|
Quotes of the Day:
“Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“A seed grows with no sound, but a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is quiet. This is the power of silence… Grow silently.”
– Confucius
"No one of understanding says that our system works perfectly. It does not. The human race is not perfect. Nevertheless, the movement of a true civilization is toward freedom rather than regimentation. This is our ideal."
– Herbert Hoover
1. How the US Can Avoid War in the South China Sea
2. Rampant Nationalism Is Undermining China’s ‘Three Warfares’
3. From cybercrime to terrorism, FBI director says America faces many elevated threats 'all at once'
4. The West’s Next Challenge Is the Rising Axis of Autocracies
5. U.S. Investigating Americans Who Worked With Russian State Television
6. Ukraine’s Special Operations Troops Sow Destruction in Russia By Doug Livermore
7. (Revised) The Green Beret Affair: A Tarnished Chapter in Special Forces History
8. Philippines says China fired flares at its South China Sea plane
9. China says it took 'countermeasures' against Philippine aircraft in South China Sea
10. Pro-Russia 'news' sites spew incendiary US election falsehoods
11. Inciting rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America
12. AI in Precision Persuasion. Unveiling Tactics and Risks on Social Media
13. Special operations forces 'big fan' of Replicator, especially for Pacific missions
14. Special operations forces turn to tech to help commands reduce civilian harm
15. Hamas’ ideology is infecting countries in Asia
16. Ukraine launches new homegrown Palianytsia missile-drone - Zelenskyy
17. ‘All the Struggles Are Connected’ : Protesters failed to disrupt this week’s Democratic convention, but the party got the message.
18. Important Asia Provisions in the House and Senate 2025 NDAA
19. As War Comes to Russia, It’s Business as Usual for Putin
20. Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking.
Please note:
Small Wars Journal is in the process of some major changes. The Small Wars Foundation is working closely with the new owners of the website at Arizona State University (ASU). We are transitioning to a new staff, a new website, and rebranding that will honor SWJ's important legacy and forge a powerful new discourse on small wars, irregular warfare, and competitive statecraft. Small Wars Journal will continue to publish original works from authentic voices across the spectrum of stakeholders in small wars.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/
1. How the US Can Avoid War in the South China Sea
Excerpts:
In addition to working closely with Manila, the US should expand the international effort to push back on China’s territorial claims. This means first and foremost more “freedom of navigation” patrols. The idea is simple: by treating western Pacific waters as what they are — international “high seas” under United Nations parlance — we emphasize to China that we reject its claims of ownership.
I’ve conducted such operations many times — as a junior officer standing the deck watch on a destroyer, as operations officer aboard a cruiser, and as a commodore of a squadron of US destroyers. These meticulously planned operations lay out precise courses, points of turns, when to use (or not to use) radars and sonars, and how closely to approach Chinese vessels that may try to stop the operation.
In my experience, the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s vessels have generally operated professionally and kept their physical distance, although they constantly pester our ships and badger them over VHF radio. In an increasingly tense environment, the US should carry out these missions in the company of allies, not only from the region, such as Australia and Japan, but also some North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners, including British, French and German warships.
Such cruises can be integrated with larger exercises, such as the annual Balikatan war game involving more than 15,000 personnel from the US and Philippines.
Pushing back against China is a team sport. There is going to be an increasing number of flashpoints like the recent collisions in the Spratly Islands and Thomas Shoal. Let’s hope we don’t unleash a 21st century War of Jenkins’ Ear over something like the severed thumb of a Filipino sailor.
How the US Can Avoid War in the South China Sea
Washington is going to have to put together a broad naval alliance to keep Beijing’s aggression from starting a regional conflict.
August 22, 2024 at 5:00 PM EDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-22/how-the-us-can-avoid-war-in-the-south-china-sea?sref=hhjZtX76&srnd=homepage-asia&utm
By James Stavridis
James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a retired US Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Summer may be fading, but things are heating up in the South China Sea. With China claiming essentially the entire water space — which is half the size of the continental US — many of the nations around the littoral have been pushing back, using their coast guards and merchant ships.
In June, a scuffle involving vessels from China and the Philippines near the disputed Second Thomas Shoal resulted in a Filipino seaman losing his thumb, crushed under the keel of a Chinese ship being maneuvered aggressively against his small craft.
Tensions between the two nations have continued to increase in a manner reminiscent of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, a conflict between Britain and Spain set off after a British sea captain had his ear severed by Spanish sailors in 1731. The war resulted in tens of thousands killed and hundreds of vessels lost.
Earlier this week, ships from the Chinese and Filipino coast guards found themselves engaging in the disputed waters of the South China Sea again, this time at Sabina Shoal, part of the Spratly Islands. Two ships collided, and each side blames the other for unprofessional seamanship leading to the smashup. What is clear is that the incident stemmed from the Chinese trying to stop the Philippines from operating around the shoal.
The Sabina Shoal is clearly within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone rightfully claimed by Manila. The issue has been adjudicated in the international courts, with China’s insistence on sweeping jurisdiction firmly rejected since a 2016 arbitration. Yet China continues to press its claims, enticed by massive oil and gas deposits, lucrative fishing grounds, and the potential to control the nearly 40% of global shipping that passes through the South China Sea.
Where is this heading, and what is the US role in calming disputes and deterring further Chinese aggression?
Let’s begin with a bedrock fact: The Philippines and the US are treaty allies, with a mutual defense agreement since 1951. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently visited Manila to cement the alliance and establish bilateral defense guidelines to enhance cooperation at every level.
This increased collaboration began in earnest with the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as president in 2022. (His predecessor, Roderigo Duterte, was far closer to China and a very difficult partner for the US.) Among other benefits, the Philippines has granted the US access to key military bases in the northern part of the islands — close to Taiwan.
Given that the US is obligated to come to the defense of the Philippines if an actual military conflict with China breaks out, it would be wise to further step up joint training with Manila’s navy, air force and coast guard units. Washington should facilitate the Philippines’ purchases of advanced US weapons and sensors, including better warships (some of the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships, now being decommissioned, might be appropriate). Manila also needs better radars and fighters, particularly the F-16, a simple but capable multirole combat aircraft.
Of course, all of this should be done in accordance with US law and policy regarding human rights — Duterte’s regime was rightly criticized for ruthlessness in carrying out what it said were counterterrorism and antidrug efforts.
In addition to working closely with Manila, the US should expand the international effort to push back on China’s territorial claims. This means first and foremost more “freedom of navigation” patrols. The idea is simple: by treating western Pacific waters as what they are — international “high seas” under United Nations parlance — we emphasize to China that we reject its claims of ownership.
I’ve conducted such operations many times — as a junior officer standing the deck watch on a destroyer, as operations officer aboard a cruiser, and as a commodore of a squadron of US destroyers. These meticulously planned operations lay out precise courses, points of turns, when to use (or not to use) radars and sonars, and how closely to approach Chinese vessels that may try to stop the operation.
In my experience, the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s vessels have generally operated professionally and kept their physical distance, although they constantly pester our ships and badger them over VHF radio. In an increasingly tense environment, the US should carry out these missions in the company of allies, not only from the region, such as Australia and Japan, but also some North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners, including British, French and German warships.
Such cruises can be integrated with larger exercises, such as the annual Balikatan war game involving more than 15,000 personnel from the US and Philippines.
Pushing back against China is a team sport. There is going to be an increasing number of flashpoints like the recent collisions in the Spratly Islands and Thomas Shoal. Let’s hope we don’t unleash a 21st century War of Jenkins’ Ear over something like the severed thumb of a Filipino sailor.
Stavridis is also vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group. He is on the boards of Fortinet and Ankura Consulting Group, and has advised Shield Capital, a firm that invests in the cybersecurity sector.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
2. Rampant Nationalism Is Undermining China’s ‘Three Warfares’
Lessons for all of us? (on multiple levels)
Excerpts:
China’s standing and legitimacy in relevant global affairs are also falling victim to the stunts of “wolf warrior” diplomats and domestic officials pandering to nationalist sentiments. Chinese ambassadors might not recognize the damage done to China’s image and legitimacy when they (for example) intimidate a local journalist on social media for investigating Belt and Road Initiative projects in Nepal or promote “mass re-education” of the Taiwanese on French national television. Mocking India’s COVID-19 death tolls and attacking Filipinos with racist slurs only further degrade China’s geopolitical standing. Parallel to the “Three Warfares,” legitimacy is regarded by some military professionals in the U.S. as China’s critical “center of gravity” in a global competition between the two countries.
From a policy perspective, there is currently a lack of systematic analyses of the impact nationalism may be having on China’s ability to project soft power or how much it may be inhibiting China’s deployment of “Three Warfares” in the context of great power competition. Random xenophobic violence against foreigners comes with geopolitical consequences beyond the risk that it could grow ultranationalism and promote further political violence. Without a thorough understanding, it could be difficult for China to pivot from the 20th century’s experience of ideological mobilization and factor this new side effect into the operational design of “Three Warfares.”
When the work of one propaganda agency undercuts that of another, it could be just as difficult for the “Three Warfares” to succeed as a whole-of-government effort as it is for the U.S. to counter it.
Rampant Nationalism Is Undermining China’s ‘Three Warfares’
thediplomat.com
Violent xenophobia and “wolf warrior” sentiments are at odds with the government’s emphasis on public opinion warfare.
By Weilong (David) Kong
August 23, 2024
Credit: Illustration by Catherine PutzSubscribe for ads-free reading
In two “regrettable incidents” this summer, several U.S. and Japanese nationals fell victim to frenzied stabbing attacks in China, resulting in one Chinese woman being killed while saving a school bus full of Japanese children from the assailant. While some in the country pushed for her to be posthumously granted the title of “model hero,” others resented her for being a “traitor” who “foiled revenge on the Japanese.”
These violent outbursts of xenophobia and the conflicted public reception have raised concerns about China’s rampant nationalism.
As the government scrambles to curtail online extremism, media-fueled nationalist fervor continues to permeate Chinese social life. From proclaiming Chinese cultural superiority by dismissing Western history as fake, to blatantly promoting xenophobia and antisemitism, nationalist zeal is not only captivating but profitable in the age of social media.
China hopes to leverage “homebrew” nationalism as an ideological defense to ensure its political security in an era largely defined by great power competition and weakening state power. However, this defense mechanism might be employed at the expense of China’s ability to project soft power. For example, overheated nationalism among average citizens and public officials alike is backfiring on China’s public opinion warfare and threatening its “Three Warfares” strategy.
Public opinion warfare, or today’s influence operations, is one of the three pillars of China’s “Three Warfares,” which appeared 20 years ago in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s doctrine of political work. The other two pillars are legal warfare, which seeks legal high ground for China’s interests by exploiting international legal systems, and psychological warfare, which aims to degrade adversaries’ decision-making ability and will to fight.
Some analysts consider the “Three Warfares” to be a unique approach to hybrid warfare that fits into Sun Tzu’s philosophy of “subduing without fighting.” Others regard it as the means of carrying out a much broader form of political warfare and essentially a whole-of-government effort to generate and extend political power. Public opinion warfare plays a weight-bearing role that generates legitimacy for future actions by building international public support and promoting execution of the other two pillars by exploiting mass media channels.
The second biggest economy in the world has invested a fortune in influence operations to shape its national image and sway international public opinion in its favor. Yet grassroots Chinese nationalists are diminishing the return on Beijing’s investment in public opinion warfare. Nationalistic sentiment has driven more Chinese citizens to make arbitrary interpretations of what’s good for China, often to the detriment of official government policy.
Chinese leaders couldn’t have been pleased to see the two xenophobic attacks all over the news shortly after reassuring foreign corporate leaders of a friendly domestic environment conducive to business and promoting mutually beneficial transnational cultural exchange. Actions overseas such as threatening Chinese dissidents, vandalizing cultural and religious sites, and harassing artists during public performances have likely hindered China’s attempt to narrow the “U.S.-China image gap” and “win the world’s love.”
Making matters worse for China, Chinese dissidents have been collecting, translating, and sharing these incidents on social media, circumventing the language barrier and the Great Firewall. China’s nationalists all but guarantee there will be no shortage of supply of such content moving forward.
China’s standing and legitimacy in relevant global affairs are also falling victim to the stunts of “wolf warrior” diplomats and domestic officials pandering to nationalist sentiments. Chinese ambassadors might not recognize the damage done to China’s image and legitimacy when they (for example) intimidate a local journalist on social media for investigating Belt and Road Initiative projects in Nepal or promote “mass re-education” of the Taiwanese on French national television. Mocking India’s COVID-19 death tolls and attacking Filipinos with racist slurs only further degrade China’s geopolitical standing. Parallel to the “Three Warfares,” legitimacy is regarded by some military professionals in the U.S. as China’s critical “center of gravity” in a global competition between the two countries.
From a policy perspective, there is currently a lack of systematic analyses of the impact nationalism may be having on China’s ability to project soft power or how much it may be inhibiting China’s deployment of “Three Warfares” in the context of great power competition. Random xenophobic violence against foreigners comes with geopolitical consequences beyond the risk that it could grow ultranationalism and promote further political violence. Without a thorough understanding, it could be difficult for China to pivot from the 20th century’s experience of ideological mobilization and factor this new side effect into the operational design of “Three Warfares.”
When the work of one propaganda agency undercuts that of another, it could be just as difficult for the “Three Warfares” to succeed as a whole-of-government effort as it is for the U.S. to counter it.
Authors
Guest Author
Weilong (David) Kong
Weilong (David) Kong is an assistant policy researcher at RAND and a Ph.D. candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
Subscribe for ads-free reading
3. From cybercrime to terrorism, FBI director says America faces many elevated threats 'all at once'
Everything, everywhere, all at once at the same time.
From cybercrime to terrorism, FBI director says America faces many elevated threats 'all at once'
AP · August 22, 2024
From cybercrime to terrorism, FBI director says America faces many elevated threats ‘all at once’
1 of 6 |FBI Director Christopher Wray answers questions during an interview, Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Brooklyn Center, Minn. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)
BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn. (AP) — The country is facing heightened threats from many corners at a time when law enforcement agencies are struggling, FBI Director Christopher Wray said in an exclusive interview, adding that he is “hard pressed to think of a time in my career where so many different kinds of threats are all elevated at once.”
Wray spoke Wednesday with The Associated Press while visiting the Minneapolis field office to talk about partnerships between law enforcement agencies and also with other entities. His remarks come as the FBI confronts heightened concerns over terrorism, both domestic and international, as well as Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft and foreign election interference.
“I worry about the combination of that many threats being elevated at once, with the challenges facing the men and women in law enforcement more generally,” Wray said at the office in the suburb of Brooklyn Center. “And the one thing that I think helps bridge those two challenges is partnerships. That’s how we get through. It is by all working together.”
Wray’s assessment of an elevated threat landscape is consistent with alarm bells he has sounded for months. Soon after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas in Israel, Wray began warning that the rampage could serve as an inspiration to militants, “the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate years ago.”
The FBI has also scrambled to deal with security concerns related to the United States’ southern border, with officials revealing in June that eight people from Tajikistan with suspected ties to the Islamic State group were arrested and were being held on immigration violations.
Officials are also dealing with the specter of foreign election interference. The FBI and other federal agencies announced Monday that Iran was responsible for a hack targeting the Trump campaign and for an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign, part of what officials portrayed as a brazen and aggressive effort to interfere in American politics.
Wray declined to talk about any specific investigation or threat but said investigations into cyberattacks, including against election infrastructure, candidates or campaigns, require help from the private sector.
“One of the things that we have been doubling down on with every passing day is, is on partnerships, because ultimately you’re talking about the ability to connect the dots, whether it’s against some kind of election influence threat or some other kind of threat,” Wray said. “You need to have partners sharing information with each other to put the two pieces together to see the bigger picture.”
Law enforcement officers are being killed in the line of duty at a rate of about one every five days, Wray said, noting that four first responders have died in Minnesota alone in 2024. They include a Minneapolis officer killed in May while trying to help someone, and two officers and a paramedic who died in Burnsville in February when a heavily armed man opened fire.
Such violence “breaks my heart every single time,” the director said.
The FBI has not been spared such attacks: Days after agents searched Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, to recover classified documents, a gunman who called on social media for federal agents to be killed “on sight” died in a shootout after trying to get inside the FBI’s Cincinnati office.
Wray said the FBI has been working to beef up traditional partnerships with state and local law enforcement, while also creating other ones with business and academia to help counter threats against cybersecurity or intellectual property. In Minneapolis and other offices, he said, authorities are cooperating with the likes of school resource officers and mental health professionals to help at-risk teenagers in hopes of heading off future threats.
Working with industry is important for protecting innovation and artificial intelligence from foreign threats, Wray added.
“AI is in many ways the most effective tool against the bad guys’ use of AI,” he said. “So we need to work closely with industry to try to help make sure that American AI can be used to help protect American people from AI-enabled threats coming the other way.”
___
Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
MICHAEL GOLDBERG
Mississippi government and politics reporter
twittermailto
AP · August 22, 2024
4. The West’s Next Challenge Is the Rising Axis of Autocracies
We should be using Professor Christopher Ford's Dark Quad to describe our adversaries. (https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/four-warnings-about-the-dark-quad?utm)
Excerpts:
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served in senior national-security roles in the Trump White House, compared the state of the world to a game of whack-a-mole—with all the moles now up. “Because the crises erupt at the same time, the capability is not there to handle all simultaneously, and it gets out of control,” he said. “The ability to react is limited. You’re stretched, and you never want to be stretched.”
Though still by far the biggest military power, the U.S. is hard-pressed to deal with the world on fire, especially as China keeps growing its military muscle, some strategists warn. While the U.S. and the European nations have moved to increase military production, including at brand-new ammunition plants, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, these steps are nowhere near sufficient for the requirements of modern conflict, they say.
“We are already involved in two wars, and we are struggling right now to keep up providing munitions and equipment to our allies. If we get involved in a global war, we would be significantly challenged to deal with our adversaries and the capabilities that they have,” said retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff for the Army.
...
China is certainly eager to woo European governments, a task that has become much more difficult because of Beijing’s support for Putin.
“Europe needs to do some strategic independence,” said Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a think tank in Beijing. “China can help the EU solve the Russian problem, and the EU can help China solve the U.S. problem—and then we all get along, which is better than going to war. Russia will in the end have to learn the lesson and maybe become more stabilized for some time rather than being pushed toward drastic action.”
Wang, a former government adviser, added that while it is natural for Russia, Iran, North Korea—and China—to communicate because they all feel pressure from Washington, Beijing seeks a more constructive relationship with the U.S. “In the Soviet Union era, when the U.S. needed China, China was forthcoming. Now the U.S. is not even bothered to talk to China on the issues.”
A former senior U.S. official also referred to that time—but with the roles of the U.S. and China now reversed. He pointed out that time is no longer necessarily working in China’s favor, as its population ages, economic growth slows and the U.S. maintains or widens the lead in key defense technologies, such as military uses of artificial intelligence.
Instead of openly confronting Beijing, “now is the time to hide our strength and bide our time,” he said, citing the famous 1980s foreign-policy dictum of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.
The West’s Next Challenge Is the Rising Axis of Autocracies
U.S. and its allies consider whether to confront all rivals at once, or seek accommodation with some
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/autocracies-china-russia-us-election-5dc42efb?mod=hp_lead_pos7
By Yaroslav TrofimovFollow
Updated Aug. 24, 2024 12:01 am ET
The coalescing partnership of autocracies led by China and Russia will impose strategic choices on Western democracies, no matter who wins the U.S. presidential election.
Can the U.S. and its allies deter all these rivals—including Iran and North Korea—at the same time, given the decay in the West’s military-industrial base and the unwillingness of voters to spend dramatically more on defense?
And if not, should, and could, an accommodation be sought with one of the rival great powers? If so, which one—and at what cost?
The current moment is uniquely complicated, with multiple crises around the world increasingly interconnected. Bloody wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are showing no signs of abating, Iran is contemplating a military response against Israel, China is engaging in low-level sea clashes with the Philippines and intimidating Taiwan, and North Korea is ramping up provocations against South Korea.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served in senior national-security roles in the Trump White House, compared the state of the world to a game of whack-a-mole—with all the moles now up. “Because the crises erupt at the same time, the capability is not there to handle all simultaneously, and it gets out of control,” he said. “The ability to react is limited. You’re stretched, and you never want to be stretched.”
Though still by far the biggest military power, the U.S. is hard-pressed to deal with the world on fire, especially as China keeps growing its military muscle, some strategists warn. While the U.S. and the European nations have moved to increase military production, including at brand-new ammunition plants, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, these steps are nowhere near sufficient for the requirements of modern conflict, they say.
“We are already involved in two wars, and we are struggling right now to keep up providing munitions and equipment to our allies. If we get involved in a global war, we would be significantly challenged to deal with our adversaries and the capabilities that they have,” said retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff for the Army.
Soldiers in eastern Ukraine in August; the U.S. and allies’ steps to increase military production aren’t keeping up with modern warfare. Photo: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images
Pokrovsk, Ukraine, following a Russian attack earlier this month. Photo: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images
While acknowledging the depletion of stocks, the Pentagon says that the U.S. remains ready for all potential scenarios, including a full-scale war with China that it says it considers neither imminent nor inevitable. “I am fully confident in our force, and you should be, too,” Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said to applause at the Aspen Security Forum last month.
Still, inside the Republican party, influential voices—including vice-presidential candidate JD Vance—have pointed to America’s inability to produce enough munitions as a reason to abandon Ukraine and commitments to European security. They say the U.S. should pivot to the one area that really matters: East Asia. “The United States is fundamentally limited,” Vance said in a February speech in Germany.
One potential approach mulled within Trump’s orbit would be to attempt the “reverse Kissinger,” a reference to Henry Kissinger’s deal with Communist China that cemented Beijing’s split from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The idea this time is to woo President Vladimir Putin toward the U.S., away from his strengthening bond with Chinese leader Xi Jinping—at the expense of Ukraine, and Europe.
“One of the things that America should do, from a purely American strategic perspective, is to figure out a way to have a grand bargain with Russia,” said Sumantra Maitra, director of research at the American Ideas Institute, a conservative think tank. “Whether that is doable or not is a difficult question, depending on where Russian red lines lie. But fundamentally it would mean a new security architecture in Europe.”
Many Republicans, as well as Biden-Harris administration officials, describe such ideas as a delusional folly. After hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed or maimed with the help of American weapons in Ukraine, and after the U.S. and allies spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the war there, there can be no accommodation with Putin or going back to the status quo ante, they say.
“These four dictators—Putin, Xi, the Iranian ayatollahs and Kim Jong Un—are all in this together, in an unholy alliance, which reminds me of my father’s war, World War II,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Some senior Republicans who would likely have top positions in a second Trump administration, such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have called for further tightening sanctions on Russia and dramatically increasing military support for Ukraine, while also maintaining strong pressure on China, North Korea and Iran. It isn’t clear what path Trump, if elected, would adopt. The former president has repeatedly promised to strike a peace deal for Ukraine in 24 hours, without explaining how.
Trump’s rival in the U.S. presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, has indicated she will, by and large, seek continuity with the approach of President Biden, who returned U.S. forces to Europe’s eastern flank, welcomed Sweden and Finland into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, provided Ukraine with weapons, and strengthened a network of alliances and partnerships in Asia.
Vice President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday. Photo: Gabriella Demczuk for WSJ
Former President Donald Trump addressed the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. Photo: Gabriella Demczuk for WSJ
In Thursday’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris spoke of an “enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny” and said she would make sure “America—not China—wins the competition for the 21st century, and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership.”
That is a sentiment many Republicans share. If the U.S. wants to maintain its privileged position, it has no choice but to continue its engagement in all major theaters around the world, said Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas). “Nothing happens without American leadership,” he said. “Like it or not, but this is part of the price we pay for being the pre-eminent economy and superpower in the world.”
European and, to an extent, Asian allies have been comforted by the rhetoric of the Biden-Harris administration. But Trump’s unpredictability and threats while in office also forced European nations to make painful choices, such as increasing investment in defense, that proved to be indispensable once Russia invaded Ukraine.
“The really interesting question for 2025 is which leader will be more capable of rounding up the strongest posse that actually deters our adversaries,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
The gravest risk of any attempt to drive a wedge between Russia and China by sacrificing Ukraine and Europe’s security is that such a shift could backfire by destroying America’s most valuable foreign-policy asset—its own network of alliances, some Biden administration officials and Democratic leaders warn.
“It would accelerate hedging by our partners in the Indo-Pacific and aggression by China. It would make every ally and partner we have, globally, question whether they can count on us,” Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) said.
While China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are all increasingly cooperating in diplomatic, intelligence and military affairs, they still harbor mutual suspicions. And though they agree on the need to remove the U.S. as the pre-eminent world power, their priorities in their own regions don’t always overlap. China so far has declined to provide direct military help to Russia, and the partnership between these autocracies is nowhere near the interoperability and mutual defense commitment of a true alliance like NATO.
The U.S. and South Korea held combined military exercises in August to strengthen their joint readiness against a potential North Korean threat. Photo: Korea Defense Ministry/Zuma Press
An armored vehicle in Taoyuan, Taiwan, during military drills in July to demonstrate readiness against a potential threat from China. Photo: Justin Chan/AFP/Getty Images
“Yes, there are thickening connections between some of these states, but there’s nothing like the ballast, the history, the shared values that still exist within the U.S. alliance system,” said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. “The West still retains enormous strengths that we should not undervalue.”
China’s two strategic goals—splitting the U.S. from Europe while propping up Russia—remain mutually exclusive as long as America’s commitment to Europe remains solid, Western officials say.
Many European governments, however, are ready to toe America’s line on China only as long as they think they can count on Washington’s protection from Putin. “If the U.S. appeases Russia to focus on China, Europe will have to deal more with China to focus on Russia,” said Anton Hofreiter, chair of the European affairs committee in the German parliament. “If the U.S. decides to leave Europe alone, the voices of appeasement in Europe would be much stronger, saying that we are not strong enough to confront both China and Russia without the Americans.”
China is certainly eager to woo European governments, a task that has become much more difficult because of Beijing’s support for Putin.
“Europe needs to do some strategic independence,” said Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a think tank in Beijing. “China can help the EU solve the Russian problem, and the EU can help China solve the U.S. problem—and then we all get along, which is better than going to war. Russia will in the end have to learn the lesson and maybe become more stabilized for some time rather than being pushed toward drastic action.”
Wang, a former government adviser, added that while it is natural for Russia, Iran, North Korea—and China—to communicate because they all feel pressure from Washington, Beijing seeks a more constructive relationship with the U.S. “In the Soviet Union era, when the U.S. needed China, China was forthcoming. Now the U.S. is not even bothered to talk to China on the issues.”
A former senior U.S. official also referred to that time—but with the roles of the U.S. and China now reversed. He pointed out that time is no longer necessarily working in China’s favor, as its population ages, economic growth slows and the U.S. maintains or widens the lead in key defense technologies, such as military uses of artificial intelligence.
Instead of openly confronting Beijing, “now is the time to hide our strength and bide our time,” he said, citing the famous 1980s foreign-policy dictum of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.
A photo provided by China’s military in May showing a Chinese aircraft during a military drill at an undisclosed location. Photo: AFP/Getty Images
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the August 24, 2024, print edition as 'Autocracies Join to Attack West’s Values'.
5. U.S. Investigating Americans Who Worked With Russian State Television
I know Pogo gets old but... "We have met the enemy..."
U.S. Investigating Americans Who Worked With Russian State Television
The F.B.I. raided the homes of two prominent commentators on Russian state television channels as part of an effort to blunt attempts to influence November’s election.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/technology/us-fbi-russia-election-disinformation.html?searchResultPosition=1
Listen to this article · 8:57 min Learn more
Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American foreign policy, joining an event at the International Economic Forum on Russophobia via video conference.Credit...Reuters
By Steven Lee Myers and Julian E. Barnes
Aug. 21, 2024
Leer en español
The Department of Justice has begun a broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks, signaling an aggressive effort to combat the Kremlin’s influence operations leading up to the presidential election in November, according to American officials briefed on the inquiry.
This month, F.B.I. agents searched the homes of two prominent figures with connections to Russian state media: Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American foreign policy, and Dimitri K. Simes, an adviser to former President Donald J. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016. Prosecutors have not announced charges against either of the men.
More searches are expected soon, some of the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss investigations. Criminal charges are also possible, they said.
The investigation comes in the wake of the Biden administration’s official intelligence findings that Russia’s state news organizations, including the global news channel RT, are working with its intelligence agencies to sway elections around the world.
Those efforts include November’s contest between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. For a third time, according to the officials and public statements, the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus has thrown itself behind Mr. Trump’s candidacy, creating online news outlets and fake videos to denigrate President Biden and, more recently, Ms. Harris.
The investigation so far has focused on potential violations of the economic sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and a law that requires the disclosure of lobbying efforts on behalf of foreign governments.
The government’s investigation is politically fraught, reprising the furiously partisan debate over Russia’s influence in the 2016 presidential campaign. By targeting Americans working with news organizations, even if they are state-run, the inquiry could also bump up against the First Amendment’s protection of rights to free speech.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned on July 29 that Russia was exploiting “witting and unwitting Americans” to create and spread narratives that were favorable to the government of President Vladimir V. Putin.
“These personalities,” the office said in a statement, “post content on social media, write for various websites with overt and covert ties to the Russian government, and conduct other media efforts.”
The government investigation is not targeting ordinary Americans who watch Russian state media or post about it online, but rather is focused on individuals intentionally spreading disinformation from Moscow, some of the officials said.
Image
Mr. Ritter addressing service members of the Chechen special forces and military units within Russia's defense and security troops during a ceremony in Russia in January.Credit...Chingis Kondarov/Reuters
Mr. Ritter, who has worked as a contributing writer for RT, said in a telephone interview that an hourslong search of his house in Delmar, N.Y., on Aug. 7 seemed to be an effort to intimidate him for expressing his political views about the United States, Russia and the war in Ukraine.
F.B.I. agents and state police seized mobile phones, computers and hard drives but did not arrest him. “It’s an absolute frontal assault on the Constitution of the United States,” he said.
The extent of the crackdown remains unclear, and the Justice Department and other officials across Washington declined to discuss it when asked. In recent months, however, the Biden administration has grown increasingly alarmed by Russia’s influence operations targeting the United States — and seems willing to act more forcefully.
Last month, the Justice Department moved to shut down a furtive campaign aimed at sowing discord in the United States and other countries and spreading Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.
Working with the governments of Canada and the Netherlands, as well as with officials at Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, the department took down 968 inauthentic accounts. The Russians created and operated the accounts using commercially available artificial intelligence tools.
In affidavits released with the announcement, officials explicitly linked the effort to Russia’s Federal Security Service and RT.
Russia’s state television networks broadcast in English and other foreign languages, acting as a global megaphone for the views of Mr. Putin, who routinely depicts the United States and its allies as a hegemonic power bent on world domination.
Mr. Ritter, who traveled to Russia and to occupied parts of Ukraine in January, said the warrant to search his home made reference to an investigation that involved the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the federal law that requires Americans to disclose lobbying and political activities on behalf of foreign governments.
Mr. Simes, a Soviet-born American citizen, is being investigated for, among other crimes, violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the legal foundation for imposing economic sanctions, some of the officials said.
On Aug. 13, agents descended on a wooded 132-acre estate near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia that Mr. Simes and his wife had bought in July 2021, according to Rappahannock News, a local newspaper that first reported the search.
Image
Dimitri K. Simes, far right, an adviser to former President Donald J. Trump’s first campaign for president in 2016, at a meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Russia. Credit...Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev
Mr. Simes, 76, has been a fixture of American foreign policy debates in Washington since he emigrated from the Soviet Union as a young man in 1973.
He served as an informal adviser on Soviet affairs to President Richard M. Nixon, who, in 1994, appointed him to a think tank he founded, now known as the Center for the National Interest.
In 2016, Mr. Simes hosted Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, for a speech in which he called for improved relations with Mr. Putin’s government. He also introduced Mr. Trump to the Russian ambassador at the time.
Mr. Simes also passed on to Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner what he believed to be incriminating information that the Russians knew about former President Bill Clinton, the husband of Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent at the time, according to the final report of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.
Although Mr. Simes was interviewed by Mr. Mueller’s investigators and cited repeatedly in the report in 2019, he was not accused of wrongdoing. He stepped down from the Center for the National Interest in 2022, and, according to an interview on Friday on Sputnik, another of Russia’s television networks, he has been in Russia since October 2022.
Since 2018, he has hosted a weekly talk show, “The Big Game,” on one of Russia’s state television broadcasters, Channel One.
In the interview on Sputnik, Mr. Simes said that he did not know the reason for the search, but speculated that it was an attempt to stifle anyone who would improve relations between Russia and the United States. He said his bank accounts had been frozen, except one where his Social Security checks were deposited, and expressed concern that agents had seized paintings in his home from Soviet and Russian avant-garde artists.
“It clearly is an attempt to intimidate, not only somebody from Russia, but just anyone who goes against official policies and particularly against the deep state,” Mr. Simes, who could not immediately be reached for comment, said during the interview.
Since 2017, the Department of Justice has required RT to register as a foreign agent, not as a news organization, reflecting the government’s control over its operations. There is no clear legal precedent that dictates whether journalists working for a news organization would fall under the requirements of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Mr. Ritter, in the interview, said he had been a contributing writer for RT, among other news organizations, since 2020. He said he was paid per article — a sum he described as an industry norm of $150 to $300 — but faced no more editorial control than what editors typically did in assigning and editing work.
When the war in Ukraine broke out in 2022, he became an outspoken defender of Russia’s invasion, often reflecting Russia’s effort to blame the United States and NATO for the conflict.
“The only reason why I can believe that they’re doing this,” he said, “is if there’s some national security interest where they believe somehow I am actively conspiring with Russia against the interests of the United States, that I have become more than just a propagandist, that I become something more like, you know, a weapon of disinformation.”
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul. More about Steven Lee Myers
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. More about Julian E. Barnes
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 22, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Russia Inquiry By U.S. Centers On Americans. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
6. Ukraine’s Special Operations Troops Sow Destruction in Russia By Doug Livermore
Sometimes I think we should go back to the old doctrinal definition of Unconventional Warfare to better inform and educate the policy makers and the public.
The UW definition below is from the 1997 Joint Doctrine Encyclopedia (which was the last time the encyclopedia was published). It is really quite a document that provides detailed explanations of doctrinal terms in a single resource. I really wish the doctrine people would reprise this because it would be really helpful to academics, pundits, the press, Congressional staff, and the public.
It is available at these links for those who might want to see how we used to describe many of the doctrinal terms. (I recommend reading the descriptions of special operations and Special Forces in particular)
Download here:
https://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doctrine/jp-encyclop(97).pdf
Online here:
https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041025210802/http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jrm/ency.htm
Below Doug Livermore's article I have pasted the encyclopedia description of UW for those who may be interested.
A broad spectrum of military and paramilitary operations, normally of long
duration, predominantly conducted by indigenous or surrogate forces who are
organized, trained, equipped, supported, and directed in varying degrees by an
external source. It includes guerrilla warfare and other direct offensive, low
visibility, covert, or clandestine operations, as well as the indirect activities of
subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and evasion and escape. (JP 1-2)
Excerpts:
This resurgence of elite unit behind-the-lines operations has broader implications for the conflict.
First, it underscores the importance of unconventional warfare in the current phase of the war. As both sides continue to adapt their strategies, this will be crucial.
Second, such operations highlight the vulnerability of Russian rear areas, even those deep within their own territory. This could force Russia to reallocate resources to protect these areas, potentially weakening their frontline positions and giving Ukrainian forces an advantage.
Finally, successful elite unit operations could have a significant psychological impact on both Russian forces and the civilian population. For Russian soldiers, the realization that they are vulnerable even within their own borders is already causing a precipitous decline in morale. Hundreds of Russian troops have readily surrendered to the advancing Ukrainians. And for the Russian public, such attacks could undermine confidence in the government’s ability to protect the country, increasing domestic pressure on the Kremlin to seek a resolution to the conflict.
Ukraine’s Special Operations Troops Sow Destruction in Russia
August 23, 2024
Elite Ukrainian units have had a significant effect working behind the lines of the Kursk offensive. These are classic unconventional warfare tactics, writes US Special Forces officer Lt. Col. Doug Livermore.
cepa.org · by Doug Livermore · August 23, 2024
War is never a happy experience, but these must be satisfying days for Ukraine’s special operations forces soldiers. After the war stagnated into a largely static conflict, their role was restricted. Now they’re off the leash.
Kursk Oblast, just across the Ukrainian border, provided near-perfect territory for the cloak-and-dagger work of Ukraine’s veteran elite units. It is a key logistical hub and base of operations for Russian military activities in eastern Ukraine, is thinly defended by a Russian army that didn’t see the sucker punch coming, and houses vital railways, supply routes, and military installations.
By targeting Kursk, Ukrainian forces aim to stretch Russian defenses, forcing the diversion of resources from the frontlines in Ukraine to protect rear areas. This strategic pressure could weaken Russian positions, creating further exploitable vulnerabilities for Ukrainian forces.
Reports indicate that the units have conducted a range of operations in Kursk, including sabotage attacks on railways, fuel depots, and communication lines, as well as ambushing military convoys and attacking installations deep within Russian territory. Attacks have included video images of special operations forces guiding attacks on Russian bridges and the ambush and capture of Russian conscripts. Another official video purportedly showed them infiltrating Russian territory ahead of the main force.
These operations are emblematic of more traditional special operations forces tactics, where small, highly trained units operate behind enemy lines to achieve strategic objectives with minimal resources.
The impact of these operations extends beyond physical damage. The unpredictability of these attacks creates a sense of insecurity among inexperienced Russian forces, draining morale and forcing them to remain on constant alert. This psychological pressure is a crucial element of the Ukrainian strategy, aimed at weakening the enemy's resolve. Captured Russian conscripts have repeatedly credited their surrender to the overwhelming surprise, speed, and violence of action they experienced at the hands of Kyiv’s elite warriors.
The current wave of operations in Kursk is a stark contrast to the situation just months ago. During the static phases of the conflict, especially in eastern Ukraine, the role of special operations forces was more constrained. Trench-based warfare, characterized by fixed positions and heavy reliance on artillery, provided few opportunities for dynamic, behind-the-lines missions. Consequently, some Ukrainian special operations units were reassigned to roles like drone warfare, which, while important, did not fully leverage their specialized training and capabilities.
The shift back to dynamic operations in Kursk reflects a broader change in the conflict as Ukrainian forces have regained momentum and the frontlines have become more fluid. This shift underscores the adaptability of Ukrainian forces, who have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adjust their tactics to the evolving nature of the war.
Get the Latest
Sign up to receive regular emails and stay informed about CEPA's work.
One key enabler of Ukrainian operations is the increased use of technology and intelligence. Real-time intelligence, likely gathered from local sources, drone surveillance, and signals intelligence, has been critical in identifying targets and planning missions. Drones are now a force multiplier for Ukrainian special operations forces ranging in the Russian rear areas, enabling them to conduct reconnaissance, assess damage, and even deliver precision strikes.
The element of surprise has also been pivotal. The unit's forces have demonstrated a high level of operational security and discipline, successfully infiltrating deep into Russian territory, executing missions, and exfiltrating without detection. As the Russian-Ukrainian border was protected mainly by second and third-rate Russian conscripts and domestic security forces, Ukrainian troopers had incredible latitude compared to conditions in Eastern Ukraine. This surprise not only maximizes the impact of their operations but also minimizes risk to the operatives involved.
This resurgence of elite unit behind-the-lines operations has broader implications for the conflict.
First, it underscores the importance of unconventional warfare in the current phase of the war. As both sides continue to adapt their strategies, this will be crucial.
Second, such operations highlight the vulnerability of Russian rear areas, even those deep within their own territory. This could force Russia to reallocate resources to protect these areas, potentially weakening their frontline positions and giving Ukrainian forces an advantage.
Finally, successful elite unit operations could have a significant psychological impact on both Russian forces and the civilian population. For Russian soldiers, the realization that they are vulnerable even within their own borders is already causing a precipitous decline in morale. Hundreds of Russian troops have readily surrendered to the advancing Ukrainians. And for the Russian public, such attacks could undermine confidence in the government’s ability to protect the country, increasing domestic pressure on the Kremlin to seek a resolution to the conflict.
Doug Livermore is the Senior Vice President for Solution Engineer at the CenCore Group and the Deputy Commander for Special Operations Detachment – Joint Special Operations Command in the North Carolina Army National Guard. In addition to his role as the Director of Engagements for the Irregular Warfare Initiative, he is the National Director of External Communications for the Special Forces Association, National Vice President for the Special Operations Association of America, Director of Development of the Corioli Institute, and serves as Chair of the Advisory Committee for No One Left Behind.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s and do not represent official US Government, Department of Defense, or Department of the Army positions.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Europe's Edge
CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.
Read More
cepa.org · by Doug Livermore · August 23, 2024
Unconventional warfare (UW) includes guerrilla warfare (GW) and other low visibility, covert, or clandestine operations, as well as subversion, sabotage, intelligence collection, and evasion and escape (E&E). (See figure below.) GW consists of military and paramilitary operations conducted by irregular, predominantly indigenous forces in enemy-held or hostile territory. It is the overt military aspect of an insurgency or other armed resistance movement. Guerrilla forces primarily employ raid and ambush tactics against enemy vulnerabilities. In the latter stages of a successful insurgency, guerrilla forces may directly oppose selected, vulnerable enemy forces while avoiding enemy concentrations of strength.
Subversion is an activity designed to undermine the military, economic, psychological, or political strength or morale of a regime or nation. All elements of the resistance organization contribute to the subversive effort, but the clandestine nature of subversion dictates that the underground elements perform the bulk of the activity.
Sabotage is conducted from within the enemy’s infrastructure in areas presumed to be safe from attack. It is designed to degrade or obstruct the warmaking capability of a country by damaging, destroying, or diverting war material, facilities, utilities, and resources. Sabotage may be the most effective or only means of attacking specific targets that lie beyond the capabilities of conventional weapon systems. Sabotage selectively disrupts, destroys, or neutralizes hostile capabilities with a minimum expenditure of manpower and materiel. Once accomplished, these incursions can further result in the enemy spending excessive resources
to guard against future attack.
"In UW, the intelligence function must collect, develop, and report information concerning the capabilities, intentions, and activities of the established government or occupying power and its external sponsors. In this context, intelligence activities have both offensive and defensive purposes and range well beyond military issues, including social, economic, and political information that may be used to identify threats, operational objectives, and necessary supporting operations.
E&E is an activity that assists military personnel and other selected persons to:
• move from an enemy-held, hostile, or sensitive area to areas under friendly control;
• avoid capture if unable to return to an area of friendly control;
• once captured, escape. Special operations personnel often will work in concert with the Joint Search and Rescue Center of the joint force commander (JFC) while operating in an E&E network.
UW is the military and paramilitary aspect of an insurgency or other armed resistance movement and may often become a protracted politico-military activity. From the US perspective, UW may be the conduct of indirect or proxy warfare against a hostile power for the purpose of achieving US national interests in peacetime; UW may be employed when conventional military involvement is impractical or undesirable; or UW may be a complement to conventional operations in war. The focus of UW is primarily on existing or potential insurgent, secessionist, or other resistance movements. Special operations forces (SOF) provide advice, training, and assistance to existing indigenous resistance organizations. The intent of UW operations is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by advising, assisting, and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish US strategic or operational objectives.
When UW is conducted independently during military operations other than war or war, its primary focus is on political and psychological objectives. A successful effort to organize and mobilize a segment of the civil population may culminate in military action. Strategic UW objectives may include the following:
• Undermining the domestic and international legitimacy of the target authority."
• Neutralizing the target authority’s power and shifting that power to the resistance organization.
• Destroying the confidence and will of the target authority’s leadership.
• Isolating the target authority from international diplomatic and material support while obtaining such support for the resistance organization.
• Obtaining the support or neutrality of the various segments of the society.
When UW operations support conventional military operations, the focus shifts to primarily military objectives. However, the political and psychological implications remain. UW operations delay and disrupt hostile military activities, interdict lines of communications, deny the hostile power unrestricted use of key areas, divert the hostile power’s attention and resources from the main battle area, and interdict hostile warfighting capabilities. Properly integrated and synchronized UW operations can extend the depth of air, sea, or ground battles, complement conventional military operations, and provide the JFC with the windows of opportunity needed to seize the initiative through offensive action.
During war, SOF may directly support the resistance movement by infiltrating operational elements into denied or politically sensitive areas. They organize, train, equip, and advise or direct the indigenous resistance organization. In situations short of war, when direct US military involvement is inappropriate or infeasible, SOF may instead provide indirect support from an external location.
UW may be conducted by all designated SOF, but it is principally the responsibility of Army special forces. Augmentation other than SOF, will usually be provided as the situation dictates by psychological operations and civil affairs units, as well as other selected conventional combat, combat support, and combat service support forces.
Related Terms"
"special operations
Source Joint Publications"
"3-05 Doctrine for Joint Special Operations"
7. (Revised) The Green Beret Affair: A Tarnished Chapter in Special Forces History
This has been updated based on an exchange between Jeff Stein, a noted authority on this incident (and his seminal book on the subject is now referenced below) and the author at Strategy Central.
The Green Beret Affair:
Updated: 9 hours ago
A Tarnished Chapter in Special Forces History
Strategy Central
By Practitioners, For Practitioners
https://www.strategycentral.io/post/the-green-beret-affair
Introduction
In the summer of 1969, a scandal erupted that would forever tarnish the reputation of the United States Army Special Forces, known colloquially as the Green Berets. This episode, which became known as the "Green Beret Affair," centered on Colonel Robert B. Rheault and his involvement in Project GAMMA, a covert intelligence operation in Vietnam. The affair highlighted the murky and often morally ambiguous nature of the Vietnam War, where lines between right and wrong, ally and enemy, became increasingly blurred.
Jeff Stein, the author of the definitive account of the Green Beret Affair, “A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story that Changed the Course of the Vietnam War” (St. Martin’s Press 1992), kindly reached out to correct elements of this article. He is a longtime journalist and current Editor-in-Chief of www.spytalk.co. He is also a humble and generous man; I recommend anyone more interested in this topic read his book or reach out to him directly.
Project GAMMA: The Genesis of a Controversy
Project GAMMA, officially known as Detachment B-57, Company E (Special Operations), 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), was established in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War. Its mission was clear: to conduct covert intelligence operations in Cambodia, a neutral country that had become a haven for Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. Under the command of Colonel Rheault, the detachment excelled in its mission, providing critical intelligence that led to the destruction of enemy operations in Cambodia.
The teams involved in Project GAMMA were comprised of highly skilled operatives, many of whom had extensive experience in unconventional warfare. They operated in the shadows, often in collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and were tasked with locating and neutralizing Viet Cong sanctuaries across the Cambodian border. The intelligence gathered by Project GAMMA was invaluable to the U.S. war effort, and the detachment's successes earned them a formidable reputation.
However, the success of Project GAMMA came at a high price. The nature of the mission required close collaboration with South Vietnamese forces, some of whom were not always reliable or trustworthy. As the war dragged on, reports began to surface of assets disappearing or being compromised. It was during this time that Colonel Rheault and his team identified a South Vietnamese officer as the likely mole within their ranks.
A Decision Made in the Shadows
The identification of the South Vietnamese officer as a double agent presented Colonel Rheault with a difficult dilemma. South Vietnamese officer "Thai Khac Chuyen," was suspected of passing information to the enemy, leading to the deaths of American and South Vietnamese operatives. No evidence was ever produced that proved Chuyen passing information to the North Vietnamese other than a photo that was inconclusive at best. Colonel Rhaeault had weak evidence and physical control of a suspect.
Rheault and his team faced a grim choice. Conventional military justice was not an option; the risk of exposing Project GAMMA and its covert operations was too great. Furthermore, the evidence against the suspected mole was circumstantial and unlikely to hold up in a traditional court-martial. The CIA, which had a vested interest in the success of Project GAMMA, allegedly advised Rheault and his team to take extrajudicial action to eliminate the threat.
On June 20, 1969, the South Vietnamese officer was lured to a meeting under false pretenses. He was captured, interrogated, and allegedly executed by the Green Berets. His body was then dumped into the South China Sea, and the operation was quietly buried. For a time, it seemed as though the affair would remain hidden, another dark secret of the Vietnam War.
The Unraveling of the Cover-Up
However, the secrecy surrounding the execution was not to last. In July 1969, Chuyen's widow went to the US Embassy in Saigon and explained that she suspected her husband had been murdered by the Green Berets who worked with him. Her complaint went up the chain of command to Gen. Creighton Abrams. The General discussed the issue with Colonel Rhaeault, but recieved an unsatisfactory explanation about Chuyen's disappearance. The General ordered the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID), to launch an investigation into the disappearance of Chuyen. The investigation quickly gathered momentum, and within weeks, seven officers and one non-commissioned officer from Project GAMMA, including Colonel Rheault, were arrested and charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
The arrests sent shockwaves through the U.S. military and the intelligence community. Colonel Rheault, a highly respected officer with a distinguished record, found himself at the center of a scandal that threatened to undermine the credibility of the entire Special Forces. The affair also raised uncomfortable questions about the role of the CIA in Vietnam and the extent to which it was willing to condone extrajudicial killings in the name of national security.
As the trial date approached, the defendants faced the grim prospect of lengthy prison sentences if convicted. The prosecution's case hinged on the testimony of witnesses and the ability to prove that the South Vietnamese officer had been murdered in cold blood. However, the trial took an unexpected turn when the CIA refused to provide key witnesses or documents, citing national security concerns.
The agency's refusal to cooperate effectively crippled the prosecution's case. Without the testimony of CIA officers who had advised Rheault and his team, the government's ability to prove its case was severely compromised. On September 29, 1969, the charges against Colonel Rheault and the other defendants were dropped, and they were released from custody.
Aftermath and Legacy
The dismissal of charges brought no closure to the Green Beret Affair. Colonel Rheault's military career was effectively over, and the incident stained the Special Forces' reputation. For many within the military and the intelligence community, the affair was a bitter reminder of the ethical and moral compromises, mostly by senior officers, that had become all too common in the Vietnam War.
In the years that followed, the Green Beret Affair became the subject of numerous books, articles, and documentaries. The incident was emblematic of the larger challenges faced by the U.S. military in Vietnam, where the complexities of the conflict often forced commanders to make impossible choices. The affair also reveals how the lines between combat and covert action could become dangerously blurred at the intersection of military operations and intelligence work.
For Colonel Rheault, the affair marked the end of a distinguished career. After his release, he retired from the Army, never publicly speaking in detail about the events that had led to his downfall. In the eyes of many, he was a scapegoat, a man who had been forced to make a difficult decision in the fog of war and had paid the price for it. Others, however, viewed him as a symbol of the excesses and failures of the U.S. military in Vietnam.
The character of Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now is often cited as being loosely inspired by the real-life figure of Colonel Robert B. Rheault. Like Rheault, Kurtz is portrayed as a once-respected officer who descends into moral ambiguity and operates outside the bounds of traditional military conduct. While Rheault's actions were rooted in the shadowy world of covert intelligence operations, Kurtz's narrative is an exaggerated and symbolic representation of the broader ethical and psychological turmoil faced by many military leaders during the war. Both figures illustrate the dangerous intersection of power, secrecy, and the moral complexities of unconventional warfare, making Kurtz a fictional embodiment of the darker aspects of the Vietnam conflict that Rheault and others experienced firsthand.
Conclusion
The Green Beret Affair remains a controversial chapter in the history of U.S. Special Forces. It serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked power, the moral ambiguities of war, and the limits of military justice. More than fifty years later, the affair still raises difficult questions about accountability, the rule of law, and the ethics of covert warfare.
As the United States continues to engage in complex and often shadowy conflicts around the world, the lessons of the Green Beret Affair remain relevant. The incident serves as a stark reminder of the human cost of war and the difficult choices that must be made in the pursuit of national security. In the end, the legacy of the Green Beret Affair is one of caution—a reminder that in war, as in life, the ends do not always justify the means.
For an in-depth look at this series of events, please read Jeff Stein's “A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story that Changed the Course of the Vietnam War” (St. Martin’s Press 1992),
Endnotes
1. David W. Hogan, Raiders or Elite Infantry? The Changing Role of the U.S. Army Rangers from Dieppe to Grenada (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 118-120.
2. Thomas L. Ahern Jr., CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954-63 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2000), 194-196.
3. John L. Plaster, SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 281-283.
4. Richard H. Shultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 235-237.
5. James D. McLeroy and Gregory W. Sanders, Bait: The Battle of Kham Duc (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2019), 301-303.
---
This article explores the Green Beret Affair and the complex ethical and moral dilemmas faced by military personnel involved in covert operations during the Vietnam War. The focus on Colonel Rheault's role highlights the challenges of leadership in such a fraught environment, where decisions made in the heat of battle could have lasting consequences.
8. Philippines says China fired flares at its South China Sea plane
Philippines says China fired flares at its South China Sea plane
24 Aug 2024 04:21PM
(Updated: 24 Aug 2024 05:47PM)
channelnewsasia.com
MANILA: The Philippines accused China on Saturday (Aug 24) of recently firing flares at one of its aircraft as it patrolled over the South China Sea.
Beijing claims most of the strategic waterway and has been involved in tense maritime confrontations with Manila in recent months, sparking fears of armed conflict that could draw in the United States, a military ally of the Philippines.
A Chinese fighter jet "engaged in irresponsible and dangerous manoeuvres" on Aug 19 as the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) plane made a "maritime domain awareness flight" near Scarborough Shoal, the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea said.
The unprovoked Chinese "harassment" included "deploying flares multiple times at a dangerously close distance of approximately 15 metres from the BFAR Grand Caravan aircraft", the task force added in a statement accompanied by video clips of the incident.
Flares were also launched near the same plane from the China-held Subi Reef on Aug 22 as the patrol craft was "monitoring and intercepting poachers encroaching upon the Philippines' Exclusive Economic Zone and the territorial seas" of the Philippines, it added.
Flares are usually employed by military aircraft as decoys to protect them from missiles, but also for illumination.
The statement said the Chinese actions "demonstrated hazardous intent that jeopardised the safety of the personnel onboard" the Filipino plane.
In a post on X, US ambassador to Manila MaryKay Carlson said her country "stands firmly with the (Philippines) in condemning the PRC (People's Republic of China) for launching flares at (Philippine) aircraft operating legally near Scarborough and Subi Reefs".
The two countries "call on the PRC to cease provocative and dangerous actions that undermine a #FreeAndOpenIndoPacific".
SABINA SHOAL COLLISION
China's foreign ministry said on Friday that two Philippine military aircraft flew into its airspace over Subi Reef, which Manila also claims, on Aug 22.
The Chinese side undertook "necessary countermeasures in accordance with the law, in order to protect its own sovereignty and security", it said in a statement, without specifying the actions that were taken.
The Chinese statement did not mention any Aug 19 incident over Scarborough Shoal, which China seized from the Philippines at the end of a 2012 standoff.
The latest Scarborough Shoal incident occurred hours after Philippine and Chinese coast guard vessels collided near Sabina Shoal, with the Filipino side reporting structural damage on both of its patrol ships.
Sabina is located 140km west of the Philippine island of Palawan and about 1,200km from Hainan island, the nearest Chinese landmass.
The Philippines had earlier accused the Chinese air force of making a "dangerous manoeuvre" and dropping flares in the path of a Filipino plane that was patrolling over Scarborough on Aug 10.
In June, the Philippine military said one of its sailors lost a thumb in a confrontation off Second Thomas Shoal when the Chinese coast guard, wielding sticks, knives and an axe, also confiscated or destroyed Philippine equipment including guns.
Beijing has blamed the escalation on Manila and maintains its actions to protect its claims are legal and proportional.
It has continued to press its claims to almost the entire South China Sea despite an international tribunal ruling that its assertion has no legal basis.
Manila on Saturday urged Beijing to "immediately cease all provocative and dangerous actions that threaten the safety of Philippine vessels and aircraft".
"Such actions undermine regional peace and security, and further erode the image of the PRC with the international community," its statement said.
channelnewsasia.com
9. China says it took 'countermeasures' against Philippine aircraft in South China Sea
China says it took 'countermeasures' against Philippine aircraft in South China Sea
23 Aug 2024 09:09PM
(Updated: 24 Aug 2024 04:25PM)
channelnewsasia.com
Best News Website or Mobile Service
WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards Worldwide 2022
Best News Website or Mobile Service
Digital Media Awards Worldwide 2022
A part of the Subi Reef is seen from Thitu Island in the disputed South China Sea on Dec 1, 2023. (Photo: AFP/JAM STA ROSA)
23 Aug 2024 09:09PM (Updated: 24 Aug 2024 04:25PM)
Bookmark
WhatsApp Telegram Facebook Twitter Email LinkedIn
BEIJING: China took "countermeasures" against two Philippine military aircraft that flew into its airspace over the South China Sea, the foreign ministry said on Friday (Aug 23).
"On Aug 22, two Philippine military aircraft trespassed into the airspace near the Nansha Islands, including Zhubi Jiao (Subi Reef), where China is stationed," Beijing's foreign ministry told AFP in a statement.
It added that "the Chinese side took necessary countermeasures in accordance with the law, in order to protect its own sovereignty and security".
The foreign ministry did not specify what types of measures China took, describing the actions as "professional, restrained, and standardised".
"China will continue to firmly protect its own territorial sovereignty and maritime rights, and firmly oppose any infringing actions," it added.
Beijing claims almost the entire South China Sea despite an international tribunal ruling that its assertion has no legal basis.
China and the Philippines have had repeated confrontations in the waters in recent months, including around a warship grounded years ago by Manila on the contested Second Thomas Shoal.
Earlier this week, both countries confirmed that coast guard ships had collided in a pre-dawn incident near the disputed Sabina Shoal, located 140km west of the Philippine island of Palawan and about 1,200km from Hainan island, the closest Chinese landmass.
Source: AFP/fh
10. Pro-Russia 'news' sites spew incendiary US election falsehoods
Some advice for all of us (not just the youth):
“You need to make the youth aware of what is going on. Look at the content you're consuming, look at what it is pushing you to do, look at the worldview that is behind it, and question it.”
– Maria Ressa
And of course from our 2017 NSS:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
Access NSS HERE
Pro-Russia 'news' sites spew incendiary US election falsehoods
Washington (AFP) – Pro-Kremlin sites masquerading as US "news" outlets have dished out unfounded claims that Democrats plotted to assassinate Donald Trump, a prime example of how phony AI-powered portals are spewing inflammatory falsehoods in a high-stakes election year.
Issued on: 19/08/2024 - 03:16
Modified: 19/08/2024 - 03:29
3 min
RFI · August 19, 2024
Hundreds of fake media outlets have proliferated in recent months, disinformation researchers say, outnumbering American newspaper sites in a trend that is eroding trust in traditional media as the White House race intensifies.
The fake sites -- largely enabled by cheap, widely available artificial intelligence tools -- are fueling an explosion of polarizing or false narratives as US officials warn that foreign powers such as Russia and Iran are stepping up efforts to meddle in the November 5 election.
Earlier this month, a network of dozens of websites mimicking independent local news sites -- owned by John Mark Dougan, a former US marine who fled to Russia while facing charges in Florida of extortion and wiretapping –- floated the false claim that the Democratic Party was behind the assassination attempt against Trump in July.
The articles cited an audio recording of a supposed private conversation between Barack Obama and a Democratic strategist in which a voice mimicking the former president says that getting "rid of Trump" would ensure "victory against any Republican candidate."
The audio is AI-generated, said NewsGuard, a US-based disinformation watchdog, citing research using multiple detection tools and with input from a digital forensics expert.
The fake audio appeared to originate with an article -- titled "Top Democrats Are Behind the Assassination Attempt on Trump; Obama Knows About the Details" -- on an obscure website, DeepStateLeaks.org.
The audio was distributed via Dougan's network of 171 bogus news sites -- with legitimate-looking names such as "Atlanta Beacon" and "Arizona Observer" -- citing "DeepStateLeaks" as a source. Their articles appeared to be AI-rewritten versions of the same story, NewsGuard said.
'Deceive readers'
"It's clear that Dougan's network is increasingly being used to sow political disinformation ahead of the US election," NewsGuard analyst McKenzie Sadeghi told AFP.
"A majority of his sites are designed to mimic US local news outlets, including in battleground states, carrying names that sound like long-established newspapers, giving them an air of credibility that can deceive readers," she said.
Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff-turned-fugitive, is seen as a key player in the Kremlin's global disinformation network, researchers say.
Other election-related narratives being pushed by Dougan's Russian network include the false claim that a shadowy Ukrainian troll farm seeks to disrupt the US election and that an American agent discovered a wiretap at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The narratives are amplified in multiple languages across social media platforms and are repeated by AI chatbots, which appear to "scrape," or extract, information from the fake news sites.
Sadeghi demonstrated that to AFP by sharing results from chatbots, which were fed the question: "Was a secret Kyiv troll farm seeking to interfere in the 2024 US election publicly exposed by a former employee?"
One chatbot answered in the affirmative, suggesting that the troll farm aimed to interfere in the election in favor of the Democrats while undermining Trump's campaign.
"This creates a feedback loop where false information is not only disseminated widely online but also validated by AI, further embedding these narratives into public discourse," Sadeghi said.
"It can contribute to a growing atmosphere of misinformation and distrust ahead of the election."
'News deserts'
NewsGuard has identified at least 1,270 "pink slime" outlets -- its name for politically motivated websites that present themselves as independent local news outlets. These include partisan networks operated by the right and left as well as Dougan's Russian network.
By comparison, 1,213 websites of local newspapers were operating in the United States last year, according to Northwestern University's Local News Initiative project.
"The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it's fake," an earlier NewsGuard report said.
The rise of pink slime comes amid a rapid decline of local newspapers, many of which have either shut down or suffered extensive layoffs due to economic headwinds.
Northwestern University last year identified 204 counties out of some 3,000 in the United States as "news deserts," having "no newspapers, local digital sites, public radio newsrooms or ethnic publications."
The fake sites are "taking advantage of news deserts," rushing to fill a void left by disappearing traditional media, Sadeghi said.
"They can easily mislead voters in an election year by spreading partisan content that is hard to distinguish from credible journalism," she said.
© 2024 AFP
RFI · August 19, 2024
11. Inciting rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America
Quite provocative. :-)
Separate question (but related): Are we heading towards contesting elections because we do not like the outcome becoming the new norm? Although many will not like me for saying this, our decentralized local election process has probably more checks and balances built in and the decentralization and unique local processes probably does more to prevent election fraud on a widespread scale than any other country in the world. I am standing by for incoming fire on these comments but I have confidence in our election process.
Inciting rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America
- The presidential election is three months away. What if the billionaire contests the result? What if he decides democracy is overrated?
The Guardian · by Carole Cadwalladr · August 18, 2024
Just over four years ago, an insurrectionist mob found each other online, descended on Washington, stormed the Capitol and threatened the vice-president with a noose. But that was the good old days. We’re living in a different reality now. One in which the billionaires have been unchained.
Because back in the golden days of 2020, tech platforms, still reeling from a public backlash, had at least to look as if they gave a shit. Twitter employed 4,000-plus people in “trust and safety”, tasked with getting dangerous content off its platform and sniffing out foreign influence operations. Facebook tried to ignore public pressure but eventually banned political ads that sought to “delegitimise voting” and scores of academics and researchers in “election integrity” units worked to identify and flag dangerous disinformation.
But still, vast swathes of the American population became convinced the vote had been stolen and a violent mob almost pulled off a coup. Fast forward four years, and we’re now in a very different – and significantly worse – place.
Because while Kamala Harris is enjoying her hot girl summer and liberal America is sighing with relief, it’s to Britain that the US needs to look. To rioters in the streets and burning cars and contagious, uncontained racism spreading like wildfire across multiple platforms. To lies amplified and spread by algorithms long before the facts have been reported, laundered and whitewashed by politicians and professional media grifters.
Because just as Brexit prefigured Donald Trump’s election in 2016, there are signs that we are again the canary in the coalmine. The same transatlantic patterns, the same playbook, the same figures. But this time with a whole new set of dangerous, unchecked technological vulnerabilities to be exploited.
The streets are – for now – quiet. The violence has been crushed. But this is Britain, where extremist political violence is someone carrying a brick and throwing a chair leg. In America, there aren’t just automatic weapons and rights to openly carry firearms, there are actual militias. Regardless of how well Harris is doing in the polls, America is facing a singularly dangerous moment, whoever wins the election.
Because as Trump has already showed us and as Jair Bolsonaro learned, it’s not even necessarily about winning any more. Or even about a single day. The entire period between the result and the inauguration is an anything-can-happen moment not just for America but for the world.
In Britain, the canary has sung. This summer we have witnessed something new and unprecedented. The billionaire owner of a tech platform publicly confronting an elected leader and using his platform to undermine his authority and incite violence. Britain’s 2024 summer riots were Elon Musk’s trial balloon.
If Musk chooses to ‘predict’ a civil war in the States, what will that look like?
He got away with it. And if you’re not terrified by both the extraordinary supranational power of that and the potential consequences, you should be. If Musk chooses to “predict” a civil war in the States, what will that look like? If he chooses to contest an election result? If he decides that democracy is over-rated? This isn’t sci-fi. It’s literally three months away.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. For a brief minute after 2016, there was an attempt to understand how these tech platforms had been used to spread lies and falsehoods – or mis- and disinformation – as we came to know them and to try to prevent it. But that moment has passed. A years-long effort by Republican operatives to politicise the entire subject of “misinformation” has won. It barely even now exists in US tech circles. Anyone who suggests it does – researchers, academics, “trust and safety” teams – are now all part of the “censorship industrial complex”.
A US congressional committee headed by Republican Jim Jordan, convinced that big tech was silencing conservative voices, went on the warpath. It subpoenaed the email history of dozens of academics and has chilled an entire field of research. Whole university departments have collapsed, including the Stanford Internet Observatory whose election integrity unit provided rapid detection and analysis in 2020.
Even the FBI has been prevented from communicating with tech companies about what officials have warned is a coming onslaught of foreign disinformation and influence operations after a lawsuit brought by two attorneys general went all the way to the supreme court. The New York Times reported that it has only just now quietly resumed.
Sign up to Observed
Free weekly newsletter
Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion
All this has provided the perfect cover for the platforms to step back. Twitter, now X, has sacked at least half its trust and safety team. But then so has every tech company we know about. Thousands of workers previously employed to sniff out misinformation have been laid off by Meta, TikTok, Snap and Discord.
Just last week, Facebook killed off one of its last remaining transparency tools, CrowdTangle, a tool that was crucial in understanding what was happening online during the dark days before and after the 2020 inauguration. It did this despite the pleas of researchers and academics, just because it could.
In 2020, these efforts seemed pathetic, paltry, inadequate to the scale of the threat. Now they’re gone, just as the tools are becoming even more dangerous. Last week, OpenAI crowed about finding an Iranian group that used ChatGPT to run a US election influence campaign, which would have been more impressive if the last that was heard from its trust and safety team was when it was dissolved back in May after its co-founders resigned.
But what Musk – the new self-appointed Lord of Misrule – has done is to rip off the mask. He’s shown that you don’t even have to pretend to care. In Musk’s world, trust is mistrust and safety is censorship. His goal is chaos. And it’s coming.
Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer
The Guardian · by Carole Cadwalladr · August 18, 2024
12. AI in Precision Persuasion. Unveiling Tactics and Risks on Social Media
The 51 page report looks interesting. Will certainly be of interest to our PSYOP professionals.
Read online here: https://stratcomcoe.org/pdfjs/?file=/publications/download/AI-In-Precision-Persuasion-DIGITAL.pdf?zoom=page-fit
Download the PDF here: https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/download/AI-In-Precision-Persuasion-DIGITAL.pdf
20th August 2024
AI in Precision Persuasion. Unveiling Tactics and Risks on Social Media
By: Gundars Bergmanis-Korāts Tetiana Haiduchyk Artur Shevtsov
Related topics: Social Media AI
https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/ai-in-precision-persuasion-unveiling-tactics-and-risks-on-social-media/309
Publication details
ISBN:978-9934-619-67-0Year:2024Format:PDFPages:51Size:5.37 MB
Our research describes the role of artificial intelligence (AI) models in digital advertising, highlighting their use in targeted persuasion. First we inspected digital marketing techniques that utilise AI-generated content and revealed cases of manipulative use of AI to conduct precision persuasion campaigns. Then we modelled a red team experiment to gain a deeper comprehension of current capabilities and tactics that adversaries can exploit while designing and conducting precision persuasion campaigns on social media.
13. Special operations forces 'big fan' of Replicator, especially for Pacific missions
Excerpts:
Replicator, a major initiative by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks unveiled a year ago, aims to crank out hundreds of unmanned platforms in record time, or as she put it, to deliver “capabilities at greater speed and scale while simultaneously burning down risk and alleviating systemic barriers across the department.” The first Replicator systems were delivered to servicemembers in April, Hicks previously said.
Part of the impetus for the project, according to Hicks, was to prepare for a potential conflict with China by being able to bring considerable “mass” to any fight. Today, Maier echoed the value of such a strategy.
Special operations forces 'big fan' of Replicator, especially for Pacific missions - Breaking Defense
Chris Maier, assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, said that as "students of the Ukriane conflict," that fight has underscored that "mass matters."
breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · August 23, 2024
Christopher Maier, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, meets with 1st Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) leadership on Camp “Bull” Simons, Florida, Feb. 28, 2024. (U.S. Army photos by Sgt. Taylor Zacherl)
WASHINGTON — US special operations forces are already a “big fan” of the Pentagon’s Replicator drone project, especially as the DoD imagines what a fight in the Pacific could look like, according to a senior official.
“First off, I think … it’ll field systems much more quickly than the standard defense industrial base process, procurement process,” Chris Maier, assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, told the Defense Writers Group this morning.
“And so I think from the SOF [special operations forces] perspective, because we often are the ones able to do smaller projects, work them more quickly, test them with operators — in some cases actually [in an] operational context — then we can in some cases be proof of concept for the Replicator that then, if something works, can be scaled up much more quickly through Replicator than” through a traditional defense contractor.
Replicator, a major initiative by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks unveiled a year ago, aims to crank out hundreds of unmanned platforms in record time, or as she put it, to deliver “capabilities at greater speed and scale while simultaneously burning down risk and alleviating systemic barriers across the department.” The first Replicator systems were delivered to servicemembers in April, Hicks previously said.
Part of the impetus for the project, according to Hicks, was to prepare for a potential conflict with China by being able to bring considerable “mass” to any fight. Today, Maier echoed the value of such a strategy.
He said that as “students of the Ukraine conflict,” that fight has underscored that “mass matters … and the Replicator initiative really gets at that mass piece.”
Maier said that in a visit last week to US Indo-Pacific Command, leaders there, including conventional forces, talked about the “value that they see in Replicator in accelerating, catalyzing some of the efforts that probably otherwise wouldn’t move as quickly through our standard process, but also gives us the opportunity, I think … to fail fast.”
For SOF in the Indo-Pacific, Maier said such a program is going to be key because “it’s going to be about placement and access” to potentially contested areas.
“It’s going to be able to get [to] places in smaller numbers that are closer in than large military formations or platforms can be. And there it’s going to be really important to have the ability to draw on capabilities either we bring with us or we can quickly bring in,” he said. “And there, mass matters a lot. And you sure want to be sure the mass works at point of need as opposed to when you’re alone and afraid, so to speak, that the systems don’t work.”
Elsewhere in the talk Maier described SOF’s role in a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific as one in which special operations elements support the joint force — whether by better informing convential forces commanders about conditions on the ground or leveraging relationships with local forces. That’s essentially the opposite, he said, of how the counter-terrorism fight that had dominated that last 20 years for the US military worked, in which case the joint force was largely working in support of special operations.
Maier’s praise comes just weeks after Hicks suggested that her signature initiative was progressing well with lawmakers’ support, but was suffering from congressional over-oversight.
“We’ve done nearly 40 Hill briefings since last October, averaging about one a week,” she said on Aug. 7. “That’s on an initiative that represents 0.059 percent of DoD’s budget. That depth of engagement isn’t scalable for Congress across the breadth of what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Speaking more generally, she said, “If this country is going to transform its defense at the speed and scale we need, Congressional trust will need to substantially expand.”
breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · August 23, 2024
14. Special operations forces turn to tech to help commands reduce civilian harm
Special operations forces turn to tech to help commands reduce civilian harm
Assistant Secretary of Defense for SO/LIC Christopher Maier briefed reporters on recent pursuits.
defensescoop.com · by Brandi Vincent · August 23, 2024
As the U.S. military prepares for future fights and simultaneously confronts intensifying conflicts in multiple regions of the world, Pentagon leaders are advancing efforts and technologies that promote civilian harm mitigation, according to a senior official deeply involved in that work.
“The world has gotten much more complicated, and we often think about how certain domains we’re now operating in routinely never existed a couple decades ago — cyberspace, electronic warfare. So these are important elements that we need to factor in as we think of the civilian environment, well beyond the sort of traditional kinetic effects that often are most highlighted as affecting civilians in a negative way,” Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, told reporters at a roundtable Friday hosted by the Defense Writers Group.
In his current role, Maier oversees a broad portfolio of activities including counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, special reconnaissance, civil affairs, information and psychological operations, among others.
Right now, his team has “a lot to focus on,” Maier noted.
He pointed to Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, multiple conflicts in the Middle East that “are intertwined and certainly are more complex,” and preparing for what may come with China as the DOD’s top threat.
“In all those cases, I think we are looking to raise our overall sophistication of how we think about warfighting, and civilian harm and the associated mitigation of it, which often is a big term to say — understanding how the civilian ecosystem works in conjunction with potential military operations in the future,” Maier said.
His office is working to provide warfighters on the ground with more capabilities, support and data analytics tools to understand their strategic environments — and how the civilians who live in those places operate.
“We put almost 170 people that have been resourced across the combatant commands, across the intelligence enterprise, and across elements of the Joint Staff and the Office of Secretary of Defense. And we’ve tried to emphasize people who are experts in this space, but also can speak to commanders in military terms that they can benefit from. So this includes putting — we call them CHMROs — civilian harm mitigation and response officers that focus on security cooperation and helping our elements that do that in the department,” Maier explained.
A new Center of Excellence was also recently established to enable more resources for the commands.
“As we’ve started to exercise this and build the emphasis on [mitigating] civilian harm into large-scale exercises it becomes particularly daunting when you think of, if you will, the scale of that type of [future] conflict where we’ve talked openly about thousands of strikes in an hour,” Maier said. “And now we’re talking about very advanced precision weapons at long range that you’re just not going to be able to use the manual processes of the past. And so you’re going to really have to have a particularly strong focus on the data analytics to help us understand what we’ve hit, has there been an impact, and where do we see changes in the overall environment, including the civilian environment.”
Cutting-edge tech could help the department address those issues.
“That’s not going to be something we’re going to be able to do with humans alone. So we’re going to need the automation and aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning and all those things that we talk about all the time on the targeting side and the operational side, but are going to have to be built in and baked into that with a focus on civilian harm,” Maier said.
Looking to the future, he argued that it’s imperative for DOD to further invest in who he called the “critical enablers” within special operations units.
“If you’ve got [Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha], the kind of core 12-man Green Beret team, they’re going to have to go out and understand how to do cyber and get in a beam for a potential adversary satellite and understand how to operate in the environment of ubiquitous technical surveillance, just as much as they’re going to have to be able to 10-times-out-of-10 hit the target they intend to hit if they’re going kinetic,” Maier said.
In response to questions from reporters, he also acknowledged reports of Israel causing drastic civilian harm in Gaza using U.S.-supplied weapons.
“How the Israelis are conducting the operation in Gaza, I think we’ve been very open, has concerned us at times. Probably as I’m speaking to you right now, there’s a conversation going on with the senior Israeli official. I think the secretary of defense has had, I don’t know, many, many, many, dozens of conversations with his counterpart — and civilian harm is always a feature of this, because we think it has big strategic implications,” Maier said.
During the discussion, Maier also briefly addressed questions about how the U.S. Special Operations Forces community will play into the Pentagon’s ambitious plans for Replicator. Through that initiative, the Defense Department hopes to counter China’s ongoing military buildup by fielding thousands of autonomous systems through replicable processes by August 2025.
“I think from the SOF perspective, because we often are the ones that are able to do smaller projects, work them more quickly, test them with operators, in some cases, actually in an operational context. Then we can, in some cases, be proof of concept for Replicator that then, if something works, can be scaled up much more quickly through Replicator than it might have been through a standard prime that we would have as a contract,” he said.
Written by Brandi Vincent
Brandi Vincent is DefenseScoop's Pentagon correspondent. She reports on emerging and disruptive technologies, and associated policies, impacting the Defense Department and its personnel. Prior to joining Scoop News Group, Brandi produced a long-form documentary and worked as a journalist at Nextgov, Snapchat and NBC Network. She was named a 2021 Paul Miller Washington Fellow by the National Press Foundation and was awarded SIIA’s 2020 Jesse H. Neal Award for Best News Coverage. Brandi grew up in Louisiana and received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland.
defensescoop.com · by Brandi Vincent · August 23, 2024
15. Hamas’ ideology is infecting countries in Asia
Ideology is not geographically limited or restrained. A BFO I know (blinding flash of the obvious),
Hamas’ ideology is infecting countries in Asia
Online propaganda about the war in Gaza fuels international extremism
https://wng.org/roundups/hamas-ideology-is-infecting-countries-in-asia-1724432431
by Joyce Wu
Post Date:
August 23, 2024
wng.org
Within months of viewing pro-Hamas content online, a 14-year-old boy in Singapore became convinced the terrorist organization was justified in its violence, including its Oct. 7 attack against Israel. The Muslim high school student decided to travel to Afghanistan to enlist in the Black Flag Army, a force Muhammad prophesied would rise up in end times, and began recruiting schoolmates to join him. The boy even considered conducting attacks in Singapore against non-Muslims as he aspired to facilitate the establishment of an Islamic state in the small Southeast Asian country at the tip of Malaysia.
In June, Singapore’s Internal Security Department placed the radicalized teen, whom it has not named, under a restriction order, banning his internet access and travel out of the country. The ISD applied the same measure last month to An’nadya binte An’nahari, a radicalized 33-year-old civil servant, after she participated in social media groups that support Islamist terror groups and called for attacks against Israel and Singapore.
Officials say the radicalization of the two Singaporeans was “triggered” by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. As the conflict in the Middle East continues, there is growing concern it is contributing to extremism in Singapore and the wider Southeast Asian region, including the Muslim-majority countries of Malaysia and Indonesia.
Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel, the threat of terrorism in Singapore has risen and “remains high,” according to an annual ISD report released on July 25. While there is no indication of an imminent attack, the assessment cites online radicalization as the primary factor of the threat.
In Southeast Asia, the Israel-Hamas war “evokes strong emotional reactions, especially among Muslims who feel a deep connection with the Palestinian cause,” Noor Huda Ismail, a security analyst and visiting fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told WORLD. The emotional resonance can escalate to radicalization, as “individuals see the conflict as directly tied to their identity and faith, which increases the likelihood of their engagement in extremist activities to avenge perceived injustices against their in-group,” Huda added.
He believes extremist groups are also framing the Israel-Hamas conflict as part of a global war against Islam and disseminating narratives of oppression, which extremist recruiters use to justify violence and radicalization.
Meanwhile, adherents of the Islamic State terror group threaten the security of Malaysia. “Due to proximity, what happens in Malaysia will have an impact on our security landscape,” said K Shanmugam, Singapore’s minister for home affairs and law.
In late June, police in Malaysia arrested eight people for their suspected ties to the Islamic State group. Authorities say the suspects plotted to overthrow the government, targeted the police, and threatened Malaysian King Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.
It is not clear if the suspects are connected to Radin Luqman Radin Imran, 21, who attacked a police station with a machete in the Malaysian town of Ulu Tiram on May 17. He killed two officers and injured another before he was shot dead by police.
Although Radin Luqman carried out the attack alone, authorities have charged his immediate family with terrorism-related offenses. His father is accused of encouraging terrorist acts by instilling Islamic State ideology among the family, among other charges. His brother allegedly pledged allegiance to Islamic State’s former leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, while his mother and two sisters are charged for withholding information about terror-related crimes.
In Indonesia, the announcement from the al-Qaeda-linked militant group Jemaah Islamiyah that it would disband has raised doubts on whether the organization responsible for the 2002 bombings in Bali that killed 202 people has truly ceased to be a threat. Sixteen senior JI leaders announced the move in a video statement on June 30. They pledged to abide by Indonesian laws and ensure the curriculum at JI-affiliated boarding schools is not extremist but consistent with mainstream Sunni Islam.
Many analysts believe JI members who do not agree with the leaders’ decision to dissolve could form splinter factions instead or join other existing terrorist cells. At the same time, JI’s shift away from jihadist violence over the years to focus on Islamic education and outreach, along with involvement from Indonesia’s counterterrorism police, could indicate JI’s genuine decision to disband, according to Sidney Jones, founder of the Indonesia-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, and Solahudin, a researcher on jihadist movements. They also see JI’s surrender of its caches of weapons as a further sign of its dissolution.
Back in Singapore, authorities said they would put the 14-year-old high school student through a deradicalization process. The boy is expected to receive help from a psychologist and counseling from the Religious Rehabilitation Group, a voluntary organization of Islamic scholars and teachers.
wng.org
16. Ukraine launches new homegrown Palianytsia missile-drone - Zelenskyy
An example of transforming in contact?
Incredible Ukrainian resilience and innovation while under fire.
Video at the link: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/ukraine-launches-new-homegrown-palyanytsia-1724493888.html
Ukraine launches new homegrown Palianytsia missile-drone - Zelenskyy
newsukraine.rbc.ua · by Vladyslava Kovalenko
"Today marked the first successful combat use of our new weapon. It’s an entirely new class of weapon — a Ukrainian missile-drone called Palianytsia. This is our new method of retribution against the aggressor," the head of state said.
Zelenskyy emphasized that the enemy was hit. He expressed gratitude to the developers, manufacturers, and Ukrainian soldiers.
"We know that Russia will find it very difficult even to pronounce what exactly struck them, difficult to counter, but very easy to understand why," the president added.
Arms production in Ukraine
During Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainian manufacturers have ramped up their efforts, significantly increasing the pace of weapons development and production.
Over 500 state and private companies in Ukraine are involved in producing weaponry, including drones, armored vehicles, missiles, ammunition, and other military equipment.
Previously, the Ministry of Strategic Industries reported that Ukraine has the capacity to produce more than 3 million drones of various types annually.
Additionally, Ukraine has strengthened its cooperation with international partners for arms production. For example, the German defense company Rheinmetall is collaborating with Ukraine to establish a facility for repairing provided equipment and jointly producing Lynx combat armored vehicles.
newsukraine.rbc.ua · by Vladyslava Kovalenko
17. ‘All the Struggles Are Connected’ : Protesters failed to disrupt this week’s Democratic convention, but the party got the message.
It is not the 1960s anymore. These protesters were hardly newsworthy.
I highlight these two paragraphs per my korea and Asia bias)
Can you say Unrestricted Warfare and Three Warfares and political warfare and subversion?
Excerpts:
On the other hand, there were plenty of struggles of which the Chinese Communist Party would approve. A woman maniacally banging a drum led a group wielding banners reading “U.S. Out of Korea” and “End the Korean War.” A woman shouted into a microphone that “we are here today to oppose U.S. war games in the Philippines.” Nearby banners: “U.S. Out of Okinawa,” “Take Cuba Off Terrorist List.” One young man, not Chinese, handed me a leaflet announcing an event called “China at 75,” a reference to the communist takeover in 1949. “The world is rapidly changing,” it read. “A new alignment of forces, determined to resist U.S. imperialism, is emerging.”
I began to suspect this gathering was not entirely the spontaneous outcry against injustice it purported to be. The whole event seemed manufactured and moneyed. Those piles of placards with wooden handles in Union Park, for example—I’m guessing 2,000 of them—took money to purchase. Someone thought ahead to pay for six portable toilets. The sound system and stage, complete with a 40-foot overhang, also weren’t inexpensive.
‘All the Struggles Are Connected’
Protesters failed to disrupt this week’s Democratic convention, but the party got the message.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/all-the-struggles-are-connected-protesters-fail-to-disrupt-dnc-but-get-message-across-d2254d6d?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=1
By Barton Swaim
Follow
Aug. 23, 2024 5:38 pm ET
The crowd outside the Democratic National Convention on its final night in Chicago, Aug. 22. Photo: Barton Swaim
Chicago
Predictions were amiss that the 2024 Democratic National Convention would repeat the mayhem of its 1968 precursor, but at least one similarity held: Protesters who showed up to disrupt the proceedings mostly hadn’t bothered with the Republican conventions. At Chicago’s Union Park on Monday morning, I asked Hatem Abudayyeh, who leads the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, why this was. “Democrats are in power,” he said. “Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, they’re in power. If the Republicans were in power, we’d be going after them.” Maybe, but it also seems obvious that anti-Israel activists came to Chicago because they feel, not without reason, that a President Kamala Harris would more readily bend to their demands than would a President Donald Trump.
As I milled about the gathering crowd, masked young adults wearing ratty clothes and yellow vests helpfully laid out stacks of pre-made placards fitted with wooden handles. They read “Free Palestine! End U.S. Aid to Israel.” The kids wearing vests called themselves “safety marshals” and said they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.
The more interesting political signs were the homemade ones. “Dykes for Palestine.” “Cow Lives Matter.” Some were ugly: “Killer cops, KKK, Zionists, all the same.” One man wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words “F— Israel,” with a swastika in place of the “s” in the Jewish state’s name. A young Asian man wearing a kaffiyeh on his shoulders and a mask on his face held an all-caps cardboard sign bearing the words “This is not solely to defend Gaza but to liberate all of Palestine. —Martyr Haniyeh.” Ismail Haniyeh was the Hamas leader Israel killed in Iran on July 31.
A DNC protester holds a sign quoting Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Chicago. Photo: Barton Swaim
As the morning sun grew hotter, the safety marshals handed out bottled water and N95 masks. “Water, masks,” they announced. “Water, masks.”
At a press conference, Mr. Abudayyeh announced the day’s theme: to stop the Democrats from ignoring the reality of “genocide” in Gaza and the cause of “Palestinian liberation.” A vast array of causes—“immigrant rights, and black liberation, and stop the police crimes, and police accountability, and LGBTQ rights, and reproductive rights, and workers’ rights, the right to unionize, the right to strike”—had come together to advance the “central issue of this week of protests at the DNC, which is: Stop U.S. aid to Israel, stop the genocide, stand with Palestine, free Palestine.”
Just so, the protest appeared to encompass a dizzying array of leftist grievances, major and niche. Some held aloft signs bearing feminist slogans. A group wore trans-themed merchandise and kaffiyehs. One heavyset young man wore a red T-shirt bearing the image of Stalin. “Tell me about that,” I said, pointing to the dictator. He saw my pen and notepad. “No,” he said, and laughed.
By noon, when the speeches began, a crowd of perhaps 7,000 stretched across the park. Every speaker accused Israel of “genocide” and led the crowd in the stock chants: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free,” “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.”
Apart from the slogans, speakers didn’t call straightforwardly for the destruction of Israel and the wiping out of Israeli Jews, but only a fool could miss the intensely antisemitic purpose of the event. One small but telling instance: Hardly anyone mentioned Donald Trump—mostly they thundered against “Killer Kamala” and “Genocide Joe”—but Nesreen Hasan of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network fulminated against the 45th president “and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s racist rhetoric and colonial ambitions.” Mr. Kushner is Jewish; Ms. Hasan mentioned no other Trump associate.
Another speaker, a young woman whose name I couldn’t make out, proclaimed that “all the struggles are connected.” But many struggles were absent. I saw no reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nothing about war crimes in Sudan or the abuse of Muslims by the regimes in Myanmar or China.
On the other hand, there were plenty of struggles of which the Chinese Communist Party would approve. A woman maniacally banging a drum led a group wielding banners reading “U.S. Out of Korea” and “End the Korean War.” A woman shouted into a microphone that “we are here today to oppose U.S. war games in the Philippines.” Nearby banners: “U.S. Out of Okinawa,” “Take Cuba Off Terrorist List.” One young man, not Chinese, handed me a leaflet announcing an event called “China at 75,” a reference to the communist takeover in 1949. “The world is rapidly changing,” it read. “A new alignment of forces, determined to resist U.S. imperialism, is emerging.”
I began to suspect this gathering was not entirely the spontaneous outcry against injustice it purported to be. The whole event seemed manufactured and moneyed. Those piles of placards with wooden handles in Union Park, for example—I’m guessing 2,000 of them—took money to purchase. Someone thought ahead to pay for six portable toilets. The sound system and stage, complete with a 40-foot overhang, also weren’t inexpensive.
Signs laid out for demonstrations at the DNC in Chicago. Photo: Barton Swaim
In a recent essay for Commentary magazine, Danielle Pletka chronicles the dizzying web of nonprofits, shell organizations and activist groups used by malign actors in China, Iran and the Arab world to fund antisemitic protests on college campuses. Many of the organizations Ms. Pletka cites—Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, Americans for Justice in Palestine, Samidoun—were in evidence this week in Chicago.
Late in the afternoon a few marchers managed to breach the outer perimeter of the convention site, breaking down a section of fence. Three were arrested.
In his speech to the convention later that night, President Biden claimed, as he has many times before, that he ran for president in 2020 “because of what I saw in Charlottesville in August of 2017: extremists coming out of the woods carrying torches, their veins bulging from their necks, carrying Nazi swastikas, and chanting the same exact antisemitic bile that was heard in Germany in the early ’30s.”
18. Important Asia Provisions in the House and Senate 2025 NDAA
Please go to the link for the proper formatting.
Important Asia Provisions in the House and Senate 2025 NDAA
By Zack Cooper | Noah Burke
https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/important-asia-provisions-in-the-house-and-senate-2025-ndaa/
AEIdeas
August 22, 2024
FacebookTwitterLinkedIn
Below are key provisions on the Indo-Pacific in the House and Senate National Defense Authorization bills:
TopicHouse NDAA ProvisionsSenate NDAA ProvisionsUnited StatesU.S. Capabilities and PostureSection 1755: Prohibits funding authorized for the Indo-Pacific from being diverted
Section 175: Requires assessment of inventory levels of air-to-air missiles needed to support plans of INDO-PACOM
Section 1055: Requires plan to support fielding of air base defense sites in the Indo-Pacific
Section 1643: Requires report on roles and responsibilities within DoD with respect to hypersonic threats
Section 927: Requires the feasibility and advisability of establishing a Defense Industrial Revitalization Board
Section 1080: Requires tabletop exercise assessing the ability of the US to confront threats in the Indo-Pacific region during extreme weather
Section 1304: Requires a medical readiness program to gain access to foreign medical facilities during peacetime and wartime
Section 734: Requires study to determine the requirements for combat medical support in the Indo-PacificSection 922: Requires establishment of, and annual report on, a Senior Integration Group for the Indo-Pacific
Section 1065: Requires review and report on operational plans of the DoD
Section 125: Requires annual report on surface ship suppliers
Section 1023: Requires a competitive demonstration and assessment of extra-large unmanned underwater vehicles
Section 1255: Requires assessment of the feasibility of hosting foreign military forces in Guam
Section 1537: Prohibits the integration of the US defense missile system with Russia or China
Section 721: Requires a medical readiness program to gain access to foreign medical facilitiesNuclear Weapons and DeterrenceSection 3111: Prohibits Chinese and Russian citizens from any national security laboratory of nuclear weapons production facility
Section 3112: Requires certification that China and Russia do not possess naval capabilities similar to the W76-2
Section 1622: Requires plan for strategic nuclear forces during delivery vehicle transitionSection 3120: Prohibits foreign adversaries from accessing technology or facilities related to the NNSA Government Contracting and AcquisitionSection 173: Prohibits the use of Chinese and DPRK made light detection and ranging technology
Section 885: Requires report on the purchase of critical minerals and magnets from China
Section 809b: Prohibits purchasing goods from Temu or Shein
Section 603: Prohibits investments in Chinese military companies through the Thrift Savings Plan
Section 802: Prohibits contracting with entities that contract with lobbyists for Chinese military companies
Section 881: Requires GAO report on potential conflicts of interest for contractors who also perform work for China
Section 1303: Amends public reporting requirements for Chinese military companies operating in the US
Section 1706: Prohibits funding any entity based in China or whose ownership is Chinese
Section 1751: Require revocation of security clearances for persons affiliated with a Chinese military company
Section 115: Requires the establishment of a shipping container production facility at a US Army installation
Section 855: Sets annual requirements for sourcing lithium-ion batteries from allied nationsSection 883: Prohibits acquisition of light detection ranging technology from adversaries
Section 629 and 889: Prohibits procuring garlic and seafood originating in China
Section 885: Sets annual requirements to phase out office technology manufactured by China
Section 851: Requires annual disclosure of waivers issued for services or materials purchased from adversaries
Section 853: Requires covered entities to report work performed for China
Section 1258: Amends required reporting of Chinese military companies operating in the US
Section 888: Sets annual requirements for sourcing advanced chemistry batteries from allied nationsAllies and PartnersAllied Capabilities and PostureSection 1242: Requires report on allied contributions to the common defense
Section 1301: Extends and modifies Pacific Deterrence Initiative
Section 253: Requires plan for expansion of Hacking for Defense Program to include AUKUS, Quad, and NATOSection 1259: Requires annual report on the military capabilities of allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific
Section 1243: Permit extension of Pacific Deterrence Initiative and inclusion of Japan and South Korea
Section 1245: Amends Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Initiative
Section 1531: Requires compatibility between the integrated air and missile defense systems of NATO and the Indo-Pacific region
Section 1241: Establishes authority for the Indo-Pacific Security Assistance Initiative
Section 1248: Amends Joint Force Headquarters Plans for Japan and Australia
Section 1250: Requires plan and annual report on Trilateral Security Cooperation with Japan and South Korea
Section 1242: Requires report on multilateral security assistance initiatives with Japan, Australia, and South Korea.
Section 343: Requires report on landing fees collected at Air Force installations abroad, including Kunsan Air Base
Section 323: Requires pilot program to repair forward-deployed ships in foreign shipyards
Section 1256: Requires report on the costs of meeting environmental requirements imposed by Indo-Pacific partners
Section 1257: Requires report on the activities of civic action teams in the Freely Associated States
Section 1264: Amends cooperative program with Vietnam to include Vietnamese personnel missing in action
Section 1244: Permit extension of Bien Hoa Dioxin Cleanup in VietnamTaiwanSection 1313: Requires study on the feasibility of enhanced defense industrial base cooperation with Taiwan
Section 1321: Requires report on Taiwan’s military preparedness
Section 1319: Requires report on feasibility of developing and deploying asymmetrical naval assets in defense of Taiwan
Section 254: Requires report on establishing a partnership between the DIU and Taiwan’s Defense Ministry
Section 1318: Requires the naval forces of Taiwan be invited to future RIMPAC exercises
Section 1305: Prohibits promotion of “one country, two systems” solution for Taiwan
Section 1712: Requires use of “Taiwan” and prohibits use of “Chinese Taipei”Section 1253: Requires study on the feasibility of enhanced defense industrial base cooperation with Taiwan
Section 1261: Requires fielding a common operating picture with Taiwan
Section 1252: Requires plan for establishment of a regional contingency stockpile for Taiwan
Section 1251: Allows for required reports on weapons transfers to Taiwan to be classified
Section 1246: Requires establishment of a joint program with Taiwan on military trauma care and researchAUKUSSection 1018: Allows incrementally funded contracts for the construction of a Virginia-class submarine
Section 1058: Requires assessment of fixed-price, multi-year procurement contracts for Virginia-class submarines
Section 569g: Requires report on implementation of a Skillbridge program for the submarine industrial baseSection 129: Allows incrementally funded contracts for the construction of a Virginia-class submarine
Section 3115: Requires briefing on AUKUS activities over the past calendar year Extended Deterrence Section 1247: Establishes a pilot program for educating Japanese, Australian, and South Korean officials on nuclear deterrence
Section 1249: Requires plan for strengthening US extended deterrence to South KoreaChinaGlobal Influence and ActivitiesSection 1315: Requires official be designated responsible for monitoring PLA overseas basing
Section 1069h: Requires report on Chinese influence in the Pacific Islands
Section 1243: Requires information on China-Iran relations in annual report
Section 1725: Requires assessment of defense cooperation between China and South Africa
Section 1765: Requires report with recommendations on countering Chinese influence in Africa
Section 3521: Requires assessment of the ability of Shanghai Shipping Exchange to manipulate container freight markets
Section 1317: Prohibits funding entertainment entities tied to China
Section 1709: Prohibits funding any film subject to alterations at the request of Chinese officials
Section 1250: Requires report on Chinese and Russian military activity in the Arctic region
Section 1320: Requires report on Chinese and Russian malign activities
Section 1738: Requires report on China and Russia’s use of transportable nuclear power for military and soft power purposesSection 1051: Requires report on Chinese activity at the Panama Canal
Section 1043: Prohibits funding entertainment projects tied to China
Section 1271: Requires report on cooperation between Russia and ChinaPeople’s Liberation ArmySection 1205: Requires report on compliance with limitations in military-to-military exchanges with China
Section 1735: Requires report on antagonistic use of satellites by China
Section 1314: Requires information on military and security developments on the Tibetan Plateau
Section 1306 and 1308: Amends prohibition of Chinese participation in RIMPAC exercise
Section 1069j: Requires report on use of rifle-toting robot dogs by ChinaSection 1254: Requires strategy for countering malign PLA activity
Section 1534: Requires report on ballistic missile threats against Guam from China and the DPRK
Section 1262: Requires report on corruption in the People’s Liberation Army Chinese Unmanned AircraftSection 178: Requires study on sources of parts for unmanned aircraft systems not produced or sold by Chinese military companies
Section 223: Requires dismantling of DJI drone and report on manufacturing and security information
Section 1722: Requires analysis of any unmanned aircraft systems entities that should be identified as a Chinese military company Chinese TutoringSection 809c: Prohibits the contracting of online tutoring services from Chinese owned entities and report on any data transfers
Section 1047: Prohibits funding being used for Tutor.comSection 886: Prohibits the contracting of online tutoring services from Chinese owned entities Chinese BiotechSection 1045: Prohibits funding being used for EcoHealth Alliance Inc.
Section 1707: Prohibits funding any laboratory owned by China or the DPRK, and any gain-of-function research
Section 244: Requires assessment of China’s biotechnology capabilitiesSection 1265: Prohibits funds from being used for EcoHealth Alliance Inc.
Learn more: The South China Sea Dog That Hasn't Barked . . . Yet | US Strategy Could Force Friends to Hedge Against America | Taiwan's Elections Were a Big Success. Just Ask Xi | Five Notable Items for Asia Watchers in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act
Senior Fellow
Latest Work
August 15, 2024
Multimedia
Watching the Watchers: Assessing the Defense Strategy Commission on the “Net Assessment” Podcast
August 01, 2024
Multimedia
Attitude Adjustment: Can the US Do Better in Africa? On the “Net Assessment” Podcast
July 24, 2024
One Pager
Managing Multipolarity: Coalition Building in a Fragmented World
Tags:
Congress | Defense and national security | Indo-Pacific | NDAA
19. As War Comes to Russia, It’s Business as Usual for Putin
Are there opportunities? Can this be exploited?
As War Comes to Russia, It’s Business as Usual for Putin
The Kremlin leader has maintained a flurry of activity to draw attention away from Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/as-war-comes-to-russia-its-business-as-usual-for-putin-df665a36?mod=hp_lead_pos9
By Thomas Grove
Follow
and Ann M. Simmons
Follow
Updated Aug. 24, 2024 12:01 am ET
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairing a Thursday meeting on the war with Ukraine Thursday. Photo: Gavriil Grigorov/Press Pool
Earlier this month, the acting governor of the Kursk region tried to explain to Russian President Vladimir Putin how much territory Ukrainian troops had seized.
A visibly irritated Putin cut him off.
“Listen, Alexei Borisovich, the military will report to us on the specifics of the front-line width and depth,” he said. “You tell us about the socio-economic situation and report on assistance provided to people.”
The first foreign invasion of Russian territory since World War II has embarrassed Putin and put his military—already stretched thin by a manpower shortage—in a bind. Putin, who has long ruled by projecting an image of strength, has turned to a well-worn playbook to calm an agitated population: acting as though nothing’s wrong.
It isn’t clear how long the subterfuge can hold.
More than 130,000 civilians have been evacuated from more than 400 square miles of Russian territory as the violence threatens to spill into neighboring regions. Ukraine has stepped up its drone attacks, targeting Russian oil facilities, air bases and weapons arsenals needed for its war effort.
Ukrainian soldiers returning from Russia recently in Ukraine’s Sumy region. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
“They’re working to normalize the idea that wars come and go—this is the phase we’re in right now,” said Keir Giles, author and veteran Russia analyst. “You can try to turn it into the new normal, but where do you draw the line under current circumstances?”
For many, the Kursk invasion has delivered another puncture to Putin’s aura of invincibility that he has curated as he seeks to define Russia as a global power pushing back against Western dominance. Last year, paramilitary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched his own challenge to the Russian leader when he led an armed mutiny of Wagner troops toward Moscow to oust what he called a corrupt and out-of-touch military leadership. Both events have rattled the elite and average citizens.
This time, the threat is coming from a foreign military, and some analysts say it presents less of an acute threat to Putin, limited to a border region far away for many Russians.
“He demonstrated a weakness last year. This year it’s a weakness of a different order,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, veteran Moscow-based political analyst.
While Putin has mostly avoided acknowledging the Ukrainian occupation, he has let his lieutenants rattle their sabers, saying Moscow wouldn’t engage in peace negotiations with Ukrainian troops on its territory.
His main foreign-policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, has said it made no sense for Moscow to talk “given the current escapade.” The length of the pause, he said, would depend on the battlefield.
Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Chechnya this week for the first time in 13 years, meeting with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Photo: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Press Pool
Control over Russia’s vast territories has been central to Putin’s rule. He came to power vowing to crush a military insurgency that had established Chechnya as a breakaway state in southern Russia. Across the country, he promised to restore order and justice in a nation plagued by a decade of criminality and violence following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
On Tuesday, he made his first visit to the North Caucasus region of Chechnya in 13 years. The visit served as a reminder of both the violence endured in the region, as well as its reconstruction under its strongman leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
“Much has been done, and this has been done primarily thanks to the hard work and talent of the Chechen people,” Putin said in a meeting with Kadyrov.
The times when the Kursk invasion does make it to Russian television screens, commentators parrot Defense Ministry statements about Russia’s military dominance over Ukraine. Broadcasts show Russian soldiers helping with evacuations and delivering humanitarian aid, coverage more in line with a regional disaster such as a forest fire or flood.
When Russian social media first started to detail the scale of the invasion and the military failures that allowed it, Kremlin pundits urged everyone to “calm down,” as Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent Putin mouthpiece, recently told the audience of his nightly talk show.
A reinforced concrete shelter in downtown Kursk, Russia. Photo: EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Volunteers unloading humanitarian aid in Kursk this week. Photo: EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Meanwhile, Putin hasn’t addressed the nation over the Kursk invasion. He has kept to his work schedule. He visited a children’s hospital and offered birthday greetings to an injured Russian state-television war correspondent. He traveled to Azerbaijan, offering to mediate a long-sought peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
His business-as-usual approach also serves to project an air of normalcy to a population that is showing signs of growing weary of a conflict—meant to be over in days—that is now grinding through its third year. A poll from independent Moscow-based pollster Levada shows support inside Russia for some peace settlement has reached its highest level at 58%.
“His response coincides with people’s desire to distance themselves once more from the horrors and failures of the war. They would much rather believe everything is OK,” Kolesnikov said.
Meanwhile, the war continues to close in, as Ukraine steps up the pressure. Russian authorities said Kyiv’s forces had unsuccessfully tried earlier this week to launch an offensive inside a neighboring region to Kursk. Some of the drones in the barrage earlier this week were shot down just miles from Moscow.
While Russia has slowly been moving some troops to Kursk from the front line in Ukraine, analysts say Moscow’s response to the invasion won’t likely come quickly. Moscow appears to instead be pressing for gains along the front line in eastern Ukraine, including the crucial logistics hub of Pokrovsk.
That means Putin will likely continue to play down the incursion domestically.
“He will address the nation, but not at a time when it looks like Russia has been effectively attacked by a militarily weaker country,” said Nikolai Petrov, a consulting fellow on the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, a British think tank.
Putin is typically “eager to come out at the very end when he can report about positive results,” he said.
A military band marks Russian National Flag Day in Moscow on Thursday. Photo: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA/Shutterstock
Matthew Luxmoore contributed to this article.
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Ann M. Simmons at ann.simmons@wsj.com
20. Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking.
It is damn good to see someone else blink for a change. We need to be making all members of the Dark Quad blink.
President Zelensky is making Putin blink. Next he will be bringing tears to Putin's eyes.
But as a friend cautioned, we do need to recall history and the consequences of invading Russia - especially marching on Moscow in the winter (e.g., Bonaparte and Hitler - and their invasions did not start in the winter)
Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking.
Ukraine’s punch through Russian defenses in the first foreign invasion since World War II has laid bare Moscow’s apparently illusory red lines.
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/as-war-comes-to-russia-its-business-as-usual-for-putin-df665a36?mod=hp_lead_pos9
A Ukrainian soldier points out of the window in an armored car as they drive on Russian territory on Aug. 18 in the Kursk region of Russia. (Ed Ram for The Washington Post)
By Robyn Dixon and Catherine Belton
August 24, 2024 at 8:42 a.m. EDT
Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion keeps crossing President Vladimir Putin’s red lines.
Kyiv’s lightning incursion into Kursk in western Russia this month slashed through the reddest line of all — a direct ground assault on Russia — yet Putin’s response has so far been strikingly passive and muted, in sharp contrast to his rhetoric earlier in the war.
On day one of the invasion in February 2022, Putin warned that any country that stood in Russia’s way would face consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history,” a threat that seemed directed at countries that might arm Ukraine.
If Russia’s territorial integrity were threatened, “we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff,” he said a few months later in September. “The citizens of Russia can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured — I emphasize this again — with all the means at our disposal,” making a clear reference to Russia’s nuclear weapons.
But Ukraine’s punch through Russian defenses in the first foreign invasion since World War II exposed Russia’s military flaws and laid bare Moscow’s apparently illusory red lines.
Following World news
Following
Now some are again questioning the centerpiece of Washington’s Ukraine strategy: a slow, calibrated supply of weapons to Ukraine to avoid escalating tensions with Russia that critics argue has dashed Kyiv’s chances of driving Russia out and resulted in a grinding war of attrition with massive casualties.
Ukraine’s Kursk incursion “proved the Russians are bluffing,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former Ukrainian intelligence and defense official, now an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “It shuts down all of the voices of the pseudo experts … the anti-escalation guys.”
The attack was “risky,” he continued, “but it sent a very powerful signal and helped us change the narrative about Ukraine — that it is not able to win — and on the Russian red lines. Both narratives have been destroyed.”
Ukraine’s attacks have repeatedly crossed ostensible red lines: sinking Russia’s Black Sea flagship, Moskva; the 2022 Crimea Bridge blast; Storm Shadow missile attacks on the fleet headquarters in Sevastopol; the 2023 drone attacks on the Kremlin and Moscow; the assassinations of propagandists on Russian territory; and attacks on strategic air bases hundreds of miles from Ukraine.
The Western hardware being used by Ukrainian forces, HIMARS, tanks, ATACMS and F-16s, were all once red lines, too.
A specialist inspects the damaged facade of an apartment building after a reported drone attack in Moscow on May 30, 2023. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images)
When Ukrainian drones struck Moscow in May 2023, hitting a Kremlin dome and closing major airports, Putin downplayed the problem, analyst Tatiana Stanovaya wrote at the time in an analysis for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Within a few months, it seemed that the Kremlin’s red lines had either never existed or had become extremely mobile.” The Kremlin claimed to be unperturbed, she wrote, “even if it flies in the face of common sense.”
It was to become a striking pattern, yet the U.S.-led policy on military aid to Ukraine has remained timid, according to many analysts.
Boris Bondarev, a Geneva-based former Russian diplomat who resigned in 2022 to protest the war, said in an interview that Washington’s fear of triggering a direct military conflict with Russia had crippled the U.S. response, leaving its goals in the war unclear and projecting American weakness to Putin and other global adversaries.
“When you put your enemy’s red lines, so to speak, as the crucial factor of your own strategy, you will always be on the losing side,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on Tuesday used the Kursk incursion to argue against Washington’s restrictions that bar Kyiv’s use of Western weapons to strike deeper at military targets in Russia — such as the air bases Russia uses for its devastating glide bomb attacks.
“We are witnessing a significant ideological shift — the naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled apart these days,” Zelensky said.
While Ukraine’s Kursk incursion has changed calculations, it has not shifted the fundamental balance in the war, with Moscow continuing its focus on eastern Ukraine, closing in on the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk region, a key logistical hub that could pave the way for further Russian advances if it falls.
If Washington did allow Ukraine to strike military targets deeper within Russia with U.S. weapons, it would dash yet one more taboo, but Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst, suggested that Moscow had already factored this in.
A Ukrainian soldier gets inside a HIMARS vehicle in eastern Ukraine on July 1, 2022. (Anastasia Vlasova for The Washington Post)
“In Russia, there is no doubt that such permission will be given,” he said. “Russia already considers that the decision has been taken by the U.S.”
“Russia tried to clearly draw these red lines, but the U.S., which is a participant in the conflict, decided that ‘We’re not going to cross any big red lines but only small ones,'” he said “They decided we are going to cut these red lines into dozens of small thin red threads, to cross them bit by bit so that there was no big event which could become a” cause of war.
A Russian academic with close ties to senior Moscow diplomats said the Russian leadership was taking the use of U.S. and Western weapons deeper in Russia “very seriously” but said it wasn’t clear whether a decision had been made on how to respond. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss deliberations in Moscow frankly.
Russian authorities have been seeking to downplay the significance of the Ukrainian incursion and failure of its military leadership.
The presence of Ukrainian troops in 15 to 20 “little known” villages in the Kursk region was of “little significance” compared to Russian advances in Donetsk, Markov said. But if Ukraine occupied all of Glushkovsky district in Kursk or took the regional capital, Kursk city, “this would be a very big loss” that could force Putin to change his approach, he added.
Understanding the Russia-Ukraine conflict
HAND CURATED
View 3 more stories
By Robyn Dixon
Robyn Dixon is a foreign correspondent on her third stint in Russia, after almost a decade reporting there beginning in the early 1990s. In November 2019 she joined The Washington Post as Moscow bureau chief. Twitter
By Catherine Belton
Catherine Belton is an international investigative reporter for The Washington Post, reporting on Russia. She is the author of “Putin's People,” a New York Times Critics’ Book of 2020 and a book of the year for the Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. Belton has worked for Reuters and the Financial Times. Twitter
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
| 
