Quotes of the Day:
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."
- John Quincy Adams
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value."
- Thomas Paine
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."
- Herbert Hoover
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 24, 2023
2. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, August 24, 2023
3. Defecting Russian Mi-8 Helicopter Was Lured To Ukraine: Reports
4. USASOC study outlines measures to optimize female Soldiers
5. Prigozhin’s death shows that Russia is a mafia state
6. China Casts CIA as Villain in New Anti-Spying Push
7. Early Intelligence Suggests Prigozhin Was Assassinated, U.S. Officials Say
8. China’s Crisis of Confidence in Six Charts
9. US issues threat warning after hackers break into a satellite
10. US intel believes ‘intentional’ blast downed Wagner chief’s plane
11. Ukrainian pilots will learn to fly F-16s at US Air Force’s 162nd Wing
12. Ukraine says it landed troops on the shores of Russian-occupied Crimea
13. Retired Army Lawyer Will Oversee Pentagon’s War Court
14. Meet the tiny State Department offices clearing billions of dollars’ worth of weapons for Ukraine
15. Open Source Technology and Public-Private Innovation Are the Key to Ukraine’s Strategic Resilience
16. Ukrainians Are Cutting Open U.S. Cluster Shells To Make Drone Munitions
17. The Mercenary Always Loses
18. The Dangers of Broken Trust Between Military and Elected Officials
19. Russia Crushes Drone Swarm Over Crimea One Day After Commando Raid
20. The Price of Fragmentation – Why the Global Economy Isn’t Ready for the Shocks Ahead
21. The Folly Of Merging The Indo-Pacific And Europe – Analysis
22. Putin’s Night of the Long Knives
23. The error of NATO’s ways in Asia
24. New ship named after legendary Navy SEAL and Alaska Native
25. Preparing for the next global pandemic: What a recent wargame teaches us
26. HIMARS changed the game in Ukraine, but a former US artillery officer says what they need now is a firepower boost with M26 cluster rockets.
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 24, 2023
Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-24-2023
Key Takeaways:
- The Wagner Group will likely no longer exist as a quasi-independent parallel military structure following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s almost certain assassination of Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner founder Dmitry Utkin, and reported Wagner logistics and security head Valery Chekalov on August 23.
- Putin delivered a brief de facto eulogy of Prigozhin and reportedly deceased Wagner leadership on August 24, and portrayed Prigozhin as his loyal subordinate up until his death, the armed rebellion notwithstanding.
- The Wagner Council of Commanders have notably not released a public statement following the downing of Prigozhin’s plane.
- Putin’s almost certain assassination of Wagner leadership has made it very clear that the Kremlin will be outwardly hostile to those that attempt to secure independence for their own parallel military structures.
- The Russian information space largely refrained from linking the Kremlin and the Russian MoD to Prigozhin’s and Utkin’s assassination.
- Ukrainian forces advanced closer to the Russian second line of defense in the Robotyne area in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 24, further widening their breach of Russian defensive lines in the area.
- Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk reported that Russian forces are conducting additional lateral redeployments from Kherson Oblast to the frontline in Zaporizhia Oblast, suggesting that Ukrainian forces have further degraded Russian defensive lines in the area.
- Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 24, and reportedly advanced.
- Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along at least two sectors of the front on August 24 and advanced near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023 - Press ISW
Download the PDF
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 24, 2023
Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Angelica Evans, Christina Harward, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Frederick W. Kagan
August 24, 2023, 7:50pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.
Note: The data cut-off for this product was 2:00pm ET on August 24. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 25 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.
The Wagner Group will likely no longer exist as a quasi-independent parallel military structure following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s almost certain assassination of Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner founder Dmitry Utkin, and reported Wagner logistics and security head Valery Chekalov on August 23. The death of Wagner’s central leadership disrupts Wagner’s ability to reverse the effects of the Kremlin’s and the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) campaign to weaken, subsume, and destroy the organization following the June 24 armed rebellion.[1] The Russian MoD has reportedly established private military companies (PMCs) that have been recruiting current and former Wagner personnel to assume control over Wagner’s operations abroad.[2] Russian sources claimed that the Kremlin refused to pay the Belarusian government for Wagner’s deployment to Belarus and that financial issues were already leading to reduced payments that were causing Wagner fighters to resign.[3] Satellite imagery from August 1 and 23 shows that Wagner had dismantled almost a third of the tents at its camp in Tsel, Asipovichy, Belarus in the previous month, suggesting that the effort to weaken Wagner may have resulted in a notable flight of Wagner personnel from the contingent in Belarus.[4] Some milbloggers denied claims that Wagner fighters are dismantling their camp in Tsel, however.[5] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on August 23 that an unspecified number of Wagner personnel at camps in Belarus began preparations to return to Russia following Prigozhin’s death.[6] The central Wagner leadership had brought Wagner to the height of its independence during the offensive to capture Bakhmut and was attempting to retain some semblance of that independence in the aftermath of Wagner’s rebellion.[7] The elimination of this central leadership likely ends any remaining means Wagner had to operate independently of the Russian MoD. It remains unclear whether the Kremlin intends for Wagner to completely dissipate or intends to reconstitute it as a much smaller organization completely subordinate to the Russian MoD. A third option—restoring Wagner as a quasi-independent organization under a new commander loyal to the Kremlin—is possible but unlikely.
Putin delivered a brief de facto eulogy of Prigozhin and reportedly deceased Wagner leadership on August 24, and portrayed Prigozhin as his loyal subordinate up until his death, the armed rebellion notwithstanding. Putin characterized Prigozhin as having a “difficult fate” in which he made “serious mistakes,” and Putin noted that he had known Prigozhin since the early 1990s. Putin notably stated that Prigozhin “achieved the necessary results both for himself and what I [Putin] asked him for – for a common cause, as in these last months.” Putin’s comment implies that Prigozhin had been fulfilling Putin’s orders recently and throughout their acquaintance and notably refrains from suggesting that Prigozhin had ever betrayed Putin, but subtly indicates that Prigozhin’s loyalty through the years was not enough to offset the “serious mistake” of launching a rebellion against the Russian military leadership. Putin’s speech largely confirms ISW’s prior assessment that Prigozhin did not intend to oust Putin during his June 24 rebellion and instead saw himself as loyal to Putin while seeking to force Putin to fire the Russian military leadership as he had been demanding.[8] A Russian insider source, citing an unnamed individual who knew Prigozhin, claimed that Prigozhin was confident that Putin would forgive him.[9] Prigozhin likely underestimated how seriously his rebellion had personally humiliated Putin. Prigozhin had also apparently overestimated the value of his own loyalty to Putin. Putin places significant value on loyalty and has frequently rewarded loyal Russian officials and military commanders even when they have failed. Prigozhin’s rebellion was an act of significant insubordination despite his claim that he rebelled out of loyalty to Russia.[10] Putin’s statement was therefore a warning to those currently loyal to Putin that some mistakes are too serious for loyalty to overcome.
The exact cause of Prigozhin’s plane crash remains unclear as US and Russian sources offered varying explanations, while Wagner-affiliated channels continued to call on Russian sources to stop speculating. US officials have provided different preliminary unconfirmed explanations for the plane crash: surface-to-air missiles, a bomb aboard the aircraft, or other sabotage.[11] Pentagon Spokesperson Brigadier General Patrick Ryder stated that the Pentagon currently has no indication that a surface-to-air missile downed the plane.[12] Russian state news outlet Kommersant reported on August 23 that sources close to the Russian Investigative Committee stated that there is no reason to believe that a terrorist attack downed Prigozhin’s plane, contradicting a Russian official who immediately blamed terrorism.[13] A Russian insider source previously reported that Russian authorities are setting conditions to blame the attack on terrorism.[14] The Russian information space largely continued to speculate about the potential causes of the crash, including mechanical failure, sabotage, surface-to-air missiles, and air-to-air missiles but noted the lack of information from Russian officials.[15] Some sources claimed that Russian authorities are investigating the possibility of an explosive device planted on the wing or landing gear, and one insider source claimed that Russian authorities are investigating Prigozhin’s personal pilot and the cofounder of MNT Aero, which owned the plane.[16] Many Wagner-affiliated channels tried to minimize this speculation by calling on the information space to wait until confirmed Wagner sources publish official information.[17]
The Wagner Council of Commanders have notably not released a public statement following the downing of Prigozhin’s plane. A Russian news aggregator claimed that the Wagner Council of Commanders met on the evening of August 23 to prepare a joint statement and announce what would happen to Wagner in the near future.[18] The Wagner Council of Commanders has not released any statement as of this publication, and several Wagner-affiliated sources emphasized that circulating reports about the contents of the expected statement are false.[19] The Wagner Council of Commanders’ silence may be due to chaos and confusion within their ranks following Prigozhin’s and Utkin’s assassination or due to explicit instructions from Russian authorities to remain silent. The Kremlin may view a public statement from the Wagner Council of Commanders as an attempt to organize and reconstitute an independent Wagner force that could continue to threaten the Kremlin and the Russian MoD. Putin’s willingness to publicly assassinate the Wagner leadership is likely prompting the Wagner Council of Commanders to refrain from publicly appointing successors to Prigozhin and Utkin at this time. A member of the Wagner Council of Commanders personally selected by Putin to replace Prigozhin now would risk becoming the focus of the ire of Wagner rank and file upset about the assassination of Wagner’s leadership.
Putin’s almost certain assassination of Wagner’s leadership has made it very clear that the Kremlin will be outwardly hostile to those who attempt to secure independence for their own parallel military structures. ISW previously assessed that Putin’s demonstrative assassination of Wagner’s leadership was meant to reassert his dominance and exact vengeance for the humiliation of Wagner’s rebellion, and specific individuals who may have planned to oppose Putin, the Kremlin, or the MoD likely took note.[20] The Kremlin will likely view any future efforts to establish independent parallel military structures explicitly through the prism of its experience with Wagner and Prigozhin. The assassination of Wagner’s leadership will likely serve as a standing threat against those with designs on creating parallel military structures reminiscent of Wagner.
The June 24 agreement between Putin, Prigozhin, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was likely invalidated by the destruction of Prigozhin’s aircraft, and Lukashenko will likely remain silent on the matter to avoid provoking Putin and further risking his already vulnerable position. Prigozhin’s safety and survival were likely crucial to the June 24 agreement in which Putin allegedly promised unspecified “security guarantees” to Prigozhin and the Wagner Group in Belarus.[21] Prigozhin’s death likely canceled a key pillar of this agreement, rendering the rest of it moot. Lukashenko will likely remain silent on the matter so as to not provoke Putin, especially since Lukashenko’s act of directly negotiating with Prigozhin in June and then bragging about the role he had played notably embarrassed Putin. Prigozhin’s assassination has likely signaled to Lukashenko both a dramatic reduction of his negotiating space with the Kremlin and an implicit threat against his continued attempts to resist Union State integration efforts.[22]
Putin may avoid making Prigozhin a martyr, but Utkin’s assassination will likely become a long-term grievance for Wagner personnel. ISW had long assessed that Putin refrained from eliminating Prigozhin out of fears of angering Wagner personnel, and he may have determined that he had sufficiently separated Wagner from Prigozhin in the months since the rebellion and could assassinate Prigozhin without prompting a serious backlash.[23] Putin’s likely calculus for killing Utkin probably focused more on the immediate opportunity to destroy Wagner’s leadership completely and less on the ramifications of Utkin’s death. There has been an outpouring of support and condolences for both Prigozhin and Utkin following the downing of the plane on August 23, although Wagner-affiliated sources appear to be more heavily focusing on their loss of Utkin.[24] A prominent Wagner-affiliated channel posted primarily about Utkin on August 24 and stated that Utkin will be forever inscribed in Russian military history.[25] Grievances over Utkin’s assassination may become a focal point for future conflicts between the Russian military establishment and current and former Wagner personnel. Wagner personnel are unlikely to conduct immediate reprisals against those they view as responsible for Utkin’s death, however.
The Russian information space largely refrained from linking the Kremlin and the Russian MoD to Prigozhin’s and Utkin’s assassination. Russian milbloggers and insider sources largely discussed new reports about the ongoing investigation and entertained theories that an explosive device may have led to the crash.[26] One milblogger criticized the other milbloggers for devaluing the work of the departments responsible for preventing terrorist attacks by promulgating a narrative of a terrorist attack on board Prigozhin’s plane.[27] Another milblogger claimed that Wagner is a household name that will not be forgotten in Russia even if Wagner is disbanded and its personnel is persecuted.[28] A Wagner-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russia had lost its military elite – the Wagner Group – as a result of Prigozhin’s death.[29]
Ukrainian forces advanced closer to the Russian second line of defense in the Robotyne area in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 24, further widening their breach of Russian defensive lines in the area. Geolocated footage published on August 24 shows that Ukrainian forces advanced further towards the Russian defensive lines west of Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv) and into southern Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv).[30] Some Russian milbloggers indicated that Russian forces maintain limited if any, positions in southern Robotyne and that fighting continues east of Robotyne.[31] A prominent Russian milblogger expressed concern at the Ukrainian breach of Russian defensive lines in western Zaporizhia Oblast and stated that this is a critical moment on the battlefield.[32] The milblogger stated that Russian forces need to hold their positions for at least another month and a half to try to make gains in another area of the frontline and attempt to shift the battlefield situation in favor of Russian forces.[33] Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valeri Zaluzhnyi responded to criticisms about the Ukrainian counteroffensive by stating that it was not a counterinsurgency but the Battle of Kursk, referencing a weeks-long World War II battle that ultimately allowed the Soviet army to regain the battlefield initiative and recapture significant swaths of territory.[34]
Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk reported that Russian forces are conducting additional lateral redeployments from Kherson Oblast to the frontline in Zaporizhia Oblast, suggesting that Ukrainian forces have further degraded Russian defensive lines in the area. Humenyuk reported on August 23 that Russian forces are transferring units from the Kherson direction to the Zaporizhia direction due to the large number of wounded personnel among forces defending in Zaporizhia Oblast.[35] Humenyuk did not specify the Russian formations or units that are laterally redeploying to the Zaporizhia direction, nor did she specify whether the Russian forces are transferring to western Zaporizhia Oblast or to the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.[36] Russian forces laterally redeployed elements of the 7th Guards Airborne (VDV) Division from the Kherson direction to the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area following the start of the counteroffensive in June and additional elements to the Robotyne area in western Zaporizhia Oblast in early August.[37] Humenyuk’s reporting supports ISW’s previous assessment that Russia’s lack of operational reserves will force the Russian command to conduct additional redeployments as Ukrainian counteroffensive operations continue to degrade defending Russian forces in several sectors of the front.[38] Russian lateral redeployments will likely weaken the Russian defensive lines in aggregate as these transfers offer Ukrainian forces additional opportunities for exploitation.[39] Exploiting these opportunities or preventing further lateral reinforcements will likely require Ukrainian forces to continue efforts in several sectors of the front that either pin Russian forces to a certain area or present the Russian command with dilemmas about which axes to reinforce.[40] A Ukrainian offensive focused exclusively on a single axis would allow Russian forces to laterally redeploy forces from elsewhere in Ukraine without worrying about the consequences of weakening other sectors of the front as ISW has previously observed.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated boilerplate anti-Western rhetoric at the BRICS summit on August 24 despite some members’ statements against turning BRICS into an “anti-Western” organization. Putin made claims about the BRICS countries’ “unanimous” support for the formation of a multipolar world and reiterated boilerplate Russian rhetoric aimed at painting Russia and its partners as opposing the West.[41] Some founding BRICS countries seemed less willing to fully align with Russia and its anti-Western rhetoric during the BRICS summit; Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that he did not want BRICS to be a “counterpoint to the G7, G20, or the United States.” South Africa’s representative in the BRICS negotiations, Anil Sooklal, stated that “BRICS is not anti-West.”[42] The BRICS countries adopted the Johannesburg II Declaration on August 24 which included standard statements promoting multilateralism and more representation for developing countries in international organizations.[43] The BRICS countries also announced that they invited Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to join the organization in 2024.[44]
Russian forces conducted a missile strike on Dnipro City, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on August 24. Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat reported that Russian forces launched two Iskander-M ballistic missiles from Rostov Oblast, an Iskander-K ballistic missile from Crimea, and likely S-300 missiles from occupied Tokmak at Dnipro City.[45] Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Head Serhiy Lysak reported that Ukrainian Eastern Air Command shot down one missile but that the other Russian missiles struck transportation infrastructure in the city.[46]
Ukrainian forces conducted a limited raid on the western shore of occupied Crimea on August 24. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) posted footage and announced that Ukrainian forces landed on the shores near Olenivka and Mayak (both 116km northeast of Sevastopol).[47] The GUR reported that Ukrainian forces skirmished with Russian forces and raised a Ukrainian flag prior to leaving the shore.[48] Most Russian sources dismissed the landing as insignificant, but some prominent milbloggers expressed concern about Russian defensive vulnerabilities in the western Black Sea and western Crimea.[49]
Key Takeaways:
- The Wagner Group will likely no longer exist as a quasi-independent parallel military structure following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s almost certain assassination of Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner founder Dmitry Utkin, and reported Wagner logistics and security head Valery Chekalov on August 23.
- Putin delivered a brief de facto eulogy of Prigozhin and reportedly deceased Wagner leadership on August 24, and portrayed Prigozhin as his loyal subordinate up until his death, the armed rebellion notwithstanding.
- The Wagner Council of Commanders have notably not released a public statement following the downing of Prigozhin’s plane.
- Putin’s almost certain assassination of Wagner leadership has made it very clear that the Kremlin will be outwardly hostile to those that attempt to secure independence for their own parallel military structures.
- The Russian information space largely refrained from linking the Kremlin and the Russian MoD to Prigozhin’s and Utkin’s assassination.
- Ukrainian forces advanced closer to the Russian second line of defense in the Robotyne area in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 24, further widening their breach of Russian defensive lines in the area.
- Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk reported that Russian forces are conducting additional lateral redeployments from Kherson Oblast to the frontline in Zaporizhia Oblast, suggesting that Ukrainian forces have further degraded Russian defensive lines in the area.
- Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 24, and reportedly advanced.
- Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along at least two sectors of the front on August 24 and advanced near Bakhmut and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukranian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied areas
Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)
Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 24 and reportedly advanced. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Novoyehorivka (15km southwest of Svatove).[50] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near the Serebryanske forest area (10km southwest of Kreminna), Kreminna, and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna) and that Russian forces plan to regroup and replace troops in the Lyman direction.[51] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces control most of Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk).[52] Some Russian milbloggers claimed on August 23 that Russian forces are advancing on Bilohorivka and control the road to Hryhorivka (11km south of Kreminna) from Bilohorivka, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[53] A Russian milblogger claimed that positional battles are ongoing near Torske and the Serebryanske forest area.[54]
Russian officials claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line but did not advance on August 24. The Russian MoD and Russian Central Grouping of Forces Spokesperson Alexander Savchuk claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Synkivka, Novoselivske (14km northwest of Svatove), Novoyehorivka, Hryhorivka, Torske, Dibrova (7km southwest of Kreminna), the Serebryanske forest area, and Berestove (30km south of Kreminna).[55]
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in the Bakhmut direction on August 24 and advanced north of Bakhmut. Geolocated footage published on August 24 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced west of Zaliznyanske (12km northwest of Bakhmut).[56] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations south of Bakhmut.[57] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces continue to gradually advance in the Bakhmut direction.[58] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces made unspecified advances near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut) and captured Russian forward positions west of the settlement.[59] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that elements of the Russian Southern Grouping of Forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Pivnichne (21km southwest of Bakhmut).[60]
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully counterattacked north of Bakhmut near Vesele (19km north of Bakhmut) on August 24.[61]
The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited unsuccessful ground attacks near Nevelske (14km southwest of Avdiivka) on August 24.[62]
Russian forces continued limited offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front on August 24 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults south of Avdiivka, near Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka), and northwest of Novomykhailivka (36km southwest of Avdiivka).[63] A Russian milblogger also claimed that Russian assaults in Marinka and south of Avdiivka were unsuccessful.[64]
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on August 24 but did not make any confirmed advances. The Russian MoD claimed that elements of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces repelled a Ukrainian attack near Pryyutne (16km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[65] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Pryyutne and Staromlynivka (15km south of Velyka Novosilka).[66] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces control Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) but that the speed of Ukrainian advances in the area has slowed.[67]
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 24 and advanced closer to Russian secondary defensive lines. Geolocated footage published on August 24 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced in southern Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv).[68] Additional geolocated footage published on August 24 indicates that Ukrainian forces also advanced east of Robotyne towards Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv).[69] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified success in the direction of Novodanylivka (5km south of Orikhiv) and Novoprokopivka (13km south of Orikhiv).[70] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces continued to advance near Robotyne and towards Novopokropivka on the evening of August 23.[71] Some Russian sources claimed on August 24 that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Novoprokopivka, however.[72] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted armored attacks in southern Robotyne and east of the settlement.[73] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces only control the northern part of Robotyne and one Russian milblogger claimed that neither side controls central Robotyne.[74] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces control most of the settlement, however.[75] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled five Ukrainian attacks near Robotyne and near the Balka Uspenivka area (11km southeast of Orikhiv).[76]
Russian forces continued ground attacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 24 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Mala Tokmachka (9km southeast of Orikhiv).[77] A Russian source claimed that Russian forces counterattacked in Robotyne and pushed Ukrainian forces from the northern part of the settlement.[78]
Ukrainian forces continued limited raids on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast on August 24. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command posted footage and reported that Ukrainian forces temporarily raised a large flag on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.[79] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces struck several Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups that landed on unspecified islands in the Dnipro River delta and repelled several groups attempting to land on the east (left) bank between Hola Prystan (10km southwest of Kherson City) and Kardashynka (7km south of Kherson City).[80] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain limited positions near Oleshky (8km southeast of Kherson City) and the Antonivsky Bridge.[81]
Some Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces struck the command post of an unspecified element of the Russian 58th Combined Arms Army (Southern Military District) in Tokmak on August 24.[82]
Russian forces reportedly struck a Ukrainian S-300 air defense system in Mykolaiv Oblast. Russian sources, including the Russian MoD, claimed that Russian airstrikes destroyed two missile launchers, a radar station, and the command-and-control center of a Ukrainian S-300 system near Zelenyi Hai (13km east of Mykolaiv City), Mykolaiv Oblast.[83] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that the strike was a response to the Ukrainian strike on a Russian air defense system in Crimea on August 23.[84]
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Nothing significant to report.
Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian occupation authorities continue preparations for the September 2023 regional elections. The Kherson Oblast occupation administration claimed that it trained its final batch of election observers.[85] Russian Public Chamber official Alena Bulgakova claimed that the Russian Public Chamber has trained 50,000 election observers and hopes to train 100,000 observers by the start of elections.[86] Russian authorities likely aim to use election observers to falsely portray elections in occupied Ukraine as transparent and legitimate.[87] The Kherson Oblast occupation administration reported that the Kherson branch of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party adopted an election platform and that the Kherson branches of the Russian Communist, Liberal Democratic, and Just Russia parties will also vote for election platforms.[88] Russian Central Election Commission Chairperson Ella Pamfilova claimed that the elections in occupied Ukraine are highly competitive.[89] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian and occupation authorities are struggling to find willing collaborators or attract Russians to take positions in occupation administrations, however.[90]
Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)
The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated that Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) countries will participate in the “Combat Brotherhood” joint exercises in Belarus from September 1 to 6.[91]
Belarusian maneuver elements continue conducting exercises in Belarus. The Belarusian MoD stated that elements of the 11th and 120th Separate Guards Mechanized Brigades conducted live fire and other tactical exercises.[92]
ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
2. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, August 24, 2023
Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update-august-24-2023
Key Takeaways
- The Kuomintang (KMT) is facing several internal disputes as the party falls further behind in the presidential election polls.
- The flagship CCP journal Qiushi republished a February article by Xi Jinping on August 15 that emphasized “Chinese-style modernization.” This content of the publication and its reprinting indicates that the party aims to buttress support for spreading its political and economic governance models in formerly colonized countries.
- The CCP outlet Red Flag Manuscript published an article on August 14 about the necessity of recapturing the spirit of “revolutionary patriotism” embodied by the Chinese military during the Korean War. The content of the article indicates that creating ideological alignment amongst PLA leadership is becoming increasingly necessary in order to prepare for future wars.
CHINA-TAIWAN WEEKLY UPDATE, AUGUST 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023 - Press ISW
China-Taiwan Weekly Update, August 24, 2023
Authors: Nils Peterson, Eli Kravinsky, and Ian Jones of the Institute for the Study of War, Alexis Turek of the American Enterprise Institute
Editors: Dan Blumenthal and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute
Data Cutoff: August 22 at 5pm
The China–Taiwan Weekly Update focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s paths to controlling Taiwan and relevant cross–Taiwan Strait developments.
Key Takeaways
- The Kuomintang (KMT) is facing several internal disputes as the party falls further behind in the presidential election polls.
- The flagship CCP journal Qiushi republished a February article by Xi Jinping on August 15 that emphasized “Chinese-style modernization.” This content of the publication and its reprinting indicates that the party aims to buttress support for spreading its political and economic governance models in formerly colonized countries.
- The CCP outlet Red Flag Manuscript published an article on August 14 about the necessity of recapturing the spirit of “revolutionary patriotism” embodied by the Chinese military during the Korean War. The content of the article indicates that creating ideological alignment amongst PLA leadership is becoming increasingly necessary in order to prepare for future wars.
Taiwan Developments
This section covers relevant developments pertaining to Taiwan, including its upcoming January 13, 2024 presidential and legislative elections.
The Republic of China (Taiwan) Vice President and Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Lai Ching-te transited through the United States on August 12 and August 16. ISW will produce a forthcoming follow-up article to the pre-transit August 9 publication.
The Kuomintang (KMT) is facing several internal disputes as the party falls further behind in the presidential election polls. A faction in the party sought and failed to replace the KMT Chairman Eric Chu, who risked drawing the KMT into another scandal. Several KMT officials also recently left the party and raised concerns over the KMT’s internal decision-making process.[1] An August 21 Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation Poll shows Hou as polling at 13.6 percentage points of support compared to the leading candidate, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Lai Ching-te, at 43.4 percentage points.[2] This is a change from July when Hou polled 20.2 percentage points while Lai polled 36.4 percentage points.[3]
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KMT Chairman Eric Chu publicly stated his support for Taiwan People’s Party Hsinchu Mayor Kao Hung-an after the Taipei District Prosecutors indicted her for corruption on August 14.[4] This angered KMT presidential candidate Hou Yu-ih’s campaign manager Jin Pucong because he did not want the Hou campaign to become involved in the scandal.[5] A faction within the KMT also unsuccessfully submitted a proposal on July 19 to replace Chu as the party chairman.[6] Chu also stated in July that party “guns should be [focused] externally.”[7]
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Several local KMT officials have also left the party. Former Miaoli County Magistrate Hsu Yao-Chang left the KMT on August 22 criticizing the KMT’s “minority decision-making and backroom politics.”[8] Hsu previously caused controversy by stating that “we not only want the DPP to step down, we also want to take down the KMT” at a rally with Terry Gou.[9] Gou is an ROC billionaire who maintains a popular base of support in the KMT.
The failure of the KMT to address these internal disputes and regain its footing in the polls likely would deny the CCP its most preferred ROC presidential candidate to influence cross-strait policy. ISW assessed in May that the CCP is framing the ROC presidential election as a choice between peace and war, which provides the party leverage points over the cross-strait policy of the three major Taiwanese political parties.[10] ISW also assessed that this electoral framing would confer leverage over a KMT administration. It would enable the CCP to frame cross-strait economic integration and political dialogue on the PRC’s terms as necessary to maintain peace.[11]
China Developments
This section covers relevant developments pertaining to China and the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP).https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update...
The flagship CCP journal Qiushi republished a February article by Xi Jinping on August 15 that emphasized “Chinese-style modernization.” This content of the publication and its reprinting indicates that the party aims to buttress support for spreading its political and economic governance models in formerly colonized countries. Xi drew on the historical memory of Western modernization as one “full of bloody crimes such as war, slavery, [and] colonialism” that caused developing countries great suffering. He stated that China experienced “the tragic history of aggression and humiliation by Western powers” and will “never repeat [this] old path.”[12] Xi parlayed this shared historical memory of colonial grievance into a counter narrative that “Chinese-style modernization” is purely peaceful and economically responsible.[13] The timing of the release in the week before the ongoing BRICS summit, as well as the article’s harsh anti-Western tone, suggests the party’s aim was to degrade Western influence while exporting its own authoritarian model to developing countries.
The spread of CCP governance and economic influence in developing countries previously undermined the international definition of human rights in October 2022. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) successfully garnered votes from several African countries to help defeat a motion in the United Nations to debate human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. This came after the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report on August 31, 2022, that assessed PRC actions in Xinjiang “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”[14] The PRC’s success in voting down the debate despite the report demonstrates the international implications for global governing norms that arise from the party’s authoritarian economic and political support in developing countries.
The CCP outlet Red Flag Manuscript published an article on August 14 about the necessity of recapturing the spirit of “revolutionary patriotism” embodied by the Chinese military during the Korean War.[15] The content of the article indicates that creating ideological alignment amongst PLA leadership is becoming increasingly necessary to prepare for future wars.
The article entitled “Carrying Forward the Great Spirit of the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea” discusses the heroism and patriotism of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV). It also conveys the lessons on instilling a revolutionary mindset that the Chinese people should carry into the modern day.
The main audience of Red Flag Manuscript includes PLA leadership, CCP party theorists, and everyday party cadre. Readers of this article would likely recognize that its evaluations on the state of the modern PLA reflect several enduring self-criticisms that can be traced back to 2012 when Xi Jinping stated his intention to increase the PLA’s combat abilities across all services.[16] The most commonly mentioned weakness within PLA academic journals and publications such as PLA Daily is the lack of effective PLA leadership. One of the most commonly cited criticisms is known as the “Five Incapables,” which states that many PLA officers are not capable of judging situations, understanding the intentions of higher authorities, making operational decisions, deploying troops, or dealing with unexpected situations.[17] This description of many PLA officers as incapable of basic military leadership stands in stark contrast to the heroic historical figures discussed in the article. This contrast emphasizes how lacking modern PLA leaders are by comparison. As the article mentions, significant attention within the PLA has been given to reforming ideological education and political work to instill patriotic values in the ranks of PLA soldiers. While this may result in future generations of PLA leadership more closely adhering to party ideology, current educational reform efforts do not address the full extent of problems within current PLA leadership.
The article’s timing reflects the continued salience of these ideas and their current relevance to the PLA. In an October 2020 speech commemorating the 70th anniversary of China’s entry into the Korean War, Xi Jinping characterized the war as a victory for China against U.S. injustice and imperialism.[18] According to Xi, the “martial spirit” displayed by the CPV should guide the Chinese people to overcome today’s challenges. Xi then reminded the audience that it is sometimes necessary to “use war to prevent war,” and use the military victory to win respect. The phrase “using war to prevent war” refers to the party’s idea that escalation and smaller conflicts can be useful tools in preventing a large-scale war.
The author of the article, Fan Jing, has researched theories of military political work on behalf of the Military Political Work Research Institute of the Academy of Military Sciences for many years.[19] The Academy of Military Sciences is a high-level research institute of the PLA, and the Military Political Work Research Institute conducts research concerning the political work done within the PLA. Fan has published over 60 articles on the subject, including a longer piece on the lessons of the Korean War published a year earlier.[20] While the general sentiment of these two pieces is similar, the first article provided a purely historical overview of the conflict, whereas the more recent article stated that the heroism of the past should characterize the PRC’s future actions as it works towards the goal of national rejuvenation.
3. Defecting Russian Mi-8 Helicopter Was Lured To Ukraine: Reports
Defecting Russian Mi-8 Helicopter Was Lured To Ukraine: Reports
Claims swirl around a Mi-8 combat transport helicopter and its crew that ended up in Ukrainian hands.
BY
THOMAS NEWDICK
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PUBLISHED AUG 23, 2023 6:26 PM EDT
thedrive.com · by Thomas Newdick · August 23, 2023
In what’s probably one of the more remarkable stories to come out of the Russia-Ukraine air war, reports emerged today of an apparent defection to Ukraine by a Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS, in its Russian abbreviation) Mi-8AMTSh Hip combat transport helicopter, in what is claimed to have been a long-planned Ukrainian intelligence operation.
If true, not only did the Mi-8 and at least some of its crew end up in Ukrainian hands, but the helicopter’s cargo consisted of undisclosed parts for VKS Su-27 and Su-30SM Flanker fighters, which were being transported between two airbases. That is the claim made by the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper, citing sources in Ukrainian defense intelligence, and the chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence has also confirmed the basics of the story.
Those Russian airbases have not been named, and the exact route taken by the helicopter into Ukraine is unclear, although there are suggestions it landed somewhere near Poltava, in central Ukraine.
The approximate location of Poltava in Ukraine. Google Earth
The reports suggest that Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence planned the operation over a six-month period, before achieving success. The pilot of the Hip was apparently convinced to defect, with members of his family already having been moved to Ukraine for their own safety. It is not known if there was also a financial incentive, but that would not be unheard of in this kind of situation.
The most comprehensive account of the incident was provided by the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, speaking to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He confirmed that the operation had happened, stating:
“We were able to find the right approach to the man, we were able to create the conditions to take out the whole family unnoticed, and ultimately create the conditions so that he was able to overrun this aircraft with a crew that did not know what was going on. When they realized where they had landed, they tried to run away. Unfortunately, they were destroyed; we would have liked to [take them] alive, but we have what we have.”
Budanov said the captured helicopter was now in Kyiv and that the pilot wanted to stay in the country.
Russian sources also confirmed that a VKS Mi-8ATSh had ended up in Ukraine, bu provided different reasons as to why. According to Fighterbomber, a prominent pro-Russian military channel on Telegram, the incident took place “a couple of weeks ago,” after the helicopter’s crew lost their way.
“The crew, for some reason, lost their bearings and crossed the border,” Fighterbomber stated, as well as confirming that a photo circulating in Ukrainian media was that of the Mi-8 involved.
The Mi-8 crossed the border into Ukraine with three individuals on board, Fighterbomber says, although the identity of the others is unclear. For normal transport missions, the Mi-8AMTSh is operated by a crew of three: pilot, pilot-navigator, and flight technician.
Fighterbomber also refuted claims that the pilot’s family had been moved to Ukraine in advance and said that they were in contact with relatives of all crew members.
The same Russian source also agreed that two crew members were likely killed, in an apparent firefight with Ukrainian soldiers:
“Realizing where they landed, [the crew] attempted to take off, but were shot while the helicopter was on the ground. Presumably, two crew members died, and the commander was taken hostage.”
None of these specifics can be independently verified, at this stage.
Not surprisingly, for an operation of this scope, Ukrainian officials have otherwise provided little in the way of detail.
However, Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, told state television: “There will be official information. We need to wait a little bit — we are working on it, including with the crew.”
That statement would seem to cast doubt on claims that both other crew members had been killed.
At the same time, Yusov appeared to confirm the general aspects of the incident, including that a Mi-8 had landed in Ukraine.
That’s not to say the Hip might not genuinely have become lost and accidentally crossed the Ukrainian border before landing in hostile territory. It could also potentially have been forced down by enemy action or a technical malfunction.
On the other hand, a defecting and compliant VKS combat pilot would be a very valuable intelligence windfall for Ukraine. As one of the latest versions of the long-established Mi-8 Hip design, the Mi-8AMTSh may also be of interest for closer examination, especially if fitted with some of the more modern Russian self-protection equipment.
Meanwhile the various Flanker jet parts — depending on what exactly they consisted of — could potentially yield even greater intelligence benefits. All this could be useful for Ukrainian allies, too, with an established intelligence-sharing program to better understand various bits of Russian defense technology and tactics and share these lessons.
Either way, the incident is another embarrassment for the Russian Armed Forces and the VKS in particular.
Just three days ago, an apparent Ukrainian drone strike on Soltsy-2 airbase in Russia destroyed at least one Tu-22M3 Backfire bomber, evidence of which we were able to look at in more detail thanks to satellite imagery that emerged yesterday.
A close-up of a Planet Labs satellite image showing the burned remains of a Russian Tu-22M3 Backfire bomber destroyed during a Ukrainian drone attack last week at the Stoltsy-2 airbase in Russia. PHOTO © 2023 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION
That incident, taking place more than 400 miles north of the Ukrainian border, was just the latest in a string of Ukrainian attacks, or attempted attacks against the VKS outside of Ukraine. These have mainly targeted VKS bombers, but also highly valuable airborne early warning platforms, at bases in Russia, Russian-occupied Crimea, and Belarus.
While the bombers of the VKS have maintained a steady campaign of mainly missile strikes against Ukrainian targets, including civilian ones, the tactical aviation arm — including helicopters — has been generally less effective, especially against Ukrainian ground-based air defenses, which have extracted a heavy toll. As a result, the VKS has not yet managed to establish air superiority over Ukraine, despite the much inferior equipment and small size of the Ukrainian Air Force.
Nevertheless, there are signs that the VKS has been more successful in holding back the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive, with attack helicopters in particular scoring valuable kills against Ukrainian armor. At the same time, changing tactics have seen VKS tactical jets lobbing glide bombs against battlefield and infrastructure targets, in a tactic against which Ukrainian air defenses are apparently impotent — at least for the time being.
The VKS was also struck another blow today, when its commander, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, was relieved of his command. His became the highest-level sacking yet of a military commander, after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s abortive mutiny in June. Prigozhin had previously publicly voiced his support for Surovikin, which seems to have sealed the general’s fate.
The fallout from that attempted coup may have also claimed the life of Prigozhin, whose business jet crashed in northern Russia today, killing all on board, as you can read about here.
Surovikin was put on extended leave before being removed and the repercussions may well extend beyond the VKS. After all, there are now questions about whether Surovikin was aware of the plans for the mutiny or perhaps even aided it.
Taken together with the reported Mi-8AMTSh defection, this has turned out to be an altogether highly unfortunate day for the beleaguered Russian Aerospace Forces.
Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com
thedrive.com · by Thomas Newdick · August 23, 2023
4. USASOC study outlines measures to optimize female Soldiers
We have seen the reports about women in SOF for the past couple days. This is from the Army PAO.
The 106 page report can be downloaded here: https://www.soc.mil/wia/women-in-arsof-report-2023.pdf
The report was signed out by LTG Braga. I recommend reading the report to get a fuller picture of the issues and the recommendations rather than the somewhat sensational reporting.
Whatever you might think of these issues, USASOC is being transparent and airing all the issues publicly as well as the plans to make improvements.
USASOC study outlines measures to optimize female Soldiers
https://www.army.mil/article/269270/usasoc_study_outlines_measures_to_optimize_female_soldiers?utm
By Joe Lacdan, Army News ServiceAugust 22, 2023
WASHINGTON — To better address obstacles facing female Soldiers serving in special operations units and to retain its top talent, Army Special Operations Command outlined 42 recommendations in a study released Monday.
The research’s findings will guide USASOC in optimizing female warfighters while noting their physical and anatomical differences.
“It is not about providing accommodations for women,” said USASOC Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann. “It's providing tools that allow women to maximize their performance and continue to serve at all levels and across time.”
During the yearlong study, researchers found that 44% of the female Soldiers surveyed said they experienced equipment-fitting challenges relating to body armor, helmets and ruck systems. The problem can impact women’s abilities to perform basic Soldier maneuvers and skills.
Female Soldiers also reported that the time they spent planning pregnancies negatively impacted their careers, leading to Soldiers scheduling childbearing around career milestones or avoiding pregnancy entirely, according to the 106-page report, titled, “Breaking Barriers: Women in Army Special Operations Forces.”
Researchers held more than 40 focus groups and interviews with women and men from across the force. The study focused on the areas of equipment fitting, childcare, gender bias, social support, sexual harassment, pregnancy and postpartum, and morale and wellbeing. Retired Lt. Gen. Francis Beaudette, former USASOC commander, initiated the 2021 study, which had more than 5,000 respondents. Additionally, the survey addressed other concerns including challenges of small-statured Soldiers and access to healthcare.
The study also explored attitudes towards females serving in combat and special operations units. The survey results showed Soldiers had a favorable view of women serving in special operations units with no reported decline in morale. About 72% of women and 64% of men surveyed said they would support their daughter joining Army special operations units.
According to findings, 80% of men reported that gender-related concerns had no impact on their decision to remain in special operations forces. Researchers found most gender-biased comments and attitudes during the study came from senior NCOs, indicating a difference in generational views, Naumann said.
“Although disappointed by some of the findings and comments in the study, we are committed to addressing these issues with candor and transparency,” Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOC commander wrote in the report’s introduction.
“To change culture takes time,” Braga added. “We have to be better — we must be better.”
The Women in ARSOF Initiative outlined three lines of effort to address the hurdles: mentorship and sponsorship, health and readiness, and modernization.
For mentorship and sponsorship, units can create a “culture of excellence” through education and accountability, said Lt. Col. Rachel Cepis, the director of the Women in ARSOF Initiative. For example, the Army can host more educational forums where Soldiers can learn how to schedule duties around breastfeeding or deal with postpartum related issues, as well as women’s health and nutrition.
Survey participants that have had children listed the top five postpartum challenges: (1) depression, stress, and anxiety, (2) inability to perform to the same level as the unit, (3) lactation, (4) maternity leave, and (5) diastasis recti abdominus.
Focus group participants said they experienced hardship finding adequate care during and after pregnancy. Soldiers also voiced concerns about pregnancy hindering career progression and having adequate breastfeeding locations, as well as convalescent leave following miscarriages.
The 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, Colorado began a female mentorship program, while the 3rd Special Forces Group and 528th Sustainment Brigade at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, plan to establish a similar initiative at each battalion headquarters. The 528th Sustainment Brigade also hosts monthly engagements with female Soldiers.
“We're looking at it holistically. I'm excited to see the growth of women in our formation in all positions,” Cepis said. “And I'm thrilled that we're looking at ways to help them perform at their maximum potential.”
“This is about driving change and making ultimately, ARSOF and the [Defense Department] better,” she added.
In the second line of effort, health and readiness, USASOC partnered with Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Massachusetts to study physiological, metabolic and psychological responses during and after completion of extreme and prolonged training. USASOC has also submitted four topics to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services 2024 research solicitation: (1) women’s physical and physiological characteristics of elite female warfighters, (2) pregnancy and postpartum impacts on readiness, (3) long and short-term impacts of intentional dehydration, and (4) endocrine adaptations of female warfighters.
Cepis said USASOC is working with the Army, SOCOM, and academic partners to study the effects of menstrual cycles on female warfighters and ways to maximize performance. USASOC plans to examine sicknesses and illnesses that females suffer in the field and explore how to avoid musculoskeletal injuries related to female anatomy differences, she added.
Finally in modernization, the study recognizes the anatomical and anthropometric differences between men and women and Army Combat Capabilities Development Command [DEVCOM] at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland will be modernizing dress and duty uniforms as well as body armor that better fits the varying body types and sizes.
USASOC has done limited user assessments with the Army Modular Scalable Body Armor, a lightweight, adjustable bulletproof vest, and the Army Integrated Helmet Protection System, a multi-faceted head gear, which consists of protection and retention systems, a helmet cover and hearing protection.
The Women in ARSOF Director has partnered with DEVCOM to better develop items ranging from pregnant female service uniforms to female urinary devices.
USASOC founded the Women in ARSOF Initiative to specifically study female-modernization challenges while advising Army and SOF senior leaders. ARSOF also began publishing a newsletter series, created an online platform and developed a portal site to keep Soldiers updated on the study findings and ongoing efforts.
“I have never felt so heard and understood in my career until [the newsletter] started being published,” wrote a 25-year-old Soldier who has spent five years in special operations forces.
USASOC, headquartered at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, trains, equips and educates special operations units in support of the joint force.
5. Prigozhin’s death shows that Russia is a mafia state
Excerpts:
For all that, Mr Prigozhin’s death marks the further decay of the Russian state. Mr Putin is a supreme example of why never-ending one-man rule is so ruinous. The more power is concentrated, the more Mr Putin and his obsessions, whims and resentments become the face of Russia itself.
The killing of Mr Prigozhin extends that dismal pattern. After mutinies challenge the state’s monopoly of the use of force, a healthy country restores order using the justice system. Mr Putin prefers ostentatious violence instead. Yet this will not restore order so much as reimpose the balance of terror. It further distances Russia from the rule of law and the institutions that every modern country depends on for competent and steady government. It leaves Russia in a miserable state.
Prigozhin’s death shows that Russia is a mafia state
A healthy country uses justice to restore order. Mr Putin uses violence instead
Aug 24th 2023
The Economist
As we published this editorial, it was not certain that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private jet was shot down by Russian air-defences, or that the mutineer and mercenary boss was on board. But everyone believes that it was and that his death was a punishment of spectacular ruthlessness ordered by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. And that is the way Mr Putin likes it.
If Mr Prigozhin is confirmed dead, Mr Putin will emerge stronger. For the moment at least, he will have seen off the biggest immediate threat to his 23-year rule. But the death also exposes the growing weakness of the system he created. Mr Putin has pretensions to being the tsar of a great power, but in reality his rotting empire runs as never before on lies, bribery and repression. And, as this killing shows, Russia’s ultimate authority is terror.
Mr Prigozhin’s Embraer jet came down in the Tver region north-west of Moscow on August 23rd. He and other commanders of the Wagner mercenary group were listed among the ten passengers on the flight manifest. Mr Prigozhin was a violent man. He grew rich from working in the kleptocracy that surrounded Mr Putin. He recruited convicts from Russia’s jails to fight in Ukraine and sent them to their deaths. His men are accused of crimes against humanity, especially in Africa, where Wagner makes much of its money.
None of that appeared to bother Mr Putin who, on the contrary, rewarded Mr Prigozhin with new business and extra responsibilities. But everything changed in June when, as a protest at the prospect of his men being absorbed into the regular army, he marched Wagner troops to within 200km of Moscow. Lacking the foresight to prevent the mutiny or the strength to crush it, Mr Putin was humiliated. So he cut a deal and Mr Prigozhin called off the mutiny.
The downing of the jet suggests that Mr Putin has reneged—and emerged on top. The wonder is that Mr Prigozhin did not see it coming. For as long as the Wagner boss was alive, he remained a source of instability. His death and Mr Putin’s apparent disregard for everyone else on the aircraft serve as a public example to any other would-be tsars of where treachery leads in the mafia world that the Kremlin has built.
The elimination of Mr Prigozhin will also strengthen Mr Putin’s control over Russia’s army, which conspicuously failed to stop the mutineers in June. It is surely no coincidence that on the same day the plane came down, General Sergei Surovikin, who was suspected of supporting Wagner’s mutiny in June, was formally sacked. Meanwhile, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, and Sergei Shoigu, the minister of defence, two Putin loyalists who were the butt of Mr Prigozhin’s scorn for their graft and incompetence, remain in office.
Wagner forces may grumble. Some are in Belarus, where the despot Alexander Lukashenko will be looking over his shoulder. There is talk of a second march on Moscow, but Wagnerites are more likely to choose wealth and self-preservation than loyalty to a dead commander. Meanwhile, Russia’s positions in Africa are cemented by corruption, not principle.
For all that, Mr Prigozhin’s death marks the further decay of the Russian state. Mr Putin is a supreme example of why never-ending one-man rule is so ruinous. The more power is concentrated, the more Mr Putin and his obsessions, whims and resentments become the face of Russia itself.
The killing of Mr Prigozhin extends that dismal pattern. After mutinies challenge the state’s monopoly of the use of force, a healthy country restores order using the justice system. Mr Putin prefers ostentatious violence instead. Yet this will not restore order so much as reimpose the balance of terror. It further distances Russia from the rule of law and the institutions that every modern country depends on for competent and steady government. It leaves Russia in a miserable state. ■
The Economist
6. China Casts CIA as Villain in New Anti-Spying Push
China Casts CIA as Villain in New Anti-Spying Push
State-security ministry accuses two Chinese citizens of spying for U.S. as espionage fears grip both countries
By Chun Han Wong
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Updated Aug. 24, 2023 9:45 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-casts-cia-as-villain-in-new-anti-spying-push-74e112b0
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns recently said his agency has ‘made progress’ in rebuilding its intelligence operations in China. PHOTO: AMANDA ANDRADE-RHOADES/ASSOCIATED PRESS
SINGAPORE—Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expanding a campaign to harden the country against foreign efforts to steal its secrets, with his spymasters warning citizens abroad to guard against enticement from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The Ministry of State Security—China’s main civilian intelligence agency—recently accused two Chinese nationals of spying for the U.S., saying both were recruited by the CIA while living overseas. It publicized the cases soon after CIA Director William Burns said the agency had made progress in rebuilding its spy network in China, an assertion that drew widespread attention on Chinese social media.
The disclosures are part of the Chinese state-security ministry’s first-ever public foray on social media, where it has solicited the public’s help in fighting espionage and other threats to national security. In its debut post on the popular do-everything app WeChat on Aug. 1, titled “Counterespionage Requires Mobilization of an Entire Society,” it urged ordinary Chinese to help build a “people’s line of defense for national security.”
The ministry’s social-media offensive lands amid rising tensions and mutual distrust between the U.S. and China, with each power portraying the other as a strategic threat. Both sides have also traded spying allegations, with Washington accusing Beijing of running cyberattacks and espionage efforts against American targets, and vice versa.
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Two active members of the U.S. Navy have been charged with allegedly transmitting sensitive military information to the People’s Republic of China in exchange for thousands of dollars, officials said. Photo: Meg McLaughlin/The San Diego Union-Tribune/AP (Published Aug. 3)
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray, for instance, has cast China as a major source of spying threats against the U.S., saying last year that his agency had about 2,000 ongoing investigations that potentially involved Beijing, and on average was opening two new China-related counterintelligence probes a day.
China’s counterespionage publicity drive reflects the exalted position that national security has acquired under Xi, who has made it a priority even over economic growth. Chinese authorities have appeared particularly concerned about locking down flows of information they see as potentially compromising security, even as foreign businesses say Beijing’s opacity is discouraging them from investing more in the country.
Earlier this year, the government raided the Beijing offices of the New York-based due-diligence firm Mintz Group and detained all of its Chinese staff. Regulators recently ordered Mintz to pay roughly $1.5 million in financial penalties for conducting “foreign-related statistical investigations” without authorization.
In a throwback to the Cold War, a time when governments routinely warned citizens to be on the lookout for spies, the Chinese state-security ministry is promising to make it easier for members of the public to report suspicious behavior and educate the masses about security threats using real-life cases.
Beijing has voiced the most concern about spying by the U.S. In the early 2010s, a U.S. intelligence breach allowed China to dismantle a major American spy network in the country, where authorities jailed about 20 CIA informants and executed an unknown number of them, according to former U.S. officials familiar with the episode.
CIA Director Burns told a security forum in July that his agency has “made progress” in rebuilding its intelligence operations in China. Hashtags related to Burns’s remarks garnered millions of views on Chinese social media, with many users blasting what they saw as American hypocrisy in spying on China while hyping up Chinese espionage threats.
Chinese authorities have been looking to lock down flows of information they see as potentially compromising security. PHOTO: KYODO NEWS/ZUMA PRESS
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman later said that Burns’s July comment was “rather concerning” and that China will “take all measures necessary to safeguard national security.”
In early August, American officials announced the arrest of two U.S. Navy sailors who allegedly provided Beijing with military secrets after they were approached by Chinese intelligence officers.
That’s when Beijing began to strike back with its own disclosures. On Aug. 11, the state-security ministry published a WeChat post saying a Chinese national, surnamed Zeng, working for a Chinese military-industrial group was recently detained for giving sensitive information to the CIA.
On Monday, the ministry revealed another case, this time involving a Chinese bureaucrat—surnamed Hao—who also allegedly provided intelligence to the CIA.
The CIA declined to comment.
According to the ministry, the CIA recruited Zeng and Hao while they were studying abroad in Italy and Japan, respectively. Both suspects became acquainted with officials at the local U.S. Embassy, who cultivated close relationships with the two Chinese nationals and eventually persuaded them to help gather intelligence on behalf of the U.S. government.
Zeng, now 52 years old, agreed to provide sensitive information on the Chinese military in return for large rewards and the promise that Zeng’s family can migrate to the U.S., the ministry said. Hao, now 39, agreed to try joining a Chinese ministerial-level government agency, and went on to supply intelligence to the U.S. in return for fees, according to the ministry.
The ministry said Zeng’s case has been transferred to prosecutors, while investigations into Hao’s case were continuing. The ministry didn’t provide any other identifying information about Zeng and Hao, apart from their birth month and year. “Any illegal and criminal acts that endanger national security shall be severely punished by law,” the ministry said.
The ministry’s WeChat account has also pumped out a stream of rousing content, from slickly produced videos to chest-thumping screeds that denounce foreign hostile forces trying to contain China.
In one recent WeChat post, the ministry accused the U.S. of being selfish and hypocritical in smearing China’s efforts to protect its interests. Another post, titled “National security is for you, and depends on you,” featured stirring footage—showing daily lives, military operations and scenic frontier landscapes across China, as well as cultural heritage like Beijing opera—that appealed to a sense of duty among citizens.
“Your choices are closely tied to the nation’s choices, your fate is closely tied to the nation’s fate,” the video’s narration said. “To protect the nation’s security is to protect yourself.”
Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.
Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com
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Appeared in the August 25, 2023, print edition as 'Beijing Casts CIA as Villain in Anti-Spying Push'.
7. Early Intelligence Suggests Prigozhin Was Assassinated, U.S. Officials Say
Early Intelligence Suggests Prigozhin Was Assassinated, U.S. Officials Say
Preliminary findings indicate it wasn’t surface-to-air missile that took down Wagner leader’s plane
By Michael R. Gordon
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Updated Aug. 24, 2023 3:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/wagner-prigozhin-russia-assassinated-intelligence-3e456fab
The plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, crashed as the result of an assassination plot but wasn’t shot down by a surface-to-air missile, U.S. officials said.
The preliminary U.S. government assessments, which officials stressed are incomplete, suggest that a bomb exploded on the aircraft or that some other form of sabotage caused the crash northwest of Moscow.
The Russian government has said it is investigating the cause of the crash, but hasn’t offered an explanation. Social-media channels close to Prigozhin’s Wagner have claimed that the aircraft was downed by a Russian military antiaircraft missile.
“We have no information at this time to suggest that a surface-to-air missile was launched against the private aircraft reportedly carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin,” a senior Biden administration official said.
U.S. satellites with infrared sensors can detect the heat from missile launches, and none was detected at the time the plane was downed, defense officials said.
U.S. officials, however, haven’t determined what specifically led to the crash and have stopped sort of publicly asserting that the downing was an assassination, although numerous officials have privately concluded that.
“Our initial assessment is that it is likely Prigozhin was killed,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said at a briefing Thursday. It was the first time the U.S. confirmed Prigozhin’s death.
Ryder didn’t describe the downing as an assassination, and said the U.S. is still assessing the episode.
The day after Prigozhin’s death, his supporters flocked to makeshift memorials to pay tribute to a man who had staged a short-lived uprising against Moscow.
Watch: Putin Breaks Silence, Offers Condolences After Death of Prigozhin
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Watch: Putin Breaks Silence, Offers Condolences After Death of Prigozhin
Play video: Watch: Putin Breaks Silence, Offers Condolences After Death of Prigozhin
Russian President Vladimir Putin commented publicly on the death of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin on Thursday. Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin broke his initial silence Thursday and offered condolences to the families of the victims.
He offered some praise for Prigozhin’s accomplishments, but also said that the Wagner chief had committed some serious mistakes.
“I want to note that these are the people who significantly contributed to our common cause of fighting the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine,” he said of the Wagner members on the plane. “We remember it, we know it, and we will not forget it.”
In St. Petersburg, Prigozhin’s hometown, people came to place flowers, candles and military patches with Wagner’s skull-and-crossbones logo outside the building that once served as the company’s headquarters in the city.
“It feels like losing a father. He was everything for us,” said a man who came to mourn Prigozhin.
Official information on the crash and its causes has been scant. Authorities said all 10 people aboard the plane had died, and Russia’s Investigative Committee launched a criminal probe into alleged violations of air-safety rules.
Russian state media said 10 bodies had been recovered from the site and on Thursday published footage of investigators working on the scene. Police have cordoned off the entrance to the village in the Tver region where the plane had crashed.
Local media reported that the bodies of the victims had been loaded into cars belonging to a funeral service company and driven away. State news agency RIA cited local residents saying they had heard an explosion before they saw the plane plummeting to earth. The agency said one part of the plane had landed 2 miles from the main crash site.
Mourners left flowers at an informal memorial for Yevgeny Prigozhin in St. Petersburg. PHOTO: ANTON MATROSOV/ZUMA PRESS
Numerous Telegram channels close to Wagner Group posted a video showing a fighter in Wagner uniform kneeling and crying before a makeshift shrine outside a former Wagner office in Novosibirsk, a city in southern Russia.
“All of us are emotional now, but we have to hold ourselves together,” Grey Zone, a channel close to Wagner, wrote. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
As with previous deaths of rivals to Putin, the Kremlin is likely to sow confusion over who killed Prigozhin. Russia’s state-run media has already begun spinning contradictory suggestions—from blaming Ukraine to suggesting that a rival of Prigozhin planted a bomb aboard his plane.
The Kremlin can only benefit from uncertainty because Prigozhin was a divisive, if popular, figure within Russia, as well as a protégé of Putin. While the Kremlin has eliminated rivals before, Prigozhin was the first high-level loyalist whom Putin is suspected of killing for alleged transgressions.
His death is problematic because he was a hero to millions of disgruntled veterans and common Russians for his war record and his truculent denunciations of alleged sloth and corruption in the military.
In the Kremlin, “there is likely sensitivity to how the Wagner fighters and their sympathizers will take the news” of Prigozhin’s death, said Eric Green, former Russia adviser to President Biden’s National Security Council, now a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
At the same time, Prigozhin was a dangerous rival to Russia’s top defense officials, most of whom are likely clear-eyed about who was behind his murder. Green said that the Kremlin also might be more definitive about who killed Prigozhin as time passes, noting that in the poisoning of other rivals—such as political critic Alexei Navalny and ex-spies Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko—“the Kremlin initially cultivated ambiguity, but in subsequent months dropped unmistakable hints as to its authorship.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin attending the Brics summit in Johannesburg via video link. PHOTO: KIM LUDBROOK/ZUMA PRESS
A banner with portraits of Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin outside the local office of Wagner Group in Novosibirsk, Russia. PHOTO: STRINGER/REUTERS
A U.K. government official said that while Western governments were still gathering information and insight into the crash, the most likely suspect of foul play would be Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, its domestic intelligence agency.
The warlord once fielded a force of some 50,000 troops in Ukraine, who spearheaded a monthslong battle to capture the city of Bakhmut and hand Russia its most significant victory in months. He later said Wagner had lost 20,000 men in the fight for the city, most of them convicts recruited from Russian jails. The contingent of Wagner fighters that marched toward Moscow in June numbered only several thousand men.
Vladimir Osechkin, an exiled Russian rights activist who helps defectors flee the country and is writing a book on Wagner, said a rift is growing between members of Wagner’s military command and those with access to its finances after the death of the group’s leading figures.
Among the victims alongside Prigozhin and Wagner’s top commander Dmitry Utkin, according to Russia’s civil aviation authority, was Valery Chekalov, who had been tasked with transferring Russian state money designated to Wagner through dozens of offshore companies tied to the group.
“They have no Plan B now that Prigozhin is gone,” Osechkin said, citing what he said were screenshots of text exchanges between Wagner members that had been forwarded to him. “The most important Wagner figures died on that plane.”
Nancy A. Youssef and David Luhnow contributed to this article.
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com, Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com, Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com
8. China’s Crisis of Confidence in Six Charts
Please go to the link to view the charts.
China’s Crisis of Confidence in Six Charts
Chinese households are losing faith in the nation’s future and could drag down the entire economy
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-crisis-of-confidence-in-six-charts-8fd36f9f?utm
By Nathaniel Taplin
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Updated Aug. 24, 2023 12:00 am ET
What ails China?
There are plenty of answers, from demographics to geopolitics to trade. But the key problem might boil down to household finances and, just as important, everyday citizens’ deeply shaken confidence that their lives will keep improving following China’s Covid-19 emergency.
Why look at households specifically? China has a serious debt and productivity problem, especially in the state-owned and local-government sectors, but that has been true for years. Exports are falling, but China has weathered trade downturns before. Moreover, private manufacturing and infrastructure investment are actually holding up relatively well.
What is really new and notable about the current slowdown is a combination of exceptionally weak consumer prices, consumption, services-sector investment and property investment. All of that points firmly at households.
Reduced willingness to spend and take risks by families also undermines other parts of the economy in pernicious and self-reinforcing ways: consumption directly, and investment indirectly because household borrowing, mainly through mortgages, has long helped keep cash-strapped property developers and local governments above water.
The shift to thrift
Chinese household debt, primarily mortgage debt, has risen so rapidly over the past decade that, as a percentage of disposable income, it is now approaching pre-2009 U.S. levels according to some analysts.
But there is a critical difference with the precrisis U.S.—China isn’t facing a tidal wave of mortgage delinquencies. Instead, households are paying down mortgage debt rapidly and retrenching financially in general.
This rise in risk aversion has many causes, but several of Beijing’s key policies during the pandemic probably contributed—especially the three-year spell of “zero-Covid” policies that damaged the services-sector jobs engine and the crackdown on property-developer leverage that forced developers to delay the delivery of “presold” houses to families.
Getting stiffed
The key thing to understand is that Chinese households are actually giant lenders to a linchpin of the economy: property developers. About 90% of homes sold in China in 2021 were “presold,” meaning developers sold families rights to yet-to-be-built apartments.
In essence, Chinese households took out interest-paying mortgages—and then passed on that cash, interest-free, to property developers in return for apartments that didn’t yet exist. Property developers in turn fill local-government coffers by purchasing land for development.
To fully appreciate what a bad deal this was, consider that mortgage loans in China also tend to be “recourse.” That means if home buyers walk away, banks can still go after their other assets.
When big, financially stressed developers such as
Evergrande began defaulting on these obligations to households in 2021, buyers responded by abandoning the market and paying down debt. Individual residential mortgage debt outstanding actually fell outright by 200 billion yuan, or about $28 billion, in the first half of 2023.
Hard times in the job market
To make matters worse, the housing crisis came as the economy’s key job engine—the services sector—was already under threat from Beijing’s “zero-Covid” policies and a regulatory crackdown on the internet platform economy, which, according to some estimates, accounts for about a quarter of urban jobs.
The services sector, which until 2020 had accounted for all the net job growth in China since 2012 and absorbs most highly educated graduates, shed a net 12 million jobs between 2020 and 2022, according to official figures. Strong exports helped paper over the cracks for a while, but as China was finally reopening in early 2023, the pandemic-era export boom was reversing.
As a result, China entered the second quarter of 2023 with deeply wounded service and construction sectors, and a manufacturing engine threatening to stall out. The job market has struggled to find its footing, and a record coterie of new college graduates—many of whom fled the 2021 and 2022 job market for higher education—has pushed youth unemployment over 20%.
Crisis of confidence
The battered job and property markets have translated into pervasive pessimism: Households are saving at much higher levels than before the pandemic and expressing deep skepticism about further increasing consumption or buying a home.
A long-running survey of urban bank depositors by the central bank found that about 58% of respondents indicated a preference for boosting savings deposits in the second quarter, slightly down from December 2022’s 62% but up close to 15 percentage points since mid-2019. Only 24.5% were inclined to boost consumption.
Actual growth in savings deposits remains high, too: above 15% on a three-month annualized basis, according to the research consulting firm Gavekal Dragonomics. That compares with a pre-Covid average pace of about 10%.
Breaking the downward spiral
China’s economy is still growing, and incomes—for those with jobs—are rising. But as long as China remains stuck in a negative feedback loop of failing developers, falling home prices and skittish households, it might be difficult to arrest the economy’s slide.
That risks pessimistic expectations becoming firmly entrenched, in turn prompting even higher saving and an economy with less momentum. It could also trigger larger problems in the financial system as developers and local governments—and their bankers—struggle to fill the hole in the financing ecosystem left by retrenching households.
To break the feedback loop, the central government probably needs to flex its own balance sheet with big fiscal transfers to households, or indirectly bail out property developers—and reverse course on some of the aggressive regulatory measures that have alienated foreign investors and some domestic entrepreneurs.
But it remains unclear if Beijing will take such steps. For one, Beijing might be wary of big direct spending because its effective liabilities—in the form of local government debt—are substantial. Having invested so much political capital painting housing speculation, tech moguls and dependence on foreigners as social maladies in recent years, an explicit reversal now could amount to a significant political risk: in essence, an admission that more of the central leadership’s signature policies have failed.
Write to Nathaniel Taplin at nathaniel.taplin@wsj.com
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the August 25, 2023, print edition as 'China Faces a Crisis of Confidence'.
9. US issues threat warning after hackers break into a satellite
US issues threat warning after hackers break into a satellite
Three teams at the DEF CON 23 convention met a government challenge to hack satellite in orbit.
defenseone.com · by John Breeden II
It seems like nothing is off limits for threat actors to target these days. Hospitals, schools, charity organizations and even municipalities have all been successfully targeted by malicious cyberattacks in recent years. And now, it seems like attackers are even looking into space for new systems to try and compromise.
Last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the FBI, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, issued a warning about increased attempts to attack both satellites in orbit and the intellectual property of companies developing space technologies.
The warning comes just about a month after three teams at the DEF CON 23 convention in Las Vegas managed to hack a government satellite in orbit. Those attacks were conducted with the full permission of the government as part of the U.S. Space Force’s Hack-A-Sat competition. Three of the teams that successfully breached the security of the orbiting satellite were awarded up to $50,000 in prize money for demonstrating how such an attack could be conducted. This was the first time that hacker groups were able to prove that it was now possible to circumvent the cybersecurity protections of satellites in orbit.
In addition to hacking, the recent warning points out that other less technical tactics are also being used to try and compromise or steal information about U.S. space technologies. The warning states that “Foreign intelligence entities (FIEs) use cyberattacks, strategic investment (including joint ventures and acquisitions), the targeting of key supply chain nodes and other techniques to gain access to the U.S. space industry.”
Defense One sister publication Nextgov/FCW talked with one of the leading experts on aviation and satellite security, Jeff Hall, about the new warning memo and the unique characteristics and challenges of cybersecurity in space. Hall has over 25 years of experience working with private industry, the DOD and other government agencies and has served as a Navy Cybersecurity Safety—or CYBERSAFE—aviation cybersecurity technical area expert and cyber warfare subject matter expert. He is currently a consultant with the NCC Group.
Nextgov/FCW: What are some of the key differences and additional challenges involved with protecting a computerized asset in space, like a satellite, versus an Earth-based asset?
Hall: There are many different aspects to this. Some of the key ones include:
The distances involved: The distance between Earth and satellites in space can cause delays or disruptions in communication, making it difficult to detect and respond to cyber-attacks.
Radiation: Satellites are exposed to high levels of radiation in space, which can cause hardware failures and software errors if components are not radiation hardened — and that’s a very expensive proposition. This can make it difficult to detect and respond to cyber attacks, as the malicious code may be hidden within the legitimate code that has been corrupted by radiation.
Limited resources: Satellites have purpose-built embedded systems with limited resources, including processing power, memory and storage. The technology is potentially older, since a satellite's life span can extend up to 15 years.
Remote Access: This makes satellites vulnerable to cyberattacks from anywhere in the world.
Complexity: Satellite systems are complex and heterogeneous, making it difficult to identify and patch all vulnerabilities.
Lack of awareness: Many satellite operators are not aware of the cyber threats they face, or don’t have the resources to implement effective cybersecurity measures.
Nextgov/FCW: And in addition to attacking satellites directly, can attackers also go after the data that is streaming to and from them?
Hall: Most definitely. And as to how that should be protected, the best thing is to use end-to-end space encryption to also secure the entire space to ground system.
Nextgov/FCW: That is a lot of challenges. Are there any advantages to securing a satellite’s cybersecurity compared to an Earth-based asset?
Hall: Yes, the advantages come from having a secure ground station using encrypted links and authentication.
Nextgov/FCW: The special bulletin also mentions other dangers for aerospace operations beyond the direct hacking of assets. Can you talk about some of those threats?
Hall: Unclassified counterintelligence updates indicate that foreign adversaries are employing a range of techniques, including insider threats, cyber penetrations, supply chain attacks and blended operations that combine some or all of these methods.
They are also using legal and quasi-legal methods, together with acquisitions, mergers, investments, joint ventures, partnerships and talent recruitment programs to acquire U.S. technology and innovation.
Nextgov/FCW: I realize that those methods of stealing intellectual property mostly fall outside of cybersecurity, but do you have any advice about how to mitigate them?
Hall: The best ways to guard against that includes using classification and handling markings; limiting access to only those who have a need to know; placing physical and technological restrictions on files; and fostering a culture that prioritizes data confidentiality.
In addition to fostering a data-confidentiality culture and following other aspects of Hall’s advice, the Department of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations has set up both a 24-hour tip line and an online forum for submitting tips about any kind of attack against space assets. This can include information about both direct cyberattacks and some of the quasi-legal activities mentioned in the recent warning memo.
John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys
defenseone.com · by John Breeden II
10. US intel believes ‘intentional’ blast downed Wagner chief’s plane
US intel believes ‘intentional’ blast downed Wagner chief’s plane
By Emma Burrows and Aamer Madhani, The Associated Press
militarytimes.com · by Emma Burrows · August 24, 2023
Editor’s note: This story was last updated at 5:40 p.m. EST.
A preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that an intentional explosion caused the plane crash presumed to have killed a Russian mercenary leader who was eulogized Thursday by Russian President Vladimir Putin, even as suspicions grew that he was the architect of the assassination.
One of the U.S. and Western officials who described the initial assessment said it determined that Yevgeny Prigozhin was “very likely” targeted and that the explosion falls in line with Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics.”
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment, did not offer any details on what caused the explosion, which was widely believed to be vengeance for the mutiny in June that posed the biggest challenge to the Russian leader’s 23-year rule. Several of Prigozhin’s lieutenants were also presumed dead.
Pentagon spokesman Gen. Pat Ryder said press reports that a surface-to-air missile took down the plane were inaccurate. He declined to say whether the U.S. suspected a bomb or believed the crash was an assassination.
Details of the intelligence assessment surfaced as Putin expressed his condolences to the families of those who were reported to be aboard the jet and referred to “serious mistakes” by Prigozhin.
A Russian serviceman inspects a part of a crashed private jet near the village of Kuzhenkino, Tver region, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023. (AP)
The jet carrying the founder of the Wagner military company and six other passengers crashed Wednesday soon after taking off from Moscow with a crew of three, according to Russia’s civil aviation authority. Rescuers found 10 bodies, and Russian media cited anonymous sources in Wagner who said Prigozhin was dead. But there has been no official confirmation.
President Joe Biden, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, said that he believed Putin was behind the crash, though he acknowledged that he did not, at that time, have solid information verifying his belief.
“I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised,” Biden said. “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.”
The passenger manifest also included Prigozhin’s second-in-command, who baptized the group with his nom de guerre, as well as Wagner’s logistics chief, a fighter wounded by U.S. airstrikes in Syria and at least one possible bodyguard.
It was not clear why several high-ranking members of Wagner, including top leaders who are normally exceedingly careful about their security, were on the same flight. The purpose of their joint trip to St. Petersburg was unknown.
At Wagner’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, lights were turned on in the shape of a large cross, and Prigozhin supporters built a makeshift memorial, piling red and white flowers outside the building Thursday, along with company flags and candles.
In this first comments on the crash, Putin said the passengers had “made a significant contribution” to the fighting in Ukraine.
“We remember this, we know, and we will not forget,” the president said in a televised interview with the Russian-installed leader of Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin.
Putin recalled that he had known Prigozhin since the early 1990s and described him as “a man of difficult fate” who had “made serious mistakes in life, and he achieved the results he needed — both for himself and, when I asked him about it, for the common cause, as in these last months. He was a talented man, a talented businessman.”
Russian state media have not covered the crash extensively, instead focusing on Putin’s remarks to the BRICS summit in Johannesburg via video link and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Several Russian social media channels reported that the bodies were burned or disfigured beyond recognition and would need to be identified by DNA. The reports were picked up by independent Russian media, but The Associated Press was not able to independently confirm them.
Prigozhin supporters claimed on pro-Wagner messaging app channels that the plane was deliberately downed, including suggesting it could have been hit by a missile or targeted by a bomb on board. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Sergei Mironov, the leader of the pro-Kremlin Fair Russia party and former chairman of the upper house of the Russian parliament suggested on his Telegram channel that Prigozhin had been deliberately killed.
“Prigozhin messed with too many people in Russia, Ukraine and the West,” Mironov wrote. It now seems that at some point his number of enemies reached a critical point.”
Russian authorities have said the cause of the crash is under investigation.
Kuzhenkino resident Anastasia Bukharova, 27, said she was walking with her children Wednesday when she saw the jet, “and then — boom! — it exploded in the sky and began to fall down.” She said she was scared it would hit houses in the village and ran with the children, but it ended up crashing into a field.
“Something sort of was torn from it in the air, and it began to go down and down,” she added.
Numerous opponents and critics of Putin have been killed or gravely sickened in apparent assassination attempts, and U.S. and other Western officials long expected the Russian leader to go after Prigozhin, despite promising to drop charges in a deal that ended the June 23-24 mutiny.
“It is no coincidence that the whole world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced ex-confidant of Putin suddenly falls from the sky, two months after he attempted an uprising,” said German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while acknowledging that the facts were still unclear.
“We know this pattern … in Putin’s Russia — deaths and dubious suicides, falls from windows that all ultimately remain unexplained,” she added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also pointed the finger. “We have nothing to do with this. Everyone understands who does,” he said.
Soon after the plane went down, people on social media and news outlets began to report that it was a Wagner plane. Minutes after Russian state news agencies confirmed the crash, they cited the civil aviation authority as saying Prigozhin’s name was on the mainfest.
Prigozhin was long outspoken and critical of how Russian generals were waging the war in Ukraine, where his mercenaries were some of the fiercest fighters for the Kremlin. For a long time, Putin appeared content to allow such infighting — and Prigozhin seemed to have unusual latitude to speak his mind.
But Prigozhin’s brief revolt raised the ante. His mercenaries swept through the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and captured the military headquarters there without firing a shot. They then drove to within about 200 kilometers (125 miles) of Moscow and downed several military aircraft, killing more than a dozen Russian pilots.
Putin first denounced the rebellion — the most serious challenge to his 23-year rule — as “treason” and a “stab in the back.” He vowed to punish its perpetrators, and the world waited for his next move, particularly since Prigozhin had publicly questioned the Russian leader’s justifications for the war in Ukraine.
But instead Putin made a deal that saw an end to the mutiny in exchange for an amnesty for Prigozhin and his mercenaries and permission for them to move to Belarus.
Now many are suggesting the punishment has finally come.
“The downing of the plane was certainly no mere coincidence,” Janis Sarts, director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, told Latvian television.
The Institute for the Study of War argued that Russian authorities likely moved against Prigozhin and his top associates as “the final step to eliminate Wagner as an independent organization.”
Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for President Putin turned political consultant, said Putin had to step in because, by carrying out the mutiny and remaining free, Prigozhin “shoved Putin’s face into the dirt front of the whole world.”
Failing to punish Prigozhin would have offered an “open invitation for all potential rebels and troublemakers,” so Putin had to act, Gallyamov said.
Videos shared by the pro-Wagner Telegram channel Grey Zone showed a plane dropping like a stone from a large cloud of smoke, twisting wildly as it fell, one of its wings apparently missing. A free fall like that typically occurs when an aircraft sustains severe damage, and a frame-by-frame AP analysis of two videos was consistent with some sort of explosion mid-flight.
Burrows reported from London.
11. Ukrainian pilots will learn to fly F-16s at US Air Force’s 162nd Wing
What if we had begun the training last summer?
All military failures (Cohen and Gooch) are the result of a failure to learn, a failure to adapt, and a failure to anticipate. Could we not have anticipated the need for air superiority long ago?
Ukrainian pilots will learn to fly F-16s at US Air Force’s 162nd Wing
By Noah Robertson and Stephen Losey
Defense News · by Noah Robertson · August 24, 2023
WASHINGTON — The U.S. will begin training Ukrainian F-16 pilots within two months, Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a briefing Thursday.
While he didn’t give specific numbers, he said there would be “several” pilots and “dozens” of maintainers trained. This follows comments earlier in the week that the U.S. would participate in the process only if the Netherlands and Denmark — who are leading the transfer of planes — reached capacity.
“We know that as the Danes and the Dutch prepare to train those pilots that at a certain point in time in the future, capacity will be reached,” Ryder said.
The training will begin in October at Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson, Arizona, and will be conducted by the Air National Guard’s 162nd Wing, Ryder said. In September, the pilots will first receive English language training tailored to the training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
Details on the curriculum, including its speed and the kind of training that will be offered, are still uncertain, Ryder said. They partially will depend on the experience level of the Ukrainian pilots.
The 162nd Wing carries out international F-16 pilot training and has trained pilots from 25 countries to fly the fourth-generation fighter, the Air Force said in a fact sheet. Morris Air National Guard Base sits next to the Tucson International Airport and uses some of the airport’s facilities such as its runway.
The wing has three squadrons that fly its F-16 Fighting Falcons, as well as maintenance squadrons to keep the fighters in the air and other units.
An Air Force official said in a Thursday email that pilots without prior flight experience could learn to fly the F-16 in about eight months, as part of the service’s standard F-16 basic qualification course.
Pilots who have previous experience flying other fighters can learn to fly the F-16 in about five months under the Air Force’s transition qualification track, the official said.
The F-16, versions of which have been flown by the Air Force for more than 40 years, can carry weapons such as the AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile and AIM-120 advanced medium range air-to-air missile, or AMRAAM. It can fly of speeds up to Mach 2, and has a total range of about 2,000 miles, according to the Air Force’s website.
In total, up to 61 Dutch and Danish F-16s could eventually be transferred to Ukraine. The Netherlands have 42 available, according to Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
Denmark said Aug. 20 it would send 19 F-16s to Ukraine. Because the planes are an American system, they first need to be approved by the State Department — a process Secretary of State Antony Blinken said would be expedited.
The Danish military announced Aug. 20 that it had started training eight Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s as part of this effort, and that another 65 service members will be trained to maintain the fighters and provide other support. Those Ukrainians have already arrived at Skrydstrup Air Base in Denmark, the nation said.
Other countries in Europe, including Greece and Norway, will also contribute, either training pilots or donating fighters.
“Our F-16 coalition is proving its efficiency,” Zelenskyy wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday.
Today’s announcement is the latest milemarker in the effort to deliver the fighters to Ukraine, which has been asking for them for more than a year. Initially, the administration declined. Yet, as with so many other systems eventually sent to Kyiv during the war, that stance eventually changed.
“We could certainly have started earlier, but there were much higher priorities,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in May.
The fighters may be a symbolic victory for Ukraine. But they won’t aid its slogging counteroffensive, which has so far failed to puncture dug-in Russian defensive lines. The fighters aren’t expected to arrive until mid-to-late 2024, and air defenses on both sides of the war still threaten anything flying.
Instead, the aircraft are part of a long game to improve Ukraine’s self-defense. The focus now is on supplying the planes and training personnel, but Kyiv will also need improved airfields and ground equipment to keep operating them once delivered, Ryder said.
“We’re talking months, not weeks, obviously. And as we said from the very beginning in May, this is about the long term support to Ukraine,” Ryder said.
About Noah Robertson and Stephen Losey
Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
12. Ukraine says it landed troops on the shores of Russian-occupied Crimea
Ukraine says it landed troops on the shores of Russian-occupied Crimea
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/24/europe/ukraine-crimea-operation-russia-intl/index.html?utm
By Tim Lister and Olga Voitovych, CNN
Updated 10:31 PM EDT, Thu August 24, 2023
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Video shows Ukrainian forces destroy Russian anti-aircraft system
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CNN —
Ukrainian forces have carried out their most complex and ambitious operations to date against Russian military facilities in the occupied region of Crimea, officials in Kyiv have said.
Special forces landed on the western shore of Crimea, near the settlements of Olenivka and Mayak, in a joint operation with the country’s Navy, according to Ukrainian Defense Intelligence.
“While performing the task, Ukrainian defenders clashed with the occupier’s units. As a result, the enemy suffered losses among its personnel and destroyed enemy equipment,” the intelligence agency said.
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While they were there, the Ukrainian unit also raised the national flag, it added.
Russian-appointed authorities in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula which has been illegally occupied by Moscow’s forces since 2014, have not responded to the claims.
The operation would constitute one of the most daring moves by Kyiv since launching its cagey counter-offensive against Russian troops, which has so far made only limited progress.
Kyiv has recently ramped up drone strikes on Crimea in a push to disrupt Russian logistics and resupply efforts, a shift in focus that has been met with skepticism in parts of the West.
The area contains extensive air defenses and missile sites, including advanced systems. The Ukrainians said Wednesday they had destroyed an S-400 missile defense battery in the area.
Ukraine's recent focus on Crimea draws skepticism from corners of the Biden administration
Mayak is said to be home to a Russian radio engineering regiment and sophisticated radar systems.
Unofficial Russian social media accounts have spoken of firing near a campsite at Cape Tarkhankut – the westernmost point in Crimea – before dawn on Thursday. One channel said the first shooting broke out shortly before 4 a.m.
“When people woke up and came out of the houses and tents to the beach, they saw two rubber boats not far from the shore. There were 10 unidentified men in them. One of them fired at the camping site,” according to the Telegram channel SHOT.
A prominent Russian military blog, Wargonzo, reported that “According to some sources, a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group landed in the area of Cape Tarkhankut, shelled the camping on the seashore and fled in the direction of Odesa.”
A Telegram channel associated with a military unit of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic also reported the clashes.
The 105th Regiment of the DPR militia said four light-engine boats with Ukrainian saboteurs were destroyed near Cape Tarkhankut. “Russian security forces liquidated the sabotage and reconnaissance in the sea at about four in the morning. According to preliminary data, about 15-20 people were liquidated,” it claimed.
Ukrainian Defense Intelligence released several videos purporting to show Ukrainian inflatables close to the Crimean coast in the darkness.
Video has also emerged of Ukrainian inflatable boats firing an anti-aircraft missile at a Russian jet. The Russian Defense Ministry released cockpit video showing a jet fighter using cannon fire against the boats.
Ukraine has meanwhile claimed some gains on the southern front in Zaporizhzhia region, and are still on the offensive around Bakhmut, as Kyiv’s counter-offensive gradually progresses in the east of the country.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces said Thursday that units had succeeded “in the direction of Novodanylivka and Novoprokopivka, consolidating their positions, inflicting artillery fire on the identified enemy targets, and conducting counter-battery operations.”
“The enemy is suffering significant losses in personnel, weapons and equipment, is moving units and troops and actively using reserves,” the General Staff said.
Ukrainian defenders were also holding back Russian attempts to advance further north around Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, as well as efforts to break through west of Svatove in neighboring Luhansk. In this area, the Ukrainians say that the Russians have poured more forces into the battlefield.
13. Retired Army Lawyer Will Oversee Pentagon’s War Court
Retired Army Lawyer Will Oversee Pentagon’s War Court
The New York Times · by Carol Rosenberg · August 24, 2023
Susan Escallier, who served for 32 years, will be the new convening authority for the Sept. 11, U.S.S. Cole and Bali bombing cases at Guantánamo.
Susan K. Escallier retired from the Army in 2021 as a brigadier general after 32 years of service. Credit...Maj. Jeku Arce/U.S. Army Reserve Legal Command
By Carol Rosenberg
Carol Rosenberg has been reporting from Guantánamo Bay about the prison and legal proceedings there since 2002.
Aug. 24, 2023
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has chosen a former career Army lawyer who served in Iraq to oversee the Guantánamo war court, a job that includes approving plea deals and deciding whether prosecutors can seek death sentences.
In a memo signed this week, Mr. Austin said that Susan K. Escallier, the former Army lawyer, would become the convening authority for the Office of Military Commissions on Oct. 8. The current convening authority, Jeffrey D. Wood, will voluntarily leave the job on that date, Mr. Austin’s memo said.
Ms. Escallier will take over as the Pentagon has been reducing detention operations at the base. The prison, which held about 660 prisoners at its peak, now has 30 detainees and 900 guards and support staff members. Eleven of the detainees are charged with war crimes or have already been convicted.
In the meantime, the war court complex, Camp Justice, has been expanding under a program that began during the Trump administration. Contractors have been preparing a second, maximum-security courtroom, so two judges can hear cases simultaneously; new prefabricated administrative buildings; and more housing near the court.
Ms. Escallier retired from the Army in 2021 as a brigadier general after 32 years of service. She provided legal advice on the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and other issues there, and she was the senior lawyer in the subsequent campaign to defeat the Islamic State.
Her last job in uniform was as commander of the U.S. Army Legal Services Agency and as the chief judge of the Army’s Court of Criminal Appeals.
Mr. Wood, a colonel in the Arkansas National Guard, was appointed to the job during the Trump administration, in April 2020.
In March 2022, he empowered prosecutors to negotiate a plea agreement in the Sept. 11 case. Under the proposal, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and four other men would serve life in prison rather than risk the possibility of a death sentence at a trial, in exchange for admitting to conspiring in the hijacking attacks that killed 2,976 people. The talks have been stalemated, awaiting a response from the Biden administration.
Mr. Wood has already approved a plea agreement in the case of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former commander of insurgent forces in wartime Afghanistan. Mr. Hadi faces sentencing next year at Guantánamo Bay. Under his agreement, Mr. Hadi, who has a degenerative spinal disease, will be resettled in a nation that can provide security assurances as well as health care for his disabilities.
Also, on the first full day of the Biden administration, Mr. Wood approved the prosecution of three Southeast Asian prisoners at Guantánamo Bay who are accused of conspiring in two deadly terrorist bombings in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003.
The three men have been in U.S. custody since 2003, and the case was dormant throughout the Trump administration. Mr. Wood’s decision came as a surprise because previous holders of his office had declined to approve the case.
Ms. Escallier became an officer in the Army in 1988 after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, and she received her law degree from Ohio State University.
In a speech at Fort Benning, Ga., in 2019 she told fellow legal officers that the job of a judge advocate general, or military lawyer, was “to bring our brains to the fight.”
She urged the lawyers and paralegals in the audience to know “the difference between law and policy.” One might require seeking a change from Congress. The other might allow a lawyer to “go back and say, ‘You know what, we need an exception to policy,’” she said. “That’s what you really bring to the fight, to be able to articulate that.”
Carol Rosenberg has been covering the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, including detention operations and military commissions, since the first prisoners were brought there from Afghanistan in January 2002. She worked as a metro, national and foreign correspondent with a focus on coverage of conflict in the Middle East for The Miami Herald from 1990 to 2019. More about Carol Rosenberg
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Former Army Lawyer Is Picked to Oversee Guantánamo War Court
The New York Times · by Carol Rosenberg · August 24, 2023
14. Meet the tiny State Department offices clearing billions of dollars’ worth of weapons for Ukraine
Excerpts:
A year and a half into this frenetic new pace, the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs feels that the work is moving along well, without delays in approving transfers to Ukraine and other countries.
“We move 95 percent of cases on the foreign military side within 48 hours,” State Department Assistant Secretary Jessica Lewis told Congress.
But with the U.S. and allies sending increasingly sophisticated weapons, the time it takes to approve transfers may also rise. “That's getting a little tricky, because now the Department of Defense has to look at releasability standards,” said Hamilton.
For gear like night vision or sensor systems, she said, “There's definitely going to be policy considerations that have to have to be weighed there, and those could prolong the adjudication of those requests.”
Resnick said more staff are also needed to process the current workload and handle any increases in aid to Ukraine.
Entering “the 21st century” would also help, she said. Currently, if a request for approval comes into their classified computer systems on the weekend, staff will only see it on Monday, a problem that Resnick said more spending on technology could fix.
Meet the tiny State Department offices clearing billions of dollars’ worth of weapons for Ukraine
They’ve handled a 150-fold increase in work by doing in hours what used to take months.
defenseone.com · by Sam Skove
As Ukraine battled to push Russia out of the suburbs of Kyiv in March of last year, State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Mira Resnick got an urgent call from a U.S. military airfield in Germany.
An allied cargo plane full of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles had just landed, and the U.S. needed permission from the State's Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs to ship the weapons on to Ukraine.
“They needed the legal authorization, and we needed to get it done fast,” said Resnick, whose office typically measured its work in weeks and months, not hours. “It was at that moment that I knew that our priorities would be shifting.”
Resnick’s bureau has since approved military aid to Kyiv worth tens of billions of dollars, all with less than 10 staff members focused on the issue.
The bureau’s heavy workload highlights the unique way the U.S. has participated in the largest land war in Europe since World War II, as well as what political will, bureaucratic innovations, and an energized workforce can accomplish.
However, State Department leaders also warn that staffing numbers, technological limitations, and the increasing complexity of the work are problems that could slow the rate at which aid is approved.
As wars go, the United States’ $46 billion in support for Ukraine is relatively low budget compared to the nearly $3 trillion it has spent on the wars in Iraq and Syria, or even the Pentagon's own 2022 budget of $858 billion.
Compared to other efforts to arm allies, though, the effort is enormous, vastly larger than the funds given to Iraq or Afghanistan in 2020, and outstripping the value of all aid given to Israel, a major recipient of U.S. security aid, since 1979.
The funding reflects in part the careful line that the U.S. has walked, in which it both seeks to prevent a Russian victory while also being unwilling to commit its own troops.
The unusual way of funding the war has put unusual demands on the offices that process foreign military aid—in particular, the Bureau of Political Military Affairs.
Among the bureau’s missions is determining whether proposed military aid advances U.S. national-security goals.
Three offices play an outsize legal role in this process, responsible not only for approving the delivery of U.S. military aid, but also approving the transfer of any U.S.-made weapons that foreign nations wish to send and any weapons Ukraine buys from U.S. arms dealers.
These offices are the Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers and the Office of Security Assistance, which handle government-to-government transfers, and the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, which handles foreign governments’ purchases of goods directly from their manufacturers.
Each office has seen their work rise exponentially. The Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers, which handles the tens of billions of dollars of weapons sent from U.S. warehouses to Ukraine, saw a 15,000 percent increase in its caseload, State Department Assistant Secretary Jessica Lewis told Congress in May.
Not only did the work rise, but the tasks expected of them also changed.
“We changed our policy completely,” Resnick said, particularly when it came to convincing allies to send weapons to Ukraine.
“Where before we were waiting for partners to come to us, in the context of Ukraine, we were going out to partners and saying, ‘Listen, we know that we approved this number of Stingers 35 years ago, and we are asking you to transfer these Stingers or Javelins to Ukraine’,” she said.
Also on the rise: work related to U.S. arms dealers selling weapons to Ukraine, either from the U.S. or acting as brokers for Soviet-designed weapons made elsewhere.
“It was just an explosion of U.S. entities and persons that sought to fill that void…hundreds and hundreds of them,” said one analyst working in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, whom Defense One agreed to quote anonymously.
To handle this avalanche of paperwork, the State Department had just eight staffers, with a single person often handling major funding programs, Resnick and Directorate of Defense Trade Controls Director Catherine Hamilton told Defense One.
Getting the job done involved a certain amount of plain hard work and late nights. Particularly at the start of major U.S. assistance in March 2022, it “was crazy late nights and early mornings,” said Resnick, who oversees both the Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers and the Office of Security Assistance.
The National Security Council, Defense Department, and State Department’s focus on the mission also smoothed over previously lengthy coordination processes, which went from weeks to months to mere days.
One key task was approving foreign governments’ requests to send Ukraine weapons bought from the U.S. government. Normally such a transfer would take “weeks or months to staff out,” said another analyst.“They did 15 or 16 on a Saturday. And that pace never really stopped.”
As the offices processed transfer after transfer, they became much faster at it.For the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, staffers sometimes needed just hours to process transfers in cases where allies were donating previously approved munitions or equipment.
Changing their own staffing also helped. The Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, for instance, typically processes applications by type of weapon. The directorate centralized all Ukraine-related decisions under one person, making them so familiar with potential problems in a prospective arms dealer’s paperwork that the analyst could process each case more efficiently.
The Directorate also used outreach events to educate new arms dealers on how to file paperwork correctly, and stayed late hours in order to take calls from across the country, Hamilton said.
A year and a half into this frenetic new pace, the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs feels that the work is moving along well, without delays in approving transfers to Ukraine and other countries.
“We move 95 percent of cases on the foreign military side within 48 hours,” State Department Assistant Secretary Jessica Lewis told Congress.
But with the U.S. and allies sending increasingly sophisticated weapons, the time it takes to approve transfers may also rise. “That's getting a little tricky, because now the Department of Defense has to look at releasability standards,” said Hamilton.
For gear like night vision or sensor systems, she said, “There's definitely going to be policy considerations that have to have to be weighed there, and those could prolong the adjudication of those requests.”
Resnick said more staff are also needed to process the current workload and handle any increases in aid to Ukraine.
Entering “the 21st century” would also help, she said. Currently, if a request for approval comes into their classified computer systems on the weekend, staff will only see it on Monday, a problem that Resnick said more spending on technology could fix.
Still, for all that, the staff feel buoyed by their mission, which is having a rare moment in the spotlight.
“I've been here 12 years, and we were hardly ever in the news,” one analyst said.
From the early days of the war, when Javelin anti-tank missiles defeated Russian tanks, to the current monthly announcements of aid, that has changed.
“It's given me a shot of adrenaline because you know, you feel a real purpose and meaning for what you're doing,” said one analyst.
defenseone.com · by Sam Skove
15. Open Source Technology and Public-Private Innovation Are the Key to Ukraine’s Strategic Resilience
Excertps:
Conclusion: Broader Implications
In the seamless integration of public and private digital capabilities across these four dimensions — data collection, integration, analysis, and operational targeting — we’re witnessing the impact of a new kind of societal mobilization that is at the heart of Ukraine’s resilience. That mobilization is now threatened by a counteroffensive against a dug-in enemy with superior conventional forces.
Ukrainian society presents a 21st-century model of what it means to prepare for the next war. The Ukrainians have been training for this conflict since 2014. Ukrainian companies were subcontractors to all the major tech companies before the current war, and many citizens’ cyber, software, engineering, and computer science skills were already well developed. Ukraine’s survival today is not just a matter of tanks vs. drones or cyber attacks vs. satellites, but also of public competency in key skills that are vital to the war effort. By integrating both military and civilian capabilities, and relying on the whole of their society, the Ukrainians have produced a cheaper, data-driven, more adaptive battlefield network that has enjoyed popular support — and that is the core of their advantage.
The role of popular support will remain crucial. High-end military technological innovation in conventional forces will be necessary but not sufficient in any future war. The United States and its democratic allies should take a broader societal approach that prepares the public to be technologically savvy long before war begins. Citizens should be ready, as Ukraine’s population was, to resist psychological manipulation and employ accessible digital technologies in a sophisticated way.
Open Source Technology and Public-Private Innovation Are the Key to Ukraine’s Strategic Resilience - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Audrey Kurth Cronin · August 25, 2023
Ukraine’s rapid public-private technological innovation under fire has been the most remarkable characteristic of the war and a key reason for the country’s survival. Ukrainians were well prepared before the war to resist Russian psychological warfare and employ accessible technologies in novel ways. The Ukrainian government’s strength has been its ability to mobilize all of Ukrainian society and much of the world, then fight asymmetrically with superior public will, supported by fast-moving private technology companies and open source innovation.
The ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive shifts the war to Russia’s strength. Those on both sides are being injured or dying in the hundreds of thousands, but Russia has a larger army, more traditional firepower, far greater conventional airpower, and three times the population of Ukraine. Even with billions of dollars’ worth of military aid in the form of anti-tank missiles, air defense systems, artillery munitions, infantry fighting vehicles, and main battle tanks, Ukraine is strategically disadvantaged in its ongoing counteroffensive because Russia can take losses and dredge up more troops.
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The United States is deeply familiar with relying on technological advantage to offset casualties, a core strategic concept during the Cold War contest against Russia. Especially because the Western allies will not risk their own active-duty soldiers to fortify a frontal assault, the Ukrainians should maximize the rapid public-private open technological innovation that advantaged them early in the war, because Ukraine’s strategic strength is its resilience and strong public will.
Ukraine’s Tactical Evolution
The West should be helping Ukraine to innovate and integrate technology into the military even faster, rather than expecting conscripts to quickly master Western-style combined arms tactics. In April 2023, Ukraine launched what they call the “Brave1” portal to facilitate public-private innovation in one place, and that is where more Western attention and resources should be directed.
Many analysts have tended to focus on the impact of one weapon or another — especially small off-the-shelf drones, proactive cyber capabilities, high-end tanks, or low-orbit commercial satellites. But what’s most noteworthy is how Ukrainian conscripts have been able to use clusters of commercial and military technologies (interacting technologies like sensors, satellites, machine learning, and quickly updateable software) to network, interact, and create dynamic systems much faster than Russian soldiers can.
When Russia invaded in February 2022 with an overwhelming military force using conventional technologies, Ukraine fought back with the help of a smaller group of technologically literate citizens who combined a series of disruptive technologies that are simple to use, multi-use, and off the shelf. The result was quicker decision-making and unification of capabilities across space, cyberspace, air, and land. Ukrainian fighters have used easily accessible technologies to create networks that communicate critical intelligence and orders faster and more effectively than Russian command-and-control systems, and at a much lower cost.
Everyone — from the Ukrainian soldier employing weaponized commercial drones to President Volodymyr Zelensky making nation-wide decisions — has relied on an interlinked system to collect, analyze, and translate data into actionable results in civilian neighborhoods or on the battlefield. With the help of NATO allies and open source companies outside Ukraine, the armed forces have leveraged both public and private technologies to create a data-driven command-and-control system through four dimensions — collection, connection, analysis, and action.
Data Collection: Commercial Satellite Services, Apps, and Drones
Long before the employment of lethal drones on the battlefield, Ukraine’s military has used a suite of sensors, including a combination of commercial satellite services, open source intelligence, and drones, to gather and transmit information about Russian military movements across Ukraine. These systems collect across air, space, and cyberspace to deliver critical wide-ranging data that form a clear picture of the conflict.
Commercial satellite services provide Ukraine with geospatial intelligence to visualize the deployment and movement of Russian troops. Companies like ICEYE, Usra Space, and MDA gather and analyze imagery through their privately owned synthetic aperture radar satellites, allowing decision-makers to maintain constant surveillance of strategically important locations. Commercial imagery, for example, was used to monitor a 40-mile-long Russian mechanized and logistics column heading to Kyiv in February 2022, which was subsequently attacked and destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine has also transformed phones and social media into open source reconnaissance devices, harvesting metadata to identify Russian troops and equipment. Ukraine’s military has launched attacks on Wagner Group mercenaries and dozens of Russian conscripts in Makiivka based on metadata collected from Telegram posts and phone calls. Apps like Diia, Telegram, and Viber transform individual phones into data-collection devices, where ordinary citizens can submit geotagged photos, videos, or a brief text summary of Russian military activity to chatbots. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation claims the apps are key sources of information: In the first month of the invasion alone, 260,000 individuals used Diia to report Russian activity.
Individual military units use commercial, off-the-shelf drones like DJI’s Phantom 3 or AeroVironment’s Quantix Recon to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions within a few miles of their positions. Hobbyist drones collect information critical to tactical intelligence requirements, especially for targeting. By May 2022, Ukraine had fielded 6,000 commercial drones to provide surveillance capabilities to military units. A year later they had vastly expanded their “Army of Drones” and the Royal United Services Institute estimated that the Ukrainians were losing 10,000 drones a month. Although these platforms are decentralized and controlled by individual users, the videos and imagery they capture can be transmitted and aggregated into much larger datasets.
Connecting Data to Systems: Low Earth Orbit Satellites and Telecommunications Networks
Uniting all these individual systems are satellite communications and telecommunications networks that ensure data transmission between Ukrainian units. SpaceX’s Starlink terminals give military units access to a stable network of low earth orbit satellites that connect sensors to processors anywhere on the battlefield. As widely reported, SpaceX has tried to constrain Kyiv from using Starlink for offensive military purposes. However, even with SpaceX’s restrictions in place, Ukrainian ground forces report only minor disruptions to service and soldiers are still able to communicate data from across the battlefield.
Additionally, Ukraine’s hundreds of mobile and internet providers continue to provide a decentralized network of connectivity through everything from stationary cellular and wireless towers and base stations to impromptu wireless hotspots. Decentralization offers greater redundancy and resilience, even under withering Russian artillery attack, and that feature has been more important than any one system.
Analyzing Data: Artificial Intelligence and Battle Management Systems
Once data is gathered through multiple sensors, Ukrainian forces supported by private companies use AI algorithms and digital battle management systems to unify disparate datasets into a common operating picture of all major battles and Russian units in Ukraine. Chatbots like the eVorog bot on Diia and the @stop_russian_war_bot on Telegram and Viber process thousands of civilian reports into a coherent dataset of tactical intelligence. These task-oriented chatbots take inputs — such as user metadata, images, or text regarding Russian activity, and the time and location of contact — to authenticate and prioritize citizens’ reports. Ultimately, a simple web program scraping data can provide real-time updates of Russian movements throughout Ukraine.
Ukraine has also used systems that identify patterns in photos, videos, and imagery, such as Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology and Palantir’s MetaConstellation, to predict the identity of individuals and the movement of equipment. Users equipped with Clearview’s facial recognition software can scan two billion images from the Russian social media service Vkontakte. This algorithm enables Ukrainian soldiers to vet people spotted on the battlefield or appearing in a range of media, such as images or videos. In addition, MetaConstellation combines synthetic aperture radar satellites and AI to sequentially analyze imagery and piece it together. It simultaneously identifies the geospatial data from numerous areas across Ukraine, which provides Ukraine’s forces with information about Russian movements across the country.
Ukrainian forces are also likely using tools like Primer’s natural language processing algorithms to generate concise intelligence reporting from real time or recorded Russian radio transmissions. This tool takes signals intelligence and generates a complete transcript of conversations from the recordings. Furthermore, the interface generates datasets and text reports that identify any key information (e.g., unit’s location, size, equipment, activity, and future intentions).
Operationalizing Data: Weaponized Commercial Drones and Loitering Munitions
Finally, after an entire system of disruptive technologies has compiled, analyzed, and communicated data, individual Ukrainian units can harness this information to conduct military operations. Soldiers use digital battle management systems to compile AI-provided analytical insights to identify events occurring in real time across the battlefield, then communicate a common operating picture to units across the country.
At the operational level, Ukrainians use the Delta battle management system to track the disposition of Russian forces in real time and enhance the ability of leaders to command and control forces. Delta operationalizes the insights provided by AI by overlaying the data on geospatial imagery with videos, maps, and intelligence reporting. In November 2022 Delta was credited with the destruction of at least 1,500 targets, with the current number likely in the multiple thousands. This online program developed by Ukrainian private industry is widely available to unit headquarters, with plans to create brigade-level intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance officers who can facilitate horizontal communication between commands.
At the tactical level, Ukraine has integrated systems like GIS Arta to identify targets and share coordinates of targets on the battlefield. This operates in a similar way to the U.S. military’s Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System by allowing soldiers to designate specific systems — like mortars, artillery, drones, and loitering munitions — to hit specific targets. Attack systems include Ukrainian manufactured drones, such as Aerorozvidka’s Drone R18, or more conventional capabilities like AeroVironment’s Switchblade 300s and 600s and the Bayraktar TB2. In Lviv, Ukraine’s Twist Robotics makes AI-powered software that guides armed drones to their targets, defying GPS spoofing and electronic jamming. The latest Ukrainian drones even drop bombs on moving targets.
Drag Strategic Planning Out of the Trenches
Every modern war ends in a political settlement of some kind. Ukraine’s ability to win this war stems from the unflagging will of its people, buoyed by international support. If hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians die in a campaign of bloody attrition, these factors will both weaken.
When a war is ongoing, high-priced conventional systems get most of the attention. This focus fits earlier wars and bolsters military hierarchies — decentralized technologies and individually empowered conscripts reach beyond leaders’ control and experience. As Rob Lee points out in the Russia Contingency podcast, the Russian military has also been innovative at the lower levels — for example, buying drones and mimicking Ukrainians’ tactics. But Russian solders’ innovations are sometimes squelched from above, and Russian soldiers lack a mobilized tech-savvy population. The average Ukrainian conscript has better situational awareness than the average Russian soldier does — and this has had a practical impact on the war. If that Ukrainian conscript dies trying to retake Bakhmut, it is not just an individual tragedy but a strategic mistake.
Innovation in communications or command-and-control usually only becomes apparent long after a war is over — as with the secret Enigma and Lorenz code-breaking during World War II, missing from the narrative of the victors for decades.
But not now. Digital technology’s tactical impact on the Ukraine war is very public and easy to spot. For example, the global open intelligence company Molfar used a team of in-house employees and Ukrainian volunteers to analyze images from journalists’ Telegram channels. Integrating them with Google Maps and Google Street View, Molfar identified members of the Russian Pyatnashka Brigade and mapped out their eastern Donetsk base. It took two and a half hours. A month later, the Ukrainians hit the Russians with a U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. This process has since been duplicated by Molfar and other commercial companies thousands of times.
Of course, open source targeting processes evolve as people change platforms (from Telegram to VKontakte, for example) or behavior (e.g., learning not to post pictures), but their impact remains dramatic. Gen. Sir John Hockenhull, who ran U.K. defense intelligence until May 2022, estimates commanders’ attention to open source versus secret intelligence should now flip from 20/80 to 80/20.
Beyond tactics, the global impact of Ukraine’s rapid innovation is powerful. The Chinese government is watching closely, planning to launch their first network of very low earth orbiting satellites akin to Starlink by the end of 2023. The NATO alliance has also taken note, launching a billion-euro investment fund called Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic in June 2022. And some of those watching — from individual criminals to authoritarian regimes — will use open-access technologies against innocent targets in the future. No one is trying to copy what is happening in Zaporizhzhia or Kherson.
Conclusion: Broader Implications
In the seamless integration of public and private digital capabilities across these four dimensions — data collection, integration, analysis, and operational targeting — we’re witnessing the impact of a new kind of societal mobilization that is at the heart of Ukraine’s resilience. That mobilization is now threatened by a counteroffensive against a dug-in enemy with superior conventional forces.
Ukrainian society presents a 21st-century model of what it means to prepare for the next war. The Ukrainians have been training for this conflict since 2014. Ukrainian companies were subcontractors to all the major tech companies before the current war, and many citizens’ cyber, software, engineering, and computer science skills were already well developed. Ukraine’s survival today is not just a matter of tanks vs. drones or cyber attacks vs. satellites, but also of public competency in key skills that are vital to the war effort. By integrating both military and civilian capabilities, and relying on the whole of their society, the Ukrainians have produced a cheaper, data-driven, more adaptive battlefield network that has enjoyed popular support — and that is the core of their advantage.
The role of popular support will remain crucial. High-end military technological innovation in conventional forces will be necessary but not sufficient in any future war. The United States and its democratic allies should take a broader societal approach that prepares the public to be technologically savvy long before war begins. Citizens should be ready, as Ukraine’s population was, to resist psychological manipulation and employ accessible digital technologies in a sophisticated way.
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Audrey Kurth Cronin is director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Security and Technology and trustees professor of security and technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Her latest book, Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists, examines the future of military technological innovation. She has been director of the core course on war and statecraft at the U.S. National War College, director of studies for the Changing Character of War program at Oxford University, and she frequently advises at senior levels of the U.S. government.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Audrey Kurth Cronin · August 25, 2023
16. Ukrainians Are Cutting Open U.S. Cluster Shells To Make Drone Munitions
Ukraine is learning and adapting. Can we anticipate the future need for this capability and have we designed weapons systems such as those the Ukrainians are developing based on necessity.
Ukrainians Are Cutting Open U.S. Cluster Shells To Make Drone Munitions
Cluster shells offers a source of ideal ammunition for Ukrainian drones, but they are also badly needed for their traditional application.
BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK
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PUBLISHED AUG 24, 2023 7:59 PM EDT
thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · August 24, 2023
Ukrainians are now breaking down some of the U.S.-made cluster munition artillery shells they've recently received to repurpose the submunition bomblets they carry as improvised weapons to be air-dropped from small drones.
Ukraine had been trying to acquire and repurpose air-dropped U.S. cluster munitions to bolster and increase the effectiveness of their stocks of small munitions for drones. Dropping improvised bomblets from often off-the-shelf drones has been a hugely successful tactic for Ukrainian forces. At the same time, 155mm artillery rounds are in extremely high demand in Ukraine for use as designed.
Video footage of Ukrainian forces cutting apart an M483A1 155mm artillery shell, which is loaded with so-called Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM) submunitions, recently emerged on social media. It is unclear where or when it was shot, but some of the watermarks indicate that it shows personnel from a relatively well-known drone unit, nicknamed "Achilles," assigned to the Ukrainain Army's 92nd Mechanized Brigade.
Ukraine's military began receiving M483A1 and M864 155mm DPICM artillery rounds from the United States in July. You can read more about these munitions in detail and why Ukrainian officials had been asking repeatedly for them here.
There are multiple different types of DPICM submunitions, also referred to officially as grenades, but they are all similar in form and function. Each one consists of a main body that contains a shaped charge intended to defeat armor – up to 2.75 inches of penetration against homogenous steel armor plate in the case of the grenades in the M483A1 – surrounded by a casing that is designed to send lethal fragments flying out in all directions. This combination of armor-piercing capability and the effects the fragments can have on unarmored targets is why the submunitions are referred to as dual-purpose.
The video from Ukraine shows individuals using an angle grinder to first saw off the front of the M483A1, before extracting the individual M42 and M46 submunitions inside. Each one of these shells contains 64 M42s and 24 M46s, or 88 in total. The main difference between the M42s and M46s is that the latter ones, which are found in the bottom rows in the shell, have a slightly heavier construction because of the increased force they experience during firing.
A graphic offering a general breakdown of the 155mm M483A1 DPICM shell. via GlobalSecurity.org
An M42/M46 submunition. CAT-UXO
The footage from Ukraine showing the process of converting the M42/M46s into bomblets that drones can drop then shows personnel manually arming the fuzes on the submunitions by twisting a tassel-like piece of cloth on top of each one. When employed in the typical manner, this component would both arm the submunition and help stabilize it. When armed, the fuze just relies on momentum to send a firing pin into a detonator, which sets off the main charge.
A screen capture showing an M42/M46 submunition being armed as part of the process of turning it into an improvised munition that can be dropped from a drone. capture via Twitter
A graphic showing various features of M42/M46 submunitions in their unarmed state. DOD
After arming the DPICM submunitions, the Ukrainians insert a small piece of metal to prevent them from detonating accidentally while they are being loaded onto a drone. This tab is then removed, making the grenades live once again. In principle, they should function as they would otherwise when dropped in this manner from a sufficient height.
A screen capture showing M42/M46 submunitions loaded onto a drone. The temporary safety tab used in this conversion process is being removed from the one on the right, but is still visible in place on the one on the left. capture via Twitter
It is worth noting immediately that this process raises a number of safety concerns throughout, starting just with the act of disassembling a live artillery shell lying on the ground with a hand-held commercial power tool. In addition, the fuzes on DPICM submunitions are notoriously finicky and can be dangerously liable to go off if they are mishandled while armed. This is one of the key issues that critics of these munitions cite in their opposition to their use.
There is also a question about whether this is a good use of resources. It is true that reports emerged earlier this year that Ukrainian officials had been asking their American counterparts about the possibility of acquiring old Rockeye II cluster bombs for the purpose of pulling them apart to turn the bomblets inside into munitions for drones. You can read more about this here.
However, the Rockeyes would not be of interest to Ukrainian forces for use in their intended fashion. Unguided cluster bombs like these are designed to be dropped by aircraft flying more or less close to or directly over a target area, something Ukrainian pilots have been largely avoiding doing due to concerns about Russian air defenses.
This all cannot be said about artillery shells, and 155mm ones in particular, which are in such high demand in Ukraine that they are often rationed to units. In April, Oleksandra Ustinova, a member of Ukraine's parliament, told the AP that the country's armed forces were firing between 6,000 and 8,000 155mm shells every day.
Before U.S. officials announced they would be sending DIPCM shells to Ukraine in July, Ukrainian authorities and their advocates had been pushing to get them for months. This was because of the capabilities they offer and just to give Ukrainian forces another source of badly needed artillery ammunition. DIPCM rounds can provide particularly useful effects against dug-in enemies in trench networks and against large formations, including ones with armored vehicles, in the open, things that Ukrainian forces are regularly encountering as part of their ongoing counteroffensive.
There is the possibility that there was something wrong with the specific M483A1 shell seen in the recent video, which would have made it less of an issue to turn it into a source of drone munitions. Depending on the nature of any such issue with the round, this could add to the aforementioned safety concerns.
On the other hand, the total number of submunitions in just one DPICM round could make this a worthwhile repurposing these artillery shells, even if drone units are only getting a few shells. As already noted, a single M483A1 contains 88 M42/M46 submunitions. That's potentially up to 88 individual targets that drones can now engage, and more effectively, thanks to the contents of just one shell.
DPICM submunitions are already purpose-built to free-fall onto their targets and have built-in stabilization. As can be seen in the recent video, the M42/M46s require no real modification to turn them into weapons for drones. More work is necessary to allow other ammunition Ukrainian forces have been repurposing in this way, including 40mm grenades, to be effectively used as improvised air-dropped munitions.
The dual-purpose nature of DPICM submunitions gives them useful capabilities against exactly the kind of targets that Ukraine's drone units are going after, including armored vehicles and groups of Russian troops under limited cover or out in the open. That translates to added flexibility in the course of a single mission where different kinds of targets may suddenly emerge.
Ukrainian forces have been already making good use of a variety of weaponized commercial uncrewed aerial systems modified to drop improvised munitions or simply act as ad hoc kamikaze drones and smash directly into their targets. Even a relatively small payload, such as a repurposed DIPCM submunition, can be very effective against a variety of targets if employed precisely. So, there is certainly a need to make sure there is a steady supply of suitable munitions.
Altogether, whether DIPCM artillery shells become a more common improvised drone munition, or if demands will prevent this from becoming a more widespread occurrence, remains to be seen. How the U.S. will respond to this 'off label' use is also unknown at this time. What we do know is that these weapons are now being used in unconventional, albeit predictable ways.
Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com
thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · August 24, 2023
17. The Mercenary Always Loses
Excerpts:
Wagner has made the lives of Central Africans even worse in many ways, but it has also made CAR more stable. President Touadéra has been trying to extend his term in office, a move widely viewed as an attempt to appoint himself president for life. Russia and Wagner will be happy to have their compliant man in power. Wagner has its cut of the diamond business, and it is involved in other, smaller sectors that probably won’t do much to rescue CAR from its miseries. A Russian vodka is now sold in the country, Wa Na Wa. (Its label says “Made in the Central African Republic with Russian technology.” I recommend that you never drive, fly, eat, drink, inject, smoke, or sleep under anything matching this description.) Wagner mercenaries are alleged to have torched a rival French brewery in March. This sort of gangsterism characterized Russia in the ’90s. It has subsided in Russia. Now it is an export.
Russia is a poor country—not as poor as CAR or Sudan, but poor enough that it cannot hope to compete with Europe and America by leveraging its money or status. Prigozhin offered Putin a service that would allow Putin to dictate terms overseas and even develop a sphere of influence. The real puzzle in the life of Prigozhin, assuming it has ended, is why he thought he could develop a locus of power independent of Putin’s. The mercenary always loses power games like these, because any real success is its own guarantee of failure. If you succeed and get powerful, your boss ends your streak, to keep you from becoming a rival.
Putin appears to have let Prigozhin survive long enough to shake the hands of a few leaders, and tell them that the failed mutiny in Russia would not mean an end to Russia’s relationship with Africa. I wonder if the Kremlin assigned some new employee to shadow Prigozhin in those meetings, write down the password to Wagner’s Yahoo Mail account, and figure out how to get check-signing privileges from Olga in payroll. Yesterday, that youngster probably flew commercial.
The Mercenary Always Loses
Any real success is its own guarantee of failure.
By Graeme Wood
The Atlantic · by Graeme Wood · August 24, 2023
In 2019, a Russian foreign-policy hand told me that his country had intervened in Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad for reasons that were, he said, “pedagogical.” Putin had watched the Bush and Obama administrations insert themselves into Iraq, Libya, and Syria, leaving messes in each. Now he would teach America how to intervene right: swiftly, decisively, and without sermonizing about “democracy,” “human rights,” and suchlike twaddle. The chief instructor in this master class would be Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s cook”—not for some cool James Bond–like reason, such as a preference for sharp throwing knives or an ability to make a mean polonium soufflé, but because before Prigozhin headed Putin’s paramilitary Wagner Group, he ran an actual catering business.
Prigozhin appears to have been fired from that teaching job. Yesterday his private jet went down north of Moscow, and Russian authorities assure us that Prigozhin was on it. That he was still available to die under these circumstances was a minor miracle of survival: In June, he led the most significant coup attempt against a Russian leader since the end of the Cold War. It was generally assumed that Putin would kill him. Instead Prigozhin remained alive and unpoisoned—and, most amazing, still active in the Wagner Group’s core mercenary business in Africa.
Many who have been laid off from more banal jobs have experienced an unsettling moment, when they realize that the youngster whom management has sent to shadow them is in fact their replacement. I suspect that the past two months have been just such a period of managerial judo by Putin. Wagner has not been fighting much in Ukraine for months, but in Africa, its work has been an indispensable element of Russian policy. And Putin saw fit to keep this dead man walking, long enough to ensure that Wagner can continue its deals.
Anne Applebaum: Prigozhin’s death heralds more spectacular violence
In the days before his death, Prigozhin posted a video from what was likely Mali, one of the four countries where Wagner is a major player. In Libya, Prigozhin’s men have supported the warlord Khalifa Haftar, and in Sudan, they have buttressed the forces of government warlords and run mining and energy camps.
But Wagner’s main prize is the Central African Republic (CAR). Last month, when it seemed that Prigozhin had been sidelined, one of the first signs that he was not yet gulagged was his public appearance at the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg. The gathering was intended to announce a whole series of Russian initiatives in Africa. A photograph showed Prigozhin shaking the hand of a senior aide to CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra. In CAR, the deal Wagner and Russia have offered is straightforward: We get your diamonds and other natural resources, and in return we will secure your rule by whatever violent means are necessary, using our mercenary army. CAR must fully enter the Russian orbit. Tell France (the country’s colonial patron) and the United States to pound sand. Vote as Russia suggests at the United Nations.
By now, Wagner reportedly has more than 1,000 soldiers in CAR. I reported there in the 2000s and early 2010s, before Wagner. The country is a “republic” in name, but only because there isn’t a word for a system of government based on a carousel of violent, pointless coups. The Wagner Group doesn’t care about Central Africans, but neither does anyone else who has intervened in or exploited the country. The place has been miserable for decades and was deteriorating before Wagner arrived.
Wagner has made the lives of Central Africans even worse in many ways, but it has also made CAR more stable. President Touadéra has been trying to extend his term in office, a move widely viewed as an attempt to appoint himself president for life. Russia and Wagner will be happy to have their compliant man in power. Wagner has its cut of the diamond business, and it is involved in other, smaller sectors that probably won’t do much to rescue CAR from its miseries. A Russian vodka is now sold in the country, Wa Na Wa. (Its label says “Made in the Central African Republic with Russian technology.” I recommend that you never drive, fly, eat, drink, inject, smoke, or sleep under anything matching this description.) Wagner mercenaries are alleged to have torched a rival French brewery in March. This sort of gangsterism characterized Russia in the ’90s. It has subsided in Russia. Now it is an export.
Russia is a poor country—not as poor as CAR or Sudan, but poor enough that it cannot hope to compete with Europe and America by leveraging its money or status. Prigozhin offered Putin a service that would allow Putin to dictate terms overseas and even develop a sphere of influence. The real puzzle in the life of Prigozhin, assuming it has ended, is why he thought he could develop a locus of power independent of Putin’s. The mercenary always loses power games like these, because any real success is its own guarantee of failure. If you succeed and get powerful, your boss ends your streak, to keep you from becoming a rival.
Putin appears to have let Prigozhin survive long enough to shake the hands of a few leaders, and tell them that the failed mutiny in Russia would not mean an end to Russia’s relationship with Africa. I wonder if the Kremlin assigned some new employee to shadow Prigozhin in those meetings, write down the password to Wagner’s Yahoo Mail account, and figure out how to get check-signing privileges from Olga in payroll. Yesterday, that youngster probably flew commercial.
The Atlantic · by Graeme Wood · August 24, 2023
18. The Dangers of Broken Trust Between Military and Elected Officials
Conclusion:
The bigger issue, however, is the apparent erosion of trust between members of the military and some elected officials. Those tensions surrounding the abortion policy are sharpening the differences between the military’s priorities and political one-upmanship. Drawing the military into political disputes represents a conscientious tactic to skirt a disagreeable legislative impasse with military compliance to a debatable directive from Defense Secretary Austin. So, the open question is whether a broken political-military trust can ever be mended.
The Dangers of Broken Trust Between Military and Elected Officials
Published 08/24/23 09:00 AM ET
Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Kenneth R. Israel
themessenger.com · August 24, 2023
There is a saying: Trust people until they prove they cannot be trusted. In America, we seem to be at the proverbial “fork in the road” regarding broken trust between the U.S. military and our politicians. It can be complex to create mutual, enduring trust between our elected officials and members of the armed forces. The soldier-statesman construct appears to be slipping away, in many respects, overtaken by time and circumstances.
The memories of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy may belong to a forgotten era. In some of today’s situations, the contrast between military professionals and active politicians is so bold — almost as if they belonged to a different time and place. Perhaps the easiest example I know of is Winston Churchill, who literally acted as the United Kingdom’s prime minister and minister for defense during World War II. Churchill possessed rare military operational experience and a sharp political sense of reality, to steer the West toward a brighter, stronger future during his five years as Great Britain’s wartime leader.
In the United States, there have been vivid examples of military personalities and political realities clashing. In 1951, for example, President Harry Truman famously relieved Gen. Douglas MacArthur of duty because of their differing approach to Communist North Korea. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary, Dick Cheney, fired Gen. Michael Dugan over remarks he made about Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and his family.
More recently, in 2010, President Barack Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal because he and aides were quoted making critical comments about the president and senior administration officials regarding troop deployments in Afghanistan. In 2018, President Donald Trump ousted Gen. (Ret.) John Kelly as White House chief of staff and accepted the resignation of Gen. (Ret.) James Mattis as secretary of defense because of policy differences. In 2020, Gen. (Ret.) Michael Hayden and 50 other senior intelligence officers crossed into political controversy by signing a letter saying that they believed emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop were the result of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Then, in 2021, President Biden overrode his senior military advisers’ recommendations and ordered the pullout of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Therefore, the trend lately appears to be for politicians to interfere with or attempt to use the military for political advantage — at the expense of the time-honored tradition of the military remaining apolitical and neutral on all divisive political issues.
The reason for this recent change — infusing political calculations into military good order and discipline — is clear: Americans are divided on cultural issues and the “woke” politics that has dominated under Democrats. Some political operatives evidently see the military as one way to mitigate some of the criticisms of progressives’ agenda. The problem is that, rather than benefiting from sound military recommendations, elected officials appear more apt to compromise the general respect that civilians have had for the heretofore neutral military institution.
As a consequence, perhaps, confidence in the military is at an all-time low, and one metric may reflect this dissatisfaction: Recruiting goals for the military are abysmal. In 2022, the Army experienced its worst recruiting year for over 50 years; not since the end of the draft in 1973 has the Army missed its recruiting goal by nearly 25%. And as some politicians use the military as a shield for promoting their culture changes, policy choices and value judgments, it is regrettable that Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin appear to be willing participants in the Biden administration’s partisan attempts to transform the military’s apolitical history.
President Biden has ignored the advice of Milley and Austin, unless it aligns with his progressive agenda. Examples include flip-flopping on the support the U.S. offers Ukraine, ordering the August 2021 troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, promoting social change in the military over its capabilities, and endorsing deficient annual budgets for the Department of Defense that do not keep pace with inflation. According to the Heritage Foundation’s recently released 2023 Index of US Military Strength, our overall military capability has fallen from “marginal” to “weak.” The president’s nominee to succeed Milley as Joint Chiefs chairman, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., made it clear during his confirmation hearing testimony that he supports Biden’s progressive policies and agenda.
As its summer recess is soon to end, one political “hot potato” looms over the 118th Congress: the issue of military promotions placed on hold by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) because of the Defense Department’s politically-charged policy toward abortion.
There are ways to overcome that hold. Option 1 is to withdraw the recently imposed Biden administration abortion policy. If the administration really thought promotions were important, they would withdraw the policy that resulted in Tuberville’s block. But the Biden team is not doing that, evidently because they view a larger political advantage accruing from making a Republican senator look like the bad guy. Option 2 is to approve promotions via regular order — that is, vote on each promotion separately. Option 3 is to change the promotion approval process, and a fourth option is to somehow convince Turberville to change his mind.
Yet there seems to be no rush to seek a resolution, as long as one party or the other sees an advantage to keeping this issue before the public’s eye. But using the military as a substitute for hammering out political differences is not in the best interest of this country. Our leaders need the political will to resolve this issue where it rightfully belongs: in the House and Senate chambers.
The bigger issue, however, is the apparent erosion of trust between members of the military and some elected officials. Those tensions surrounding the abortion policy are sharpening the differences between the military’s priorities and political one-upmanship. Drawing the military into political disputes represents a conscientious tactic to skirt a disagreeable legislative impasse with military compliance to a debatable directive from Defense Secretary Austin. So, the open question is whether a broken political-military trust can ever be mended.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Kenneth R. Israel is a veteran of the Vietnam War and former director of the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO).
themessenger.com · August 24, 2023
19. Russia Crushes Drone Swarm Over Crimea One Day After Commando Raid
Russia Crushes Drone Swarm Over Crimea One Day After Commando Raid
Special forces hoisted the Ukrainian flag on Russian-occupied Crimea during a brief incursion
Published 08/25/23 07:10 AM ET|Updated 60 min ago
Dan Morrison
themessenger.com · August 25, 2023
Moscow said it downed a swarm of 42 attack drones over Crimea early Friday, one day after Ukrainian commandos made an unusual raid on Russian forces on the occupied peninsula.
“Tonight, an attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out terrorist attacks by aircraft-type unmanned aerial vehicles on the territory of the Russian Federation was thwarted,” Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement.
Nine of the drones were shot down, the ministry said, while 33 crashed into the Black Sea under electronic jamming.
“According to preliminary data, several UAVs were destroyed over the sea,” Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol said on Telegram.
The drone wave came a day after Ukrainian naval commandos on fast boats launched another unusual attack on Russian troops on a three-mile stretch of beach on Crimea’s westernmost stretch and hoisted the Ukrainian flag on a length of clothesline, Ukraine’s military intelligence reported.
“Special units on watercraft landed on the shore in the area of Olenivka and Mayak settlements,” the statement said. “Ukrainian defenders engaged in combat with the units of the occupier. As a result, the enemy suffered losses among personnel, enemy equipment was destroyed.”
The raid took place in Ukraine's independence day. Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, and later illegally annexed the Ukrainian region.
A video clip released by the military showed a boat skipping over the waves in darkness, followed by dim footage of soldiers hanging a Ukrainian flag against a cinderblock wall. The special forces “left the scene without casualties.”
Russian media claimed that the raiders had attacked a campsite and that their boats had been destroyed.
Ukrainian reports suggested the raiders targeted air defense systems, one night before Kyiv’s drone wave was repulsed.
themessenger.com · August 25, 2023
20. The Price of Fragmentation – Why the Global Economy Isn’t Ready for the Shocks Ahead
Excerpts:
Finally, the IMF cannot be truly effective in today’s fragmented world unless it continues to deepen its ties with other international organizations, including the World Bank, other multilateral development banks such as the African Development Bank, and institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements and the World Trade Organization. All those international financial institutions must join forces to foster international cooperation on the most pressing challenges facing the world.
In 1944, the 44 men (and zero women) who signed the Bretton Woods agreement sat at one table in a modestly sized room. The small number of players was an advantage, as was the fact that most of the countries represented were allies fighting together in World War II. Today, finding consensus among 190 members is much more difficult, especially as trust among different groups of countries is eroding and faith in the ability to pursue the common good is at an all-time low. Yet the world’s people deserve a chance at pursuing peace, prosperity, and life on a livable planet.
For nearly 80 years, the world has responded to major economic challenges through a system of rules, shared principles, and institutions, including those rooted in the Bretton Woods system. Now that the world has entered a new era of increasing fragmentation, international institutions are even more vital for bringing countries together and solving the big global challenges of today. But without enhanced support from higher-income countries and a renewed commitment to collaboration, the IMF and other international institutions will struggle.
The period of rapid globalization and integration has come to an end, and the forces of protectionism are on the rise. Perhaps the only thing certain about this fragile, fragmented new global economy is that it will face shocks. The IMF, other international institutions, creditors, and borrowers must all adapt and prepare. It’s going to be a bumpy ride; the international financial system needs to buckle up.
The Price of Fragmentation
Why the Global Economy Isn’t Ready for the Shocks Ahead
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/price-fragmentation-global-economy-shock
September/October 2023
Published on August 22, 2023
We are living through turbulent times, in a world that has become richer but also more fragile. Russia’s war in Ukraine has painfully demonstrated that we cannot take peace for granted. A deadly pandemic and climate disasters remind us how brittle life is against the force of nature. Major technological transformations such as artificial intelligence hold promise for future growth but also carry significant risks.
Collaboration among nations is critical in a more uncertain and shock-prone world. Yet international cooperation is in retreat. In its place, the world is witnessing the rise of fragmentation: a process that begins with increasing barriers to trade and investment and, in its extreme form, ends with countries’ breaking into rival economic blocs—an outcome that risks reversing the transformative gains that global economic integration has produced.
A number of powerful forces are driving fragmentation. With deepening geopolitical tensions, national security considerations loom large for policymakers and companies, which tends to make them wary of sharing technology or integrating supply chains. Meanwhile, although the global economic integration that has taken place in the past three decades has helped billions of people become wealthier, healthier, and more productive, it has also led to job losses in some sectors and contributed to rising inequality. That in turn has fueled social tensions, creating fertile ground for protectionism and adding to pressures to shift production back home.
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Fragmentation is costly even in normal times and makes it nearly impossible to manage the tremendous global challenges that the world now faces: war, climate change, pandemics. But policymakers everywhere are nevertheless pursuing measures that lead to further fragmentation. Although some of these policies can be justified by the need to ensure the resilience of supply chains, other measures are driven more by self-interest and protectionism, which in the long term will put the world economy in a precarious position.
The costs of fragmentation could not be clearer: as trade falls and barriers rise, global growth will take a severe hit. According to the latest International Monetary Fund projections, annual global GDP growth in 2028 will be only three percent—the IMF’s lowest five-year-ahead forecast in the past three decades, which spells trouble for poverty reduction and for creating jobs among burgeoning populations of young people in developing countries. Fragmentation risks making this already weak economic picture even worse. As growth falls, opportunities vanish, and tension builds, the world—already divided by geopolitical rivalries—could splinter further into competing economic blocs.
Policymakers everywhere recognize that protectionism and decoupling come at a cost. And high-level engagements between the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China, aim to reduce the risks of further disintegration. But broadly speaking, when it comes to trying to turn back the tide of fragmentation, there is a troubling lack of urgency. Another pandemic could once again push the world into global economic crisis. Military conflict, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere, could again exacerbate food insecurity, disrupt energy and commodity markets, and rupture supply chains. Another severe drought or flood could turn millions more people into climate refugees. Nonetheless, despite widespread recognition of these risks, governments and the private sector alike have been unable or unwilling to act.
A more shock-prone world means that economies will need to become much more resilient—not just individually but also collectively. Getting there will require a deliberate approach to cooperation. The international community, supported by institutions such as the IMF, should work together in a systematic and pragmatic manner, pursuing targeted progress where common ground exists and maintaining collaboration in areas where inaction would be devastating. Policymakers need to focus on the issues that matter most not only to the wealth of nations but also to the economic well-being of ordinary people. They must nurture the bonds of trust among countries wherever possible so they can quickly step up cooperation when the next major shock comes. That would benefit poorer and richer economies alike by supporting global growth and reducing the risk that instability will spread across borders. Even for the richest and most powerful countries, a fragmented world will be difficult to navigate, and cooperation will become not only a matter of solidarity but of self-interest, as well.
A FRAGILE WORLD
Two world wars in the twentieth century revealed that international cooperation is critical for peace and prosperity and that it requires a sound institutional foundation. Even as World War II was still raging, the Allies came together to create a multilateral architecture that would include the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions—the IMF and the World Bank—together with the precursor to the World Trade Organization. Each organization was entrusted with a special mandate to address the problems of the day requiring collective action.
What ultimately followed was an explosion of trade and integration that transformed the world, culminating in what came to be known as globalization. Integration had accelerated in previous historical eras, especially in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. But during the world wars and the interwar period, it had sharply retreated, and in the immediate postwar era, the fragmentation of the Cold War threatened to prevent it from recovering. The international security and financial architecture the Allies built, however, allowed integration to come roaring back. Since then, that architecture has adapted to massive changes. The number of countries in the world has grown from 99 in 1944 to nearly 200 today. In the same period, the earth’s population has more than tripled, from around 2.3 billion to around 8.0 billion, and global GDP has increased more than tenfold. All the while, the expansion of trade in an increasingly integrated global economy has delivered substantial benefits in terms of growth and poverty reduction.
These gains are now at risk. After the 2008 global financial crisis, a period of “slowbalization” began, as growth became uneven and countries began imposing barriers to trade. Convergence in living standards within and across countries has stalled. And since the pandemic began, low-income countries have seen a collapse in their per capita GDP growth rates, which have fallen by more than half, from an average of 3.1 percent annually in the 15 years before the pandemic to 1.4 percent since 2020. The decline has been much more modest in rich countries, where per capita GDP growth rates have fallen from 1.2 percent in the 15 pre-pandemic years to 1.0 percent since 2020. Rising inequality is fostering political instability and undermining the prospects for future growth, especially for vulnerable economies and poorer people. The existential threat of climate change is aggravating existing vulnerabilities and introducing new shocks. Vulnerable countries are running out of buffers, and rising indebtedness is putting economic sustainability at risk.
In a more fragile world, countries (or blocs of countries) may be tempted to define their interests narrowly and retreat from cooperation. But many countries lack the technology, financial resources, and capacity to successfully contend with economic shocks on their own—and their failure to do so will harm not only the well-being of their own citizens but also that of people elsewhere. And in a less secure world with weaker growth prospects, the risk of fragmentation only grows, potentially creating a vicious downward spiral.
Should this happen, the costs will be prohibitively high. Over the long term, trade fragmentation—that is, increasing restrictions on the trade in goods and services across countries—could reduce global GDP by up to seven percent, or $7.4 trillion in today’s dollars, the equivalent of the combined GDPs of France and Germany and more than three times the size of the entire sub-Saharan African economy. That is why policymakers should reconsider their newfound embrace of trade barriers, which have proliferated at a rapid clip in recent years: in 2019, countries imposed fewer than 1,000 restrictions on trade; in 2022, that number skyrocketed to almost 3,000.
As protectionism spreads, the costs of technological decoupling—that is, restrictions on the flow of high-tech goods, services, and knowledge across countries—would only add to the misery, reducing the GDPs of some countries by up to 12 percent over the long term. Fragmentation can also lead to severe disruption in commodity markets and create food and energy insecurity: for example, Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian wheat exports was a key driver behind the sudden 37 percent increase in global wheat prices in the spring of 2022. This drove inflation in the prices of other food items and exacerbated food insecurity, notably in low-income countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Finally, the fragmentation of capital flows, which would see investors and countries diverting investments and financial transactions to like-minded countries, would constitute another blow to global growth. The combined losses from all facets of fragmentation may be hard to quantify, but it is clear that they all point to lower growth in productivity and in turn to lower living standards, more poverty, and less investment in health, education, and infrastructure. Global economic resilience and prosperity will depend on the survival of economic integration.
A GLOBAL SAFETY NET
In a world with more frequent and severe shocks, countries have to find ways to cushion the adverse impacts on their economies and people. That will require building economic buffers in good times that can then be deployed in bad times. One such buffer is a country’s international reserves—that is, the foreign currency holdings of its central bank, which provide a readily available source of financing for countries when hit by shocks. In the aggregate, reserves have grown tremendously over the past two decades, on par with the expansion of the world economy and in response to financial crises. But those reserves are heavily concentrated in a relatively small group of economically stronger advanced and emerging market economies: just ten countries hold two-thirds of global reserves. In contrast, reserve holdings in most other countries remain modest, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Latin America, oil-importing states in the Middle East, and small island states—which, taken together, account for less than one percent of global reserves. This uneven distribution of reserves means that many countries remain highly vulnerable.
No country should rely on its reserves alone, of course. Consider how a household, which cannot save enough money for every conceivable shock, purchases insurance for a home, a car, and health care. Similarly, countries are better off if they can complement their own reserves with access to various international insurance mechanisms that are collectively known as “the global financial safety net.” At the center of the net is the IMF, which pools the resources of its membership and acts as a cooperative global lender of last resort. The net is buttressed by currency swap lines, through which central banks provide one another with liquidity backstops (typically to reduce financial stability risks), and by financing arrangements that allow countries within specific regions to pool resources that can be deployed if a crisis hits.
Protecting countries and their people against shocks contributes to stability beyond their borders: such protection is a global public good. A global safety net that pools international resources to provide liquidity to individual countries when they are struck by calamities is thus in the interest of individual countries and the world. The COVID-19 crisis provides a good example. With the pooled resources of the IMF, member countries received liquidity injections at an unprecedented speed and scale, helping them finance essential imports such as medicines, food, and energy. Since the pandemic, the IMF has approved over $300 billion in new financing for 96 countries, the broadest support ever over such a short period. Of this, over $140 billion has been provided since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to help the fund’s members address financing pressures, including those resulting from the war.
Although the global financial safety net helped manage the fallout from COVID and the effects of Russia’s invasion, it is sure to be tested again by the next big shock. With reserves unevenly distributed, there is a pressing need to expand the world’s pooled resources to insure vulnerable countries against severe shocks. The IMF’s nearly $1 trillion in lending capacity is now only a small part of the overall safety net. Although self-insurance through international reserves has sharply increased for some countries, pooled resources centered on the IMF have increased far less than self-insurance and have shrunk markedly relative to measures of global financial integration. That is why the international community must strengthen the global financial safety net, including by expanding the availability of pooled resources in the IMF.
DEALING WITH DEBT
Even if the global financial safety net is strengthened, some countries might exhaust their buffers in the face of global economic shocks and accumulate economic imbalances over time—notably, higher fiscal deficits and rising debt levels. Although debt is up everywhere, the problem is particularly acute for many vulnerable emerging-market and low-income countries as a result of recent economic jolts, rising interest rates, and, in some cases, policy errors on the part of governments. By the end of 2022, average debt levels in emerging-market countries had reached 58 percent of GDP, a significant increase from a decade earlier, when that figure stood at 42 percent. Average debt levels in low-income countries had increased even more sharply over that period, from 38 percent of GDP to 60 percent. About one-quarter of emerging-market countries’ bonds are now trading at spreads indicative of distress. And 25 years after the launch of a broad-based international debt relief initiative for poor countries, about 15 percent of low-income countries are now considered to be in debt distress, with another 40 percent at risk of ending up in that situation.
The costs of a full-blown debt crisis are most keenly felt by people in debtor countries. According to one analysis by the World Bank, on average, poverty levels spike by 30 percent after a country defaults on its external obligations and remain elevated for a decade, during which infant mortality rates rise on average by 13 percent and children face shorter life expectancies. Other countries are affected as well. Savers lose their wealth. Borrowers’ access to credit can become more limited.
To ensure debt sustainability in a world of more frequent climate and health calamities, individual countries and international organizations must do everything they can to prevent the unsustainable accumulation of debt in the first place—and failing that, to support the orderly restructuring of debt if it becomes necessary. If debt crises multiply, the gains that low-income countries have made in recent decades could quickly evaporate. To prevent that from happening, international institutions can help countries focus on economic reforms that would spur growth, improve the effectiveness of budgetary spending, enhance tax collection, and strengthen debt management.
Reducing the costs of debt crises means resolving them quickly. Doing so is not easy. The creditor landscape has changed significantly over the past several decades, with new official creditors such as China, India, and Saudi Arabia entering the scene and the variety of private creditors expanding dramatically. Quick and coordinated action by creditors requires mutual trust and understanding, but the increase in the number and type of creditors has made that more challenging, especially since some key creditors are divided along geopolitical lines.
The IMF’s financial model and policies need a refresh.
Consider the case of Zambia, Africa’s second-biggest copper producer. Over the past decade, it ramped up spending on public investment financed by debt, but economic growth failed to follow, and the country ran out of resources to meet its debt repayments, defaulting in 2020. Its official creditors took almost a year to agree to a deal to restructure billions of dollars of loans. This milestone required the mostly high-income group of creditors known as the Paris Club to cooperate with the new creditor countries. But the job will be fully complete only when private creditors also come forward and agree to a comparable deal with Zambia—work that is already underway.
Although reaching an agreement for Zambia took time, official creditors have been learning how to work together, in this case under a Common Framework established by the G-20. The technical discussions taking place through the new Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable—initiated in February 2023 by the IMF, the World Bank, and the G-20 under India’s presidency—are also helping build a deeper common understanding across a broader set of stakeholders, including the private sector and debtor countries. This development holds promise for highly indebted countries, such as Sri Lanka and Ghana, that still need the international community to decisively follow through on commitments to provide critical debt relief.
But creditors and international financial institutions must do more. Debtors should receive a clearer road map of what they can expect from creditors in the timing of key decisions. Creditors also need to find ways to more quickly clear hurdles to reaching consensus. For instance, earlier information sharing can help creditors and debtors resolve debt crises in a more cooperative fashion, with help from institutions such as the IMF. And if private creditors demonstrate that they can do their part and provide debt relief on terms comparable to those offered by official creditors, it will reassure the official creditors and give them the confidence to move faster.
International financial institutions and lenders must also develop mechanisms to insure countries against debt crises in the event of major shocks. Such mechanisms play a crucial role in ensuring that a liquidity crunch does not tip countries into more costly debt distress. One promising idea would be to take a contractual approach to commercial debt. This could involve including clauses in debt contracts that would automatically trigger a deferral of debt repayments if a country experienced a natural disaster such as a flood, drought, or earthquake.
Debtors must do their part, too, starting by being more proactive when it comes to risk mitigation, and better coordinating their debt management strategy with fiscal policy. Governments must also show a willingness to tackle the underlying policy mistakes at the heart of more fundamental debt challenges. For instance, Zambia’s strong commitment to undertaking necessary economic reforms, such as removing fuel subsidies that mostly benefited wealthier households, meant that the IMF could move forward with its own financial support and that official creditors were more willing to provide debt relief.
THE FIGHT AGAINST FRAGMENTATION
The IMF has long played a central role in the global economy. It is the only institution empowered by its 190 members to carry out regular and thorough “health checks” of their economies. It is a steward of macroeconomic and financial stability, a source of essential policy advice, and a lender of last resort, poised to help protect countries against crises and instability. In a world of more shocks and divisions, the fund’s universal membership and oversight are a tremendous asset.
But the IMF is just one actor in the global economy and just one among many important international financial institutions. And to keep up with the pace of change in a fragmenting world, the fund’s financial model and policies need a refresh. An important first step would be completing the 16th General Review of Quotas. The IMF’s quota resources—the financial contributions paid by each member—are the primary building blocks of the fund’s financial structure, which pools the resources of all its members. Each member of the IMF is assigned a quota based broadly on its relative position in the world economy, and the IMF regularly reviews its quota resources to make sure they are adequate to help its members cope with shocks. An increase in quotas would provide more permanent resources to support emerging and developing economies and reduce the fund’s reliance on temporary credit lines. It is essential that the IMF’s membership come together to bolster the institution’s quota resources by completing the review by the December 2023 deadline.
The IMF’s better-off members need to make a concerted effort to urgently replenish the financial resources of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust. The trust, which is administered by the IMF, has provided almost $30 billion in interest-free financing to 56 low-income countries since the onset of the pandemic, more than quadruple its historical levels. This funding is critical to ensure that the IMF can continue meeting the record demand for support from its poorest member countries. And to address the economic risks created by climate change and pandemics, the fund’s better-off members should also scale up their channeling of Special Drawing Rights (an IMF reserve asset, which it allocates to all its members) to more vulnerable countries through the fund’s newly created Resilience and Sustainability Trust.
The IMF must also continue working to enhance representation inside the organization. It is important that the fund reflect the economic realities of today’s world, not that of the last century. Decision-making at the fund requires a highly collaborative approach and inclusive governance. This would support more agility and adaptability in the IMF’s policies and financing instruments to better serve the needs of its members.
Reducing the costs of debt crises means resolving them quickly.
Finally, the IMF cannot be truly effective in today’s fragmented world unless it continues to deepen its ties with other international organizations, including the World Bank, other multilateral development banks such as the African Development Bank, and institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements and the World Trade Organization. All those international financial institutions must join forces to foster international cooperation on the most pressing challenges facing the world.
In 1944, the 44 men (and zero women) who signed the Bretton Woods agreement sat at one table in a modestly sized room. The small number of players was an advantage, as was the fact that most of the countries represented were allies fighting together in World War II. Today, finding consensus among 190 members is much more difficult, especially as trust among different groups of countries is eroding and faith in the ability to pursue the common good is at an all-time low. Yet the world’s people deserve a chance at pursuing peace, prosperity, and life on a livable planet.
For nearly 80 years, the world has responded to major economic challenges through a system of rules, shared principles, and institutions, including those rooted in the Bretton Woods system. Now that the world has entered a new era of increasing fragmentation, international institutions are even more vital for bringing countries together and solving the big global challenges of today. But without enhanced support from higher-income countries and a renewed commitment to collaboration, the IMF and other international institutions will struggle.
The period of rapid globalization and integration has come to an end, and the forces of protectionism are on the rise. Perhaps the only thing certain about this fragile, fragmented new global economy is that it will face shocks. The IMF, other international institutions, creditors, and borrowers must all adapt and prepare. It’s going to be a bumpy ride; the international financial system needs to buckle up.
21. The Folly Of Merging The Indo-Pacific And Europe – Analysis
Folly? I do not think you can separate and compartment the security, economic, and diplomatic linkages that exist globally today.
Conclusion:
In the face of resource constraints and a shifting global landscape, America’s strategy of merging the Indo-Pacific and Europe into one interconnected theater presents significant risks. While the aim is to consolidate capabilities among allies and partners to counter the Russia-China axis and preserve the liberal international order, this approach fails to prioritize effectively between two distinct strategic theaters. The decline of America’s relative economic dominance further necessitates a reassessment of strategic priorities and avoiding excessive commitments that strain limited resources. Moreover, pivotal states such as India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Indonesia reject the notion of treating Europe and the Indo-Pacific as a unified geopolitical stage, asserting the importance of prioritizing their own regional and economic interests. In Europe, the war in Ukraine reaffirmed the United States as Europe’s security guarantor, but obtaining firmer security commitments from Western European allies is vital to America’s global posture. Reinforcing European security amplifies US efforts in the Indo-Pacific. And this is the right approach for the United States to make strategic decisions that maintain its global standing in the emerging multipolar order.
The Folly Of Merging The Indo-Pacific And Europe – Analysis
eurasiareview.com · by Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute · August 24, 2023
By Mohammed Soliman
(FPRI) — In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has embarked upon an ambitious endeavor: containing its two most powerful rivals, China and Russia, at the same time. Central to this strategy is the imperative of garnering the support and cooperation of allies and partners in Eurasia, as the underlying calculus driving this framework is predicated on Washington’s growing perception of Europe and the Indo-Pacific as interconnected and interdependent geopolitical theaters, or in other words, one geopolitical theater. The objective is to bring together the political, military, economic, and technological capabilities of America’s European and Asian allies with the aim of deterring China and Russia from undermining the liberal international order and tilting the geopolitical balance of power against the collective West.
Viewing Europe and the Indo-Pacific as a single strategic theater presents potential risks to Washington’s global standing. Merging the European and Indo-Pacific theaters would be a strategic mistake, as it diverts resources from allies who could be better utilized in their respective regions. This approach reflects the policy, intellectual, and bureaucratic challenge of prioritizing between Asia and Europe, especially considering America’s finite resources and the ongoing shift of global power towards Asia. Pivotal states like India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, and others oppose aligning fully with the United States under this approach, as it forces them to side with Washington when they would prefer to maintain their freedom of action. In due course, US strategy should shift toward prioritizing Asia by reinforcing Western Europe’s defense commitment for its Eastern flank. This step is vital to boost US global efforts, especially in the Indo-Pacific, given America’s resource limitations.
America’s Strategic Scarcity
In economic and budgetary terms, the United States cannot afford to treat Europe and the Indo-Pacific as a single geopolitical theater. America is no longer the world’s hegemon. During the height of the Cold War, the United States held a substantial economic advantage on the world stage by contributing 27 percent to the global gross domestic product (GDP), surpassing the combined share of the Soviet Union and China at 14 percent. Although GDP alone may not provide a comprehensive measure of economic strength, it remains a significant indicator nonetheless. However, the global landscape has since experienced a transformative hefty transformation. By 2020, the United States witnessed a relative decline, accounting for 16 percent of global GDP, while the combined economic clout of China and Russia surged to 22 percent.
America’s declining share of global GDP is paralleled by its waning strategic dominance. A recent RAND report titled, “Inflection Point: How to Reverse the Erosion of U.S. and Allied Military Power and Influence,” sheds light on a crucial aspect of this shift. It argues that the foundation of the US defense strategy in the post-Cold War period rested upon military forces that once held superiority across all domains compared to any potential adversary. However, this superiority has dissipated over time, as the United States and its allies no longer possess an exclusive hold on the technologies and capabilities that once granted them an overwhelming advantage against adversarial forces.
The Pentagon’s recent assurance that supporting Taiwan will not impinge on Ukraine’s supplies is hardly convincing, given the prevailing reality that both nations are deeply engaged in a fierce competition for American backing and resources. Taiwan and Ukraine are direct rivals competing for access to the very same types of Western armaments. To further exacerbate matters, Taiwan’s onerous backlog of orders, surpassing a colossal $14 billion, encompasses critical contracts for indispensable weaponry, notably the Javelin missiles and Stingers—weapons that have already been abundantly supplied to Ukraine.
The profound shift in economic and military dynamics calls for a prudent reassessment of America’s strategic priorities. It highlights the acute complexities of American military assistance to Taiwan and Ukraine, which in turn demands astute management to navigate this delicate and volatile geopolitical landscape. As nations vie for American support and compete for the same types of weapons, a careful approach is essential to avoid excessive commitments that might strain limited resources and jeopardize the nation’s standing on the global stage.
The Primacy Trap
The United States seeks to instill a shared sense of purpose among its allies and partners, urging them to adopt a unified stance in dealing with the challenges posed by China and Russia. President Joe Biden, during his recent diplomatic visits to Japan and Australia, engaged in high-level consultations with these key allies, focused not only on their ongoing response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, but also on formulating comprehensive strategies to effectively counter China’s increasingly assertive economic and military maneuvers in the Indo-Pacific.
However, treating Europe and the Indo-Pacific as a singular, interconnected strategic theater poses a substantial threat to the global position of Washington in the emerging multipolar world order. This one interconnected theater strategy reflects America’s effort to evade an unavoidable choice: prioritizing one strategic theater over the other based on shifting priorities and resource constraints. During both the Trump and Biden administrations, the United States shifted its focus to a single major war concept as a response to resource limitations. However, the foreign policy community in Washington continued to advocate for a two-theater approach and dismissed any discussions about prioritizing strategic theaters as accusations of isolationism.
The True Nature of NATO’s Indo-Pacific Engagement
In June 2022, a notable event took place during the NATO summit in Madrid. The leaders of four Indo-Pacific partner nations—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and Korea—joined their NATO counterparts. This raises questions about the rationale behind connecting Europe to the Indo-Pacific. The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July 2023 marked another meeting between these leaders.
What drives NATO’s interest in reaching out to countries situated so far from Europe? What are the underlying reasons for establishing strategic and military ties between these seemingly distant regions?
While acknowledging that the world faces complex security challenges that extend beyond regional boundaries, it remains essential to understand the motives behind forging such connections. Issues such as Russia’s actions in Ukraine and China’s growing assertiveness certainly contribute to the need for cooperation, but it is vital to assess whether this expansion truly serves the interests of all parties involved.
Moreover, it is worth considering the potential unintended consequences of linking NATO and the Indo-Pacific. Could this move create tensions in Asia or entangle European countries in conflicts outside their traditional sphere of influence? Considering the limitations of resources, it is reasonable to question whether NATO should prioritize closer-to-home issues over stretching its focus across continents. Emerging challenges in cyber, space, and disruptive technologies also demand attention, but the alliance must carefully weigh the implications of extending its cooperation beyond Europe.
The response to these pertinent questions emerged from Tokyo, where a senior Japanese official revealed that NATO’s engagement with Indo-Pacific partners, including Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan, serves a fundamental purpose: safeguarding an enduring and steadfast American commitment to Europe. The concerns of European NATO members regarding the potential shift of US focus to Asia are genuine, as they earnestly desire to avert such a scenario. In order to address this apprehension, bolstering partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region assumes critical significance. This approach allows the United States, from a European perspective, to deftly strike a balance between its attentiveness to Europe and Asia, thereby effectively protecting Europe’s vital interests.
The case for a tighter link between NATO and the Indo-Pacific is not very compelling. It seems that some Europeans may merely be paying lip service to the demands of Washington, given its support for Ukraine. The strategic intent of this concept in Europe may not be as clear-eyed as it appears. Perhaps, instead of binding itself to Europe, the United States should prioritize its much-needed pivot to Asia. This would necessitate a careful assessment of the implications and validity of forging such connections between these distant regions.
Pivotal States Reject the One Strategic Theater Approach
Currently, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, and many European countries align themselves with the US-led alliance to dually contain the Russia-China axis. The strategic manifestation of this approach is the geopolitical merging of the Indo-Pacific and Europe. From the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to the G20, pivotal states, such as India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, and others, actively reject considering Europe and the Indo-Pacific as a unified geopolitical stage. Swingstates play a major role at the emerging multipolar world order with their pivotal position in global supply chains, significant capital deployment, high-growth economies, robust military postures, and a commitment to preventing a resurgence of a bipolar structure that might jeopardize their economic and military objectives. Their viewpoint was exemplified by India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar during the 17th edition of the GLOBSEC Bratislava Forum in Slovakia. In response to a question about India’s position in the current US-China rivalry, he said, “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” He furthermore stated, “There is currently a connection being drawn between China, India, and the events unfolding in Ukraine. However, it is important to recognize that the circumstances involving China and India existed long before the situation in Ukraine arose.”
Asia-First Strategy
The evolving global landscape prompts a timely reevaluation of America’s role in Europe. Shifting priorities towards Asia raises questions about the extent of the US presence in Europe. Simultaneously addressing potential conflicts in both Asia and Europe necessitates astute resource management to avoid overextension of limited US resources. Enhancing European defense capabilities emerges as a cornerstone of US grand strategy, enabling Europe to contribute more effectively to its security while freeing vital resources for critical needs in Asia, and more importantly, it gives a firm a message to pivotal states that the United States doesn’t treat the Indo-Pacific and Europe as an interconnected theater.
Despite the ongoing Ukraine War, Western Europe still lacks adequate defense for its eastern NATO borders. European allies’ commitments to bolster eastern defenses have largely remained unfulfilled. With the addition of several hundred troops, the presence of Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands in NATO’s eastern region has been strengthened. However, Western European troop increases in the East pale next to the United States’ efforts. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has added 20,000 troops to its presence in Europe and bolstered air, land, maritime, cyber, and space capabilities, with over 100,000 service members now stationed in Europe overall.
The Ukraine War has firmly reasserted the undeniable reality that the United States is the indispensable security guarantor of Europe. However, this position, born from the lack of stronger European resolve, affects the broader global standing of the United States in terms of resources and force posture. Therefore, obtaining more solid security commitments from Western European allies for Eastern Europe’s flank is crucial to rectifying this imbalance in America’s global stance. In simpler terms, fostering self-reliant European security ultimately bolsters US efforts in the Indo-Pacific.
Conclusion
In the face of resource constraints and a shifting global landscape, America’s strategy of merging the Indo-Pacific and Europe into one interconnected theater presents significant risks. While the aim is to consolidate capabilities among allies and partners to counter the Russia-China axis and preserve the liberal international order, this approach fails to prioritize effectively between two distinct strategic theaters. The decline of America’s relative economic dominance further necessitates a reassessment of strategic priorities and avoiding excessive commitments that strain limited resources. Moreover, pivotal states such as India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Indonesia reject the notion of treating Europe and the Indo-Pacific as a unified geopolitical stage, asserting the importance of prioritizing their own regional and economic interests. In Europe, the war in Ukraine reaffirmed the United States as Europe’s security guarantor, but obtaining firmer security commitments from Western European allies is vital to America’s global posture. Reinforcing European security amplifies US efforts in the Indo-Pacific. And this is the right approach for the United States to make strategic decisions that maintain its global standing in the emerging multipolar order.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.
About the author: Mohammed Soliman is the Director of the Strategic Technologies and Cyber Security Program at the Middle East Institute. You can find him on Twitter at @Thisissoliman.
Source: This article was published by FPRI
eurasiareview.com · by Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute · August 24, 2023
22. Putin’s Night of the Long Knives
Or the "flight" of the ling knives.
Putin’s Night of the Long Knives
The Russian president’s role in Wednesday’s fatal plane crash is not entirely clear, but the day’s events were reminiscent of Hitler’s 1934 purge.
James Risen
August 24 2023, 8:22 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2023/08/24/yevgeny-prigozhin-death-nazis/
People lay carnations on a memorial for Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in a plane crash, near the PMC Wagner Center in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Aug. 24, 2023. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
FOR TWO MONTHS after Yevgeny Prigozhin led a brief mutiny that threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hold on power, the mercenary boss traveled freely, attending to business in St. Petersburg and Moscow, as if all were forgotten and forgiven.
But on Wednesday, a very suspicious plane crash killed Prigozhin and decapitated his Wagner Group, the mercenary army that marched on Moscow in June under his command. Dmitry Utkin, Prigozhin’s right hand at Wagner, and Valery Chekalov, a close Prigozhin aide, died along with him as they flew from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The other passengers on the plane were also with Wagner.
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On the same day, Putin fired Gen. Sergei Surovikin, chief of the Russian Air Force and one of Prigozhin’s closest supporters in the military.
Although Putin’s role in the plane crash is not entirely clear, Wednesday’s events were reminiscent of the “Night of the Long Knives,” Adolf Hitler’s 1934 purge of the SA, a Nazi paramilitary organization also known as the Brownshirts that Hitler feared was becoming too powerful and too difficult to control.
Prigozhin was similar in many ways to Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA. An early and avid supporter during Putin’s rise to power in St. Petersburg, Prigozhin grew so close to him that he became known as Putin’s “chef.” Röhm, meanwhile, was one of Hitler’s earliest lieutenants and took part in the Nazi’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, a decade before Hitler gained power.
As Putin consolidated his power in Russia, Prigozhin gained wealth and influence, and his Wagner Group became a key component in Putin’s national security apparatus, increasing Russia’s military reach in the Middle East and Africa. Röhm’s SA also became a fearsome force, one that used brutal tactics against Hitler’s political enemies as Hitler rose to power.
After Hitler gained control over Germany, Röhm ascended as well, yet he also became more radicalized, which led him to become increasingly frustrated with Hitler. He began calling for a drastic transformation of German society and its economy, which angered the German industrialists Hitler wanted to appease. Röhm also sought to take control of the German army by merging it with the SA, thus threatening the status of the German officer corps.
Hitler finally moved against Röhm and the SA in June 1934, when the SA’s leaders were together at a hotel in Bavaria. SS troops loyal to Hitler arrested and executed the SA leaders, while Röhm was arrested and later shot in his jail cell.
Prigozhin’s power peaked over the past year and a half during the war in Ukraine, when the Wagner Group took a leading combat role. But eventually, Prigozhin, like Röhm, became radicalized, launching a series of public diatribes against the Russian military’s handling of the war. He soon found himself at odds with the Russian general staff, and that eventually led him to become a very public critic of the entire Putin regime. After months of vituperative criticism, he finally broke into open rebellion in June, when he led his Wagner forces from Ukraine back into Russia. Seizing control of Rostov-on-Don, a key military hub that served as the forward headquarters for Russian military operations in Ukraine, Prigozhin and his forces marched north toward the Russian capital, encountering little resistance.
But with Moscow in sight, Prigozhin froze and suddenly reversed himself. He agreed to a deal with Putin, arranged by Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, and turned his troops around, while Putin agreed to drop all charges against him for his mutiny.
If Prigozhin really believed that Putin would live up to that bargain, he was a fool who didn’t understand the history of dictators.
Although to be fair to Putin, he never did take Prigozhin to court.
Hitler never put Röhm on trial either.
23. The error of NATO’s ways in Asia
More negative press about the growing Asia-Europe security cooperation.
Excerpts:
As a step toward more substantial security relations, NATO was planning to open a liaison office in Tokyo — the first of its kind in Asia. But these plans have been shelved due to apprehensions that they might fuel tensions between NATO and China. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that such a move would be a “big mistake.”
Officially, NATO’s outreach to East Asia aims at enhancing cooperation on issues such as “maritime security, new technologies, cyber, climate change, and resilience.”
But in practice, the move is unmistakably an attempt to counter China, which NATO now openly regards as a “challenge [to] our interests, security and values.”
In his meeting with Kishida, Stoltenberg noted his concern about “China’s heavy military build-up” and “the modernization and expansion of its nuclear forces.” This must have been music to Kishida’s ears, for he has persistently strived to develop closer relations with NATO for precisely this reason.
But it is difficult to see how European security would benefit from an enlarged NATO military role in East Asia, which is certain to antagonize Beijing. Unsurprisingly, China has responded vociferously to NATO’s words and actions.
The error of NATO’s ways in Asia
NATO’s overreach to East Asia has unsurprisingly riled China and risks driving Beijing and Moscow even closer together militarily
By ULV HANSSEN And LINUS HAGSTROM
AUGUST 25, 2023
asiatimes.com · by Ulv Hanssen · August 25, 2023
NATO engagement in East Asia to counter China’s influence is a misguided and potentially dangerous strategy for the alliance’s European members. It is bound to increase tensions between China and NATO and risks binding China and Russia closer together.
A China containment strategy has no tangible benefits for European security and predominantly serves the interests of the United States, which is desperately trying to maintain its global hegemony.
While NATO is not currently looking to recruit new members in East Asia, it is forging strategic partnerships with “like-minded” states in the region.
Countries like Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are all in the process of transitioning from being NATO’s “global partners” to becoming members of a more tangible arrangement that NATO has labeled “Individually Tailored Partnership Programs.”
NATO’s strategic cooperation with Japan has increased in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the July 2023 NATO Leaders Summit in Lithuania, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg greeted Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, telling him that “no partner is closer than Japan.”
As a step toward more substantial security relations, NATO was planning to open a liaison office in Tokyo — the first of its kind in Asia. But these plans have been shelved due to apprehensions that they might fuel tensions between NATO and China. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that such a move would be a “big mistake.”
Officially, NATO’s outreach to East Asia aims at enhancing cooperation on issues such as “maritime security, new technologies, cyber, climate change, and resilience.”
But in practice, the move is unmistakably an attempt to counter China, which NATO now openly regards as a “challenge [to] our interests, security and values.”
In his meeting with Kishida, Stoltenberg noted his concern about “China’s heavy military build-up” and “the modernization and expansion of its nuclear forces.” This must have been music to Kishida’s ears, for he has persistently strived to develop closer relations with NATO for precisely this reason.
But it is difficult to see how European security would benefit from an enlarged NATO military role in East Asia, which is certain to antagonize Beijing. Unsurprisingly, China has responded vociferously to NATO’s words and actions.
Chinese troops under a Russian flag in a file photo. Image: RT
China fears that the United States’ largely unconnected alliances in the region will take on a more integrated and anti-Chinese character under the NATO umbrella. NATO has countered that its military presence is benign and defensive in nature.
NATO’s allegedly defensive intentions are unlikely to reassure Beijing. Virtually all international relations experts agree that it is impossible to correctly decipher other states’ intentions.
Without certainty of others’ intentions, states tend to raise their guard and take countermeasures. One does not have to be an international relations expert to predict that this could well happen in East Asia should NATO increase its military presence there.
NATO members often complain about Chinese attempts at changing the status quo, but they seem unable or unwilling to recognize that their own venture into East Asia constitutes a change of the status quo — something Beijing would feel compelled to respond to.
This dynamic of tit-for-tat escalation in the absence of certainty used to be common knowledge in the international relations community. It is often called the security dilemma.
If Chinese leaders perceive NATO engagement with East Asian countries as increasing the threat to China, they might also take precautions by increasing armaments and alliance building. One counterproductive effect on European security, for example, would arise if China moved even closer to Russia.
But after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, warnings about security dilemmas have often been dismissed as appeasement. If we accept the security dilemma logic, hawks contend, would we not also have to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s excuse that NATO enlargement forced him to invade Ukraine?
The answer is no. It is of course true that Russia’s invasion is illegal and unjustified. But it is also true that Moscow perceived NATO enlargement as threatening, although each new NATO member had purely defensive reasons for joining the alliance. Until recently, the latter point was not seen as a crazy appeasement argument.
A Ukrainian serviceman prepares to fire at Russian positions from a US-supplied howitzer. Photo: Screengrab / Euronews
Wars stir emotions. The Ukraine war has made Europeans blind to the dangerous consequences of geographically expanded engagement. While NATO’s enlargement in Eastern Europe was tightly connected to European security, deepened engagement in East Asia has zero rhyme or reason. It will only serve to antagonize China.
Despite China’s often problematic behavior, it does not pose a direct threat to Europe. In 2020, this was recognized even by the European Union foreign affairs chief. But such realism is hard to come by in post-invasion Europe. NATO’s East Asian ambitions unnecessarily risk turning China into an enemy of Europe.
When NATO strays so far “out of area” that it begins operating in East Asia, one has to question the benefits for European security. There seem to be few, if any. For the United States, NATO’s turn to East Asia is strategically significant.
Washington is seeking to maintain US global hegemony by binding together its loose alliance networks into a firmer coalition capable of containing a rising China. It seems clear that NATO’s new East Asia policy is primarily directed from Washington.
But Europe does not have to play the United States’ power games. As French President Macron correctly stated earlier in 2023, getting involved in such games would be “a trap for Europe.”
Ulv Hanssen is Associate Professor at Soka University.
Linus Hagstrom is Professor of Political Science and Deputy Head of the Department of Political Science at Law at the Swedish Defence University.
This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.
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asiatimes.com · by Ulv Hanssen · August 25, 2023
24. New ship named after legendary Navy SEAL and Alaska Native
New ship named after legendary Navy SEAL and Alaska Native
Solomon Atkinson, an Alaska Native, was one of the first 60 Navy SEALs in 1963. Now a new Navy ship will be named after him.
BY MATT WHITE | PUBLISHED AUG 24, 2023 3:48 PM EDT
taskandpurpose.com · by Matt White · August 24, 2023
A plankholder of the Navy SEAL teams, and one of the service’s most decorated Alaska Native sailors, will be remembered as the namesake of a new Navy ship.
The USNS Solomon Atkinson is scheduled to launch in 2025 as the service’s 12th Navajo-class Towing, Salvage, and Rescue ship, a series of tender boats that officials have named after notable Native American sailors.
Solomon Atkinson died in 2019 in his hometown of Metlakatla, Alaska. His casket told the tale of his life. The side was covered in a mural of Native Alaskan art, depicting animals and symbols of the fishing village of Metlakatla, in the state’s southeastern arm. Like many Tsimshian people in Metlakatla, Atkinson had been raised on commercial fishing and hunting.
On the lid, between two crosses, was the engraved trident of the Navy SEALs, in whose history Atkinson looms large.
Solomon Atkinson’s casket in 2019, commemorating both his Tsimshian heritage as an Alaska Native and his 22-year career as a Navy SEAL and plankholder for SEAL Team 1. (Laddie Shaw/courtesy photo).
“It was one summer when he was fishing near Seattle that he saw a recruitment poster for the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT),” said Atkinson’s wife, JoAnn, in a Navy press release. “He thought it looked cool and at that point decided he wanted to become a frogman.”
Navy SEAL plankholder
After qualifying for UDT duty, Atkinson became a “plankholder” at SEAL Team 1 as one of the first 60 sailors officially assigned as SEALs in 1962. Atkinson quickly became one of the elite unit’s earliest leaders, helping develop SEAL teams from their humble beginnings as little more than beach scouts into the feared commando teams of Vietnam.
As a SEAL, Atkinson deployed to Korea and served three combat tours in Vietnam. There he was awarded a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and a Navy Commendation Medal with Combat “V.”
He also spent time as a feared SEAL instructor for new recruits, earning the nickname “the Mean Machine”.
“He earned that nickname because he was in charge of [physical training] for new recruits,” said JoAnn. “Sol was always passionate in his career. He was your typical SEAL — work hard, play hard.”
Left, Solomon Atkinson early in his Navy career. He joined the Navy’s UDT teams and became one of the original 60 Navy SEALs. Right, Atkinson’s widow JoAnn smiles during a 2021 ceremony at Solomon’s name on a plaque at SEAL Team 1 that lists the unit’s original “plankholders.” (U.S. Navy).
He had to set aside the harsh techniques known to SEAL recruits for another training assignment. As the space race heated up, Atkinson worked with astronauts in specially constructed pools that simulated working in weightless environments. The astronauts he trained included Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Jim Lovell at the Underwater Swimmers School in Key West, Florida.
He retired from the Navy in 1973 as a Chief Warrant Officer 4.
“Sol did what he thought was best for his family, community, and country,” said JoAnn. “He did what any man would do—follow his heart and do his best.”
Days after retiring from the Navy in Little Creek, Virginia, Atkinson and his family drove their Ford Econoline van more than 3,500 miles back to Metlakatla. There he spent the next 40 years as a community leader and veteran’s advocate, including being elected mayor of Metlakatla.
Atkinson died in July 2019.
A final cruise
For Atkinson’s funeral in Metlakatla, SEAL Team 1 sent a team of pallbearers. Before the final burial, the SEALs sat with Atkinson’s handmade casket on the deck of a boat for a final honor, a cruise around the waters of Metlakatla with a dozen or so local fishing boats following, a farewell parade for a hero in a hometown with more boats than streets.
Earlier this month, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro announced that the 12th Navajo-class Towing, Salvage, and Rescue (T-ATS) ship would be named the USNS Solomon Atkinson. The ships are named for Native American sailors and Native American tribes. Nearly 25,000 Active, American Indian or Alaska Natives serve in the Navy.
taskandpurpose.com · by Matt White · August 24, 2023
25. Preparing for the next global pandemic: What a recent wargame teaches us
Preparing for the next global pandemic: What a recent wargame teaches us - Breaking Defense
Dan Mahaffee of the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress lays out lessons learned from a recent pandemic-related war game.
By DAN MAHAFFEE
breakingdefense.com · by Dan Mahaffee · August 24, 2023
Hospitalman Apprentice Abigail Garcia administers the COVID-19 vaccination to Mass Communications Specialist 1st Jesse Sharpe at the COVID vaccination site in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. (U.S. Navy Photo by HM3 Hunter Tactaquin.)
While the US public has largely moved past precautions for the COVID-19 coronavirus, the lessons learned since 2020 could be vital for preparing for a future global pandemic. In the op-ed below, Dan Mahaffee of the Center for the study of the Presidency & Congress makes the case that those lessons aren’t being paid enough attention to.
The world is not far removed from the COVID-19 pandemic that killed nearly seven million people worldwide and pulverized the global economy. With the pandemic less a daily threat, the focus has largely turned to questions about the source of the virus.
But while it is important to establish what went wrong on day one of the pandemic, we also need to remember what happened in the days after, and heed those hard lessons. After all, we cannot predict whether the next pandemic will begin as a lab leak, natural crossover or bioterror attack, but we can prepare our response.
The very fact that biosecurity and preparedness are not a regular part of today’s policy discussion should give us a moment of pause. Less than three years on from the COVID-19 pandemic, and just months since the World Health Organization officially declared the pandemic over, it’s clear that biosecurity is, once again, a low priority afterthought. Put simply, despite the harrowing experience of a global pandemic, we are still not ready for what will come next.
Recently, in a conference room in the Capitol building a group of experts convened to participate in a tabletop exercise organized by Foreign Policy magazine that posited a possible bioterrorist attack against Europe. It was striking how participants drawn from government, academia, think tanks, and the private sector felt the wargame captured the post-COVID challenges. At the same time, it remained frightening how many of the wargame’s lessons still reflected failures of past exercises and the real-world experience of the pandemic itself.
During the exercise, what started as an isolated incident rapidly spread to the global commons, and demonstrated just how vulnerable we remain. Based on a wholly viable, if alarming, scenario, participants benefited from their recent experiences with COVID. Yet it was abundantly clear that we aren’t much better prepared today than we were before the pandemic. From disjointed national, regional, and global responses, to the deeply underappreciated threat of disinformation in a crisis environment, the wargame demonstrated the significant challenges that remain in terms of biosecurity preparedness.
Fortunately, the exercise was just that — an exercise, designed to illuminate lessons that could be applied to a real-world scenario. And in that regard, several potential real-world ideas emerged. Many of these solutions are neither new nor novel, but they need repeating given how far we have yet to go in terms of preparation. Transforming preparedness from just an after-thought into a global health insurance policy will require a change in mentality for legislators responsible for health security budgets.
Developing truly global early-warning and bio-surveillance networks is essential to identifying, interdicting, and sequencing viruses before they can become global pandemics. Improving international coordination of public health information-sharing — alongside allies and NGOs — and investments in front-line health care trained to identify, isolate, and test for novel pathogens around the world can shore up the “front line” of pandemic preparedness.
This means greater coordination and cooperation between national-level and international health organizations, which requires a measure of political confidence building, particularly between China and the rest of the world — perhaps a bridge too far at the moment, but vital if the world is to be better prepared. Tools honed during the pandemic like wastewater surveillance illustrate passive mechanisms for biosurveillance. Sharing lessons learned in this emerging field will also serve to improve awareness of the emergence of novel pathogens, whilst also building that necessary coordination and cooperation.
Strengthening supply chain security, domestic stockpiles of necessary medical supplies, and international partnerships on critical logistics can offset shortfalls and disruptions during future pandemics. Funding for the strategic stockpile is key, but perhaps not as much as understanding the realistic, right mix of healthcare needs to plan for based on what we have learned from the pandemic’s lessons. It is also no longer feasible for the government to buy and own everything — a surge capacity is necessary, including the ability of the private sector to rapidly build up production capacity. At the core, we know there are certain basic medical tools we need to have on hand no matter what the next global threat looks like.
Planning for the second- and third-order effects of the worst-case scenarios will lead to better preparedness outcomes. In practice this means wargaming out novel and unexpected dependenices within the supply chain. As evidenced with Hurricane Maria in 2017, an isolated weather event in Puerto Rico had a considerable knock-on effect for global medical health care given single points of failure in the IV production chain. Such planning must consider the impact of disinformation, and the need to build mental resilience and trust among affected communities. Where threats from the natural world and bad actors, biopreparedness is not a partisan issue, but one of national resilience.
Above all else, the world must make preparedness a priority. Simply because we’ve come through the worst of the viral storm and are returning to calmer seas, doesn’t mean we can let down our guard or fail to invest in better life preservers. Biosecurity and preparedness must be a continuous priority for national governments and international health agencies. If the recent pandemic has taught us anything, it is that investing in health security must be a central feature of a global health insurance policy. Paying the required premiums today will dramatically reduce the costs when the next pandemic occurs. This is not just a matter of minimizing loss of life and economic damage, but also deterring potential bioterror attacks through resilience.
Sadly, it is not a matter of if, but when, the next global pandemic strikes. We will only have ourselves to blame if we don’t prepare today for what will almost certainly happen tomorrow.
Dan Mahaffee is the Senior Vice President, Director of Policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress (CSPC).
26. HIMARS changed the game in Ukraine, but a former US artillery officer says what they need now is a firepower boost with M26 cluster rockets
HIMARS changed the game in Ukraine, but a former US artillery officer says what they need now is a firepower boost with M26 cluster rockets
Business Insider · by Jake Epstein
A M142 HIMARS launches a rocket on the Bakhmut direction on May 18, 2023 in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine.
Photo by Serhii Mykhalchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
- HIMARS rockets proved to be a game-changing weapon for Ukraine when they arrived last year.
- Now they need is a firepower boost from M26 cluster rockets, a former US artillery officer says.
- These munitions would increase the lethality of its HIMARS and threaten Russian artillery pieces.
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When the US-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) first arrived in Ukraine, the difference it could make for Kyiv's forces was immediately clear. It allowed them to strike Russian positions hard at ranges far beyond all other available artillery.
While it's still a formidable weapon, even as Russia's forces have somewhat adapted to it by pulling back their ammunition depots and command and control centers, a former US artillery officer says it's time to increase their destructive capacity.
He argues that what these rocket artillery systems need now is a firepower boost from M26 cluster rockets, which would allow Ukraine to increase the lethality of its HIMARS and turn them into an area weapon that could threaten Russian artillery, crippling a key capability in this fight. Cluster rockets would be a step up from the deadly 155 mm shells called dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs) — commonly known as cluster munitions — that the US recently delivered to Ukraine.
Washington "should be providing DPICM for the HIMARS rockets," Dan Rice, who lobbied for the Pentagon to send cluster munitions as a special advisor to Ukraine's military leadership, told Insider. "It's the biggest thing of this war."
The HIMARS first arrived in Ukraine last summer and were immediately celebrated by Kyiv's troops. The precision rockets could hit targets nearly 50 miles away, significantly farther than the M777 howitzers with ranges of a little over 15 miles, putting valuable Russian positions — like command and control posts and ammunition depots — in harm's way.
As the HIMARS extended Ukraine's reach beyond that of the US-provided M777s delivered earlier in the war, the weapon was touted as a "game-changing" system in Kyiv's brutal artillery duel with Russia.
With Russia's battlefield tactics dependent on its ability to maintain high rates of artillery fire, Ukraine used the HIMARS to degrade it by battering Moscow's ammunition storage, but not necessarily the artillery pieces themselves. Ukraine's HIMARS forced Russia to move ammunition, command and control, and key logistics hubs deeper behind the front lines to get them out of range of the HIMARS and reduce their vulnerability.
Even as the HIMARS changed the battlefield, weapons like the howitzers remained critical, and as the war dragged on, the relentless artillery exchanges did not let up.
Ukraine continued to burn through its stockpiles of conventional 155 mm artillery shells, which in turn put a strain on the stockpiles of its Western military backers. To ease this burden, the US in July announced it would outfit Kyiv with 155 mm DPICMs — ground-launched shells that break apart mid-air and disperse smaller submunitions over a piece of land below.
The remains of artillery shells and missiles including cluster munitions are stored on December 18, 2022 in Toretsk, Ukraine.
Photo by Pierre Crom/Getty Images
The decision was controversial. While cluster munitions are more efficient and deadlier than the conventional munitions Ukraine been using, the bomblets or submunitions sometimes fail to detonate, and the unexploded ordnance can pose a risk to civilians long after the fighting has ended. White House and Pentagon officials defended the move by saying that DPICMs will help Ukraine sustain high rates of fire. They also said that any impact of cluster munitions would be less destructive for Ukraine than losing to Russia.
'This will change the war'
Cluster munitions have already made a difference on the battlefield for Ukraine as it presses forward with its grueling counteroffensive.
But what Kyiv's military needs now are DPICMs for HIMARS in the form of M26 or M26A1 rockets, Rice said. These 227 mm rockets are packed with around 650 and 500 submunitions, respectively, which is a substantial increase over the nearly 90 submunitions that Ukraine's current cluster munitions contain.
Right now, Ukraine's HIMARS are consuming solid projectile rockets that are quite lethal. But Kyiv only has a limited number of them, and they're in high demand. For this reason, HIMARS rockets aren't used against individual Russian artillery pieces and are instead fired sporadically at higher-value targets, Rice said.
"What would happen if we gave them DPICM rockets would be that it would actually be used at a tactical level. So your HIMARS systems could now go after front-line battalions," he said.
Russia places many of its artillery pieces in defensive areas because all it needs to do is reach the forward edge of the battlefield area to threaten the slowly advancing Ukrainian troops, Rice said. If Ukraine wanted to strike the Russian pieces with its own artillery of the same range, Kyiv's military would have to put its artillery pieces on the forward edge, which it won't do because they're expensive and valuable targets — thus rendering many Russian artillery pieces out of reach.
"You need the HIMARS cluster munitions, which is an area weapon, so that every time a Russian artillery piece fires, you fire a rocket to the grid zone and you take out the artillery piece," Rice said.
Ukrainian soldiers watch a rocket fire from a HIMARS launcher on May 18, 2023 in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine.
Photo by Serhii Mykhalchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
The US has a large stockpile of DPICM rockets for HIMARS that are otherwise going to be destroyed, and if even a fraction of those are given to Ukraine, "the war would be over," Rice predicted. From a political standpoint, he believes getting Ukraine the M26 rockets is achievable because they are not increasing the current range of the HIMARS, long an argument against providing long-range missiles like the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), but rather just boosting its lethality and making it an area weapon.
However, Rice, cautioned, one of the issues is that the M26 rockets are believed to have a higher dud rate than what US officials gave for its 155 millimeter cluster munitions, which is less than 2.35%. A top Pentagon official said last month that Russia's cluster munitions, by comparison, have a dud rate of up to 40%.
But Rice noted that the M26 submunitions are the same as the ones that Ukraine already has in its arsenal, and the battlefield has already been littered with these, thanks in part to widespread unexploded ordnance contamination by Russia.
"All of the areas that are being fired upon are areas the Russians have been," Rice said. "And every area the Russians have been is contaminated with millions of unexploded rounds and land mines."
Like he first did with the 155 millimeter cluster munitions, Rice is currently lobbying for Washington to provide the M26 rockets to Ukraine. It remains to be seen if the US will do so. The Pentagon said it could not speculate on future security assistance packages before they are announced.
"That's the way that this will change the war," Rice said. The US has given Ukraine a chance at a certain degree of fire superiority with cluster munitions, "but now we have to give them the chance to win it."
Business Insider · by Jake Epstein
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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