiding – a method of asymmetric warfare that encompassed privateering. US naval warships captured around 250 enemy ships in the latter war, but American privateers seized up to ten times as many merchant vessels. Privateering was a capitalist affair. Investors pooled resources to outfit ships and crews, and crew members were compensated based on assets seized and ships adjudicated as legitimate prizes by a prize court. Privateering represented a particularly American mode of warfare.
However, it’s important to acknowledge the potential drawbacks to privateering. These could include challenges in maintaining operational security, ensuring adherence to international law, and managing the potential for escalation. Additionally, using privateers could complicate diplomatic efforts and potentially damage international perceptions of the United States. These concerns must be carefully weighed against the potential benefits of privateering.
Conclusion
The United States military may find itself overwhelmed and outgunned in any long-running attritional war against China. As China is uniquely dependent on bringing resources from overseas, pursuing maritime trade warfare provides another lever to manage horizontal escalation and a means to gradually strangle the PRC’s economy and war-making ability. Given deficiencies in its defense industrial base, the US will be hard-pressed to quickly generate new combat power. Recognizing this dilemma, the US should seek to identify new approaches and tools and seriously consider the revival of privateering as a potentially effective asymmetric strategy. While not without challenges, privateering offers a unique way to leverage private sector capabilities and capitalize on China’s vulnerabilities. Enlisting modern privateers to attack Chinese merchant shipping is a valid tool that deserves consideration to close the gap in a future existential conflict.
Christopher D. Booth is a non-resident fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative and co-director of Project Maritime. He has more than two decades of experience in national security and international relations, first serving on active duty as an Army armor and cavalry officer. He is a Distinguished Graduate of Command and Staff College–Marine Corps University and graduated from Vanderbilt University Law School and the College of William and Mary.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
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irregularwarfare.org · by Christopher Booth · August 20, 2024
16. The Perils of Isolationism: The World Still Needs America—and America Still Needs the World By Condoleezza Rice
Excerpts:
The United States’ global involvement will not look exactly as it has for the last 80 years. Washington is likely to choose its engagements more carefully. If deterrence is strong, that may be enough. Allies will have to bear more of the cost of defending themselves. Trade agreements will be less ambitious and global but more regional and selective.
Internationalists must admit that they had a blind spot for those Americans, such as the unemployed coal miner and steelworker, who lost out as good jobs fled abroad. And the forgotten did not take kindly to the argument that they should shut up and be happy with cheap Chinese goods. This time, there can be no more platitudes about the advantages of globalization for all. There must be a real effort to give people meaningful education, skills, and job training. The task is even more urgent since technological progress will severely punish those who cannot keep up.
Those who argue for engagement will need to reframe what it means. The 80 years of U.S. internationalism is another analogy that doesn’t perfectly fit the circumstances of today. Still, if the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries taught Americans anything, it is this: other great powers don’t mind their own business. Instead, they seek to shape the global order. The future will be determined by the alliance of democratic, free-market states or it will be determined by the revisionist powers, harking back to a day of territorial conquest abroad and authoritarian practices at home. There is simply no other option.
The Perils of Isolationism
The World Still Needs America—and America Still Needs the World
September/October 2024
Published on August 20, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Condoleezza Rice · August 20, 2024
In times of uncertainty, people reach for historical analogies. After 9/11, George W. Bush administration officials invoked Pearl Harbor as a standard comparison in processing the intelligence failure that led to the attack. Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to Imperial Japan’s attack in making the case that Washington should deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban, saying, “Decent countries don’t launch surprise attacks.” And as officials in the Situation Room tried to assess progress in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq, another analogy came up more than a few times: U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous reliance on body counts in Vietnam. Even if history doesn’t repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes.
Today’s favorite analogy is the Cold War. The United States again faces an adversary that has global reach and insatiable ambition, with China taking the place of the Soviet Union. This is a particularly attractive comparison, of course, because the United States and its allies won the Cold War. But the current period is not a Cold War redux. It is more dangerous.
China is not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was self-isolating, preferring autarky to integration, whereas China ended its isolation in the late 1970s. A second difference between the Soviet Union and China is the role of ideology. Under the Brezhnev Doctrine that governed Eastern Europe, an ally had to be a carbon copy of Soviet-style communism. China, by contrast, is largely agnostic about the internal composition of other states. It fiercely defends the primacy and superiority of the Chinese Communist Party but does not insist that others do the equivalent, even if it is happy to support authoritarian states by exporting its surveillance technology and social media services.
So if the current competition is not Cold War 2.0, then what is it? Giving in to the impulse to find historical references, if not analogies, one may find more food for thought in the imperialism of the late nineteenth century and the zero-sum economies of the interwar period. Now, as then, revisionist powers are acquiring territory through force, and the international order is breaking down. But perhaps the most striking and worrying similarity is that today, as in the previous eras, the United States is tempted to turn inward.
THE REVENGE OF GEOPOLITICS
While previous eras of competition were characterized by great-power clashes, during the Cold War, territorial conflict was fought largely through proxies, as in Angola and Nicaragua. Moscow mostly confined its use of military force to its own sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, as when it crushed uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan crossed a new line, but the move did not fundamentally challenge U.S. interests, and the conflict eventually became a proxy war. Where Soviet and U.S. forces did face each other directly, across the German divide, the extreme danger of the two Berlin crises gave way to a kind of tense stability thanks to nuclear deterrence.
Today’s security landscape features the danger of direct military conflict between great powers. China’s territorial claims challenge U.S. allies from Japan to the Philippines and other U.S. partners in the region, such as India and Vietnam. Long-held U.S. interests such as freedom of navigation run into direct conflict with China’s maritime ambitions.
Then there is Taiwan. An attack on Taiwan would require a U.S. military response, even if the policy of “strategic ambiguity” created uncertainty about the exact nature of it. For years, the United States has acted as a kind of rheostat in the Taiwan Strait, with the goal of preserving the status quo. Since 1979, administrations from both parties have sold arms to Taiwan. President Bill Clinton deployed the USS Independence to the strait in 1996 in response to Beijing’s aggressive activity. In 2003, the Bush administration publicly chastised Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian when he proposed a referendum that sounded very much like a vote on independence. All along, the goal was to maintain—or occasionally, restore—what had become a relatively stable status quo.
Xi has turned out to be a true Marxist.
In recent years, Beijing’s aggressive military activities around Taiwan have challenged that equilibrium. In Washington, strategic ambiguity has largely given way to open discussion of how to deter and, if necessary, repel a Chinese invasion. But Beijing could threaten Taiwan in other ways. It could blockade the island, as Chinese forces have practiced in exercises. Or it could seize small, uninhabited Taiwanese islands, cut underwater cables, or launch large-scale cyberattacks. These strategies might be smarter than a risky and difficult assault on Taiwan and would complicate a U.S. response.
The overarching point is that Beijing has Taiwan in its sights. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who views the island as a rogue province, wants to complete the restoration of China and take his place in the pantheon of leaders next to Mao Zedong. Hong Kong is now effectively a province of China, and bringing Taiwan to heel would fulfill Xi’s ambition. That risks open conflict between U.S. and Chinese forces.
Alarmingly, the United States and China still have none of the deconfliction measures in place that the United States and Russia do. During the 2008 war in Georgia, for instance, Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had ongoing contact with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Makarov, so as to avoid an incident as the U.S. Air Force flew Georgian troops home from Iraq to join the fight. Compare that with 2001, when a hot-dogging Chinese pilot hit a U.S. reconnaissance plane and forced it to the ground. The crew was detained on Hainan Island, and for three days, Washington was unable to make high-level contact with the Chinese leadership. I was national security adviser at the time. Finally, I located my Chinese counterpart, who was on a trip in Argentina, and got the Argentines to take a phone to him at a barbecue. “Tell your leaders to take our call,” I implored. Only then were we able to defuse the crisis and free the crew. The reopening of military-to-military contacts with China earlier this year, after a four-year freeze, was a welcome development. But it is a far cry from the types of procedures and lines of communication needed to prevent accidental catastrophe.
China’s conventional military modernization is impressive and accelerating. The country now has the largest navy in the world, with over 370 ships and submarines. The growth in China’s nuclear arsenal is also alarming. While the United States and the Soviet Union came to a more or less common understanding of how to maintain the nuclear equilibrium during the Cold War, that was a two-player game. If China’s nuclear modernization continues, the world will face a more complicated, multiplayer scenario—and without the safety net that Moscow and Washington developed.
The potential for conflict comes against the backdrop of an arms race in revolutionary technologies: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, synthetic biology, robotics, advances in space, and others. In 2017, Xi gave a speech in which he declared that China would surpass the United States in these frontier technologies by 2035. Although he was undoubtedly trying to rally China’s scientists and engineers, it may be a speech he has come to regret. Just as it was after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite, the United States was forced to confront the possibility that it could lose a technological race to its main adversary—a realization that has spurred a concerted pushback from Washington.
Shipping containers in Oakland, California, July 2022
Carlos Barria / Reuters
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the United States suddenly understood further vulnerabilities. The supply chain for everything from pharmacological inputs to rare-earth minerals depended on China. Beijing had taken the lead in industries that the United States once dominated, such as the production of batteries. Access to high-end semiconductors, an industry created by American giants such as Intel, turned out to depend on the security of Taiwan, where 90 percent of advanced chip making takes place.
It is hard to overstate the shock and sense of betrayal that gripped U.S. leaders. U.S. policy toward China was always something of an experiment, with proponents of economic engagement betting that it would induce political reform. For decades, the benefits flowing from the bet seemed to outweigh the downsides. Even if there were problems with intellectual property protection and market access (and there were), Chinese domestic growth fueled international economic growth. China was a hot market, a good place to invest, and a valued supplier of low-cost labor. Supply chains stretched from China across the world. By the time China joined the World Trade Organization, in 2001, the total trade volume between the United States and China had increased roughly fivefold over the previous decade, reaching $120 billion. It seemed inevitable that China would change internally, since economic liberalization and political control were ultimately incompatible. Xi came to power agreeing with this maxim, but not in the way the West had hoped: instead of economic liberalization, he chose political control.
Not surprisingly, the United States eventually reversed course, beginning with the Trump administration and continuing through the Biden administration. A bipartisan agreement emerged that China’s behavior was unacceptable. As a result, the United States’ technological decoupling from China is now well underway, and a labyrinth of restrictions impedes outbound and inbound investment. For now, American universities remain open to training Chinese graduate students and to international collaboration, both of which have significant benefits for the U.S. scientific community. But there is far more awareness of the challenge that these activities can pose for national security.
So far, however, decoupling does not extend to the full range of commercial activity. The international economy will still be well served by trade and investment between the world’s two largest economies. The dream of seamless integration may be dead, but there are benefits—including to global stability—if Beijing continues to have a stake in the international system. Some problems, such as climate change, will be difficult to address without China’s involvement. Washington and Beijing will need to find a new basis for a workable relationship.
THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE REBORN
In the final 2012 presidential debate, U.S. President Barack Obama argued that his opponent, Mitt Romney, was overhyping the danger from Russia, suggesting that the country was no longer a geopolitical threat. With the 2014 annexation of Crimea, it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin begged to differ.
The next step, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has brought his ambition to restore the Russian Empire face to face with the redlines of Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, which stipulates that an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all. Early in the war, NATO worried that Moscow might attack supply lines in Poland and Romania, both members of the alliance. So far, Putin has shown no appetite for triggering Article 5, but the Black Sea (which the tsars considered a Russian lake) has again become a source of conflict and tension. Remarkably, Ukraine, a country that barely has a navy, has successfully challenged Russian naval power and can now move grain along its own coastline. Even more devastating for Putin, his gambit has produced a strategic alignment among Europe, the United States, and much of the rest of the world, leading to extensive sanctions against Russia. It is now an isolated and heavily militarized state.
Putin surely never thought it would turn out this way. Moscow initially predicted Ukraine would fall within days of the invasion. Russian forces were carrying three days’ worth of provisions and dress uniforms for the parade they expected to hold in Kyiv. The embarrassing first year of the war exposed the weaknesses of the Russian armed forces, which turned out to be riddled with corruption and incompetence. But as it has done throughout its history, Russia has stabilized the front, relying on old-fashioned tactics such as human wave attacks, trenches, and land mines. The incremental way in which the United States and its allies supplied weapons to Ukraine—first debating whether to send tanks, then doing so, and so on—gave Moscow breathing room to mobilize its defense industrial base and throw its huge manpower advantage at the Ukrainians.
Great-power DNA is still very much in the American genome.
Still, the economic toll will haunt Moscow for years to come. An estimated one million Russians fled their country in response to Putin’s war, many of them young and well educated. Russia’s oil and gas industry has been crippled by the loss of important markets and the withdrawal of the multinational oil giants BP, Exxon, and Shell. Russia’s talented central banker, Elvira Nabiullina, has covered up many of the economy’s vulnerabilities, walking a tightrope without access to the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets held in the West, and China has stepped in to take off some of the pressure. But the cracks in the Russian economy are showing. According to a report commissioned for Gazprom, the majority-state-owned energy giant, the company’s revenue will stay below its pre-war level for at least ten years thanks to the effects of the invasion.
Thoughtful economic players in Moscow are worried. But Putin cannot lose this war, and he is willing to sacrifice everything to stave off disaster. As Germany’s experience in the interwar period suggests, an isolated, militarized, declining power is exceedingly dangerous.
The challenge is complicated by Russia’s growing cooperation with China, Iran, and North Korea. The four countries have a common cause: to undermine and replace the U.S.-led international system that they detest. Still, it is worth noting that their strategic interests are not easy to harmonize. Beijing cannot let Putin lose but likely has no real enthusiasm for his adventurism on behalf of a new Russian empire—particularly if it puts China in the cross hairs for secondary sanctions on its own struggling economy.
Meanwhile, the growth of Chinese power in Central Asia and beyond is not likely to warm the hearts of the xenophobes in the Kremlin. China’s ambitions complicate Russia’s relations with India, a long-standing military partner that is now turning more toward the United States. Russia’s dalliance with North Korea complicates its own relationship with South Korea—and China’s, as well. Iran terrifies both Russia and China as it moves closer to developing a nuclear weapon. Tehran’s proxies are a constant source of trouble in the Middle East: the Houthis endanger shipping in the Red Sea, Hamas recklessly launched a war with Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon threatens to widen that war into a regional conflagration, and militias in Iraq and Syria that Tehran does not always seem to control have carried out attacks on U.S. military personnel. A nasty and unstable Middle East is not good for Russia or China. And none of the three powers really trusts North Korea’s erratic leader, Kim Jong Un.
That said, international politics has always made for strange bedfellows when revisionist powers seek to undo the status quo. And they can do a lot of collective damage despite their differences.
THE CRUMBLING ORDER
The post–World War II liberal order was a direct response to the horrors of the interwar period. The United States and its allies looked back on the economic depression and international aggression of the 1920s and 1930s and located the cause in beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism, currency manipulation, and violent quests for resources—for example, leading to the aggressive behavior by Imperial Japan in the Pacific. The absence of the United States as a kind of offshore mediator also contributed to the breakdown of order. The one effort to build a moderating institution after World War I, the League of Nations, proved to be a pathetic disgrace, covering aggression rather than confronting it. Asian and European powers, left to their own devices, fell into catastrophic conflict.
After World War II, the United States and its allies built an economic order that was no longer zero-sum. At the Bretton Woods conference, they laid the groundwork for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the predecessor of the World Trade Organization), which together promoted the free movement of goods and services and stimulated international economic growth. For the most part, it was a wildly successful strategy. Global GDP grew and grew, surpassing the $100 trillion mark in 2022.
The companion to this “economic commons” was a “security commons” that was also led by the United States. Washington committed to the defense of Europe through NATO’s Article 5, which, after the Soviet Union’s successful nuclear test in 1949, essentially meant pledging to trade New York for London or Washington for Bonn. A similar U.S. commitment to Japan allowed that country to replace the legacy of its hated imperial military with self-defense forces and a “peace constitution,” easing relations with its neighbors. By 1953, South Korea also had a U.S. security guarantee, ensuring peace on the Korean Peninsula. As the United Kingdom and France stepped back from the Middle East after the 1956 Suez crisis, the United States became the guarantor of freedom of navigation in the region and, in time, its major stabilizing force.
U.S. and British troops near Nurmsi, Estonia, May 2024
Ints Kalnins / Reuters
Today’s international system is not yet a throwback to the early twentieth century. The death of globalization is often overstated, but the rush to pursue onshoring, near-shoring, and “friend shoring,” largely in reaction to China, does portend a weakening of integration. The United States has been largely absent from negotiations on trade for almost a decade now. It’s hard to recall the last time that an American politician gave a spirited defense of free trade. The new consensus raises the question: Can the aspiration for the freer movement of goods and services survive the United States’ absence from the game?
Globalization will continue in some form. But the sense that it is a positive force has lost steam. Consider the way countries acted in response to 9/11 versus how they acted in response to the pandemic. After 9/11, the world united in tackling terrorism, a problem that almost every country was experiencing in some form. Within a few weeks of the attack, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution allowing the tracking of terrorist financing across borders. Countries quickly harmonized their airport security standards. The United States soon joined with other countries to create the Proliferation Security Initiative, a forum for sharing information on suspicious cargo that would grow to include over 100 member states. Fast-forward to 2020, and the world saw the revenge of the sovereign state. International institutions were compromised, the chief example being the World Health Organization, which had grown too close to China. Travel restrictions, bans on the export of protective gear, and claims on vaccines complicated the road to recovery.
With the growing chasm between the United States and its allies on one side and China and Russia on the other, it is hard to imagine this trend reversing. Economic integration, which after the collapse of the Soviet Union was thought to be a common project for growth and peace, has given way to a zero-sum quest for territory, markets, and innovation. Still, one would hope that humankind has learned from the disastrous consequences of protectionism and isolationism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So how can it avoid a repeat of history?
ANOTHER TWILIGHT STRUGGLE
The United States might take the advice that the diplomat George Kennan gave in his famous “Long Telegram” of 1946. Kennan advised Washington to deny the Soviet Union the easy course of external expansion until it was forced to deal with its own internal contradictions. This was prescient, as four decades later, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to reform a fundamentally rotten system wound up collapsing it instead.
Today, Russia’s internal contradictions are obvious. Putin has undone 30-plus years of Russian integration into the international economy and relies on a network of opportunistic states that throw crumbs his way to sustain his regime. No one knows how long this shell of Russian greatness can survive, but it can do a lot of harm before it cracks. Resisting and deterring Russian military aggression is essential until it does.
Putin counts on a cowed and poorly informed population, and his regime indoctrinates young people in ways that are reminiscent of the Hitler Youth. The announcement this June that Russian children will attend summer camps in North Korea, of all places, is stunning. Russians, once able to travel and study abroad, now face a different future. They must make sacrifices, Putin tells them, in the service of “Mother Russia.”
Yet Russia’s human potential has always been great, despite what often seems like a deliberate plot by its leaders to destroy it. It is incumbent on the United States, Europe, and others to keep some connection to the Russian people. Russians should be allowed, when possible, to study and work abroad. Efforts, open and covert, should be made to pierce Putin’s propaganda, particularly in the cities, where he is neither trusted nor liked. Finally, the Russian opposition cannot be abandoned. The Baltic states house much of the organization built by the activist Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian prison in February. He was one of the few leaders who had a real following in much of Russia. His death cannot be the end of his cause.
Isolation has never been the answer to the United States’ security or prosperity.
The case of Solidarity, the Polish trade union, provides an important lesson in how to nurture antiauthoritarian movements. When Poland’s Soviet-aligned regime declared martial law in 1981, Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, went underground with his organization. The group was sustained by an odd troika: the Reagan administration’s CIA, the AFL-CIO, and the Vatican (and its Polish-born pope, John Paul II). Solidarity received relatively simple support from abroad, such as cash and printing presses. But when a political opening came in 1989, Walesa and company were ready to step in and lead a relatively smooth transition to democracy. The main lesson is that determined efforts can sustain opposition movements, as hard as that might be in Putin’s Russia.
China’s future is by no means as bleak as Russia’s. Yet China, too, has internal contradictions. The country is experiencing a rapid demographic inversion rarely seen outside of war. Births have declined by more than 50 percent since 2016, such that the total fertility rate is approaching 1.0. The one-child policy, put in place in 1979 and brutally enforced for decades, was the kind of mistake that only an authoritarian regime could have made, and now, millions of Chinese men don’t have mates. Since the policy ended in 2016, the state has tried to browbeat women into having children, turning women’s rights into a crusade for childbearing—yet more evidence of the panic in Beijing.
Another contradiction stems from the uneasy coexistence of capitalism and authoritarian communism. Xi has turned out to be a true Marxist. China’s golden age of private sector–led growth has slowed in large part because of the Chinese Communist Party’s anxiety about alternative sources of power. China used to lead the world in online education startups, but in 2021, the government cracked down on them because it could not reliably monitor their content. A once thriving entrepreneurial culture has withered away. China’s aggressive behavior toward foreigners has exposed other contradictions. Xi knows that China needs foreign direct investment, and he courts corporate leaders from across the world. But then, a Western firm’s offices are raided or one of its Chinese employees is detained, and, not surprisingly, a trust deficit grows between Beijing and foreign investors.
China is also suffering a trust deficit with its youth. Young Chinese citizens may be proud of their country, but a 20 percent youth unemployment rate has undermined their optimism for the future. Xi’s heavy-handed propagation of “Xi Jinping Thought” turns them off. This has led them to adopt an attitude of what is known colloquially as “lying flat,” a passive-aggressive stance of going along to get along while harboring no loyalty or enthusiasm for the regime. Now is thus not the time to isolate Chinese youth but the time to welcome them to study in the United States. As Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, has noted, a regime that goes out of its way to intimidate its citizens to discourage them from engaging with Americans is not a confident regime. Indeed, it is a signal for the United States to keep pushing for connections to the Chinese people.
Meanwhile, Washington will need to maintain economic pressure on the revisionist powers. It should continue isolating Russia, with an eye toward arresting Beijing’s creeping support for the Kremlin. But it should refrain from imposing blunt sanctions against China, since they would be ineffective and counterproductive, crippling the U.S. economy in the process. Targeted sanctions, by contrast, may slow Beijing’s military and technological progress, at least for a while. Iran is much more vulnerable. Never again should Washington unfreeze Iranian assets, as the Biden administration did as part of a deal to release five imprisoned Americans. Efforts to find moderates among Iran’s theocrats are doomed to failure and serve only to allow the mullahs to escape the contradictions of their unpopular, aggressive, and incompetent regime.
WHAT IT TAKES
This strategy will require investment. The United States needs to maintain the defense capabilities sufficient to deny China, Russia, and Iran their strategic goals. The war in Ukraine has revealed weaknesses in the U.S. defense industrial base that must be remedied. Critical reforms need to be made to the defense budgeting process, which is inadequate to this task. Congress must strive to enhance the Defense Department’s long-term strategic planning process, as well as its ability to adapt to evolving threats. The Pentagon should also work with Congress to gain greater efficiencies from the amount it already spends. Costs can be reduced in part by speeding up the Pentagon’s slow procurement and acquisition processes so that the military can better harness the remarkable technology coming out of the private sector. Beyond military capabilities, the United States must rebuild the other elements of its diplomatic toolkit—such as information operations—that have eroded since the Cold War.
The United States and other democracies must win the technological arms race, since in the future, transformative technologies will be the most important source of national power. The debate about the balance between regulation and innovation is just beginning. But while the possible downsides should be acknowledged, ultimately it is more important to unleash these technologies’ potential for societal good and national security. Chinese progress can be slowed but not stopped, and the United States will have to run fast and hard to win this race. Democracies will investigate these technologies, call congressional hearings about them, and debate their impact openly. Authoritarians will not. For this reason, among many others, authoritarians must not triumph.
The good news is that given the behavior of China and Russia, the United States’ allies are ready to contribute to the common defense. Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, the Philippines, and Japan, recognize the threat and appear committed to addressing it. Relations between Japan and South Korea are better than ever. Moscow’s recent agreements with Pyongyang have alarmed Seoul and should deepen its cooperation with democratic allies. India, through its membership in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—also known as the Quad, the strategic partnership that also includes Australia, Japan, and the United States—is cooperating closely with the U.S. military and emerging as a pivotal power in the Indo-Pacific. Vietnam, too, appears willing to contribute, given its own strategic concerns with China. The challenge will be to turn the ambitions of U.S. partners into sustained commitment once the costs of enhanced defense capabilities become clear.
In Europe, the war in Ukraine has mobilized NATO in ways unimaginable a few years ago. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO’s Arctic flank brings real military capability and helps secure the Baltic states. The question of postwar security arrangements for Ukraine hangs over the continent at this moment. The most straightforward answer would be to admit Ukraine to NATO and simultaneously to the European Union. Both institutions have accession processes that would take some time. The key point is this: Moscow needs to know that the alliance does not intend to leave a vacuum in Europe.
The United States also needs a strategy for dealing with the nonaligned states of the global South. These countries will insist on strategic flexibility, and Washington should resist the urge to issue loyalty tests. Rather, it should develop policies that address their concerns. Above all, the United States needs a meaningful alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s massive global infrastructure program. The BRI is often depicted as helping China win hearts and minds, but in reality it is not winning anything. Recipients are growing frustrated with the corruption, poor safety and labor standards, and fiscal unsustainability associated with its projects. The aid that the United States, Europe, Japan, and others offer is small by comparison, but unlike Chinese aid, it can attract significant foreign direct investment from the private sector, thus dwarfing the amount provided by the BRI. But you can’t beat something with nothing. A U.S. strategy that shows no interest in a region until China shows up is not going to succeed. Washington needs to demonstrate sustained engagement with countries in the global South on the issues they care about—namely, economic development, security, and climate change.
WHICH WAY, AMERICA?
The pre–World War II era was defined not only by great-power conflict and a weak international order but also by a rising tide of populism and isolationism. So is the current era. The main question hanging over the international system today is, Where does America stand?
The biggest difference between the first half of the twentieth century and the second half was the fact of Washington’s sustained and purposeful global engagement. After World War II, the United States was a confident country, with a baby boom, a growing middle class, and unbridled optimism about the future. The struggle against communism provided bipartisan unity, even if there were sometimes disagreements over specific policies. Most agreed with President John F. Kennedy that their country was willing to “pay any price, bear any burden” in the defense of freedom.
The United States is a different country now—exhausted by eight decades of international leadership, some of it successful and appreciated, and some of it dismissed as failure. The American people are different, too—less confident in their institutions and in the viability of the American dream. Years of divisive rhetoric, Internet echo chambers, and, even among the best-educated youth, ignorance of the complexity of history have left Americans with a tattered sense of shared values. For the latter problem, elite cultural institutions bear much of the blame. They have rewarded those who tear down the United States and ridiculed those who extol its virtues. To address Americans’ lack of faith in their institutions and in one another, schools and colleges must change their curricula to offer a more balanced view of U.S. history. And instead of creating a climate that reinforces one’s existing opinions, these and other institutions should encourage a healthy debate in which competing ideas are encouraged.
That said, great-power DNA is still very much in the American genome. Americans carry two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. One side of the brain looks at the world and thinks that the United States has done enough, saying, “It is someone else’s turn.” The other side looks abroad and sees a large country trying to extinguish a smaller one, children choking on nerve gas, or a terrorist group beheading a journalist and says, “We must act.” The president can appeal to either side.
On the USS Ronald Reagan in Danang, Vietnam, June 2023
Nhac Nguyen / AFP / Getty Images
The new Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism—tend to ride together, and they are challenging the political center. Only the United States can counter their advance and resist the temptation to go back to the future. But generating support for an internationalist foreign policy requires a president to paint a vivid picture of what that world would be like without an active United States. In such a world, an emboldened Putin and Xi, having defeated Ukraine, would move on to their next conquest. Iran would celebrate the United States’ withdrawal from the Middle East and sustain its illegitimate regime by external conquest through its proxies. Hamas and Hezbollah would launch more wars, and hopes that Gulf Arab states would normalize relations with Israel would be dashed. The international economy would be weaker, sapping U.S. growth. International waters would be contested, with piracy and other incidents at sea stalling the movement of goods. American leaders should remind the public that a reluctant United States has repeatedly been drawn into conflict—in 1917, 1941, and 2001. Isolation has never been the answer to the country’s security or prosperity.
Then, a leader must say that the United States is well positioned to design a different future. The country’s endlessly creative private sector is capable of continuous innovation. The United States has an unparalleled and secure energy bounty from Canada to Mexico that can sustain it through a reasonable energy transition over the many years it will take. It has more allies than any great power in history and good friends, as well. People around the world seeking a better life still dream of becoming Americans. If the United States can summon the will to deal with its immigration puzzle, it will not suffer the demographic calamity that faces most of the developed world.
The United States’ global involvement will not look exactly as it has for the last 80 years. Washington is likely to choose its engagements more carefully. If deterrence is strong, that may be enough. Allies will have to bear more of the cost of defending themselves. Trade agreements will be less ambitious and global but more regional and selective.
Internationalists must admit that they had a blind spot for those Americans, such as the unemployed coal miner and steelworker, who lost out as good jobs fled abroad. And the forgotten did not take kindly to the argument that they should shut up and be happy with cheap Chinese goods. This time, there can be no more platitudes about the advantages of globalization for all. There must be a real effort to give people meaningful education, skills, and job training. The task is even more urgent since technological progress will severely punish those who cannot keep up.
Those who argue for engagement will need to reframe what it means. The 80 years of U.S. internationalism is another analogy that doesn’t perfectly fit the circumstances of today. Still, if the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries taught Americans anything, it is this: other great powers don’t mind their own business. Instead, they seek to shape the global order. The future will be determined by the alliance of democratic, free-market states or it will be determined by the revisionist powers, harking back to a day of territorial conquest abroad and authoritarian practices at home. There is simply no other option.
- CONDOLEEZZA RICE is Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She served as U.S. Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009 and as U.S. National Security Adviser from 2001 to 2005.
Foreign Affairs · by Condoleezza Rice · August 20, 2024
17. Mark Cuban Says 'Everybody's Chasing Power, And Nothing Will Give You More Power Than Military And AI'
Certainly a provocative view.
Excerpts:
Even though there’s a lot we don’t know about AI, Cuban is sure that the U.S. is at the forefront of developing it. He believes this is important, not just for business but also for national security. “We are, without question, the leader,” he said, stressing how crucial it is for the U.S. to keep that lead.
Countries are now competing to be the best at AI to boost their economies and protect their national security. This competition is about having the best tech and who controls the algorithms.
Mark Cuban Says 'Everybody's Chasing Power, And Nothing Will Give You More Power Than Military And AI'
finance.yahoo.com · by Adrian VolenikUpdated Mon, Aug 19, 2024, 2:09 AM4 min readLink Copied140
Mark Cuban Says 'Everybody's Chasing Power, And Nothing Will Give You More Power Than Military And AI'
Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur, had many insights during his recent appearance on The Daily Show. Although he discussed many topics, what stood out were his views on power, the military, and artificial intelligence (AI).
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Cuban pointed out that in today’s world, everyone is increasingly focused on gaining and maintaining power, “and nothing will give you more power than military and AI,” he exclaimed.
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Cuban worries about how technology, particularly AI, is being developed and used. He sees AI as something with a lot of potential but also as something hard to predict: “I’ve been in technology for a long time, and you can always look at a new tech, PCs, networks, the internet, streaming, whatever, and say, OK, in five years, this is what’s going to happen, right, and have a good sense.”
“With AI, you can’t do that,” he said, describing the difficulty in knowing exactly where AI will lead us.
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Even though there’s a lot we don’t know about AI, Cuban is sure that the U.S. is at the forefront of developing it. He believes this is important, not just for business but also for national security. “We are, without question, the leader,” he said, stressing how crucial it is for the U.S. to keep that lead.
Countries are now competing to be the best at AI to boost their economies and protect their national security. This competition is about having the best tech and who controls the algorithms.
Cuban also explained to Stewart how powerful algorithms can be, saying that whoever controls them can easily shape people’s opinions and decisions. “If you want to influence somebody, just manipulate the algorithm, and you’ll get their attention,” he stated.
Here is my unpopular on @X opinion on this political cycle:
"This seems to be to be a race where everyone's frame of reference is influenced more by the narratives delivered by the algorithms we consume than the actual events themselves.
Those algorithms evolve as new...
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) July 15, 2024
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Cuban’s comments about the algorithms align with his tweet last month, in which he said they’re potentially steering the outcome of the 2024 election. He explained that artificial intelligence plays a bigger role in the current election season than ever before.
Instead of policies or candidates’ personalities being the main focus, it’s the algorithms that really drive what people see and how they form their opinions. In his words, “The most influential position in politics is that of whoever controls the algorithms for each significant online platform.”
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Throughout the talk, Cuban stressed that while AI and military power are incredibly strong, we must use them responsibly and have good leadership. He warned that because AI is developing so quickly, we can’t predict everything that might happen, but that doesn’t stop the race for power from being very intense.
Some tech leaders are far more optimistic than Cuban about artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are just some Silicon Valley capitalists who see AI as a powerful tool for improving society.
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finance.yahoo.com · by Adrian VolenikUpdated Mon, Aug 19, 2024, 2:09 AM4 min readLink Copied140
18. Rethinking the Role of a Systems Integrator for Artificial Intelligence
Excerpts:
Conclusion
The monopsonistic nature and long buying cycles of the defense markets create immense problems for a government buyer looking to maintain the same sharp competitive pressures that spur value delivery in commercial industry. The traditional approach to pick a large systems integrator and apply indirect pressure through that prime to subcontractors has consistently been inconsistently successful. Arguably, the persistence of the phrase “picking a winner” in government acquisitions tells you everything you need to know about the failure of competitive pressures to persist after a contract is awarded. The perniciousness of the concept of picking winners is even sharper in the critical field of AI because the concept of a “best” AI model really only exists at the most granular level: The optimal model to infer on a single data point for a single task is not guaranteed to be optimal anywhere else.
A viable approach to achieving optimality throughout the whole data and task space, in the form of a highly automated matching market, exists in commercial industry — in finance, advertising, higher education, and other two-sided marketplaces. In this world, the systems integrator for AI functions best as the maintainer of marketplaces, providing model developers and model consumers open, objective, and competitive access. Competition occurs billions of times a day, not once or twice a decade, and models win on performance, not PowerPoints. In government and in industry, as acquisitions experts and amateurs — as a nation — there’s a clear consensus that a “business as usual” approach to acquisitions is a threat to our national security. In a multi-polar world, technological progress is nearly inevitable, as is the ability of an efficient solution to displace inefficient ones. Our continued competitiveness on an increasingly AI-dominated battlefield demands that we complete the transformation of AI acquisition into an efficient market structure.
Rethinking the Role of a Systems Integrator for Artificial Intelligence - War on the Rocks
Jim Rebesco and Anthony Manganiello
warontherocks.com · by Jim Rebesco · August 20, 2024
In a now-famous blog post from 2014, journalist Steve Cichon compared a Radio Shack ad from 1991 to the then-current iPhone. The difference was stark. Of the 15 items in the ad, 13 had effectively disappeared, all of them replaced by the singular smartphone. The technology landscape embodied in 1991 was unrecognizable by 2014 — and vice versa.
1991 was also the year of the Gulf War. Looking at the defense platforms fielded that year compared to 2014 — or 2024, for that matter — shows a very different story. Not only are the technologies entirely recognizable to a 2024 audience, but the majority of those systems are still in active service.
By any measure, the development of novel technologies in the defense sector has slowed, lagging well behind the pace of commercial industry. Attempts to diagnose the problem are myriad. We talk about intellectual property rights. We talk about commercial-off-the-shelf versus government-off-the-shelf software. We talk about vendor lock, open architectures, and application programming interfaces. I’ve heard countless debates about traditional versus nontraditional defense contractors and about the idea of doing business differently — making it smarter and more agile.
As part of the founding team of Striveworks, a company that does business with the Department of Defense, we have a vested interest in government acquisitions, particularly around AI. However, we have decades of experience in the commercial sector and have seen first-hand how efficient, competitive market structures in our public equity and futures markets can create a competitive flywheel that benefits market participants.
The defense sector’s sluggish innovation is not for lack of trying on the government side. The Department of Defense has numerous innovation initiatives, from Small Business Innovation Research grants to the Defense Innovation Unit, AFWERX, the Army Applications Lab, and others. Defense leaders have made concerted efforts to lower the barriers to entry for startups and other nontraditional defense contractors to do business with the Defense Department. The so-called Last Supper, the post–Cold War consolidation of defense primes, has also been appropriately highlighted as a consequentially negative development in our defense industrial base. The rapid evolution of AI places even more pressure on us as a nation to develop new pathways of acquisition that match the requirements of technology.
This is all useful, well intended, and valuable, but they are ultimately treating a symptom and not the disease. If every market exists to match supply and demand, these activities only increase the supply of novel capabilities — and that’s not the fundamental problem.
The problem is one of competition and the incentives it drives. The market for AI capabilities is uniquely suited to be recast as a continuous competition between models for “the right to inference” individual data points. Creating this constant competition will align incentives for vendors and government alike, creating better outcomes and reducing cost.
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The Problem with a Single Buyer Market
When it comes to defense, the number of buyers is small. For large systems, there’s really only a single customer: the U.S. Defense Department (allied and partner military sales are highly correlated with the U.S. acquisitions). This puts the defense market very close to monopsony. Buying decisions occur infrequently — often only once every few years. In this environment, buyers rightly fear that vendors lack strong incentives to keep improving and iterating their products after they win a contract.
This asymmetry is why supply-side interventions don’t address the root cause of slow innovation. Encouraging nontraditional vendors and lowering barriers to entry to the defense market increase competition to the left of a major program contract; after it’s awarded, though, the problem of incentives post-award remains. (Certainly, there are incentives for growth, renewal, and expansion, but the discount factor on a recompete in five years or a lateral expansion in three years is significant.)
In an effort to address this problem, contracting officers end up allocating immense effort to defining what is and isn’t government intellectual property, attempting to lay out interfaces and define compatible subsystems, and grappling with concepts like vendor lock. Like the efforts to increase supply, these efforts improve the state of the market at the margins but don’t cut deeply to the core of the problem. They sharpen competitive pressures at the margin, but, ultimately, the challenges with defense technology must get fixed on the demand side — by eliminating the monopsony and returning to a healthy market structure where many buyers participate to incentivize innovation as in most commercial markets.
Why AI Needs a Systems Dis-Integrator
Exquisite, unique systems — stealth bombers, nuclear-powered submarines, aircraft carriers — don’t fit this multiple buyer market template. The buy is too unique and in necessarily small quantities. A different dynamic exists for business enterprise software — word processors, chat, video conferencing, and enterprise resource planning systems; the overlap between how the Defense Department uses these tools and how any large commercial company does is nearly perfect. Congress and the Defense Department have done well to take a “free ride” on the iterative buying decisions of the commercial market.
In this context, AI exists in a unique market. Only a few technologies have fundamentally restructured economic markets before. The printing press slashed the marginal cost of production for information (and the advent of digital media then zeroed it out). Likewise, the internet effectively eliminated the cost of distribution for information. The rise of the AI market will ultimately prove just as disruptive to the basic nature of economic transactions.
How does this relate to the business model of a systems integrator in defense? AI shares some properties with software: Once you have the model, the marginal costs to produce and distribute its output — the inference — are extremely low. But there is a fundamental difference between AI and software. AI is non-monolithic. Software gains leverage through monolithic horizontal scaling. This element of software is driving people to rethink the role of the systems integrator for software. Unlike software, where deterministic outputs to the same input are a core principle, the performance of AI models is highly contextual and time-dependent. Models drift, data changes, and even so-called foundational models are fine-tuned, retrained, and repurposed to new users and new use cases. There is no best model — only the best model for a particular data point at a particular time. The “fit” between a data point and a model is ephemeral and unique. This characteristic of AI has already been internalized by investors, regulators, and, of course, industry.
Yet the impacts that this essential difference can have on systems integrators for defense are still underappreciated. The business model, implemented through technology, that best suits the ephemeral nature of AI is a two-sided “marketplace” between data points and validated models. We call this approach a systems dis-integrator, and it’s a technological function as well as an organizational process. This approach isn’t new: Electronified financial markets, automated bidding in online advertising, and even the matching process for medical residency admissions have already disaggregated buyers, generated competitive pressures, and driven down costs. All these examples operate as two-sided markets of bidders and offerors matched through a digital marketplace.
The same approach should apply to the Defense Department’s AI initiatives. With a two-sided market, data streams — individual data points — would come together with a host of AI models that compete (i.e., bid) to demonstrate their appropriateness for each particular data point. A matching engine would pair these data points and models, much like buyers and sellers are matched in financial markets or real-time bidding networks for digital ads.
Most importantly, in a single stroke, the Defense Department could stop worrying about “picking winners” or initializing competitions once a decade. By shifting the point of competition from the prime contractor or subcontractor down to the datapoint and inference, the government can turn the acquisition of AI into a highly iterative, highly competitive market at the stroke of a pen. From geospatial intelligence to decision support, there are millions of datapoints flowing through AI systems every day in the Defense Department. Creating “markets” for these datapoints to be matched with models fosters a newfound level of competition that benefits the Defense Department and warfighters.
Steps Forward
The Defense Department and intelligence community have started initiatives in this direction. They have piloted programs that have tried to run iterative development — model “bake off” competitions, such as Project Maven, and other initiatives at the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Given the technology available at the time, these efforts were well directed, and they generated a lot of lessons learned — both good and bad — for delivering consistent, performant, and operationally relevant inferences to warfighters. These programs set out to acquire “gold standard” models — soliciting model submissions from a restricted pool of vendors and evaluating model efficacy on a static, holdout dataset. The most performant models were then purchased, and the programs repeated this process every three to nine months. This is a great first step — but we must go much further.
There are no such gold standard models. Model performance is constantly in flux and, unfortunately, typically degrading. This degradation can be driven by environmental factors or adversary actions. Importantly, those adversarial actions can be not just high-tech interventions, like adversarial patches, but very low-tech interventions as well. Basic camouflage and military deception have significant impact on AI systems, and these countermeasures can be deployed in days — and for hundreds of dollars. The United States cannot compete over the long term if its ability to cycle new models into operational milieus is measured in months and millions of dollars. The United States and its allies are already confronted with this economic calculus in air defense today: Knocking down a $500 quadcopter with a $3 million missile is a fundamentally losing proposition, regardless of the specifics of a particular engagement.
But it doesn’t have to be this way for AI. The Defense Department needs to think about models not as exquisite systems but as consumables — a “class XI” of supplies. The rapid commoditization of foundational models, paired with an automated technological solution that selects domain-specific models for inference in real time, creates a dynamic AI ecosystem where adaptations can occur millisecond to millisecond and the marginal cost is measured in cents, not millions.
Systems Dis-Integration Opens a Direct Marketplace for AI Inferences
Five years ago, AI model management was an intensely manual process, and the concept of a systems dis-integrator would have been purely conceptual. Recent advances in the automation of AI model management make this systems dis-integrator approach a realizable vision today. Model builders could bring their models into a catalog. Once loaded in the system, an evaluation framework would register model metadata and the model’s source-derived training data. On the other end of the marketplace, customers who need inferences would leverage the increasing proliferation of data ontologies to programmatically deliver data points preloaded with metadata — for example, the Army’s Unified Data Reference Architecture. A matching engine would then route data points to the most appropriate model. Depending on the use cases, factors like weighing the statistical properties of the inference data, the associated metadata, and user feedback on model performance, inference latency, inference resource load, and other considerations can be used to define the matching algorithm. As with the matching algorithms in commercial markets, the matching algorithm would be public and available for iteration over time. While this algorithmic matching requires additional computation on the margin, the compute required is a small fraction of that needed to perform the inference itself — because the match looks like a query into a database, versus a very graphics processing unit–intensive inference computation. Under the presumption that the compute and infrastructure exist for the models themselves to exist, the marginal burden of matching is not significant.
Why consider an approach like this one? Because it has huge, direct benefits for both sides: the model builders and the data-owning consumers. In this scenario, model builders compete purely on the merits of their developed models. It also provides a lower barrier-to-entry pathway for model builders into different segments of these inference markets. Model builders can submit a specialized model, via application programming interface, that seeks to carve out advantage in one small segment of the marketplace. With the right scaffolding, this can be done at a lower upfront cost to the builder and with the ability to iterate, resubmit, expand, trim, and so forth, much more often.
Meanwhile, inference buyers get to optimize the quality of every individual inference — not just the average performance over all inferences. Commercial vendors, government teams, research groups, federally funded research and development centers, and open-source developers all compete on a level and objective playing field. This approach bypasses the emotional appeals of proposals and lets the heart of the matter — model performance — speak for itself. Further, this concept extends and enhances the efforts already under way to implement thoughtful and codified processes for test, evaluation, validation, and verification of AI models prior to deployment. Those test and evaluation processes can remain an important prior step to the acceptance of models into a deployment scaffolding. Once in that deployment scaffolding, this concept of real-time inference matching provides an additional, complementary layer of safety around deployed models — reducing the risk that models with performance below operationally required levels touch production data and drive erroneous decisions. Active learning and other “on-the-fly” approaches to changing model performance can continue to be governed by the appropriate test and evaluation processes.
The nature and type of risks borne by market participants in such a system are also dramatically reallocated. Model vendors exclusively carry the risk for model performance: Non-performant models don’t get used, and their vendors don’t earn payments. The government wears the operational risk — defining market access, incentive structures, and so forth.
This is demonstrably different from today’s system. Right now, the government carries all the risk associated with performance: The overwhelming majority of contracting for AI models are done on a firm fixed price or time and materials construct where the model is an explicit deliverable. Unlike a usage-based approach, the standards of traditional contracting fail to match the highly iterative, evolving nature of constantly improving models — consequently, the cost of retraining or finding a new model if it doesn’t perform. As the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence observed in their 2021 final report,
Critically, the Defense Acquisition System must shift away from a one-size-fits-all approach to measuring value from the acquisition process. Adherence to cost, schedule, and performance baselines is rarely a proxy for value delivered, but is particularly unsuited for measuring and incentivizing the iterative approaches inherent in AI and other software-based digital technologies. Unless the requirements, budgeting, and acquisition processes are aligned to permit faster and more targeted execution, the U.S. will fail to stay ahead of potential adversaries.
Because those contracting actions are large and infrequent (months or years) and because funds are de facto even if not de jure obligated up front, the incentives to continue innovating are considerably dulled — many of the people on both sides of the acquisition decision won’t even be in the same job when it’s time to recompete. The acquisitions professionals in the government are also humans who are stretched very thin; between increased workload, increased regulation, and the increased frequency and duration of continuing resolutions, asking contracting officers to “just think outside the box” presumes a luxury of time and space that doesn’t exist. Like a prisoner’s dilemma, the rational result of our system of incentives today is globally suboptimal. Working with the acquisitions professionals and building a distinct, competition-based acquisition pathway for AI is the better path forward.
Meanwhile, the model vendor carries all the operational risk: getting market access, balancing the equities of their intellectual property portfolio with a government customer fearful of vendor lock, etc. The Defense Innovation Unit and other innovation shops are doing admirable work to bring down this operational risk, particularly with expanding market access. But even so, it remains the wrong risk for emerging vendors to carry.
This allocation of risks is subpar for everyone. The government loses quality of product because model builders are incentivized to devote precious energy to developing byzantine distribution channels inside government acquisition systems — rather than ruthlessly focusing on better and better models that directly contribute to customer value.
Under a true marketplace system, payment would shift to a per-inference structure. Models that do not perform cost the government nothing — unlike our current system. Per-inference payment might raise concerns of high costs if it were uncapped, but, if so, there is an easy fix: The government could institute a rebate model. On a regular basis, the government would allocate a fixed budget pro rata to all successful inferences over that time period. Overall cost would remain a fixed “not-to-exceed” number, but individual payments would fall in direct proportion to the market share earned by the model. There are close analogs to usage-based pricing models. In the commercial space, the buying model for “models as a service” is already dominated by per token or per application programming interface call. There has been broad signaling from acquisition shops pushing the cutting edge, like the Tradewinds team in the chief digital and artificial intelligence office in the Defense Department, that consumption models can be executed within existing federal acquisition law — but in a world where defense primes are vociferous that they need all of the cost risk to be worn by the government, what’s been missing is the “killer use case” that forces a shift in thinking – AI inference is that use case.
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Conclusion
The monopsonistic nature and long buying cycles of the defense markets create immense problems for a government buyer looking to maintain the same sharp competitive pressures that spur value delivery in commercial industry. The traditional approach to pick a large systems integrator and apply indirect pressure through that prime to subcontractors has consistently been inconsistently successful. Arguably, the persistence of the phrase “picking a winner” in government acquisitions tells you everything you need to know about the failure of competitive pressures to persist after a contract is awarded. The perniciousness of the concept of picking winners is even sharper in the critical field of AI because the concept of a “best” AI model really only exists at the most granular level: The optimal model to infer on a single data point for a single task is not guaranteed to be optimal anywhere else.
A viable approach to achieving optimality throughout the whole data and task space, in the form of a highly automated matching market, exists in commercial industry — in finance, advertising, higher education, and other two-sided marketplaces. In this world, the systems integrator for AI functions best as the maintainer of marketplaces, providing model developers and model consumers open, objective, and competitive access. Competition occurs billions of times a day, not once or twice a decade, and models win on performance, not PowerPoints. In government and in industry, as acquisitions experts and amateurs — as a nation — there’s a clear consensus that a “business as usual” approach to acquisitions is a threat to our national security. In a multi-polar world, technological progress is nearly inevitable, as is the ability of an efficient solution to displace inefficient ones. Our continued competitiveness on an increasingly AI-dominated battlefield demands that we complete the transformation of AI acquisition into an efficient market structure.
Jim Rebesco is co-founder and chief executive officer of Striveworks, a machine learning operations company.
Anthony Manganiello, a retired Army officer, is co-founder and chief administrative officer of Striveworks.
Image: Staff Sgt. Joseph Pagan
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Jim Rebesco · August 20, 2024
19. 10th Annual Future Security Forum - ASU & New America
10th Annual Future Security Forum - ASU & New America
https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/10th-annual-future-security-forum-asu-new-america
Mon, 08/19/2024 - 2:11pm
The Future Security Forum is the main annual event of the Future Security partnership connecting Arizona State University and New America. This year, the partnership celebrates its 10th annual Forum, in collaboration with Security & Defence PLuS, on September 9 and 10, 2024. The forum will gather the top policymakers, government and military leaders, experts, and analysts at New America’s Washington, DC office for two days of discussions on what global security will look like over the next decade. Key speakers include:
LTG. (ret.) H.R. McMaster, Former National Security Adviser; Arizona State University Distinguished University Fellow; Author, At War With Ourselves
Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King’s College; Author, Command and The Future of War: A History
Evelyn Farkas, Executive Director, The McCain Institute at Arizona State University; Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia
Sir Simon Gass, Senior Advisor to SC Strategy, former senior British diplomat and subsequently Chair of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee
Vice Admiral Ann Rondeau (US Navy, Ret.), President, Naval Postgraduate School; former member of the ASU Flag Officer Advisory Council
On September 9, Arizona State University and New America’s Future Security program will explore how global security has changed over the past decade and will change over the decade to come. Topics of discussion on September 9 will include how artificial intelligence will change warfare over the next decade, the state of the terrorist threat today, the future of U.S.-China relations, and more.
On September 10, Security & Defence PLuS, a partnership between Arizona State University, King’s College London, and the University of New South Wales, will gather experts and leaders from the three AUKUS nations and beyond to discuss advancing Indo-Pacific security over the next 10 years.
Space is limited. If you are interested in attending in-person, you can request an invitation here.
20. Is China conducting 'gray zone' warfare for Russia?
Coordination among the axis of tyranny/dictators?
Is China conducting 'gray zone' warfare for Russia? - Asia Times
China acknowledges container ship severed Finland-Estonia pipeline at time Moscow was peeved with Helsinki for joining NATO
asiatimes.com · by Denny Roy · August 19, 2024
In October 2023, damage to the Balticconnector gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia knocked it out for six months. Suspicion quickly fell upon a Chinese-owned, Hong Kong-flagged container ship called the Newnew Polar Bear.
Now the South China Morning Post has reported that the Chinese government agrees the anchor of the Newnew Polar Bear severed the pipeline. Chinese authorities add that the damage was accidental and resulted from stormy weather.
That Beijing is taking ownership of this incident is a significant and unambiguously good development. But its full significance may go deeper – and darker.
Beijing generally does not like to admit to its mistakes. The PRC often has preferred to stand on implausible counter-explanations rather than admit fault.
In the infamous 2001 aerial collision incident off Hainan Island, the Chinese government asserted that a relatively nimble Chinese J-8 fighter jet was the victim of sudden, aggressive maneuvering by a US EP-3 – a lumbering, four-engine, propeller-driven aircraft.
Amid a 2011 spate of incidents in disputed areas of the South China Sea in which Chinese vessels harassed Vietnamese oil exploration ships by cutting the cables that towed their survey equipment, in one case the PRC government claimed a Chinese crew cut the cable in self-defense due to aggressive maneuvering by the survey vessel.
China’s admission of responsibility for damaging the Balticconnector is best understood not as an indication of PRC interest in transparency, but rather a case of Beijing deciding it’s counterproductive to continue denying in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
As an example, PRC officials denied for years that Beijing had a serious air pollution problem, even claiming the US embassy’s reported air quality measurements were fake news until authorities tired of defending a patently ridiculous position and started talking about solutions.
Another example: On January 11, 2007, without prior announcement, China launched a missile into space that destroyed an aging Chinese satellite, creating a large debris field. The US had stopped such tests in 1985 because of the danger that sort of debris poses to other equipment in space.
The Chinese government drew international condemnation not only for the test but also for refusing to speak about it. Nearly two weeks later, PRC Foreign Ministry spokesperson Liu Jianchao finally confirmed the test, while emphasizing that the incident was a “peaceful use of space” and “does not constitute a threat to any country.”
There are exceptions to the pattern. In some matters, the negative political ramifications of coming clean are so large that the Chinese government will never admit to bad behavior, even if confronted with mountains of incriminating evidence.
This list would include the mass persecution and imprisonment of Uighurs in Xinjiang Province, the massacre of protestors in and near Tiananmen Square in June 1989, and China’s government-sponsored cybercrime.
The Newnew Polar Bear incident is similar to the February 2023 spy balloon incident, in which the Chinese government evidently decided that total denial was untenable so it admitted that the balloon indeed came from China – but claimed that its purpose was innocent (weather monitoring rather than collecting signals intelligence) and that its flight over the US was unintentional.
The NewNew Polar Bear incident appears more darkly ominous if we consider the context.
Some investigators believe the damage was intentional. Estonia’s defense minister questioned how the ship’s crew could have been unaware their anchor was plowing the seabed for a reported 180 kilometers before it hit the pipeline.
Similarly, Finland’s Minister of European Affairs Anders Adlercreutz opined, “I would think that you would notice that you’re dragging an anchor behind you for hundreds of kilometers. I think everything indicates that it was intentional.”
China is a quasi-ally of Russia, and Russia had a motive to punish Finland. At the time of the incident, relations between the two countries were tense because Finland had become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) six months prior.
The month the Balticconnector was severed, Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service reported that Russia considered Finland a hostile country and was “prepared to take measures against Finland.”
The Newnew Polar Bear has significant Russian connections. After leaving the damaged area, the ship sailed between China’s east coast and Russia’s Baltic coast using the Northern Sea Route within the Arctic Circle, proving that this route (shorter than going through the Suez Canal) is viable for cargo ships. During part of its voyage, a Russian government-owned icebreaker accompanied the ship.
The ship also changed the name of its registered operator from the Chinese company Hainan Xin Xin Yang to the Russian company Torgmoll, which has offices in Shanghai and Moscow and participates in Belt and Road Initiative projects.
The PRC government can order any Chinese national in the private sector to carry out a national security-related task and that citizen must comply. The percentage of PRC private citizens who actually do side jobs for their government is probably small, but it is clear the PRC government routinely uses the Chinese private sector as a force multiplier:
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Civilian fishing fleets support China’s geopolitical objectives in the South China Sea.
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The PRC enlists some of its private citizens residing abroad to gather intelligence.
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And it relies on civilian businesses to help supply computer hackers who commit cyber crimes under government direction.
China is suspected of doing something similar in the Taiwan Strait. Activity by Chinese fishing boats and excavator equipment regularly cuts undersea communication cables that connect Taiwan with its offshore islands that are very close to the coast of mainland China.
Here, as well, there is a clear motive as Beijing has been carrying out various forms of gray zone warfare against Taiwan for years.
Atlantic Council senior fellow Elisabeth Braw concludes that the rupture of undersea cables serving Taiwan is so “disproportionately frequent” that it “doesn’t look like accidental damage — it looks like harassment of Taiwan.”
Sabotage of undersea internet cables may be a skill China practiced close to home and is now taking farther afield.
There are three possibilities in the NewNew Polar Bear incident:
The best case is that the Balticconnector’s was severed accidentally; Chinese authorities might even be pressuring Chinese shippers to ensure that something similar never happens again because the fallout is embarrassing to China.
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Another possibility is that the incident was intentional sabotage directed by some part of the Chinese government but the overall result was negative enough to dissuade China from engaging in similar behavior again.
The worst-case possibility is that we are seeing the beginning of a new form of strategic cooperation between China and Russia.
North Korea is supplying Russia with missiles and artillery ammunition for Putin’s war in Ukraine. Until now, Beijing has avoided going that far to support Putin. Rather, China has been providing non-lethal assistance while PRC officials and the media criticize the United States for “adding fuel to the flames” by arming Ukraine.
But conducting gray zone warfare outside of its claimed sphere of influence and in direct support of Moscow’s interests would be a new aspect of Sino-Russian security cooperation, posing new global challenges by the authoritarian bloc to the US bloc.
If the sabotage of the Balticconnector was indeed intentional, Beijing knowingly jeopardized its attempts to improve relations with Western Europe. This would also raise the question of what Moscow owes Beijing in return.
A parallel form of payback would be some kind of concrete Russian action to help China win a conflict involving Taiwan or the South China Sea.
It may be hoped that the Chinese government’s takeaway from this incident is that openness is not so bad – not that gray zone warfare is made viable by claiming it was an accident.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
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asiatimes.com · by Denny Roy · August 19, 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
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