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Quotes of the Day:
"When the debate is lost, insults become the loser's tool."
- Socrates
"The oldest and shortest words – 'yes' and 'no' – are those which require the most thought."
– Pythagoras
"I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in or even more so."
– Romain Rolland
1. Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat
2. How a General’s Blunder Left Russia’s Border Vulnerable
3. China's 'growing authoritarianism' won't stop with Taiwan: Lai
4. IRGC founder to ‘Post’: Iran unable to sustain long-term war with Israel
5. Tough U.S. Sanctions Packages Are Here to Stay—Whether It’s Harris or Trump
6. China says it is 'seriously concerned' about US nuclear strategic report
7. Commentary: Is Japan ready for a female prime minister?
8. Walmart sells $3.74 billion JD.com stake to focus on its own China operations
9. ‘War Game’ Review: It Can’t Happen Here (Right?)
10. Haniyeh Was Killed by an F-35
11. Let the Marine Corps Test Force Design in the Grey Zone
12. U.S. military unprepared for nuclear escalation in war with China, Pentagon-funded study warns
13. Taiwan’s ‘China-free’ Drone Program May Not Be
14. War Is Draining Ukraine’s Male-Dominated Work Force. Enter the Women.
15. The Pentagon Is Planning a Drone ‘Hellscape’ to Defend Taiwan
16. Israel Is Winning
17. The Return of Hamiltonian Statecraft
18. U.S. Army Has A Plan For Paragliding Paratroopers
1. Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat
Excerpts:
The White House never announced that Mr. Biden had approved the revised strategy, called the “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” which also newly seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document, updated every four years or so, is so highly classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
...
... Mr. Kim has doubled down, and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, and the fuel for many more.
That expansion has changed the nature of the North Korean challenge: When the country possessed just a handful of weapons, it could be deterred by missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size of Pakistan’s and Israel’s, and it is large enough that it could, in theory, coordinate threats with Moscow and Beijing.
...
“It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be,” Mr. Narang said as he was leaving the Pentagon. “It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.”
The new challenge is “the real possibility of collaboration and even collusion between our nuclear-armed adversaries,” he said.
Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat
In a classified document approved in March, the president ordered U.S. forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/us/politics/biden-nuclear-china-russia.html
President Biden spent much of his political career as an advocate of nuclear nonproliferation and reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American defenses.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
By David E. Sanger
David E. Sanger has written about American nuclear strategy for The New York Times for nearly four decades.
Aug. 20, 2024
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President Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan for the United States that, for the first time, reorients America’s deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal.
The shift comes as the Pentagon believes China’s stockpiles will rival the size and diversity of the United States’ and Russia’s over the next decade.
The White House never announced that Mr. Biden had approved the revised strategy, called the “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” which also newly seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document, updated every four years or so, is so highly classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
But in recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to allude to the change — in carefully constrained, single sentences — ahead of a more detailed, unclassified notification to Congress expected before Mr. Biden leaves office.
“The president recently issued updated nuclear-weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries,” Vipin Narang, an M.I.T. nuclear strategist who served in the Pentagon, said earlier this month before returning to academia. “And in particular,” he added, the weapons guidance accounted for “the significant increase in the size and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.
In June, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, Pranay Vaddi, also referred to the document, the first to examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that break out simultaneously or sequentially, with a combination of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.
The new strategy, Mr. Vaddi said, emphasizes “the need to deter Russia, the PRC and North Korea simultaneously,” using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
In the past, the likelihood that American adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to outmaneuver the American nuclear arsenal seemed remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, and the conventional arms North Korea and Iran are providing to Russia for the war in Ukraine have fundamentally changed Washington’s thinking.
Already, Russia and China are conducting military exercises together. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is aiding the North Korean and Iranian missile programs in return.
The new document is a stark reminder that whoever is sworn in next Jan. 20 will confront a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed just three years ago. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including during a crisis in October 2022, when Mr. Biden and his aides, looking at intercepts of conversations between senior Russian commanders, feared the likelihood of nuclear use might rise to 50 percent or even higher.
Mr. Biden, along with leaders of Germany and Britain, got China and India to make public statements that there was no role for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the crisis abated, at least temporarily.
“It was an important moment,” Richard N. Haass, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official for several Republican presidents, and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an interview. “We are dealing with a Russia that is radicalized; the idea that nukes wouldn’t be used in a conventional conflict is not longer a safe assumption.”
The second big change arises from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is running at an even faster pace than American intelligence officials anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-long strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to reach or exceed the size of Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the fastest growing in the world.
Although former President Donald J. Trump confidently predicted that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, would surrender his nuclear weapons after their three in-person meetings, the opposite happened. Mr. Kim has doubled down, and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, and the fuel for many more.
That expansion has changed the nature of the North Korean challenge: When the country possessed just a handful of weapons, it could be deterred by missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size of Pakistan’s and Israel’s, and it is large enough that it could, in theory, coordinate threats with Moscow and Beijing.
A soldier stands before vehicles carrying China’s DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles.Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters
It was only a matter of time before a fundamentally different nuclear environment began to alter American war plans and strategy, officials say.
“It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be,” Mr. Narang said as he was leaving the Pentagon. “It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.”
The new challenge is “the real possibility of collaboration and even collusion between our nuclear-armed adversaries,” he said.
So far in the presidential campaign, the new challenges to American nuclear strategy have not been a topic of debate. Mr. Biden, who spent much of his political career as an advocate of nuclear nonproliferation, has never publicly talked in any detail about how he is responding to the challenges of deterring China’s and North Korea’s expanded forces. Nor has Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic Party’s nominee.
At his last news conference in July, just days before he announced he would no longer seek the Democratic nomination for a second term, Mr. Biden acknowledged that he had adopted a policy of seeking ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia partnership.
“Yes, I do, but I’m not prepared to talk about the detail of it in public,” Mr. Biden said. He made no reference to — and was not asked about — how that partnership was altering American nuclear strategy.
Since Harry Truman’s presidency, that strategy has been overwhelmingly focused on the Kremlin’s arsenal. Mr. Biden’s new guidance suggests how quickly that is shifting.
China was mentioned in the last nuclear guidance, issued at the end of the Trump administration, according to an unclassified account provided to Congress in 2020. But that was before the scope of Mr. Xi’s ambitions was understood.
The Biden strategy sharpens that focus to reflect the Pentagon’s estimates that China’s nuclear force would expand to 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035, roughly the numbers that the United States and Russia now deploy. In fact, Beijing now appears ahead of that schedule, officials say, and has begun loading nuclear missiles into new silo fields that were spotted by commercial satellites three years ago.
There is another concern about Beijing: It has now halted a short-lived conversation with the United States about improving nuclear safety and security — for example, by agreeing to warn each other of impending missile tests, or setting up hotlines or other means of communication to assure that incidents or accidents do not escalate into nuclear encounters.
One discussion between the two countries took place late last fall, just before Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi met in California, where they sought to repair relations between the two countries. They referred to those talks in a joint statement, but by that time the Chinese had already hinted they were not interested in further discussions, and earlier this summer said the conversations were over. They cited American arms sales to Taiwan, which were underway long before the nuclear safety conversations began.
Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary for arms control, deterrence and stability at the State Department, said in an interview that the Chinese government was “actively preventing us from having conversations about the risks.”
Instead, she said, Beijing “seems to be taking a page out of Russia’s playbook that, until we address tensions and challenges in our bilateral relationship, they will choose not to continue our arms control, risk reduction and nonproliferation conversations.”
It was in China’s interest, she argued, “to prevent these risks of miscalculation and misunderstanding.”
David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger
2. How a General’s Blunder Left Russia’s Border Vulnerable
A violation of Sun Tzu 101: "Never assume your enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."
How a General’s Blunder Left Russia’s Border Vulnerable
Col. Gen. Alexander Lapin dismantled a council that oversaw security in the Kursk province in the months before Ukrainian troops invaded
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/how-a-generals-blunder-left-russias-border-vulnerable-9a624abd?mod=hp_lead_pos8
Col. Gen. Alexander Lapin’s misstep is characteristic of a top brass out of touch with battlefield realities. gavriil grigorov/Sputnik/Reuters
By Thomas GroveFollow
Updated Aug. 21, 2024 12:12 am ET
In the spring of this year, Moscow’s new military appointee overseeing security in the Kursk province dismantled a council tasked with protecting the vulnerable border region. Col. Gen. Alexander Lapin said the military alone had the strength and the resources to protect Russia’s border, according to an official in Russian security services.
That plan left yet another hole in Russia’s weak border defenses, which crumbled earlier this month when Ukrainian troops executed a lightning offensive across the border into Kursk. Ukrainian troops crossed the border to find Russian troops in disarray. They surged ahead and now say they occupy more than 400 square miles of Russian territory.
To be sure, Lapin alone didn’t open the gates to the first foreign invasion of Russian territory since World War II. He was faced with a critical shortage of men. But his misstep is characteristic of a top brass often out of touch with battlefield realities, which now plagues Moscow as it seeks to oust Ukrainian forces from its territory.
Ukrainian front line
Ukrainian forces in Russian territory
Russian forces
KURSK REGION
BELARUS
Kursk
RUSSIA
Sumi
Kyiv
Kharkiv
UKRAINE
Chasiv Yar
Pokrovsk
Mariupol
MOL.
Kherson
Odesa
Sea of Azov
100 miles
Black Sea
100 km
Note: As of Aug. 19
Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project
Andrew Barnett/WSJ
Since the start of the war, Russia’s centralized, top-down thinking, one of the defining features of Russia under President Vladimir Putin, has backfired on the battlefield. It has hampered sober planning in the Kremlin, and when those plans have failed, it has prevented Russian forces from improvising to react to fast-moving developments.
“Putin’s power vertical is still in place but for now it’s working against Russian objectives on the ground,” said William Courtney, a former American diplomat and adjunct senior fellow at Rand. “And with Russia’s planning coming all from the top, its responses to unexpected, fast-moving events are incredibly impaired, with no one on the ground taking initiative.”
It is unclear whether the interagency council dissolved by Lapin, a body that combined military officers with local and regional security officials, would have helped organize a coherent response from Moscow. But without a centralized body in charge of Russia’s response, Moscow’s efforts to oust Kyiv’s forces have so far been chaotic and ineffective. That has left Russian security agencies such as the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service, which are in charge of domestic security, and Russia’s Defense Ministry, which is in charge of fighting inside Ukraine, jostling to lead the response.
Ukrainian troops crossed the border to find Russian troops in disarray. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
Ukrainian forces now occupy more than 400 square miles of Russian territory. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
“Russia is still pulling together its reaction to this incursion by Ukraine. There has been a fairly slow and scattered reaction to it,” said Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday. “Part of that is because it wouldn’t exactly be clear who’s in charge.”
The Russian defense ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment. It hasn’t publicly issued an explanation for how it allowed Ukrainian forces to cross into Russian territory. Hours after Ukraine’s incursion, Russia’s chief of general staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, said Lapin’s forces and border guards were working “to destroy the enemy in areas directly adjacent to the Russian-Ukrainian border.”
Gerasimov hasn’t made any public appearances since the incursion.
The initial response is reminiscent of the first hours of the insurrection led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led the mercenary Wagner group in Ukraine. He sent his forces toward Moscow to unseat his rivals he blamed for Russia’s military problems—Gerasimov and the then-defense minister, Sergei Shoigu.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, who sent his forces toward Moscow to unseat rivals, died months later when his plane exploded. Photo: Artem Priakhin/SOPA Images/Zuma Press
Despite days of signals that he was planning to launch an insurrection, the Kremlin was caught off guard and froze in the face of Prigozhin’s actions, said Courtney. Prigozhin, who ultimately halted the rebellion on its march toward Moscow, died two months later when his plane exploded midflight above Russia.
In the days leading up to Ukraine’s invasion, Russia’s military correspondents have said, Lapin’s command had sent reports to Moscow warning that Ukrainian forces were building their numbers on the front line. But the trick had been employed on both sides before as a tactic of psychological warfare, people familiar with border maneuvers said, and Moscow dismissed the warnings.
Regardless of the intelligence about military movements, troops under Lapin’s command still failed to act by enforcing defensive lines or laying mines as Russian soldiers had done last year to stymie a major and well-telegraphed Ukrainian counteroffensive. When Ukrainian soldiers entered the no-man’s-land between Ukraine and Russia, they were met with no resistance and, inside Russia, no territorial defense forces to help slow them down.
In the days leading up to Ukraine’s invasion, Russia’s military correspondents have said, Alexander Lapin’s command warned that Ukrainian forces were building up on the front line. Photo: Donat Sorokin/TASS/Zuma Press
Ukrainian forces used electronic jamming to disable communications, leaving Russian forces unable to contact their commanders. Lightly armed Russian forces were trapped behind the front line and scattered into the forest. Some mounted localized resistance, ambushing Ukrainian forces who moved in to mop up behind the assault troops. But hundreds of Russian soldiers, many of them conscripts, just surrendered.
“In Moscow, they simply were not pondering that a scenario like this could happen,” said Konrad Muzyka, director of Poland-based Rochan Consulting, focusing on the Russian military.
The defensive planning was almost as disastrous as Russia’s initial invasion itself when military planners relying on faulty intelligence—and a belief that the Ukrainian military would crumble under a full-scale assault—sent armored columns into Ukraine in parade formation, making them easy targets for drones and antitank weapons.
Explained: How Ukraine Pulled Off Its Invasion of Russia
Explained: How Ukraine Pulled Off Its Invasion of Russia
Play video: Explained: How Ukraine Pulled Off Its Invasion of Russia
Ukraine took control of hundreds of square miles of Russian territory, captured hundreds of prisoners and destroyed the Kremlin’s initial reinforcements. WSJ explains Kyiv’s biggest attack on Russian soil. Photo: Louisa Naks
Likewise, when the Ukrainian soldiers drove into Russia, their first armed resistance was from the 488th motor rifle regiment of the 144th motor rifle brigade, a unit consisting almost entirely of conscripts, who according to Russian policy aren’t supposed to fight inside Ukraine. The demands of the front had depleted the manpower and resources of Russia’s forces.
Under normal circumstances, they would have had around 120 armored vehicles, including tanks and armored personnel carriers. In their first armed encounter, the conscripts likely had between 10 and 20, said Muzyka.
It wasn’t the first time poor planning and a lack of men had come together under Lapin’s command. In early September 2022, Ukrainian forces launched a surprise attack in northeast Ukraine. Without the Russians having sufficiently fortified their thin front-line positions, Ukrainians blew past them using fast-moving field vehicles, followed by heavier armored echelons. Russia’s offensive line crumbled and Ukraine managed to reclaim thousands of square miles in northeastern Ukraine
Following the debacle, Chechen strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov called for his resignation: “I would demote Lapin to private, strip him of his awards and send him to the front lines with a machine gun.”
Ukrainian forces were able to roll through Ukraine’s Sumy region and into Russia practically unhindered. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
The Russian defense ministry hasn’t publicly issued an explanation for how it allowed Ukrainian forces to cross into Russian territory. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
Some among Russia’s vocal military correspondents thought the criticism was unfair as Lapin had only recently been moved to the area where Russian lines collapsed. Nonetheless, the officer was soon removed from his post and later reappointed as deputy commander of Russia’s forces in Ukraine.
That fiasco caused the Kremlin to rethink its manpower problem, and a month later Russia started a general mobilization to shore up its thin defenses. Since then, the monetary incentives of contract service have kept volunteers coming into Russian draft offices at a rate of about 1,000 a day. That has kept Russia’s war machine chewing off bits of Ukraine in a grinding war of attrition, but high losses have cut away at strategic reserves, constraining how much manpower the Kremlin can now direct at Kursk.
Now, as Russia tries to gain an advantage on its own territory, it is bringing some forces from eastern Ukraine, even if that means taking away manpower from the front line. The bungled response showed that Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory hit Moscow’s weak spot: contingency planning.
“It has certainly demonstrated the creativity and the battlefield prowess of the Ukrainians,” said Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder. “They clearly have compelled the Russians to struggle in their response.”
Michael R. Gordon, Daria Matviichuk, Isabel Coles and Lara Seligman contributed to this article.
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
3. China's 'growing authoritarianism' won't stop with Taiwan: Lai
I think I am in line with President Lai in my thinking here: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions.
But can Taiwan walk the line between yield and provoking? Is it willing to make the investments in defense (in weapons and personnel commitments and national will)? Or does the US "want it more" than Taiwan (e.g., Taiwan's defense)?
Excerpts:
"We are all fully aware that China's growing authoritarianism will not stop with Taiwan, nor is Taiwan the only target of China's economic pressures," he told politicians and scholars from 11 countries attending the forum.
"China intends to change the rules-based international order. That is why democratic countries must come together and take concrete action. Only by working together can we inhibit the expansion of authoritarianism."
...
"Taiwan will not be intimidated. We will take responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait."
Lai has repeatedly made overtures for dialogue with Beijing but talks have effectively dried up since the 2016 election of his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, who has long said Taiwan is not part of China.
"Taiwan will neither yield nor provoke ... On the condition of parity and dignity, we are willing to conduct exchanges and cooperate with China," Lai reiterated Wednesday.
China's 'growing authoritarianism' won't stop with Taiwan: Lai
21 Aug 2024 12:14PM
(Updated: 21 Aug 2024 12:24PM)
channelnewsasia.com
TAIPEI: Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te warned on Wednesday (Aug 21) that China's "growing authoritarianism will not stop with" the island and urged democratic countries to unite to curb its expansion.
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, and a senior Chinese Communist Party official said on Tuesday that Beijing was confident of "complete reunification" with the island.
Speaking at the annual Ketagalan Forum on Indo-Pacific security in Taipei, Lai cautioned that Taiwan was not "the only target" of Beijing.
"We are all fully aware that China's growing authoritarianism will not stop with Taiwan, nor is Taiwan the only target of China's economic pressures," he told politicians and scholars from 11 countries attending the forum.
"China intends to change the rules-based international order. That is why democratic countries must come together and take concrete action. Only by working together can we inhibit the expansion of authoritarianism."
Lai, who was sworn in on May 20, has been labelled a "dangerous separatist" by China for his staunch defence of Taiwan's sovereignty.
Beijing has ramped up military and political pressure on Taiwan in recent years, and launched war games days after Lai's inauguration, encircling the island with fighter jets and naval vessels.
Taiwan's military has been reporting near-daily sightings of Chinese warships around its waters, as well as sorties by fighter jets and drones around the island.
But Lai said China's "military expansionism" was taking place elsewhere, pointing to Beijing's joint exercises with Russia in the South China Sea, Western Pacific and Sea of Japan.
"Such actions are intended to intimidate China's neighbours and undermine regional peace and stability," he said.
"Taiwan will not be intimidated. We will take responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait."
Lai has repeatedly made overtures for dialogue with Beijing but talks have effectively dried up since the 2016 election of his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, who has long said Taiwan is not part of China.
"Taiwan will neither yield nor provoke ... On the condition of parity and dignity, we are willing to conduct exchanges and cooperate with China," Lai reiterated Wednesday.
Source: AFP/lh
channelnewsasia.com
4. IRGC founder to ‘Post’: Iran unable to sustain long-term war with Israel
Buried lede for me: A founder of the IRGC lives in the US? I did not know this.
Is this an influence operation? If so, who does it support? Iran or Israel? What are the effects that could result from the messaging from this person?
Excerpts:
Speaking from the US, where he is now based after leaving Iran more than twenty years ago, Sazegara also touched upon internal conflicts within the Islamic Republic and the problems facing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“What Israel did, I mean the alleged assassination of [Hamas Chief] Ismail Haniyeh, in the heart of Tehran, in one of the most protected places, was a humiliation for the intelligence organizations of Iran,” Sazegara stated. “This has created a problem for Khamenei among his main powerbase - the intelligence services.”
“[Khamenei’s] first reaction was that we retaliate and don’t stop. But when he referred to his military commanders and the experts in the IRGC, and they should present the options of what to do, they told him that Iran is not in a position to fight Israel. They don't have any strategic balance. They can send missiles toward Israel, especially hypersonic missiles that can reach Israel in six to eight minutes.‘But when Israel retaliates, then we can’t defend the country, especially air defense,’ Khamenei’s commanders told him. They told him that Iran is not in a position to fight Israel,” Sazegara added. “They emphasized that ‘even if we launch an attack, we should immediately consider a ceasefire with international mediators.’”
IRGC founder to ‘Post’: Iran unable to sustain long-term war with Israel
Mohsen Sazegara: "Assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, in the heart of Tehran, was a humiliation for Iran's intelligence organizations.”
By ALEX WINSTON
AUGUST 20, 2024 17:04
Updated: AUGUST 20, 2024 18:48
Jerusalem Post
Iran is in no position to fight a long-term war with Israel and even asked the US to intervene to prevent a possible large-scale Israeli retaliation to any Iranian attack, according to Mohsen Sazegara, founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post.
The IRGC was founded shortly after the revolution to protect the Islamic Republic’s creation to maintain religious control over the country, and to act as a counterbalance to the regular Iranian Army, many of whose officers were still loyal to the Shah of Iran, and therefore could not be trusted by the revolutionary regime. Since 1979, its authority and influence have spread throughout the world, and it is considered one of the leading sponsors of Islamic terror globally. The group is now designated a terrorist organization by the US.
Speaking from the US, where he is now based after leaving Iran more than twenty years ago, Sazegara also touched upon internal conflicts within the Islamic Republic and the problems facing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“What Israel did, I mean the alleged assassination of [Hamas Chief] Ismail Haniyeh, in the heart of Tehran, in one of the most protected places, was a humiliation for the intelligence organizations of Iran,” Sazegara stated. “This has created a problem for Khamenei among his main powerbase - the intelligence services.”
“[Khamenei’s] first reaction was that we retaliate and don’t stop. But when he referred to his military commanders and the experts in the IRGC, and they should present the options of what to do, they told him that Iran is not in a position to fight Israel. They don't have any strategic balance. They can send missiles toward Israel, especially hypersonic missiles that can reach Israel in six to eight minutes.‘But when Israel retaliates, then we can’t defend the country, especially air defense,’ Khamenei’s commanders told him. They told him that Iran is not in a position to fight Israel,” Sazegara added. “They emphasized that ‘even if we launch an attack, we should immediately consider a ceasefire with international mediators.’”
A new hypersonic ballistic missile called ''Fattah'' with a range of 1400 km, unveiled by Iran, is seen in Tehran, Iran, June 6, 2023. (credit: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA handout via Reuters)
In a wide-ranging interview with the Post, the former revolutionary-turned-politician discussed his role in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, his relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini, the founding of the IRGC, and how his political views evolved against the State-Religion axis that rules in the Islamic Republic, leading to being barred from the 2001 Iranian presidential elections.
Sazegara was managing director of the National Radio of Iran between 1979–1981, before serving in a multitude of political roles in the 80s. He served as political deputy in the prime minister's office, deputy minister of heavy industries, chairman of the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization of Iran, and vice minister of planning and budget.
Speaking about the US’s role in the growing conflict between Israel and Iran, Sazegara stated that, “As far as I know, Iran, behind the scenes, negotiated with the US and the Biden administration and asked them to talk to Israel, stating that Iran would attack somewhere in Israel, and promise nobody will be killed, but Israel should not retaliate.
“Iran asked the US to put pressure on Israel not to retaliate enough to escalate. But this time, the US did not agree and told them that we can't prevent Israel.”
What challenges does Khamenei face in attacking Israel?
For Sazegara, Khamenei faces multiple challenges in considering any military action against Israel. First, a limited attack risks provoking a significant Israeli retaliation, which could lead to the defeat of Iran's armed forces. Such a defeat could threaten Khamenei's power, as historically, humiliated armed forces can often bite the hand that feeds them.
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Secondly, Iran's economy is fragile, struggling with energy production, inflation, unemployment, and daily strikes. This economic instability further complicates the prospect of engaging in war. Lastly, Khamenei lacks the support of the Iranian people for a war with Israel. Intelligence gathered indicates that the majority of Iranians oppose any conflict with Israel, leaving Khamenei potentially isolated if he chooses to pursue military action, although knowing the forcefulness with which the regime cracks down on dissent, that thought may be far from the ayatollah’s mind.
Three senior Iranian officials told Reuters last week that only a ceasefire deal in Gaza could prevent Iran from directly retaliating against Israel for Haniyeh's assassination. Diplomatic envoys have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to de-escalate the situation. This is a face-saving measure for the regime to fall back and present the people with some form of a pyrrhic victory, according to Sazegara.
“I'm sure that in Iran, the propaganda will say that ‘Israel was actually afraid of us and accepted the ceasefire,’” should a deal be agreed, he told the Post. “They have to do something to say to their followers that this was a show of power, that [Israel] accepted a ceasefire.
“And if these [Israel-Hamas] negotiations go nowhere and there is no ceasefire, I don't know what Khamenei will do, but I guess that he would consider using Iran’s proxy groups to retaliate against Israel.”
The full interview with Mohsen Sazegara will be published in Friday’s Jerusalem Post.
Jerusalem Post
5. Tough U.S. Sanctions Packages Are Here to Stay—Whether It’s Harris or Trump
Because "Sanctions 'R US."
The fundamental tool of modern US foreign policy is the sanction. It is our hammer to every nail. We are addicted to sanctions.
I think this is because eit is the only "hard power" tool of political warfare we are willing to deploy and because we believe that but not employing the other tools of hard power we can prevent escalation to military conflict. And most fundamentally it allows us to "just do something" in response to every foreign policy challenge. I am not denigrating sanctions because they are useful and important. But we need to employ a better political airfare strategy.
Let's consider a holistic approach to our adversaries in strategic competition and use all the appropriate tools fo political warfare:
George Kennan:
“Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz's doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP--the Marshall Plan), and "white" propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of "friendly" foreign elements, "black" psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm
Paul Smith:
"Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations." Smith, Paul A., On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989), p. 3. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a233501.pdf
Tough U.S. Sanctions Packages Are Here to Stay—Whether It’s Harris or Trump
The next occupant of the Oval Office will inherit a powerful and popular sanctions apparatus, though some questions remain about its likely future targets
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tough-u-s-sanctions-packages-are-here-to-staywhether-its-harris-or-trump-11f884ba?mod=latest_headlines
By Richard Vanderford
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Aug. 21, 2024 6:00 am ET
President Biden’s administration leaned heavily into sanctions after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, taking unprecedented action that targeted a massive number of companies and individuals.
The zealous use of the tool—a low-cost way to press the U.S.’s agenda abroad—will likely continue as a permanent feature of U.S. foreign policy, regardless of who wins this year’s presidential election.
The U.S. has long leaned on its financial primacy and the dollar’s status as a reserve currency to exert worldwide influence. But Russia’s war in Ukraine led to a tectonic shift in the U.S. approach to economic coercion, with the U.S. and its allies joining in an ambitious plan to try to upend Russia’s economy and the war machine it supports.
Imposing sanctions is in many ways an easy choice for Washington—they have far lower direct costs than other foreign-policy tools, such as sending military aid, and effectively deputize banks and other actors in the private sector to serve on the front line of their implementation.
These moves have won broad support among lawmakers of both parties. Still, more than two years into the conflict, debate is continuing about the efficacy of the measures. But the next U.S. president, be it Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, will be unlikely to derail the sanctions train, though they may differ on where to make the next stop.
The Biden administration added 1,621 entities and 879 individuals, or 2,500 targets total, to its sanctions list in 2023, up from 2,275 such targets designated in 2022, according to figures from the Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan think tank. That number is a dramatic increase from historic norms—from 2017 to 2021, the U.S. added on average about 815 targets to the list each year.
The expanding use of sanctions isn’t just a Biden-era phenomenon, even if past forays into sanctions to target national security concerns haven’t approached the scale seen in recent years. There has been a steady progression in the use of sanctions, from the Obama administration through the Trump presidency and more recently.
Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris tapped a former Treasury official who until recently headed the department’s efforts to counter illicit finance to be a member of her campaign team. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg News
Harris’s campaign declined to make available an official who could speak about her views on foreign policy. Her campaign did recently tap Brian Nelson, a former Treasury official who until recently headed the department’s efforts to counter illicit finance, as a member of her team. Observers roundly expect that Harris’s approach would at least mirror, and perhaps be even tougher, than Biden’s.
The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. The former president’s views, despite his four years in the White House, can be difficult to read.
“It’s much harder to predict him on that stuff,” said William Reinsch, a former Clinton administration appointee who now works as a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based bipartisan think tank. “I would say [he is] sort of inconstant. He tends to veer from one thing to another.’”
Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump recently said he didn’t ‘love’ sanctions but had found them useful with Iran. Photo: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press
Asked whether he might consider easing Russia-related sanctions as a path toward peace, Trump recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that he didn’t “love” the tool but had found it very useful with Iran.
“Support for these sanctions [is] very, very strongly held in both parties,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University management professor who testified before Congress in 2022 in support of cutting off capital flows to Russia. “Most times, the Trump administration was just as supportive as the Biden administration was on these sanctions,” he said.
Trump has touted his supposed special relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and his views on the country differ substantially from most of the Democratic Party leadership as well as some in his own Republican Party. He may be more willing than Harris to offer sanctions relief in exchange for concessions that could bring the Ukraine war to an end, said Emily Kilcrease, a former senior staffer in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative who now researches geoeconomic statecraft as a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Broadly speaking, though, Trump in his time in the Oval Office ratcheted up the use of sanctions and similar tools, particularly targeting China.
“Certainly, there was a comfort under the Trump administration in using sanctions pretty extensively,” Kilcrease said.
Unlike, for example, President Barack Obama, the next president will inherit the fruits of dramatically expanded multilateral cooperation among the U.S. and its allies. The U.S., in seeking support for its efforts to hem in Russia, marshaled allies in the U.K., Europe and elsewhere, including Japan and Canada.
“That actually is a major change,” said Carlton Greene, a former chief counsel for the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network who now works as a partner at law firm Crowell & Moring. “You really saw the EU and the U.K. start to expand and develop the administrative infrastructure for their sanctions regimes in a way that they had not done before.”
The next president will also step into a climate of mounting speculation about the limits of sanctions as a means to respond to Chinese ambitions related to Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing regards as part of China.
Greene, who counsels clients on sanctions, said the business and investment community has expressed a growing eagerness to understand how sanctions might be applied in different Taiwan-related scenarios. Trump notably took a tough line on China even during his first election campaign, though the enthusiasm to contain China has since won broad bipartisan support and led to action from the Biden administration.
Unlike, for example, export controls already in place to deny certain goods to China’s military and thwart its artificial intelligence ambitions or tariffs on Chinese-made goods, wide-scale sanctions meant to disrupt its economy are widely seen as a last resort, given the degree of U.S.-China entanglement.
“The U.S. is not going to do really drastic moves, like sanctioning major Chinese banks or [China’s central bank], unless there’s an active military conflict,” said Kilcrease.
Write to Richard Vanderford at Richard.Vanderford@wsj.com
6. China says it is 'seriously concerned' about US nuclear strategic report
As it should be if it has intentions of using nuclear weapons against the US.
China says it is 'seriously concerned' about US nuclear strategic report
21 Aug 2024 05:18PM
(Updated: 21 Aug 2024 06:15PM)
channelnewsasia.com
East Asia
China says it is 'seriously concerned' about US nuclear strategic report
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The flags of the United States and China fly from a lamppost in the Chinatown neighbourhood of Boston, Massachusetts, on Nov 1, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder)
21 Aug 2024 05:18PM (Updated: 21 Aug 2024 06:15PM)
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BEIJING: China is seriously concerned about a report that said the United Stated approved a nuclear strategic plan to focus on China's rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Wednesday (Aug 21).
"The US is peddling the China nuclear threat narrative, finding excuses to seek strategic advantage," a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said.
According to a report by the New York Times, US President Joe Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan that focused on China's quickly growing arsenal, but also seeks to prepare the US for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea.
"China is seriously concerned about the relevant report, and the facts have fully proved that the United States has constantly stirred up the so-called China nuclear threat theory in recent years," said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning at a regular press briefing.
The White House said on Tuesday that the classified nuclear strategic plan approved by Biden this year is not a response to a single country or threat.
The US has consistently pointed to China's expansive and growing nuclear weaponry. An annual report by the Pentagon last October said China had more than 500 operational nuclear warheads in its arsenal, and will probably have over 1,000 warheads by 2030.
channelnewsasia.com
7. Commentary: Is Japan ready for a female prime minister?
Commentary: Is Japan ready for a female prime minister?
If the long-ruling party wants to signal a fresh start, a big first might be the answer, says an academic from S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Tan Ming Hui
21 Aug 2024 06:00AM
(Updated: 21 Aug 2024 01:32PM)
channelnewsasia.com · by Tan Ming Hui
SINGAPORE: With Fumio Kishida last week announcing that he will not re-contest for a second term as leader of the incumbent Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), his tenure as Japan’s prime minister will end next month after three years in power.
The timing of Kishida’s announcement to step down may have come across as abrupt, in the middle of an otherwise quiet Obon holiday season in Japan amid a megaquake warning in the country. But speculation about his resignation has been rife for a while.
For many months, the Kishida administration has struggled to contain the fallout from a string of corruption scandals and an inability to repair the LDP’s public image. Public approval hovers at near record lows for the long-ruling party, which has been in power almost continuously since 1955, dipping below 20 per cent in some polls.
At the press conference to announce his exit, Kishida cited the need for him as leader of the party to take responsibility, placing great emphasis on “change” and “recovering trust and support from the public”.
He spoke about the need to “show that the LDP has changed, and (his) decision … is the first sign … that the LDP is changing”.
File photo. Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks during a press conference at the prime minister's office in Tokyo on Aug 14, 2024. (Photo: Philip Fong/Pool via Reuters)
Kishida has been criticised for his poor handling of the LDP’s ties with the controversial Unification Church and a huge slush fund scandal involving underreporting of excessive income from fundraising events. Reform efforts, including dissolving major party factions and tightening political funds control law, bought him no respite and the party has been reeling.
The next general elections must be held by the third quarter of 2025, which gives the next prime minister about a year to regain public confidence. If a new top leader manages to recapture some popularity with the public, a snap election may also be called while the opposition parties in Japan remain weak.
What might constitute a big change for the conservative LDP and Japanese politics? And who could represent a new and reformed LDP?
A FIRST-EVER FEMALE PRIME MINISTER
The election of Japan’s first-ever female prime minister could certainly be a huge step forward in Japanese politics that is largely male-dominated. Emerging among the potential candidates for LDP leadership are Economic Security Minister Sanae Takaichi and Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa.
Takaichi, who has already signalled her intention to run for the top office, is known for her right-wing views on security issues.
In fact, she was among three Cabinet ministers who visited the controversial Yasukuni shrine on Aug 15, the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and a day after Kishida’s surprise announcement. The visit is seen as a bid to shore up conservative support within the ruling party.
In contrast, Kamikawa has opted to remain low profile despite her rising public popularity as one of the suitable candidates to become prime minister in Japan. Called a “rising star” by LDP kingmaker Aso Taro, Kamikawa is known for her low-key, practical style and majime (serious or diligent) demeanour.
The election of a trailblazing female prime minister could galvanise the public in the short term, especially if the LDP can positively reposition itself as a reformed party that is forward-looking and future-focused - in a similar manner to US Vice President Kamala Harris, who has re-energised and instilled hope in the Democratic ticket ahead of the upcoming US presidential election.
Unlike President Joe Biden, however, Prime Minister Kishida has not endorsed a successor.
As a member of the now-disbanded faction headed by Kishida, it would have been difficult for Kamikawa to express any ambition to run for the top office before he stepped down. This could change if Kishida decides to throw his support behind her.
To avoid defeat at the next general elections, it is important that the LDP picks someone who is not connected to the corruption scandals. Despite scrutiny over a gender stereotyping comment, Kamikawa’s reputation has largely remained untainted by political scandals, and this clean image could be an asset to the LDP in restoring public trust.
NO OBVIOUS FRONTRUNNER
Nevertheless, electing a woman to the top job would be a challenge in Japan’s conservative political climate, and it’s an open question whether radical reforms would ultimately be pursued. Currently, the race for Japanese leadership is wide open, with no obvious frontrunner.
Other potential candidates include former defence minister Ishiba Shigeru, who has polled favourably as the public’s top choice to be the next prime minister; former foreign minister Taro Kono; and the younger Shinjiro Koizumi, a former environment minister and the son of former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Contenders would first need to get the support of 20 lawmakers to recommend them to office. As this is the first leadership election since most of the LDP’s factions dissolved, it is difficult to predict how the lawmakers might vote.
On the international front, continuity in terms of foreign and defence policies is expected. The Kishida administration has been viewed as effective in bolstering Japan’s international standing, and there are no incentives for any LDP successor to move away from the current foreign policy directions.
Kishida’s diplomatic successes include strengthening the alliance with the United States and other Quad partners Australia and India. He is also lauded for his efforts in mending relations with South Korea, paving the way for stronger US-Japan-South Korea trilateral security ties.
Kishida has also followed in the hawkish footsteps of Shinzo Abe, shifting away from Japan’s pacifist postwar security policy, with his administration overseeing a landmark increase in military spending.
Rather than foreign policies, leadership debates in the coming weeks will likely focus on the domestic agendas that Kishida struggled with, with reinvigorating the Japanese economy and tackling inflation at the crux. Public discontent has risen over day-to-day issues such as higher living costs, a weakened yen, and real wages decline. All this contributed to his plummeting support.
Inheriting these economic woes, a fresh start for the floundering LDP and Kishida’s successor will not come easy. He or she will continue to face an uphill battle to recover public support in the long term.
Tan Ming Hui is Associate Research Fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. This commentary first appeared on Lowy Institute’s blog, The Interpreter.
channelnewsasia.com · by Tan Ming Hui
8. Walmart sells $3.74 billion JD.com stake to focus on its own China operations
Excerpt:
The sale underscores the country's e-commerce sector, once an investor darling, is losing its appeal as it grapples with poor margins due to brutal price competition and weak consumer demand.
Walmart sells $3.74 billion JD.com stake to focus on its own China operations
By Kane Wu and Summer Zhen
August 21, 20246:15 AM EDTUpdated an hour ago
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/walmart-seeks-raise-374-bln-sale-jdcom-stake-bloomberg-news-reports-2024-08-20/?utm
A view shows the logo of a Walmart store in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, June 24, 2024. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
SummaryCompanies
- Walmart was largest shareholder in JD.com with 5.19% stake -LSEG dataCompanies say they will continue commercial cooperationJD.com shares fall nearly 9% in Hong Kong, down 7% in US premarket trading
HONG KONG, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Walmart (WMT.N), opens new tab, the biggest shareholder of Chinese e-commerce firm JD.com (9618.HK), opens new tab, , has sold its entire stake, according to a person familiar with the matter, exiting an eight-year investment to focus on its own operations in China.
A placement of the Walmart shares was fully subscribed, the person said, and at the top end of the offered range would be worth $3.74 billion.
The U.S. retail giant plans to double down on its warehouse business, Sam's Club, in China after the stake sale.
The sale underscores the country's e-commerce sector, once an investor darling, is losing its appeal as it grapples with poor margins due to brutal price competition and weak consumer demand.
Shares of JD.com have fallen around 70% from their peak in early 2021 and prices are little changed from the levels in 2016 when Walmart became its major shareholder.
"This decision allows us to focus on our strong China operations for Walmart China and Sam's Club, and deploy capital towards other priorities," Walmart said in a statement, adding it was committed to a continued commercial relationship with the Chinese company.
JD.com said in a statement that it was "full of confidence in the future cooperation between the two sides."
Walmart offered 144.5 million American depositary shares of JD.com in the price range of $24.85 to $25.85, according to a term sheet seen by Reuters. Morgan Stanley was the broker-dealer of the offering.
The shares were offered at a discount of up to 11.8% to Tuesday's closing price of $28.19. Morgan Stanley did not respond to a request for comment.
00:00
01:43
JD.com's Hong Kong-listed shares fell nearly 9% on Wednesday. Its U.S.-listed shares dropped more than 7% in Wednesday's premarket trading to $26.09. Bloomberg first reported the share sale plan.
JD.com said in a stock exchange filing that it repurchased shares worth $390 million on Wednesday, part of a $3 billion buyback plan approved in March.
The company reported a better-than-expected second-quarter profit last week on its low-price policy, but China's retail market has been hit by a persistent downturn in consumer confidence, sparked by a property market slowdown and concerns about employment and incomes.
Major e-commerce firms, including JD.com and rivals Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab and PDD Holdings' (PDD.O), opens new tab Pinduoduo have engaged in a brutal price war in order to entice consumers to buy, pressuring revenue growth and margins.
The stake sale allows Walmart to raise capital and refocuses JD.com on its core online business, but a strategic partnership between the pair can continue, especially in data sharing, said Jeffrey Towson, a Beijing-based partner at TechMoat Consulting.
In the latest quarter, Walmart reported a 17.7% year-on-year rise in revenue from its China business to $4.6 billion on the back of strong growth in its Sam's Club warehouse chain and its digital offering.
Walmart added that membership income in China from its Sam's Club business grew 26% as member count continues to increase. The company has about 48 clubs in China.
The U.S. retailer owned a 5.19% stake in JD.com worth about $2 billion as of March 31, per LSEG data.
The partnership between the companies began in 2016 when Walmart sold its Chinese online grocery store, Yihaodian, in return for a 5% stake in JD.com worth about $1.5 billion based of the firm's market value at the time.
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Reporting by Kane Wu and Summer Zhen in Hong Kong, Sophie Yu in Beijing and Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Deborah Sophia; Editing by Jamie Freed and Janane Venkatraman
9. ‘War Game’ Review: It Can’t Happen Here (Right?)
I missed the press on this film. I saw the trailer on social media yesterday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n6xDGpZJ20&t=126s
It is only having a limited showing across the country. It appears to be in the DC area at one theater only from 30 August through 5 September. https://wargamefilm.com/tickets/?
I am surprised this has not received more media attention from both sides of the political divide.
But this begs a serious question: Is the USG conducting actual wargaming to look at various contingencies in this area?
‘War Game’ Review: It Can’t Happen Here (Right?)
This nail-biter of a documentary imagines it is Jan. 6, 2025, and armed supporters of the losing candidate are hatching a coup and maybe a civil war. What will the nation’s leaders do?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/movies/war-game-documentary-review.html?
From left, Heidi Heitkamp and Gwen Camp in the Situation Room built for “War Game,” an unscripted documentary that captures an actual exercise in confronting a coup.Credit...Film Forum
By Manohla Dargis
Aug. 1, 2024
War GameNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Tony Gerber, Jesse MossThrillerNot Rated1h 34m
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“War Game,” a nail-biter of a documentary, asks a question a lot of us don’t want to even consider: What if there’s another Jan. 6, only bigger, better organized and more ideologically cohesive? To try and answer that question, on Jan. 6, 2023, two filmmakers turned their cameras on a nonpartisan group of politicians and intelligence and military advisers who were role-playing in a fake crisis like the assault on the Capitol. Like actors in a grim sequel — Steve Bullock, the ex-governor of Montana, plays the incumbent president — they were taking part in an unnervingly familiar scenario, racing to prevent a coup and maybe civil war.
This war game was created by Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for veterans that was founded in 2009. As in other war games, exercises that simulate and prepare for wars (the U.S. Defense Department uses them), this one features sets of players. On one side is Bullock’s President John Hotham and his team white-knuckling through the unscripted scenario in the (fake) Situation Room; on the other is a fictional group of extremists, the Order of Columbus, who are loyal to the losing candidate, Gov. Robert Strickland (Chris Coffey, an actor). Among the rebels is a cool cat (Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran), who, from another location, approves moves and disinformation while elsewhere the game’s designers and consultants observe the proceedings.
This particular game had one overarching rule: The president and his team have six hours to quell the revolt and ensure the “peaceful transfer of power,” parameters that, as the clock runs out, give it mounting urgency. The movie’s directors, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, working with Vet Voice, built sets and, using moody lighting, sleek camerawork and brisk editing, gave the game dramatic shape and momentum, paring down its six hours into a fast-moving 94-minute intrigue. The players did their part, too, of course: Bullock is definitely leading man material, even if, as the crisis deepens, he’s upstaged by Heidi Heitkamp, a former U.S. senator from North Dakota who plays his tough-talking senior adviser.
Vet Voice’s appealing C.E.O., Janessa Goldbeck, a former combat engineer officer in the Marine Corps, takes on dual roles here as the game’s onscreen no-nonsense producer and the voice of the offscreen governor of Arizona. When she’s not hovering with the other game producers and consultants — these include the retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and the conservative standard-bearer Bill Kristol — Goldbeck fills in some details. This war game, she explains, was inspired by a sobering 2021 Washington Post opinion piece by Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba and Steven M. Anderson, all retired U.S. Army generals.
“We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time,” the three wrote, urging the Defense Department to “war-game the next potential postelection insurrection.”
The war game — or, rather, the cinematically amped, streamlined version you watch here — effectively dramatizes the argument presented by the generals, one that is made entirely within the logic of administrative and military power. That’s no surprise given the game’s aims, scope, creators and participants. The presence of recognizable figures like Vindman and the retired general Wesley K. Clark, for instance, who plays the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strengthens the exercise’s verisimilitude as does the use of footage of the 2021 Capitol riot. Yet while the game is inherently interesting, all these policymakers, politicians, current and former members of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies, can’t help but suggest that the country’s problems are best handled (and solved) from the top down.
I wish that the filmmakers had taken a more dialectical approach to this material; there are, after all, more ways to secure democracy than from within the towers of power. The closest you get to real people, as it were, are in some moving, behind-the-scenes interviews with Goldbeck, Goldsmith and Chris Jones, a Marine Corps veteran who plays another insurrectionist. All three are good on camera, partly because they haven’t been smoothed into bureaucratic blandness. These veterans have been on the ground in actual conflict; they’re real and often raw, something the filmmakers capture in a postgame huddle in which Goldsmith — a close-up of one of his hands catches him agitatedly drumming his fingers as Clark speaks — says that “insider threats” in the military need to be taken more seriously.
“War Game” is blunt and effective. It’s easy to get swept up by the ticktock storytelling, and to be moved both by the recent history it invokes and by the sincerity of its participants. Even so, as the imaginary emergency escalates and talk inside the Situation Room turns to the Insurrection Act, which would allow the president to send military forces into states, the movie’s Hollywood-like qualities can seem ill-suited to the profundity of the subject. The first time I saw “War Game,” it shook me up; the second time, my visceral response was tempered by a skepticism about power that the movie doesn’t invite. I don’t fault the filmmakers for making an entertainment, but as they cut from one resolute face to another and paused on Bullock’s handsome profile, I also regretted that I was watching another superhero movie.
War Game
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.
War GameNYT Critic’s Pick
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DirectorsTony Gerber, Jesse Moss
StarsSteve Bullock, Wesley Clark, Heidi Heitkamp, Linda Singh, Doug Jones
RatingNot Rated
Running Time1h 34m
GenreThriller
Movie data powered by IMDb.com
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 2, 2024, Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Role-Playing the Next Capitol Insurrection. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
10. Haniyeh Was Killed by an F-35
A lot of detail in this interesting analysis/speculation.
Excerpts:
A possibility is that there are witnesses who reported an aerial projectile impacting the building, and in order to control the narrative, Iranian officials sympathetic to the IRGC have steered the account towards the claim of a 7 kg projectile fired locally. Paradoxically, both Israeli hawks and Iranian hardliners are incentivized to demonstrate the weakness of Iran’s security apparatus. For the Israelis it satisfies a statecraft dependent on a robust deterrence of disproportionate retaliation. For Tehran’s hybrid regime, it legitimizes a state security and surveillance architecture that is primarily designed to delay the trend of liberalization of its mainstream population.
Instead, we propose a detailed explanation for a third scenario of a strike conducted by an F-35 stealth aircraft. The F-35 certainly has the range capability, with estimates of more than 1,200 nautical miles with a full internal ordnance load. There is evidence that Israel has made further range-enhancing modifications to the F-35, as it had with the F-15I and F-16I. The straight line distance between Nevatim Air Base, which houses the Israeli Air Force’s F-35s, and Tehran, is approximately 860 nautical miles, without accounting for the flight path necessary to evade early warning detection sites and SAM battery locations. Thus, an F-35 on a strike mission to Tehran (flying hi-hi-hi), which had a refueling operation conducted in the airspace above Jordan, would be able to cut at least 100 nautical miles from its round trip.
Haniyeh Was Killed by an F-35
By Julian Spencer-Churchill & Alexandru Filip
August 21, 2024
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/21/haniyeh_was_killed_by_an_f-35_1052997.html?mc_cid=129dc9115d&mc_eid=70bf478f36
The media narrative around the method of the July 31, 2024 assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, depends largely on how interest groups are trying to frame the vulnerability of their adversaries. Israel is focused on demonstrating full-spectrum capability, while Tehran’s current administration is using the incident to bolster domestic policing against internal enemies and collaborators. However, of the three principal accounts, including the pre-planted explosive device, the locally launched missile, and an Israeli stealth aircraft delivered precision light munition, the latter appears to be the most consistent with the evidence of the damage inflicted.
Israeli deterrence is highly escalatory and disproportionate because it seeks to counter-act its adversaries’ foreign policies that are modelled after institutions designed for suppression of their domestic populations, which is often how the Jewish presence in the Near East is viewed by its enemies in the region. For example, Syria, Iraq and Iran have generally pursued anti-Zionist policies whose aggressiveness and rhetoric mimics the suppression of their own populations, as in Syria’s use of chemical weapons during its civil war, Iraq’s attack on the Kurds in the Anfal campaign, and Iran’s suppression of the Baloch and Azeri communities. In contrast, with the exception of Palestine and Jordan, the frontline Arab states do not face an existential threat from Israel, and therefore harness nationalist public sentiments as part of a diversionary foreign policy. This obviates and delays the political need to reform their rentier and hybrid authoritarian regimes. It also means that while anti-Israeli leaders can safely blame Western powers for arming Tel Aviv, their principal focus is to use threats from Israel to consolidate domestic control. In the specific case of Iran, support for Hamas and Hezbollah are a combination of religiously ideological compulsions, and instruments leveraged against moderate Arab states, as there is nothing inherently anti-Zionist about mainstream Iranian nationalism.
At 2 am, on July 31, 2024, Ismael Haniyeh, the chairman of the Political Bureau of Hamas and envoy to Iran, was killed, along with a bodyguard, by an explosion at his guesthouse, in Tehran. The first explanation, reported on by the New York Times, is that the explosive was a bomb that was planted two months prior. There are several issues with this explanation, the first being the considerable amount of time for an explosive device not to be found out by Iranian intelligence services, particularly through sniffer dogs and detection of electronic transmissions necessary for remote setting and detonation. This explanation is also lacking in significant details, such as the type of explosive, where it was planted, and how it was detonated. It also claims that the detonation “…appeared to do minimal damage beyond the building itself, as a missile probably would have done,” yet the observed damage is remarkably similar to the effects of the Israeli use of the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs against targets in Gaza.
Further, while it is understandable that the New York Times would not reveal their unnamed and alleged Middle Eastern sources (two Iranians, and one American), the compounding absence of even speculative corroborating commentary among U.S., Israeli, Iranian, or Hamas experts, suggests there is little evidence for this scenario. Similarly, it was another New York Times article that made the sensationalist claim that Israel used an “A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine” to assassinate Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020, Iran’s top nuclear physicist, which caused almost immediate skepticism among intelligence and security pundits. This explanation of the Fakhrizadeh assassination was actually identical to the official press release account of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). In fact, one of the authors of both pieces, Farnaz Fassihi, has been the subject of an official complaint by the National Union for Democracy in Iran, for her inaccurate reporting on the popular reaction in Iran after the January 3, 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, and her reporting of how Flight PS752 was shot down. She has further been accused of Pro-Iranian government bias in her reporting, and been the subject of criticism due to her ignorance of anti-regime activists and her downplaying of human rights issues in Iran, in favor of regime talking points.
The second explanation for the Haniyeh assassination is the account officially backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which stated that a “7 kg projectile” was fired from a mountainous area facing the residence from the North and West. This theory is particularly revealing of the measures used by the Iranian regime in its attempt to exercise control of the narrative. To that end, the IRGC has marshalled a number of witnesses that point to the widely held view that an aerial projectile was used. Evidence that this scenario is actually what some of the IRGC leadership believes, is supported by the almost immediate securing of the video footage from cameras at the Tochal Station 1 ski resort facing Haniyeh’s compound, and the detention and interrogation of staff and the public there until 1 PM the next day.
The issue however is that a shoulder-launched rocket could not have caused the observed damage of collapsing two sides of the wall and affecting the interior, to the extent that it did. The effects of an RPG-7 warhead on a concrete or brick wall, are well known. A locally procured 120mm mortar system would have been too inaccurate, and, along with a guided anti-tank missile, would have required a set-up and crew that would have been easily noticed. However, in every scenario, there would have been the need for active, local, and continuous surveillance by a team to coordinate the attack, given the shortcoming of using drones to track over a complex urban landscape.
A possibility is that there are witnesses who reported an aerial projectile impacting the building, and in order to control the narrative, Iranian officials sympathetic to the IRGC have steered the account towards the claim of a 7 kg projectile fired locally. Paradoxically, both Israeli hawks and Iranian hardliners are incentivized to demonstrate the weakness of Iran’s security apparatus. For the Israelis it satisfies a statecraft dependent on a robust deterrence of disproportionate retaliation. For Tehran’s hybrid regime, it legitimizes a state security and surveillance architecture that is primarily designed to delay the trend of liberalization of its mainstream population.
Instead, we propose a detailed explanation for a third scenario of a strike conducted by an F-35 stealth aircraft. The F-35 certainly has the range capability, with estimates of more than 1,200 nautical miles with a full internal ordnance load. There is evidence that Israel has made further range-enhancing modifications to the F-35, as it had with the F-15I and F-16I. The straight line distance between Nevatim Air Base, which houses the Israeli Air Force’s F-35s, and Tehran, is approximately 860 nautical miles, without accounting for the flight path necessary to evade early warning detection sites and SAM battery locations. Thus, an F-35 on a strike mission to Tehran (flying hi-hi-hi), which had a refueling operation conducted in the airspace above Jordan, would be able to cut at least 100 nautical miles from its round trip.
Regarding the possibility of an air-to-air refueled mission, flight tracking data shows an Israeli Air Force (IAF) Air-to-Air Refueling tanker: Boeing 707-3W6C, with the registration code 290, taking a coincidental route which would have allowed it to refuel an F-35 en route to Iran. Both AirNav Radarbox and FlightRadar24 have blocked the aircraft with this registration code from being identified on their platforms. However, according to two open-source aircraft monitoring websites (ADS-B Exchange and ADS-B.NL), on the night to of July 30th, and into the leading hours of July 31st, this exact tanker was present and flying through Jordanian airspace.
ADS-B Exchange corroborates the flight path information of ADS-B.NL, but with less detail. This particular flight bearing hex code 738A45, reflects the same flight path in the last leg of its journey towards Muwaffaq Air Base in Jordan. However, there is significant disruption of the flight data before the crossing into Jordan, possibly indicating the effects of GPS jamming and spoofing, which is fairly common in the Middle East. The aircraft’s last reported coordinate indicates an altitude of 11525 feet and a decent rate of -2832 feet per minute, which would be significantly steep, and consistent with evading long-range surveillance radar after a hi-altitude refueling mission.
Figures from ADS-B.NL reveals a clearer tracking of flight altitude detail, as it posts more vector data. Between July 30th at 20:56:01, and July 31st at 00:20:39, there are 68 data points which show the aircrafts altitude, speed, track, triangulated positions, and mapping of those points. A caveat to make is that sensor interference can cause an altitude significantly lower than normal, and airspeeds which are not realistically feasible, but nevertheless allow valuable vector inference. While the first leg of the journey seems to suffer from the effects of spoofing or jamming, it would still indicate that this aircraft was in the air and operational at those given times. The specifically observed distortions are similar to what we observe in the effect of disruptions in the ADS-B Exchange. The last leg directed towards Muwaffaq Air Base is supported by the detail of consecutively linked data on altitude, speed, and track. Also noteworthy is the fact that the aircraft’s last known position on July 31st in the Jordanian desert, on and near the airbase, was experiencing lower levels of GPS interference compared to air space closer to Israel.
On this second track, which illustrates the aircraft’s location more accurately, we see the first positional recording of the aircraft established at 20,275 feet, due north from Nevatim Air Base (where Israeli tanker assets are housed). Due to the fact that at this point the aircraft is at 20,275 feet and only 13 miles from the Air Base, it is unlikely to have just taken off. The Boeing 707-3W6C typically climbs at a rate of around 290 knots and 1500 feet per minute, at an angle of around 15 degrees. Consequently, this aircraft was likely already airborne for several hours, which matches up with the particularities of the times which indicate the aircraft being in the air from 20:56”01 on July 30th.
Of particular note, is the final point where this aircraft is identified, showing an altitude decrease from 18,925 feet at 00:14:45, to 10,450 feet at 00:20:02, on July 31st. This would indicate the aircraft descending at 1,605 feet per minute, which is in agreement with the usual decent rate of an aircraft of this size. The 707 then disappears off the map, but it is important to note that the rate of descent, as well as its last known position, puts it at around 4 nautical miles from Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, indicating an approach and landing there. Muwaffaq has been a heavily trafficked airbase for the U.S. military (likely a successor of the 407th Air Expeditionary Group) in the Middle East for the past decade, and as recently as 2022 saw an additional investment of $265 million for its expansion. That Tel Aviv cooperates with the Jordanian air force, likely with U.S. coordination, is demonstrated by Amman’s help in intercepting Iranian missiles fired at Israel on April 13, 2024.
Full spectrum and intense jamming can seriously degrade the accuracy of ADS-B data, which is infrequently practiced in the Middle East because of the hazard to civil aviation. The U.S. Department of Defense has expressed concerns that open-source flight tracking data poses a threat to its military aircraft and operations. However, even with the disabling of ADS-B data through jamming, there remains an ability to track aircraft through Multilateration (MLAT), which essentially triangulates the aircrafts positions through a series of Secondary Surveillance Radar receivers based of the Mode-S transmission from the craft. The presence of MLAT receivers in the region (the Judean mountains of Israel and highlands of Jordan), which act as feeders to flight tracking companies such as FlightAware, and ADS-B Exchange, validates the accuracy of the last leg of refueling tanker, especially over the flatter east of Jordan.
The air defense conditions an IAF F-35 would be faced with in Iran, with the objective of a deep strike operation, are not dissimilar to what Israel has already confronted and neutralized in operations against Syria. The Israeli Air Force has bombed Syria multiple times from within their own airspace, even as recently on April 1st, 2024, when they used an F-35 to target the Iranian consulate in the middle of Damascus. They have also conducted suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) operations in Syria to great success: in 2018, Operation House of Cards destroyed multiple air defense systems and in particular an S-200, the same system Iran fields for extended range air defense. Israel has also previously destroyed Iranian S-300 air defense radar at Isfahan.
Iranian media reported that the explosion that killed at Haniyah occurred at around 2am. Considering the time the Israeli Air Force tanker was airborne over Jordan, an F-35 fighter jet cruising towards Iran at Mach 0.86 would have reached Tehran in two and a half hours, lining up with the timeline of the strike. The most likely ordnance used, consistent with the damage at the residence, is the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB), with which Israel has extensive experience, and which has a 1 meter CEP (Circular Error Probability). The May 10, 2023 Israeli strike used to kill Ali Ghali in Khan Younis, the commander of Islamic Jihad’s rocket forces, is consistent with the blast effects of a GBU-39, as well as the observed damage in Tehran. The destruction of the outer wall and the relatively undamaged floor may be the result of a near flat trajectory impact. The strikes throughout Gaza have shown similar damage, destroying outer walls, but leaving the floors intact, as well as preserving the structural integrity of the building, while minimizing the prospects of survivable for the buildings occupiers on that story. As we seen on the images showing the damage at Haniyeh’s compound in Tehran, the outer wall is effectively destroyed.
Tehran does not seem politically concerned with having to improve its air defense surveillance and interception of Israeli aircraft, because it relies primarily on deterrence through the threat of missile strikes on Israel, which are both financially and diplomatically costly for Washington. The Houthi attacks on shipping have demonstrated the complexity of forcing a reopening of the Straits of Hormuz should Iran retaliate against a U.S. attack through that expedient. Consequently, the IRGC is far more disposed to investing its energies into pursuing domestic opponents, which pose a far greater threat to the long term survival of the regime. Rather than searching for a sophisticated strategy behind Israel’s assassination of Haniyeh, it is far more likely that politics of domestic and international insecurity in Tel Aviv are driving a broad front attack on all Hamas leadership. Israeli silence on claiming responsibility for the attack was likely a U.S. condition for the use of Jordan’s Muwaffaq air base.
Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.
Alexandru Filip is an International Relations student at Concordia University, Montreal, and an analyst and editor at the Canadian Center for Strategic Studies research institute. His research focus is strategic and security studies, with a particular interest in naval, air and nuclear capabilities.
11. Let the Marine Corps Test Force Design in the Grey Zone
Can we please decide on "Grey" versus "Gray?" I mean we do need to pole vault over mouse turds.
All sarcasm and controversy aside, buried in this article is a most critical point. Will our allies support our actions in the Asia Pacific (INDOPACIFIC)? Which planning assumption should we adopt? They will support or will they not? And we need to think about more than just the defense of Taiwan (though that is the most extreme conflict that is likely to occur (along with north Korea)). That assumption has huge implications for planning (truly a no brainer statement I know).
Excerpt:
All that having been said, I don't believe that such an experiment will ever happen because one of the basic assumptions underlying Force Design is flawed -- that host nations in the region will allow their territory to be used. The Philippines, our closest ally in the SCS region, has made it clear that it will not allow its territory to be used in a conflict over Taiwan. Even regarding the Spratly situation, the Philippines has tread very carefully to avoid direct confrontation with China.
Let the Marine Corps Test Force Design in the Grey Zone
Military.com | By Gary Anderson
Published August 20, 2024 at 4:13pm ET
https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2024/08/20/let-marine-corps-test-force-design-grey-zone.html?mc_cid=129dc9115d&mc_eid=70bf478f36
military.com · by Military.com | By Gary Anderson Published August 20, 2024 at 4:13pm ET · August 20, 2024
The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.
It has been five years since the Marine Corps adopted Force Design as its operating concept. It divested some of what many considered to be key warfighting capabilities to buy anti-ship missiles with which to deny China control of the South China Sea (SCS) in favor of a new approach to operations designed around island-hopping.
A half decade later, there are still no missiles. But there is an opportunity to test the theory behind the strategy and support an ally against Chinese aggression: Place Marines on disputed islands to provide support and protection for local fishermen.
Maybe it will force Chinese and American leaders to come to an understanding that would deescalate the ongoing game of chicken in the region. While there is a risk of shooting breaking out, that risk is small and inherent in any operations in the South China Sea anyway.
Force Design has two objectives vis-a-vis China: deterrence in peacetime and defeat in war. It is obvious that Beijing has developed a third way to extend its influence in the SCS, that being operations in the "Grey Zone" between peace and war. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Spratly Islands. In this group of many islets and shoals, only one is populated with Philippine fishermen. Control over the Spratly Islands is disputed by China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. Through nonlethal bullying and intimidation, China's coast guard ships have limited Philippine fishermen to just two of the islets.
It would be well within the spirit of freedom of navigation operations to offer support from one of the elements of the Corps' new Littoral Combat Regiments to the Philippines to give their fishermen some top cover. To make up for the missing anti-ship missiles, the Marine Corps could borrow anti-ship missiles from one of the other services, all of which have them. This is the kind of joint approach that many of us skeptics suggested when the former commandant General David Berger first announced the concept.
Placed ashore on one of the shoals in the Spratly chain, the Marine detachment could support beleaguered fishermen with nonlethal means of their own by firing mortar-delivered smoke during the day and illumination rounds at night. The Marines could also employ acoustic weapons such as those used against pirates in the Indian Ocean and Straits of Malacca. If the Chinese coast guard were foolish enough to target the Marines with radar or laser range finders, the Marines could reciprocate with targeting means of their own. Coast Guard cutters know better than to tangle with anti-ship missiles.
If this test is carried out, three things can happen:
Best case, the harassment ceases or significantly decreases. If that becomes the case, it would indicate that the pivot to Force Design has merit. Nonetheless, it is a very expensive grey zone tool.
Second, and most likely, the Chinese will ignore the LCR detachment and continue harassing the fishermen as usual.
As in any freedom of navigation incident, there is always the possibility that one side or the other will miscalculate or have an accidental discharge, leading to a shooting incident. It is doubtful that this will lead to World War III, and such an incident might not be an entirely bad thing. It might sober both sides up enough to force them to sit down and draw up some mutually agreed ground rules.
All that having been said, I don't believe that such an experiment will ever happen because one of the basic assumptions underlying Force Design is flawed -- that host nations in the region will allow their territory to be used. The Philippines, our closest ally in the SCS region, has made it clear that it will not allow its territory to be used in a conflict over Taiwan. Even regarding the Spratly situation, the Philippines has tread very carefully to avoid direct confrontation with China.
If the Marine Corps wants to test Force Design, it should offer the Spratly package to the Indo-Pacific commander. If he turns down the offer, it will tell the Corps a lot about the perceived value of Force Design.
-- Gary Anderson retired as chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.
military.com · by Military.com | By Gary Anderson Published August 20, 2024 at 4:13pm ET · August 20, 2024
12. U.S. military unprepared for nuclear escalation in war with China, Pentagon-funded study warns
I would have thought we could develop conventional munitions of sufficient size and capability to destroy any ship. Why do we need a "nuclear tipped missile" to destroy ships? But I defer to the nuclear strategy and naval experts.
U.S. military unprepared for nuclear escalation in war with China, Pentagon-funded study warns
Military urged to build nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles to counter China
washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz
By - The Washington Times - Tuesday, August 20, 2024
U.S. military forces are not ready to respond to tactical nuclear weapons strikes by China in a protracted war, according to a recent Pentagon-funded study.
China’s rapid expansion of nuclear forces, coupled with the dual conventional and nuclear warhead configuration of its missile forces, means it is more likely to employ low-yield nuclear attacks in a future conflict with America, according to the report from the Center for a New American Security.
“Broadly speaking, the emerging nuclear dynamics between the United States and China appear to have different dynamics than those between the United States and the Soviet Union and carry a greater risk of limited nuclear use,” reads a portion of the study, which was funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
The report also calls for the Defense Department to consider building nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles to counter growing threats from the People’s Republic of China, or PRC.
The study is based on hypothetical non-strategic nuclear attacks that were conducted during two tabletop exercises, which are simulated war games conducted in conference rooms.
The exercises found that a lengthy war between the U.S. and China will set conditions for tactical nuclear weapons strikes that are “both appealing to the PRC and difficult to manage for the United States.”
“In a protracted conflict, nuclear use is unfortunately plausible as either a substitute for conventional arms, or as a gamble for termination,” said Andrew Metrick, one of three CNAS co-authors of the report.
“In this future, the U.S. lacks the capabilities and concepts needed to achieve effective intra-war deterrence.”
The exercises found that tactical nuclear weapons use by both sides would continue during a war but not necessarily lead to a major nuclear exchange.
For China, the use of low-yield missile and bomber attacks are more conducive to the Indo-Pacific region because of broad ocean geography and targets, compared to plans for tactical arms use in Europe during the Cold War.
“The United States lacks the doctrine, capabilities, and concepts to manage the conventional-nuclear crossfade,” the report said, using the film editing term that means making one image fade as another image appears.
“U.S. nuclear thinking and systems remain tied to the Cold War, and current capabilities suffer from a lack of signaling tools and employment difficulties.”
To bolster defenses, the study recommends expanding nuclear capabilities.
“The United States likely lacks the theater nuclear capabilities necessary to engage in effective conflict management and forestall successful nuclear coercion,” the report said.
“For this reason, the United States should consider the development of a small number of nuclear-tipped anti-ship capabilities to increase the flexibility of U.S. theater nuclear capabilities and better align legacy Cold War capabilities with the Indo-Pacific age,” the study said.
21st-century weapons
America’s necessary weapons could include the nuclear-armed Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) and Maritime Strike Tomahawk, as well as the W80-4 warhead, used for attacking ships.
Current U.S. advantages in conventional weapons also could lead China to use its unknown number of tactical nuclear weapons in airbursts capable of inflicting damage on enemy forces over wide areas.
To resolve regional nuclear warfighting issues, U.S. military forces must fully integrate nuclear activities into planning and exercises, the report argued, rather than regarding the options as what the report calls “last day” or stand-alone exercises.
Reviving the Cold War skills for preparing for tactical nuclear war also would send a powerful signal to China that U.S. forces are alert to the threat of nuclear escalation and that Beijing will not gain advantages from such attacks.
“Given the inherent signaling limitations of ballistic missile submarines, the U.S. Air Force must develop the tactics, techniques, and procedures to move nonstrategic nuclear weapons quickly and safely to theater and mate with forward-deployed aircraft,” the report said.
Another way to reduce the potential for regional nuclear conflict is to improve numbers and capabilities for advanced conventional arms.
U.S. tactical nuclear land-attack cruise missiles and other weapons were removed from U.S. warships in 1991 during the George H.W. Bush administration.
The current U.S. tactical nuclear weapons arsenal consists of about 230 B61 gravity bombs carried on jets.
The Trump administration in 2018 reversed an earlier decision to retire nuclear-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles and called for deploying low-yield sea-launched cruise missiles, or SCLM-N, for use as non-strategic regional forces.
The Trump administration also called for creating a low-yield W76 nuclear missile warhead for use on submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Both tactical nuclear weapons were sought by military commanders to increase deterrence against both China and Russia.
The Biden administration sought to defund the SLCM-N but Congress rescued the program.
For allies, current U.S. nuclear policy relies heavily on extended deterrence and on key regional partners like Japan, South Korea and Australia to counter China’s buildup of regional missiles.
But China could use its expanding nuclear forces in a coercive effort to break U.S. extended deterrence and ultimately undermine American alliances in the region, the report said. Greater coordination with Japan and Australia on responses to China’s use of nuclear weapons is needed, the report said.
More engagement with China on nuclear weapons is also recommended by the study, but China for the past several decades has refused U.S. requests to hold nuclear arms talks.
In June, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced it was canceling nuclear arms and proliferation talks with the U.S. to protest recent American arms sales to Taiwan.
China’s nuclear ’breakout’
The Chinese nuclear expansion has been described by military commanders as a “breakout” from earlier Chinese military concepts which centered on deploying a small warhead arsenal.
Current Chinese strategic stockpiles are estimated to be around 500 warheads and will increase to as many as 1,500 by 2030. The number of tactical nuclear warheads is unknown.
The commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton, testified to Congress in February that the size and rapid pace of Beijing’s nuclear buildup is “breathtaking.”
In the past five years, China’s nuclear expansion has included new mobile DF-31AG and DF-41 multi-warhead missiles, enhanced JL-3 submarine-launched missiles and modernized H-6N bombers.
The most dramatic increase was the deployment of over 300 hardened intercontinental ballistic missile silos in western China.
“PRC leadership has clearly decided on markedly increasing their nuclear capabilities but has failed to explain the overarching strategic rationale for this expansion,” the Center for a New American Security report said.
The buildup increases the threat of a misunderstanding and misperception leading to a nuclear exchange, since the rationale for the expansion has not been explained by Beijing.
China’s DF-26 intermediate-range missile is a nuclear weapon of particular concern. The DF-26 was dubbed a “Guam killer” by Beijing because it is designed to target the major U.S. military hub on the American Pacific island.
“While details on PLA thinking remain sparse, small-yield, precise nonstrategic nuclear arms neatly fit into the PLA’s conventional warfighting approaches and are being discussed in Chinese military writings,” the report said.
• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.
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13. Taiwan’s ‘China-free’ Drone Program May Not Be
Taiwan’s ‘China-free’ Drone Program May Not Be
Rush to meet burgeoning demand finds some manufacturers sneaking in Chinese chips
https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/taiwan-china-free-drone-program?utm
Aug 21, 2024
By: Jens Kastner
Photo from Ming-Tang Huang
President Lai Ching-te’s ambitious plans to make Taiwan “the Asian hub of unmanned aerial vehicle supply chains for global democracies,” pitching Taiwan-made drones to friendly governments who distrust theoretically hackable mainland Chinese suppliers’ products, appear to have nearly capsized with a defense ministry video showing a soldier handling a drone running on a chip carrying a logo of China-based drone producer Diatone Innovations. That is in contravention of an edict that companies aren’t allowed to use Chinese components.
Faced with widespread derision on social media mockery, the defense ministry said the drone shown in the footage wasn’t related to the “national drone team” program, without however providing further explanation. Although the government said it was an isolated incident, a Taipei-based drone-maker recently told Asia Sentinel that given the feverish pace of development, the industry faces significant challenges in attempting to match defense initiatives and compete in the global market. Some rivals, he said, are rebranding products from other firms, while others buy Chinese parts, remanufacture them in a third country, and pass the finished drones off as foreign models to enter the bidding.
Taiwan has more than three dozen companies involved in the development and manufacturing of civilian drones. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, drones have literally revolutionized warfare, with virtually every military initiative on either side dictated by drone intelligence or military action. The overwhelming majority of small, inexpensive drones that are having the greatest impact on battlefields are made in China, with Chinese drone-maker DJI alone owning three-quarters of the world’s consumer-drone market, according to market research firm Drone Industry Insights, as cited by the Wall Street Journal. After banning Chinese manufacturers from government purchases and establishing an R&D base, the government found itself far behind.
Accordingly, officials introduced a set of proposals aimed at accelerating the production of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, along with an evaluation program for five categories of drones free of technology from China. Under the national drone team program to subsidize private drone makers switching from civilian use to military drones, all Taiwanese suppliers participating in recent bidding for a mass production project for land-based drones and drones that are launched from warships pitching their wares as being free of any Chinese components.
But “Various anomalies have emerged in the bidding for the mass production project, such as companies lacking R&D capabilities directly purchasing foreign products for flight testing,” the source said. “Some participated in flight tests with drones that were absolutely identical with Chinese types, falsely claiming to be the fruit of a ‘Taiwan-France’ or Taiwan-Ireland’ international cooperation.”
The industry source went on to explain that Chinese spying activity aimed at the Taiwan drone sector appears to be intense. He recalled that an unknown woman with a heavy mainland accent recently showed up at his Taipei office, asking him to allow her access to the office Wi-Fi on claims her phone was broken in a way that it could not use mobile data.
“It was apparently a very clumsy attempt by an amateur spy to hack into our system,” the source said.
While the development of large drones like the US’s MQ-9 Reaper remains in the hands of Taiwan’s state-owned arms makers National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology and the Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (AIDC), the outbreak of the Ukraine hostilities compelled the Taiwanese government to include non-state-owned companies as prime contractors for the production of affordable drones that spy on enemy movements and deliver explosives.
But the drone sector is far from being the only Taiwanese defense sector failing to eliminate Chinese components from weapon systems. In late June, the Taiwanese military apologized for revelations that Yilan-based solar power equipment supplier Yongliang had contravened the law by using China-made photovoltaic inverters in a military complex. An opposition legislator claimed he had visited the site and found that all 44 photovoltaic inverters installed at the center have the words “Made in China” on them.
According to the Taipei Times, Yongliang’s parent company, Hsinchu-based United Renewable Energy, responded with a statement saying that purchasing photovoltaic inverters from a German company that had them assembled in China was an error stemming from a lack of proper management.
More precariously, the military in August 2023 discovered some Chinese-made components installed by Taipei-based Idano on its Storm 3 light tactical utility vehicles. The discovery occurred when soldiers complained about poor quality control of parts supplied by Idano. The defense ministry had it coming: it awarded Idano a contract worth NT$200 million (US$6.3 million), even though the company only had a minuscule net worth of NT$1 million and had to source from subcontractors.
“They often procure the cheapest bid for military manufacturing, so long as it meets quality control standards, and often, the manufacturer has no idea what the component is to be used for,” said Wendell Minnick, a veteran military analyst based in Taipei and publisher of the China in Arms blog. “As long as it meets the ISO [global industrial standard], then it's ok. If it's hi-tech, that's a different matter.”
14. War Is Draining Ukraine’s Male-Dominated Work Force. Enter the Women.
The headline used in the print addition for this article is: "If Rosie Could Rivet, Karina Can Work in a Mine"
War – a great equalizer?
War Is Draining Ukraine’s Male-Dominated Work Force. Enter the Women.
More and more women are replacing men mobilized in the army. But there are not enough of them to make up for the labor shortage affecting the economy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/world/europe/ukraine-women-workforce-war.html?utm
By Constant MéheutPhotographs by Finbarr O’Reilly
Reporting from Pokrovsk, Pavlohrad and Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine
On a recent morning in eastern Ukraine, Karina Yatsina, a mine worker, was busy operating a conveyor belt in a dim, 1,200-foot-deep tunnel. Lights flickered at the end of the shaft, illuminating miners carving out the coal seams.
A year and a half ago, Ms. Yatsina, 21, was working as a nanny. Then friends told her that a mine in the eastern town of Pavlohrad was hiring women to replace men drafted into the military. The pay was good and the pension generous. It wasn’t long before Ms. Yatsina was walking through the mine’s maze of tunnels, a headlamp strapped to her red helmet.
“I would have never thought that I would be working in a mine,” Ms. Yatsina said, taking a short break in the sweltering heat of the tunnel. “I would have never imagined that.”
Ms. Yatsina is one of 130 women who have started working underground at the mine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. They now operate conveyors that carry coal to the surface, work as safety inspectors or drive the trains that connect the different parts of the mine.
“Their help is enormous because many men went to fight and are no longer available,” said Serhiy Faraonov, the deputy head of the mine, which is run by DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company. Some 1,000 male workers at the mine have been drafted, he said, or about a fifth of the total work force. To help make up for the shortage, the mine has hired some 330 women.
Image
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Ukrainian government suspended a law that had barred women from working underground and in “harmful or dangerous” conditions.
Image
“I would have never thought that I would be working in a mine,” said Karina Yatsina, who used to be a nanny.
They are part of a wider trend in Ukraine, where women are increasingly stepping into jobs long dominated by men as the widespread mobilization of soldiers depletes the male-dominated work force. They have become truck or bus drivers, welders in steel factories and warehouse workers. Thousands have also voluntarily joined the army.
In doing so, these women are reshaping Ukraine’s traditionally male-dominated work force, which experts say has long been marked by biases inherited from the Soviet Union. “There was this perception of women as second-class and less reliable workers,” said Hlib Vyshlinsky, the executive director of the Kyiv-based Center for Economic Strategy.
Mr. Vyshlinsky said that Ukrainian women had long been excluded from certain jobs, not only over the physical demands but also because such roles were considered too complicated for them. Women, he said, could drive trolley buses, but not trains. “It was full of stereotypes.”
The current influx of women into the Ukrainian job market has echoes of the munitionettes, the British women who worked in arms factories during World War I, and the women — memorialized in the iconic posters of Rosie the Riveter — who went to work in the United States during World War II.
But even with the influx of women into the work force, they will not be enough to replace all the male workers who have left, economists say. Three-quarters of Ukrainian employers have experienced labor shortages, a recent survey showed.
Before the war, 47 percent of Ukrainian women worked, according to the World Bank. Since then, some 1.5 million female workers, about 13 percent of the total, have left Ukraine, Mr. Vyshlinsky said.
“The share of women currently working in Ukraine is higher than before the war,” Mr. Vyshlinsky said. But too many have left Ukraine to allow the country to overcome its work force shortages, he said.
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Even with the influx of women into the work force, they will not be enough to replace all the male workers who have left, economists say.
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Valentyna Korotaeva said she had lost her job as a shop assistant in Povrovsk after a Russian missile landed nearby, causing the owners to pack up and leave. She now works as a crane operator at the mine.
The phenomenon of women joining the work force has been particularly evident in the mining industry.
After Russia invaded in 2022, the Ukrainian government suspended a law that had barred women from working underground and in “harmful or dangerous” conditions. Now, they are a regular presence in the cramped lift shafts that take workers to the depths of the mines.
“I was surprised. It’s unusual to see a woman with a shovel doing a man’s work,” said Dmytro Tobalov, a 28-year-old miner, not long after a woman walked past him and other burly miners who were resting on benches in a tunnel, waiting to board the elevator back out of the mine.
Mr. Tobalov, who works at a mine in Pokrovsk, in the eastern Donetsk region, said 12 men had left his group of miners for the army, replaced by 10 men and two women. “They’re doing great,” he said of the women.
Several women said they had joined the Pokrovsk mine, owned by Metinvest, Ukraine’s largest steel maker, because it offered stable jobs in a war-ravaged economy. Valentyna Korotaeva, 30, a former shop assistant in Pokrovsk, said she lost her job after a Russian missile landed near the shop, causing the owners to pack up and leave. She now works as a crane operator at the mine, moving large metal machines under repair in a warehouse.
How long Ms. Korotaeva can keep her job will depend on the situation on the front line, just eight miles from the mine. Russian forces have been creeping closer to Pokrovsk in recent weeks. Russia frequently shells the area, and the mine’s management has prepared evacuation plans in case it becomes too dangerous to remain there.
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At a Ukrainian Railways maintenance yard in Kharkiv. Ukrainian businesses have begun training women in jobs usually held by men, in a movement that could reshape Ukraine’s traditionally male-dominated work force.
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Natalia Kharchenko, 56, a machine operator at a Ukrainian Railways maintenance yard.
“It’s scary,” Ms. Korotaeva, a mother of two, said. “But for now I’m staying because there are schools and kindergartens here. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Several women said working in a mine was a way to participate in the war effort, keeping the Ukrainian economy going while men fight on the front. Coal mines have been a lifeline for many towns and cities in eastern Ukraine, employing tens of thousands of people and contributing significantly to the government budget through taxes.
Yulia Koba, a former child psychologist who joined the Pokrovsk mine in June as a conveyor belt operator, described it as a multipronged effort, with women in the rear supporting men on the front. “They’re there and we’re here,” she said.
Ms. Koba said male colleagues had been skeptical when she took on her new position, with some believing that women had no place in the mine’s dark and dusty tunnels. “What are you doing? Why are you here and not somewhere above ground?” she said she was asked.
But over time, Ms. Koba added, the men gradually overcame gender stereotypes and understood that women could do the job just as well as men. If women “go to serve in the armed forces, why can’t they take on traditionally male positions in the mine?” she said.
Companies have also tried to bring more women into the labor market through training programs.
The Pokrovsk mine started a program earlier this year that has so far enabled 32 women to work underground. Reskilling Ukraine, a Swedish nonprofit organization, has offered accelerated training courses for women wishing to become truck drivers. More than 1,000 women applied this year, but the organization has the funds to train only 350, said Oleksandra Panasiuk, the program coordinator.
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Women at a training facility designed to replicate a mine shaft, near the city of Povrovsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
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Olena Richko, taking lessons to become a truck driver, in Kyiv.
“A lot of women wanted to be drivers, but, for a long time, society didn’t really allow them to do that,” Ms. Panasiuk said. “That’s changing.”
At the Pavlohrad mine, several women hired during the war are now hoping to make a career for themselves and move up the ladder. Ms. Yatsina, the former nanny who is now a conveyor belt operator, said she would like to become an electromechanical technician. “I’ve thought about it,” she said, a faint smile creeping onto her youthful face. “I like it here.”
Evelina Riabenko and Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.
Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people. More about Constant Méheut
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 21, 2024, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: If Rosie Could Rivet, Karina Can Work in a Mine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
15. The Pentagon Is Planning a Drone ‘Hellscape’ to Defend Taiwan
Why is our Pentagon planning this? Why isn't Taiwan planning this? Again, I ask if we want to defend Taiwan more than Taiwan wants to defend itself?
I also think the author may be misusing or "misapplying" the phrase "grand strategy."
I would consider one of the Eight Points of Irregular Warfare (which applies to more than irregular warfare).
5. Ensure US and indigenous interests are sufficiently aligned. If indigenous and US interests are not sufficiently aligned the mission will fail. If the US has stronger interest than the indigenous force we can create an “assistance paradox” - if indigenous forces believe the US mission is "no fail” and the US forces will not allow them to fail and therefore they do not need to try too hard. They may very well benefit from long term US aid and support which may be their objective for accepting support in the first place.
https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html
The Pentagon Is Planning a Drone ‘Hellscape’ to Defend Taiwan
The US Defense Department’s grand strategy for protecting Taiwan from a massive Chinese military offensive involves flooding the zone with thousands of drones.
Wired · by Jared Keller · August 19, 2024
It has become conventional wisdom among the halls of the United States government that China will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan within the next few years. And when that happens, the US military has a relatively straightforward response in mind: Unleash hell.
Speaking to The Washington Post on the sidelines of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Shangri-La Dialogue in June, US Indo-Pacific Command chief Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo colorfully described the US military’s contingency plan for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as flooding the narrow Taiwan Strait between the two countries with swarms of thousands upon thousands of drones, by land, sea, and air, to delay a Chinese attack enough for the US and its allies to muster additional military assets in the region.
“I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities,” Paparo said, “so that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”
Cheap, easily weaponizable drones have transformed battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East in recent years, and the US military is rapidly adapting to this new uncrewed future. While Paparo isn’t the first to invoke the image of a robotic “hellscape” with regards to Taiwan (his predecessor, Admiral John Aquilino had previously used the term in August 2023), his comments offer the most vivid description of the Defense Department’s plan for dealing with Chinese aggression toward the US ally. In recent months, new details have started to draw out the contours of what, exactly, this “hellscape” would look like.
A Great Wall of Drones
China has undertaken a major military buildup ahead of what American defense leaders see as an imminent attempt to annex Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a breakaway province. According to a June analysis from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, the People’s Liberation Army Navy now boasts the largest maritime force on the planet, with 234 warships to the US Navy’s fleet of 219; testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, then-INDOPACOM boss Aquilino stated that the PLA Air Force also now has the largest number of warplanes in the region (not counting uncrewed systems), with designs on soon surpassing the US and Russian air fleets.
While the exact size of the Chinese military’s arsenal of uncrewed vehicles is difficult to estimate, the country has become the leading exporter of armed combat drones around the world over the past decade (along with Turkey), according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And when it comes to the consumer drones that are converted into weapons of war by soldiers on the front lines, Chinese drone giant Da-Jiang Innovations (better known in the US as DJI) controls three-quarters of that market, according to The Wall Street Journal. While the US and China may appear locked in an military drone arms race, the latter currently possess a significant advantage.
“China has essentially copied all of the large and medium high-altitude drones the US has and produced what amount to cheaper versions of the MQ-9 Reaper or the [RQ-4] Global Hawk,” Stacie Pettyjohn tells WIRED. A senior fellow and director of defense programs at the Center for a New American Security, Pettyjohn is the lead author of the June report “Swarms Over the Strait” on the role of drones in a future conflict over Taiwan. “Potentially more concerning is the smaller drones that don’t have to fly as far and can be launched from mainland China, of which the Chinese military has many.”
Simply put, China has a lot of drones and can make a lot more drones quickly, creating a likely advantage during a protracted conflict. “This stands in contrast to American and Taiwanese forces, who do not have large inventories of drones or the right mix of drones to successfully defeat a Chinese invasion,” Pettyjohn and her coauthors write in the CNAS report.
Apart from beefing up Taiwan’s counter-drone defenses, the Pentagon’s “hellscape” plan proposes that the US military make up for this growing gap by producing and deploying what amounts to a massive screen of autonomous drone swarms designed to confound enemy aircraft, provide guidance and targeting to allied missiles, knock out surface warships and landing craft, and generally create enough chaos to blunt (if not fully halt) a Chinese push across the Taiwan Strait. Networked drones will not just strike adversaries but also provide critical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance functions to fill the gaps between satellite imaging and crewed overflights, ostensibly allowing the US and its allies to develop a more complete picture of the battlefield as it evolves.
“A 2020 Rand Corporation report concludes that hundreds of networked, low-cost drones could guide American long-range anti-ship missiles toward a Chinese invasion fleet and would be a key capability needed to defeat China and successfully defend Taiwan,” the CNAS report says. “Similarly, proponents of air denial strategy argue that using ‘sufficiently large numbers of smaller, cheaper weapons,’ including ground-based air defenses and drone swarms, ‘in a distributed way’ would prevent China from gaining air superiority.”
As Pettyjohn points out to WIRED, the concept of Taiwan using densely layered defenses to inflict incredibly high losses on an invading Chinese force isn’t new, with past visions of a “porcupine strategy” built on missiles and mines as deterrents to an outright invasion. But the incorporation of massive drone fleets adds a new layer to the fight. Indeed, war games conducted by the US Air Force and defense think tanks like Rand over the past several years have pointed to the critical role drone swarms could play in potentially thwarting an invasion of Taiwan.
According to the CNAS report, this strategy appears to have been sharpened by recent lessons from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian military has successfully deployed drones against the superiorly numbered and equipped Russian force to disrupt enemy formations, destroy armored vehicles, and even neutralize surface combatants. Look no further than the Black Sea, where Ukrainian forces have managed to destroy 26 Russian vessels and forced Moscow’s vaunted Black Sea Fleet to a safe harbor hundreds of miles away using missiles, kamikaze UAVs, and explosive-laden drone boats.
The CNAS report makes several recommendations for how the Pentagon can best employ drones to defend Taiwan, emphasizing the need to build a “diverse” fleet of UAVs encompassing “a mix of higher-end and cheaper systems” (the large and expensive Reaper versus low-cost single-use kamikaze drones, for example), investing in the development of autonomous drone boats for attacking larger surface warships, and pre-positioning short- and medium-range drones on Taiwan for a rapid, immediate response to a Chinese invasion.
“In addition to acquiring ‘good enough’ long-range drones for target acquisition and strike, the United States should have a smaller number of stealthy drones that can conduct surveillance in highly contested airspace and provide targeting information for standoff missile strikes,” the report says, adding that “affordable kamikaze drones with relatively simple autonomy could overwhelm the Chinese navy’s air defenses and damage or destroy the invasion fleet.”
Engage the Replicator
With a potential invasion looming, the Pentagon has kicked efforts to make its vision of a “hellscape” into high gear. Last August, deputy secretary of defense Kathleen Hicks announced the department’s new Replicator initiative, designed to build and field “attritable autonomous systems”—DOD-speak for disposable, AI-enabled drones—“at scale of multiple thousands, in multiple domains” within the next 18 to 24 months. As of March, the Pentagon had earmarked $1 billion across its fiscal-year 2024 and 2025 budgets for its first round of Replicator systems, as USNI News reported.
Replicator appears to be doing its job already. In May, the Pentagon announced its first tranche of fresh capabilities, which includes the accelerated fielding of more than 1,000 of defense contractor AeroVironment’s Switchblade-600 loitering munitions—a man-portable missile that circles over targets before dive-bombing them at the right moment—in the next year, as well as the procurement of uncrewed “interceptor” surface vessels under the department’s new Production-Ready, Inexpensive, Maritime Expeditionary (Prime) effort. According to a DOD solicitation released in January, the Prime drone boats will purportedly be capable of “autonomously transiting hundreds of miles through contested waterspace, loitering in an assigned operating area while monitoring for maritime surface threats, and then sprinting to interdict a noncooperative, maneuvering vessel.” The first Replicator systems were already deployed to the Indo-Pacific, according to Hicks, with some military units training with cheap drones produced under the initiative as of August.
"This is just the beginning," Admiral Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a May statement. "Replicator is helping us jump-start the delivery of critical capabilities at scale.
Replicator isn’t the US military’s only effort to incorporate uncrewed weapons platforms into its formations. The Army has asked for $120.6 million as part of its fiscal-year 2025 budget request for Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (Lasso) semiautonomous loitering munitions to outfit infantry brigade combat teams with the capability. As of April, the Marine Corps has selected three defense contractors (AeroVironment, defense upstart Anduril, and Teledyne FLIR) to compete for a potential $249 million contract to furnish Marines with so-called Organic Precision Fires-Light kamikaze drone swarms (to say nothing of the Corps’ push to acquire Long Range Attack Missile air-launched loitering munition). US Special Operations Command, an early adopter of loitering munitions, now wants to outfit its fleet of aircraft with air-launched systems. And as for the maritime realm, the Marine Corps has been experimenting with uncrewed surface vessels bristling with Uvision Hero-120 kamikaze drone launchers, while the Navy has been eyeing missile-hauling drone boats as potential escorts for transport ships, among other lethal initiatives, after years of experimenting with uncrewed surface vessels as waterborne sensor nodes.
Beyond expanding its arsenal of uncrewed systems, the US is also working to bolster Taiwan’s own drone capabilities. In June, the State Department announced the approval of a $360 million weapons sale to Taipei that included 291 ALTIUS 600M-V kamikaze drones produced by Anduril and 720 Switchblade-300 loitering munitions. As the CNAS report notes, the integration of these one-way attack drones into Taiwanese military formations, when deployed in conjunction with explosive-laden drone boats and anti-ship missiles, could potentially prevent Chinese warships from ever reaching the country’s shores in a similar manner to how Ukrainian forces have denied the Russian military control over the Black Sea.
“Taiwan needs a lot of these systems and needs them quickly to incorporate them into broader tactics and formations” as effectively as the Ukrainians have, Pettyjohn says.
And this is just the beginning: The Taiwanese government plans to procure nearly 1,000 additional AI-enabled attack drones in the next year, according to Taipei Times, with long-standing plans to expand indigenous production of homegrown capabilities to prevent backlogs in weapons transfers from the United States—and, more importantly, ease reliance on Chinese-made commercial off-the-shelf parts. (Although, as Pettyjohn points out, the Taiwanese defense community itself isn’t totally unified around the “hellscape” plan in the first place.)
Access to commercial drones “is where Taiwan is most disadvantaged” because of DJI’s relative dominance of the market, Pettyjohn says, noting that “even if Taiwan had Chinese drones available to them, they would have to hack in to each system to ensure they can’t be tracked by DJI or don’t have similar vulnerabilities.”
“Consider that for most of the first-person-view kamikaze drones used in Ukraine right now, all of those components are sourced from China,” she adds. “Even Ukraine has tried to wean itself off Chinese sources and hasn’t found anything at a comparable price point.”
Mass-Producing Hell
Planning a “hellscape" of hundreds of thousands of drones is one thing, but actually making it a reality is another. An April 2023 assessment from the Rand Corporation indicated that rising demand for weaponized drones would likely “strain” the capacity of the existing US defense industrial base. Similarly, a separate CNAS report from June 2023 argued that the war in Ukraine (and the US government’s role as a major provider of security assistance to Kyiv) has “shed light on serious deficiencies” in the Pentagon’s ability to rapidly scale production of “key weapons” like precision-guided munitions compared to Russia—a problem echoed in the most recent CNAS report’s assessment of the US government’s approach to Taiwan’s defense.
“Ukraine consistently has pioneered new approaches to drone warfare, but Russia has rapidly adapted and scaled drone production in a way that Ukraine cannot match,” the June 2024 CNAS report says. “Technological and tactical innovations are necessary but not sufficient. Mass production of an affordable mix of drones is also needed to support a large and likely protracted conflict.”
The report adds that the US defense industrial based may not be “ currently capable of producing the quantities of drones needed for a war with China.”
Like Russia, China’s autocratic regime has enabled the country’s defense industrial base to rapidly accelerate weapons R&D and production, so far that Beijing is “heavily investing in munitions and acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the United States,” as a March comparison from CSIS put it. By contrast, the US defense industrial ecosystem has over the past several decades consolidated into a handful of large “prime” contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, a development that threatens to not only stifle innovation but hamstring the production of critical systems needed for the next big war.
“Overall, the US defense industrial ecosystem lacks the capacity, responsiveness, flexibility, and surge capability to meet the US military’s production and war-fighting needs,” the CSIS report says. “Unless there are urgent changes, the United States risks weakening deterrence and undermining its war-fighting capabilities.”
To that end, the latest CNAS report recommends that the Pentagon and Congress work to foster both the commercial and military drone industrial base “to scale production and create surge capacity” to quickly replace drones lost in a future conflict. While the Pentagon has, with regards to Ukraine, relied on multi-year and large-lot procurement programs to source munitions from large “primes” and “[provide] industry with the stability it needs to expand production capacity,” as the 2023 CNAS report put it, the Replicator initiative is explicitly designed to not only further provide that stability to drone makers but also to pull in “nontraditional” defense industry players—startups like Anduril or drone boat maker Saronic, the latter of which recently received $175 million in Series B funding to scale up its manufacturing capacity.
Replicator “provides the commercial sector with a demand signal that allows companies to make investments in building capacity, strengthening both the supply chain and the industrial base,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon organ responsible for capitalizing on emerging commercial technologies. “Replicator investments incentivize traditional and non-traditional industry players to deliver record volumes of all domain attritable autonomous systems in line with the ambitious schedule set forth by the deputy secretary of defense.”
“It comes down to contracts,” Pettyjohn says. “Where Replicator is potentially most impactful is where the Pentagon buys something they keep for a few years before they get something new for a different mission set so the DOD isn’t keeping a system in their inventory for decades. Establishing those practices, getting those contracts out there, and getting enough money into it so there’s competition and resiliency within industry is really needed to fuel innovation and provide the capabilities that are needed.”
It’s unclear whether the United States will actually be ready to defend Taiwan when the moment arrives; as legendary Prussian military commander Helmuth von Moltke is famously quoted as saying, “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” But with the right preparation, funding, and training (and a little luck), the Pentagon and its Taiwanese partners may end up successfully throwing a wrench in China’s suspected invasion plans by flooding the zone with lethal drones. War is hell, but when the next big conflict in the Indo-Pacific rolls around, the US wants to guarantee that it will be an absolute hellscape—for the Chinese military, at least.
Wired · by Jared Keller · August 19, 2024
16. Israel Is Winning
"Installing" new leadership? It cannot be externally imposed or it will just breed continued resistance. And of course Hamas is so entrenched in Gaza that there is likely no chance of new leadership rising from within. What a dilemma.
Excerpts:
No previous example is exactly like Israel’s operation today in terms of the number of Hamas combatants embedded in populated urban areas, the tactics Hamas uses, or the vast bunker and tunnel complexes at its disposal. But a few battles are comparable. In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, more than 10,000 civilians died in a campaign by U.S. and Iraqi forces to liberate the city from around 4,000 Islamic State fighters, a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of roughly 2.5 to 1. In the 1945 Battle of Manila, the U.S. military operation led to the death of 100,000 civilians to rout 17,000 Japanese defenders, for a ratio of nearly 6 to 1. Figures are less reliable in other battles, such as the 1950 Second Battle of Seoul, urban fighting during the 1999–2009 Second Chechen War, or Russia’s more recent attack of Mariupol. But the civilian-to-combatant death ratio for Israel’s operation in Gaza today, typically estimated between 1 and 3 to 1, is at the lower end of the historical range.
Neutralizing Hamas and securing a new governing authority in Gaza may be Israel’s best chance at recovering its damaged global reputation. Israel must now show it has a plan to reach that outcome. Wars have been lost when the governments that enter a conflict, their populations, and their allies do not understand the strategy, tactics, and timelines for achieving their goals. Sun Tzu’s maxim still applies: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, while tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Today, the world mostly sees Israel’s tactics, reported through the lens of civilian casualties. But to win, Israel needs to emphasize its strategy. It must consolidate the gains it has made against Hamas by pushing forward a political solution. If Israel cannot fully remove Hamas from power, demilitarize the strip, and back a new authority in Gaza, then Hamas will likely reconstitute itself and fight another day. That result would be no victory for Israel or for the region. Israel must therefore take advantage of the present moment, when it has the upper hand and Hamas is on the run.
Israel Is Winning
But Lasting Victory Against Hamas Will Require Installing New Leadership in Gaza
August 21, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Understanding Urban Warfare · August 21, 2024
Reading the news today often leaves the impression that Israel is struggling in its war against Hamas. The fighting in the Gaza Strip has carried on for more than ten months, a peace deal remains elusive, and the threat of regional escalation looms. More than 100 hostages taken on October 7 have yet to be released, with dozens of them presumed dead. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have died, and Gaza faces a dire humanitarian crisis. Critics of Israel’s military strategy have argued that the devastation it has caused has increased support for Hamas and left the group stronger. According to this common perspective, Israel’s prosecution of the war has served only to lock in a cycle of deadly violence.
In the flurry of commentary, however, it is easy to lose sight of what it means to win the war Israel is fighting. War is the pursuit of political objectives through force. A war has a start and a finish, so its progress can be assessed based on how close each side has come to meeting its political objectives. By this measure, it is Israel, not Hamas, that now holds the advantage.
Hamas initiated the war when it invaded southern Israel on October 7. The group launched over 4,000 rockets at civilian areas, and more than 3,000 Hamas militants and Palestinian civilians crossed into Israeli territory. By the end of the attack, around 1,200 Israeli civilians, soldiers, and foreign nationals were dead and 251 hostages were taken to Gaza. Hamas has never formally stated its political objectives for the current bout of fighting, but the group’s overarching goal is Israel’s destruction—not a more moderate outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as a two-state solution. Its goals for the October 7 attack were likely multiple, such as: to trigger a string of attacks by other militant groups on Israel, stop the process of Arab-Israeli normalization, and drive a wedge between Israel and its principal ally, the United States. After Israel’s devastating counterassault, however, Hamas’s objectives are clear: to survive the attacks, maintain power, and retain Palestinian and international support.
Israel has defined its own war aims more explicitly. It formally declared a war of self-defense against Hamas the day after the October 7 attack, outlining three strategic objectives: to recover all hostages, secure its borders, and destroy Hamas. After ten months of high-intensity fighting, Israel has made significant progress toward or nearly achieved each of these goals. More than half of the hostages have returned from Gaza, and strong defenses are in place at Israel’s southern border. Hamas today has a fraction of the military power it boasted on October 7. The group had already been forced to govern from the shadows before Israel assassinated its political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran last month, dealing a major blow to Hamas’s ability to rule in Gaza.
Israel’s degradation of Hamas’s military and political strength puts it in a position to move toward a postconflict phase in some areas of the Gaza Strip. Even if significantly lowering the intensity of the fighting is possible in only a small part of the territory right now, Israel must show constituencies in Gaza, in international community, and within Israel itself that it has a larger political plan to follow its military achievements. Israeli leaders need to understand and clearly communicate that the focus of the war must begin to shift. If Israel does not take this opportunity to secure new leadership in Gaza to replace Hamas, it will forfeit its current advantage and end the war in defeat.
REBUILDING DEFENSES
Israel’s military campaign has made progress on the first of its war aims, the release of those kidnapped on October 7. The number of hostages retrieved, released, or rescued stands at 146. Israeli soldiers have retrieved seven living hostages, as well as the bodies of 30 deceased hostages. Some argue that the fact that a majority of the hostages—105—were returned to Israel through prisoner exchanges means that negotiation, not military force, was the only viable way to bring them home. But it was Israeli military action in Gaza that created the conditions for Hamas to agree to release hostages during the temporary cease-fire in November 2023. Historically, Hamas has not returned the Israelis it has captured without significant pressure forcing its hand. Recall that Hamas held a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, for more than five years before agreeing in 2011 to free him in exchange for the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who would go on to plan the October 7 attacks. To this day, Hamas holds two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two deceased Israeli soldiers it captured in 2014 and 2015. For the remaining October 7 hostages, there is still hope that Israel can secure their release through negotiations with what is left of the Hamas leadership.
Israel has mostly secured its southern flank, too. Within days of last October’s attack, it had regained control of all border crossings and the places along the wall separating Israel from Gaza that Hamas breached to enter Israel. Today, residents have returned to some semblance of normal life in most major urban areas in southern Israel, such as Sderot and Ofakim, cities that Hamas militants attacked on October 7 and Hamas rockets targeted several times afterward. The small communities within a few miles of the border wall remain evacuated until the end of August, after which the Israeli government will assess whether it is safe enough for residents to return to their homes. The imminent danger of rocket attacks has dropped significantly in these areas. There were more than 6,000 alerts about incoming rockets from Gaza the week of October 7, but now most weeks the number of alerts is in the single digits, low double digits, or even zero.
Israel is even adding an extra layer of defense to its border with Gaza. In the past, Israel relied on just a wall at the border for protection. Now Israeli forces are creating a security zone of around half a mile from the wall. They are clearing all buildings from the area, which will allow Israeli forces to more easily patrol and to set up outposts along the border. Building this buffer zone also requires finding and destroying Hamas’s tunnels that lead to the wall, such as the one Israel forces discovered in December 2023 just over 400 yards from the Erez crossing point on Gaza’s northern border. That tunnel was 2.5 miles long, reached depths of 165 feet, and was wide enough to drive a truck through. The Israeli military is also establishing control of a passage through the middle of the Gaza Strip, the Netzarim corridor, which connects Israel to the Mediterranean Sea. This corridor and various new humanitarian entry points and roads will allow Israeli forces to move freely and rapidly into Gaza on security missions or to provide other forms of support to a post-Hamas governing body.
CHIPPING AWAY
That leaves Israel’s objective of destroying Hamas. Many observers have suggested this goal is unrealistic because military action can never destroy Hamas’s ideology, but what Israel actually needs to do to achieve its war aims is much more attainable. It must destroy Hamas politically, which means removing the group as the governing power in Gaza. And it must destroy it militarily—that is, dismantle and degrade the group’s military capability to the point that it cannot conduct organized attacks or defend the territory it now controls. It is necessary for Israel to accomplish both, as brute force is what gives Hamas the ability to rule over the population of Gaza. If it succeeds, Israel can prevent Hamas from reclaiming its pre–October 7 position.
Hamas’s authority in Gaza is much shakier today than it was on October 7. Although Hamas remains the main political power, it must now use heinous force in order to govern. Hamas militants kill civilians in Gaza, including clan or tribal leaders, who challenge the group’s brutal rule. The fact that residents increasingly criticize Hamas on social media and in comments to international press is in itself a sign that the group is losing its grip. Even more telling, Hamas’s political rivals in the West Bank see it as weak enough to criticize. In the aftermath of October 7, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, the longtime ruling body and representative of the Palestinian people in the West Bank, was careful not to criticize Hamas directly. But by July, Abbas had said publicly that Hamas bore some of the “legal, moral, and political responsibility” for prolonging the current war. The same month, a senior Fatah official, Munir al-Jaghoub, called on the group to stop using civilians in Gaza as human shields.
As it clings to power, Hamas has also warned that it would attack any Arab forces that enter the strip—forces that could end up providing security assistance to a post-Hamas government in Gaza, with the express goal of keeping the group from resurging. And the group is stealing, hoarding, selling, and distributing international humanitarian aid, which has become one of its last remaining ways of holding onto power. The death of Ismail Haniyeh, moreover, will make it far more difficult for Hamas to maintain the international political networks and financial infrastructure that have been essential to keeping the group well resourced.
It is Israel, not Hamas, that now holds the advantage.
Destroying Hamas’s military capabilities has been an arduous task for Israel. Hamas had spent more than 15 years and billions of dollars to build a heavily armed terrorist network covering all of Gaza. More than 30,000 militants were organized into brigades and battalions, each assigned a geographic area of control and equipped with antitank guns, rifles, heavy machine guns, grenades, mortars, improvised explosive devices, and other weapons. Hamas possessed between 15,000 and 20,000 rockets, and had the manufacturing capability to produce its own rockets and munitions.
Hamas also built one of the world’s most expansive military tunnel networks, estimated to be more than 300 miles long—longer than the New York City subway system—and range in depth from a few feet below the surface to more than 200 feet underground. Hamas uses its tunnels for a variety of purposes. Some help the group move freely throughout Gaza, including travel beneath Wadi Gaza, a wetland area that separates the north and south parts of the strip. Other tunnels help Hamas brigades carry out specific tactical maneuvers, both offensive and defensive, in key areas.
Israel has made significant progress degrading these military capabilities. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Hamas militants, but the damage it has done to Hamas’s combat power is greater than the raw numbers suggest. Combat power is a combination of leadership, command-and-control systems, trained units, weapon and equipment supplies, manufacturing capability, and infrastructure, among other things. Israel has destroyed 22 of Hamas’s 24 organized battalions, killing three of five brigade commanders, more than 20 battalion commanders, and approximately 150 company commanders within these units, as well as taking out their weapon supplies and infrastructure. In July, Israel conducted a strike in central Gaza that killed Mohammed Deif, the founder and head of Hamas’s military wing and second in command of the organization as a whole; Hamas’s third-highest-ranking member, Marwan Issa, was killed a few months earlier. When Israeli forces reenter areas of Gaza they previously cleared, the Hamas formations they find are weaker than the ones they encountered before, with fewer experienced leaders and fighters, weaponry, and tunnels from which to conduct guerrilla-style attacks.
It is almost impossible to say what percentage of the tunnels in Gaza have been destroyed, as Israeli forces have not yet discovered all of them. That process will take years. But Israel has demolished many of the most valuable tunnels, including two separate mile-long tunnels that ran under the river valley that divides the northern and southern ends of Gaza, large tunnels that opened within a few hundred yards of the Israel border and were designed for launching attacks, tunnels that crossed from Gaza to the Sinai, and many tunnels that connected brigade areas within Gaza and served as command-and-control areas. In addition to curtailing Hamas’s movements within the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has isolated it from the outside world. Gaza’s border with Egypt is now under Israeli control, and Israeli forces are methodically finding and destroying cross-border tunnels. Without these routes through Egypt, Hamas is cut off from external military support.
HOW TO WIN
For all the progress Israel has made toward its war aims, however, it will lose in the end if it fails to secure a replacement for Hamas as a new ruling power in Gaza. The United States knows such defeat well: it lost in Vietnam when the North Vietnamese took South Vietnam in 1975, and it lost again in Afghanistan when the Taliban seized power in 2021 from the government the United States had backed for 20 years.
It is now Israel’s responsibility to create the conditions that would allow new leadership in Gaza to survive. The first step is to reduce Hamas’s capabilities enough to let an external force enter Gaza and provide security in population centers. When a new body, such as the Palestinian Authority, takes over governance from Hamas, Israel will need to provide it security assistance, including with counterterror operations. The role of Israeli forces should not amount to a constant presence in Gaza. As parts of the strip are stabilized, the new authority can lead the postconflict work of deradicalization, disarmament, demobilization, and reconciliation. By supporting this new government in Gaza, facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid, and making it possible to rebuild, Israel can show the Palestinian public it is committed to a better future without Hamas.
To realize such a future, Hamas must be destroyed with no hope of resurgence. How Israel goes about that task does matter. It must follow international law and maintain foreign and domestic support if it is to sustain its war effort. At this point, however, Israel is losing the public relations battle. It has failed to communicate consistently how its day-to-day operations were linked to its strategic goals. All the world sees are reports of an ever-climbing civilian casualty count and images of vast destruction, without reference to how the fight against Hamas is progressing or how similar urban battles have proceeded in the past.
Israel must show that it has a political plan to follow its military achievements.
No previous example is exactly like Israel’s operation today in terms of the number of Hamas combatants embedded in populated urban areas, the tactics Hamas uses, or the vast bunker and tunnel complexes at its disposal. But a few battles are comparable. In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, more than 10,000 civilians died in a campaign by U.S. and Iraqi forces to liberate the city from around 4,000 Islamic State fighters, a civilian-to-combatant death ratio of roughly 2.5 to 1. In the 1945 Battle of Manila, the U.S. military operation led to the death of 100,000 civilians to rout 17,000 Japanese defenders, for a ratio of nearly 6 to 1. Figures are less reliable in other battles, such as the 1950 Second Battle of Seoul, urban fighting during the 1999–2009 Second Chechen War, or Russia’s more recent attack of Mariupol. But the civilian-to-combatant death ratio for Israel’s operation in Gaza today, typically estimated between 1 and 3 to 1, is at the lower end of the historical range.
Neutralizing Hamas and securing a new governing authority in Gaza may be Israel’s best chance at recovering its damaged global reputation. Israel must now show it has a plan to reach that outcome. Wars have been lost when the governments that enter a conflict, their populations, and their allies do not understand the strategy, tactics, and timelines for achieving their goals. Sun Tzu’s maxim still applies: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, while tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Today, the world mostly sees Israel’s tactics, reported through the lens of civilian casualties. But to win, Israel needs to emphasize its strategy. It must consolidate the gains it has made against Hamas by pushing forward a political solution. If Israel cannot fully remove Hamas from power, demilitarize the strip, and back a new authority in Gaza, then Hamas will likely reconstitute itself and fight another day. That result would be no victory for Israel or for the region. Israel must therefore take advantage of the present moment, when it has the upper hand and Hamas is on the run.
Foreign Affairs · by Understanding Urban Warfare · August 21, 2024
17. The Return of Hamiltonian Statecraft
I thought the revival of Hamiltonianism was due to a Broadway musical. (apologies for the attempt at humor).
I am recalling my political philosophy classes now. It is good to engage (or re-engage) with these ideas whether you agree or disagree. These are ideas that we should be discussing and debating.
Conclusion:
The revival of national Hamiltonianism in American life is being driven by the interplay of a new era of geopolitical competition with the dynamics of the information revolution. The ideas and priorities that come with it are essential if the United States is to regain its cultural and political balance at home while navigating the increasingly challenging environment overseas. American leaders must embrace the return of a set of ideas that in past generations have done so much to make the United States, for all its shortcomings, one of the richest, most powerful, most open, and most progressive societies in history.
The Return of Hamiltonian Statecraft
A Grand Strategy for a Turbulent World
September/October 2024
Published on August 20, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Walter Russell Mead · August 20, 2024
The twenty-first century has seen the return to prominence of U.S. foreign policy traditions once largely considered relics of an outmoded past. Jacksonian national populism, once dismissed as an immature sentiment that an enlightened nation had left behind, returned with a fury after 9/11. With the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, Jeffersonian isolationism—the belief that U.S. intervention abroad leads only to endless war, the enrichment of corporate elites, and the erosion of American democracy—also reemerged as a potent force on both the right and the left.
These two schools returned to prominence as the post–Cold War foreign policy consensus broke up. After 1990, a broadly liberal and globalist consensus defined the boundaries within which mostly Democratic liberal internationalists competed against mostly Republican neoconservatives. President Barack Obama’s retreat from humanitarian intervention following the disastrous campaign in Libya in 2011 illustrated the waning hold of liberal internationalism among Democrats. So did his restrained response to Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Likewise, Donald Trump’s shock victory in the 2016 Republican presidential primary contest signaled the collapse of neoconservatism as a significant electoral force among the Republican base. In both parties, restraint eclipsed intervention as the dominant mode of foreign policy, and a commitment to free trade gave way to various forms of protectionism and industrial policy.
The liberal, globalist consensus collapsed just as geopolitical competition returned to the center of world affairs. Today, the security of the United States and its allies, along with a variety of international public goods that the Pax Americana once largely secured, is increasingly under threat. The foundations of the U.S.-led world order are steadily eroding, with deepening crises on Russia’s western frontiers, in the Middle East, and in the contested waters around China. Effective responses to the growing challenges require the kind of stable consensus that a politically fragmented America can no longer provide.
U.S. foreign policy has turned in a widening gyre in the last quarter century, as one president after the other—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden—brought very different approaches to the White House. Allies and adversaries alike began to discount the commitments of each president, given the likelihood that his policies would be reversed or dramatically modified by his successor. Although Jacksonian national populism and Jeffersonian isolationism have their legitimate place in American foreign policy debates, neither can fully address today’s challenges. Another historical school of U.S. foreign policy, Hamiltonian pragmatism, is better suited to the crises of the contemporary world. Based on the political philosophy of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father and first secretary of the treasury, this school offers a grand strategy that actively promotes U.S. commerce, American patriotism, and enlightened realism in foreign affairs. The Hamiltonian school lost its way in the “end of history” optimism of the early post–Cold War era, but the pressures of a more sober era in world history are leading to a rediscovery of the foundational ideas that make the Hamiltonian tradition an essential component of successful American foreign policy.
LIBERALISM UNDER FIRE
The driving force behind the Hamiltonian renewal is the rising importance of the interdependence of corporate success and state power. In the heady days of post–Cold War unipolarity, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and many leading companies started thinking of themselves as global rather than American firms. Moreover, it seemed to many foreign policy thinkers and officials that the distinction between U.S. national interests and the needs and requirements of the global economic and political system had largely disappeared.
U.S. economic and security interests, the thinking went, required the construction of a strong international system promoting liberal economic and political values. It was increasingly anachronistic to think of U.S. interests as opposed to those of the emerging U.S.-led world system. To adapt the famous phrase of Charles Wilson, President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of defense: in the post–Cold War, end-of-history era, what was good for the world was good for the United States.
Today, that vision of a global liberal utopia is under fire from all sides. China and other illiberal regimes seek to use and abuse state power to build up economic challenges to leading U.S. tech firms. Companies such as Alphabet, Apple, and Meta face growing legal and regulatory obstacles from the governments of revisionist powers. Moreover, the growing trend toward the use of subsidies and trade restrictions to promote climate goals increases the degree to which government decisions drive private-sector investment decisions and affect the profitability of businesses around the world. Never has the strength of the state been so closely tied to the dynamism of the corporate world. This connection operates most strongly at the most advanced levels of tech and production: the information-finance-business-government complex is increasingly necessary to the prosperity and security of the American state and people.
Meanwhile, geopolitical conflict poses actual and potential risk to the business models of private-sector companies that rely on global supply chains. Ragtag militias can throttle commercial navigation in a waterway as vital as the Red Sea. A real crisis in the waters around Taiwan could block commerce in and out of the island, denying global access to the most advanced semiconductors. A crisis could also close those waters to shipping to and from China, Japan, and South Korea, triggering the greatest economic shock since World War II—and perhaps even nuclear war. The information revolution is also driving the state and the corporate sector together. Increasingly, the gathering, storage, and exploitation of information is joining money as a critical element of the power of states. Information today plays a growing role as the basis of military power, of the economic strength that makes military power affordable, of a viable arms industry, and of both defensive and offensive cybersecurity capabilities. Given the strategic importance of the information sector, and the reality that only profitable private firms can support the huge investments required to build a sophisticated tech innovation culture that can allow a given state to compete, states cannot avoid taking a strong interest in the health and prosperity of a domestically based tech sector (or at least a friendly foreign one). Nor can they view with indifference the success of businesses based in hostile or unreliable countries.
A statue of Alexander Hamilton, Washington D.C., October 2013
Joshua Roberts / Reuters
Both business and government leaders are today discovering something that Hamilton could have told them has long been true: economic policy is strategy, and vice versa. The combined effects of the information revolution, the massive mix of investment and regulatory activism by governments in the energy complex involved in the fight against climate change, and the continuing impact of the regulatory changes introduced in the wake of the financial crisis have brought the corporate world and the American state into intimate contact. The role of economic and technological competition in the contest with China reinforces the marriage between the White House and Wall Street.
The libertarian right will be disappointed that the nexus exists and that it will inexorably deepen. The anticorporate left will be pained to realize that states will choose, of necessity, to use their economic and political clout to strengthen rather than check Big Tech. In the current era of geopolitical competition, Washington is going to worry more about whether its leading tech companies are strong enough and well resourced enough to stay ahead of their Chinese rivals than about whether U.S. tech companies are becoming too big. Future presidents are more likely to push back against European Union efforts to impose heavy antitrust fines on U.S. tech companies than to impose similar rules at home. The question of whether a given tech company is a loyal and reliable partner for Washington will matter more to the U.S. government than whether the company is too big or too rich. That reality, in turn, will drive large tech companies to seek a modus vivendi with the state.
The U.S. political system has become newly sensitive to the relationship between business and national security. From the Trump administration’s battle against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to the Biden administration’s ban on Russian cybersecurity companies such as Kaspersky Lab, policymakers are scrutinizing investment and purchasing activities by private companies to identify potentially adverse consequences for national security. Increasingly, U.S. economic diplomacy explicitly incorporates security issues among its core objectives. Agreements such as AUKUS (the nuclear submarine deal among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) open the doors to closer tech relationships with trusted partners. Meanwhile, U.S. diplomats seek to influence decisions by semiconductor manufacturers and friendly governments to prevent hostile countries from gaining access to critical technologies.
The rise of populism is also driving business in self-defense to embrace the nation-state. Populist nationalism views multinational corporations, big business, and finance capitalism with deep suspicion. Companies seen as less than loyal to the United States can face swift backlash from angry politicians attacking them as either woke or pro-China, or both. For domestic as well as international reasons, American corporate leaders are likely to find new value in staying close to Old Glory.
PROSPERITY THROUGH PRAGMATISM
None of this would have come as a surprise to Hamilton. In 1772, he arrived in New York from the Caribbean as a penniless teenager. He was a formidable youth. When Princeton refused to admit him at a sufficiently advanced level, he went to King’s College (now Columbia) in New York, but he returned to the Princeton campus as a captain of artillery during the Revolution and shelled Nassau Hall.
During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution and his time as secretary of the treasury in George Washington’s administration, Hamilton created both an intellectual framework and a practical foundation for constitutional order, economic development, and foreign policy that dominated almost all of U.S. history. The Hamiltonian tradition in political life offers a mix of pragmatism, financial prudence, strategic focus, and, when necessary, ruthlessness that has inspired generations of past American leaders. Secretary of State Henry Clay in the early nineteenth century, President Abraham Lincoln, and President Theodore Roosevelt all claimed to stand in this tradition. From Washington through Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of State George Shultz in the modern era, many of the country’s greatest leaders used Hamilton’s ideas to shape the United States’ success at home and abroad.
The Hamiltonian way is not a rigid system or an ideological straitjacket. It is a way of thinking pragmatically about the relationship between the requirements of market capitalism, the demands of domestic politics, and the realities of the international system. It proposes a strong but limited federal government that favors the development of a thriving business sector at home and promotes U.S. security and trade abroad. Domestic policy should be grounded on a sound financial system and a profound but not rigid or doctrinaire embrace of pro-market economics. Foreign policy should be based on a commonsense mixture of balance-of-power politics, commercial interests, and American values.
The liberal, globalist consensus is under fire from all sides.
Hamilton’s statecraft sought to adapt the most important features of the British system for the United States—which is one reason it encountered such deep hostility from Anglophobes such as Thomas Jefferson. As Hamilton looked around the world for models that the newly independent American republic could emulate, he realized that the essence of British statecraft, adapted to American conditions, offered the best opportunity for his country to achieve the prosperity and strength that could stabilize its domestic politics. A powerful executive, a solid financial system supported by an independent central bank and a stable management of the public debt, an integrated national market supported by the rule of law and intelligent government investments in infrastructure—all these elements would, given the United States’ ample natural resources and entrepreneurial spirit, develop a strong, dynamic, and technologically advanced national economy.
That economy, in turn, would allow the rising nation to support a navy that could defend its global interests and an army powerful enough to address the security threats that the United Kingdom, France, and Spain still posed in the Western Hemisphere. Today, beyond ensuring supremacy in the hemisphere, the United States’ foreign policy goals should be to preserve, at the lowest possible cost, a balance of power on both ends of Eurasia while keeping the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific open to U.S. trade.
“AMERICA FIRST” IN PRACTICE
Through more than two centuries of sometimes dramatic change, three ideas stood at the heart of the Hamiltonian vision: the centrality of commerce to American society, the importance of a strong national identity and patriotism, and the need for an enlightened realism in foreign affairs. The era after the Cold War, when much of the American establishment sought to transcend the national element of Hamiltonian thought, reflected an unusual and, as it turned out, short-lived period in American history, one in which the construction of a global order appeared to have replaced the more parochial tasks of safeguarding the interests of the American state and American business. The separation of the business agenda from any sense of a national or patriotic goal had profound and sharply negative consequences for the political standing of pro-business politicians and interests in the United States. It also encouraged the rise of antibusiness populism across the political spectrum.
The shift from a focus on building a postnational order back to a more nation-centric foreign policy will likely result in significant and, overall, positive changes in U.S. foreign policy and in the political climate around it. Such a shift could also promote the development of a more intellectually robust and internationally viable understanding of what an “America first” policy agenda would involve. A brief review of the three pillars of national Hamiltonian thought should illustrate some of the ways in which the return of an invigorated Hamiltonian voice to the U.S. foreign policy debate should raise the level of that debate and, one hopes, help drive better outcomes at home and abroad.
The first critical idea from Hamiltonian thought is that business is the foundation not only of the United States’ wealth (and, therefore, of its military security) but also of its social and political stability. Thanks to the abundance of the country and the resourcefulness of its people, Hamilton believed, the United States could be a society like no other. Unlike in European countries, most of the people would be owner-entrepreneurs. Widely distributed property ownership and prosperity would insulate the American experiment from the tumultuous and revolutionary fate of republics in European history.
The first business of government, therefore, is to ensure the conditions that allow private business to flourish. A sound currency, a stable financial system, and deep capital markets are key parts of the infrastructure that sustains American life. A legal system that protects property and enforces contracts, backed by competent police and military forces able to preserve order, is another. Physical infrastructure—such as roads, harbors, and canals in Hamilton’s day and, later, railroads, highways, and airports—is necessary, as well. What can be called “infostructure” also matters: the legal and regulatory frameworks that allow for the orderly conduct of business in the complex fields of modern commerce, such as the regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum and the definition of intellectual property.
American corporate leaders are likely to find new value in staying close to Old Glory.
A Hamiltonian government is pro-market, but it is not exactly laissez-faire. It has economic policies beyond observing the operation of free markets. It acts. It invests. It uses its power to promote some types of enterprise over others. Hamilton saw tariffs as a way to tilt the balance of American development away from agricultural commodities to manufactured goods and financial services. His successors would adopt policies such as the 1862 Homestead Act, which gave public lands for free to those who would bring them under cultivation, and support policies that subsidized mining and railroad construction. These public-sector policies often resulted in massive corruption, but they also created wealth for the nation as a whole. After World War II, Hamiltonians supported initiatives such as the Marshall Plan, which financed the rebuilding of Europe, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the predecessor to the World Trade Organization. They did so out of a belief that promoting economic recovery and integration among the United States’ Cold War allies would both strengthen and solidify the anti-Soviet coalition.
The second big Hamiltonian idea—the critical role of the nation and national feeling—is likely to be at least as important in the coming era of American politics. Hamilton was a patriot. Perhaps because he was an immigrant without deep roots in a particular colony, he believed that the bonds that hold Americans together mattered more than the ethnic, regional, religious, and philosophical differences that divided them. For Hamilton, and for Hamiltonians such as Lincoln and Roosevelt, the preamble to the Constitution mattered. “We the people of the United States,” the founders wrote, not “We the peoples.”
Then, as now, Americans must embrace a duty of care toward one another. Nationalism—or patriotism, for those allergic to the more common term—is a moral necessity, not a moral failing. Americans are not just citizens of the world but also citizens of the American republic. And just as individual Americans have duties and ties to their family members that they do not have to the public at large, they have obligations to their fellow citizens that do not extend to all humankind. Hamilton risked his life fighting for a nation that was just being born. His successors have characteristically made patriotism the bedrock of their participation in political life. The sincerity of patriotism, which led so many into military service, has helped to legitimize the Hamiltonian vision for other Americans who were not instinctively drawn to the Hamiltonian ideal.
Hamiltonians have understood that patriotism lends American business a legitimacy without which its future is insecure. It is the patriotism of businesspeople as a class that ultimately safeguards their property and their lives. If a corporation considers itself a citizen of the world; is as at home in China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia as it is in the United States; and has leaders who feel no special obligations toward the American people, why would the American people support this business against unfair competition from foreigners? Or for that matter, why would they not simply tax its profits and confiscate its assets?
The shift from national Hamiltonianism to globalism across much of the post–Cold War American elite has massive, although often overlooked, implications for the immigration debate. If U.S. business leaders are not committed, first and foremost, to the American people, populists will be free to impugn corporate advocacy for higher levels of immigration as a sinister plot against the well-being of the average American family.
Outside the New York Stock Exchange, New York City, January 2023
Andrew Kelly / Reuters
Hamilton stood for an impassioned but enlightened patriotism. He risked his life in battle for his country and dedicated himself to its service, at times to his considerable financial or personal cost. He understood that the security of property and liberty rests on the legitimacy of society’s leaders and that if the great and the powerful are seen to despise the common good and the common man, the social order will come crashing down. He was neither a jingoist nor a xenophobe, but he understood that a commercial society cannot flourish unless its social and business leaders are clearly, conspicuously, and consistently identified with the flag.
This sense of the necessary connection between solid patriotism and the political legitimacy of business and property was largely, although never entirely, lost in the post–Cold War years. Elite universities moved ever farther away from their old role of instilling patriotism in their students or expecting it from their faculties. Hamilton would have condemned this as a dangerous folly likely to end in attacks on the legitimacy of the state and the security of property. Hamiltonians have long understood that elite privilege can be justified only by a conspicuous adherence to a widely accepted vision of the common good—and that serious patriotism is an indispensable element of that adherence.
The third idea to recover from Hamilton’s legacy is the concept of realism in foreign policy. The originality of the Anglo-American foreign policy intellectual tradition is not sufficiently appreciated with respect to this idea. Hamilton and his followers neither stand with the naive liberal internationalists nor with the Machiavellian realpolitikers. Unlike the naifs, he did not believe that humanity was naturally good or naturally disposed to settle down in democratic and egalitarian societies, all harmoniously at peace with one another. Short of divine intervention, he did not expect the arrival of a perfectly just society, a perfectly honest government, or a perfectly fair international order. He did not even expect a reasonable approximation of these eminently desirable conditions to appear.
Hamilton believed that people were naturally flawed. They were selfish, greedy, jealous, petty, vindictive, and sometimes extraordinarily brutal and cruel. Elites were arrogant and grasping; mobs were ignorant and emotional. With such material you could not build a perfect village, much less a perfect nation or a perfect world order. Democratic peace theory, the idea that democracies would never go to war with each other, had not received its modern form, but Hamilton’s argument in “Federalist No. 6” (of The Federalist Papers) is a sustained attack on what he saw as the delusional folly behind such utopian dreams. And the idea that global institutions such as the United Nations would ever have the wisdom, power, or legitimacy to replace national governments would have seemed dangerously credulous. He never accepted the idea that U.S. foreign policy should be about installing democracies in other countries or establishing a global system of government. He rejected Jefferson’s call for an ideological crusade at the side of revolutionary France. But that view did not drive him, or those who follow in his footsteps, to cynical depths of despair. Hamiltonians might not be able to transform earth into heaven, but that did not mean they had to go to hell. Following a tradition of Anglo-American thought grounded in books such as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hamiltonians see human nature offering the hope for limited and perhaps only temporary but still real improvements in the human condition.
Through commerce, Hamiltonians have believed, U.S. foreign policy could make the world at least somewhat more peaceful. By encouraging Germany and Japan to reenter the global economy on equal terms after World War II, American diplomats, such as Acheson and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, hoped to promote the integration of these countries into a peaceful order.
ENLIGHTENED REALISM
But Hamilton was not a determinist. He did not think that textbook maxims and social science “laws” of human development, either Marxist or liberal, could explain the crooked course of human history. Economic integration could create the possibility for the construction of a durable and stable international system, but there was nothing automatic about this process. Germany and Japan embraced a Hamiltonian capitalist system and entered into new kinds of international relationships, but countries such as today’s China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have made different choices. Unlike so many policymakers and analysts in post–Cold War America, Hamilton would not have been surprised by their rejection.
Law-based and democratic societies might tend toward more stable and less violent international relations, but there is no guarantee that nations will persist on this path and even less that all nations will ever embrace it. In this wicked and imperfect world, the United States cannot unilaterally disarm. It cannot afford to let down its defenses, and it cannot align its national strategy with arcs of history that never quite bend when you want them to.
Nationalism is a moral necessity, not a moral failing.
But neither can the United States turn its back on the world. The prosperity on which Americans’ domestic peace and happiness depend has always been bound up in overseas trade. When one country seeks to dominate Europe or Asia, U.S. security at home quickly comes under threat. Engagement may sometimes demand that, as during World War II, Washington aligns with and actively supports mass murderers such as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. And it may sometimes require ruthless and decisive actions that test the uttermost boundaries of what is morally permitted. But it equally requires fidelity to some values beyond the United States’ own selfish interests, narrowly conceived.
As Americans struggle to deal with a world in which powerful countries have rejected the kind of order the United States hoped to build, they will need both sides of the Hamiltonian vision: the enlightenment and the realism. Hamiltonian policymakers can act ruthlessly in support of the national interest; they can also be models of enlightened statecraft. They choose their course of action depending on their reading of the circumstances of the time.
The revival of national Hamiltonianism in American life is being driven by the interplay of a new era of geopolitical competition with the dynamics of the information revolution. The ideas and priorities that come with it are essential if the United States is to regain its cultural and political balance at home while navigating the increasingly challenging environment overseas. American leaders must embrace the return of a set of ideas that in past generations have done so much to make the United States, for all its shortcomings, one of the richest, most powerful, most open, and most progressive societies in history.
- WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is Professor of Strategic Studies and Humanities at the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, the Global View columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Foreign Affairs · by Walter Russell Mead · August 20, 2024
18. U.S. Army Has A Plan For Paragliding Paratroopers
Funny thing is our ROK Special Forces brothers have been conducting paraglide operations for years. Every time we would go to Maesan RI for airborne operations we would see them launching from the hills. Most of the time people laughed it off and said there would never be an application for this capability.
As an aside you might want to watch this video for some airborne history.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vvS7mOGu1OM
The background story is here: https://www.asomf.org/womens-history-month-the-incredible-story-of-georgia-tiny-broadwick/
U.S. Army Has A Plan For Paragliding Paratroopers
Paragliders could give airborne and other Army units valuable new ways to get around and perform other missions on contested battlefields.
Joseph Trevithick
Posted on Aug 20, 2024 1:56 PM EDT
8 minute read
twz.com · by Joseph Trevithick
The U.S. Army is looking at paragliders as a way to give conventional forces, especially airborne units, new options for getting around the battlefield and surveilling enemy forces. The service says these capabilities, which are already found in the special operations community, could be especially useful during a future high-end fight in environments that are too risky for traditional fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to operate in.
The Army put out a contracting notice regarding what it is currently calling the Personnel Air Mobility System (PAMS) earlier today.
Specifically, the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command-Soldier Center‘s Soldier Sustainment Directive (DEVCOM-SC SSD) “is seeking information on technologies or capabilities of private entities (non-profit and commercial) to develop a preliminary Personnel Air Mobility system design that will support a prototype project,” according to the notice. “The Personnel Air Mobility System (PAMS) is planned to be developed to support the U.S. Army’s Airborne forces by addressing a capability gap to provide unit organic personnel air mobility to support freedom of movement in contested environments.”
A member of U.S. Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) uses a paraglider during a public capabilities demonstration earlier this year. Jamie Hunter
“Future battlefield threats are expected to require disbursed operations by small units in complex, contested environments,” the notice continues. “Traditional air assets, including fixed wing and rotary wing transport aircraft, will likely be unavailable for the movement of small teams due to supporting other missions and the difficulty of operating these vehicles in anti-access/area denial threat areas.”
“Development of a PAMS will provide an additional option to the unit commander, supporting freedom of action in remote and austere locations. This new system will be capable of transporting individual warfighters hundreds of kilometers, reducing dependency on traditional aircraft platforms and extending the range available through traditional parachute infiltration systems,” the request for proposals adds. “The PAMS will support multiple mission types including reconnaissance, surveillance, troop movement, infiltration and exfiltration. This new PAMS will also significantly reduce the cost to deliver/transport warfighters over traditional means.”
To meet these mission requirements, the Army is looking at a motorized paraglider with a range of at least 62 miles (100 kilometers) that can get up to an altitude of 10,000 feet mean sea level. Objectively, the service is interested in a PAMS that can fly to destinations as far as 186 miles (300 kilometers) away and at altitudes as high as 20,000 feet mean sea level. A supplementary oxygen source would be required for sustained flight at the upper limits of that altitude requirement. This is also something that is necessary for very high-altitude freefall parachute jumps.
A member of the US Army seen making use of a supplementary oxygen system during a high-altitude freefall parachute jump. US Army
Flying at low altitudes using nap-of-the-earth flight profiles would make paragliding troopers harder to detect and reduce their vulnerability to threats in the air and on the ground. Paragliders, in general, have low radar, infrared, sound, and other signatures, which would make it even more difficult for defenders to spot and track them. At the same time, operating at higher altitudes, where viable, would also offer benefits in terms of aerodynamic efficiency and, by extension, fuel economy and range.
In addition, the Army wants the PAMS paraglider itself to weigh no more than 75 pounds without fuel, and potentially as light as 60 pounds, while still having a payload capacity of up to at least 350 pounds, and maybe as much as 400 pounds. The weight of the weapons and gear a typical soldier might be called upon to carry varies widely depending on the mission and other factors, but data from recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan shows that it can easily be more than 100 pounds. Paratroopers expected to operate for extended periods without access to well-established supply chains could well find themselves carrying more. The low logistics footprint required to operate paragliders would offer additional benefits to airborne and other conventional forces operating at the tactical edge, or even behind enemy lines.
Members of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, laden with parachutes and other gear, board a US Air Force C-130 cargo plane during training. USAF
For general Army use, paragliders might be useful in other roles beyond just getting soldiers around and surveilling opponents, such as casualty evaluation and delivery of small cargoes to frontline units. U.S. special operations units have employed uncrewed cargo paraglider systems called CQ-10A SnowGooses for resupply missions.
It is also worth noting that the U.S. military as a whole is looking for new and novel ways to help rescue downed aircrew in contested environments. Depending on circumstances, forward-deployed teams might be able to use paragliders to reach those personnel and extract them. Paragliders could potentially be air-dropped to rescuees to allow them to escape on their own or at least move to an area where it might be easier for combat search and rescue units to retrieve them.
As mentioned, U.S. special operations forces have already been at least testing and evaluating paragliders, if not operationally using them to some degree, for many of the same reasons the Army has outlined in its PAMS contracting notice. Members of U.S. Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) used them to descend into the harbor area in Tampa, Florida during a biennial public capabilities demonstration earlier this year. That event also highlighted the potential for paragliders to be used as small electronic warfare platforms, as well as for mobility and reconnaissance and surveillance, as you can read more about here.
“The parafoil, in general, is a great special operations platform that the Marines are taking advantage of. It’s something that’s easily deployable, it’s light, it’s inexpensive, it uses unleaded gasoline, so you can find that anywhere,” Jim Gregory, the Deputy Director of SOCOM’s Office of Communications, told The War Zone at the time. “And it’s something that can take off from say a ship or you know an otherwise fairly inaccessible area for air capability. So they can get operators up off the ground and take advantage of that other [air] dimension of warfare … that they might not otherwise be able to.”
The U.S. Navy has at least explored the possibility of using paragliders to help Marines, in general, get from amphibious warfare ships to the shore and as airborne surveillance platforms in the past, as well.
In the unprecedented surprise attacks on southern Israel in October 2023, Hamas terrorists also notably used paragliders, underscoring their value for getting personnel into more contested areas. North Korean commandos have trained to employ them to infiltrate across the DMZ and attack critical sites, as well.
This is a known infiltration capability. Paragliders have small radar and thermal signature, very low altitude flight profile, can fly below speed gate settings of certain warning and fire control radars. Widely accessible and not too hard to operate. https://t.co/ZahYPti7rv
— Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) October 7, 2023
As the new PAMS contracting notice explains, the Army is looking at a future full of distributed operations, especially as part of a potential high-end fight, such as one against the Chinese in the Pacific. In a major conflict with a near-peer competitor like China, U.S. forces would have to contend with an ever-growing anti-access and area denial threat ecosystem. This presents immediate challenges for getting airlifters loaded with paratroopers into the fight. When it comes to moving personnel and materiel by air once in theater, as well as providing organic aerial reconnaissance and surveillance, these issues are further compounded for the Army, which continues to rely heavily on traditional helicopters for these missions. The ongoing war in Ukraine has underscored the threats that helicopters face from modern air defenses.
This all looks to have factored into the Army’s selection of a derivative of Bell’s V-280 Valor tilt-rotor as the successor to at least a portion of its UH-60 Black Hawk fleets in 2022 and its cancellation of the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program this year. In Febraury, the service announced other major changes to its future aviation plans, including increased investments in new drones.
Whether or not paragliding paratroopers, or other conventional Army forces, become a reality on a broad scale remains to be seen. The service has explored a host of concepts intended to provide individual soldiers with a degree of air mobility, including jetpacks and rocket belts, since the 1960s, but none of them have been adopted for general use. At the same time, paragliders are a known commodity that have already made inroads in the special operations realm.
It is not hard to see how the qualities that make paragliders attractive to special operations units – low cost, low footprint, and low probability of detection – would make them appealing for more general Army use.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com
Deputy Editor
Joseph has been a member of The War Zone team since early 2017. Prior to that, he was an Associate Editor at War Is Boring, and his byline has appeared in other publications, including Small Arms Review, Small Arms Defense Journal, Reuters, We Are the Mighty, and Task & Purpose.
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twz.com · by Joseph Trevithick
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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