Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"No amount of belief makes something a fact."

- James Randi

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

- Thomas Jefferson

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

- Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 26, 2023

2. China’s Navy 'Might' Have Lost A Submarine Crew In a Truly Horrific Way: No Air?

3. How a whistleblower says Booz Allen Hamilton defrauded the government

4. How Russia's War in Ukraine Could 'Collapse'

5. Time and Logistics are Working Against Ukraine

6. Ukraine — Victory Is Closer Than You Think

7. Why Tribalism Took Over Our Politics

8. 'Unexpected Hit': Russia's 'Special Military Operation' in Ukraine Has a New Problem

9. Our military is being held as political hostages

10. What Does Victory Look Like for Ukraine?

11. UPDATED: 3 U.S. Marines Killed in Australian MV-22 Crash

12. Hollywood Rewrites History Again: What the Oppenheimer Deification Movie Didn’t Tell You

13. Poland investigates cyber-attack on rail network

14. Ukraine-Russia War: The Changing Trends In Modern Warfare

15. Taiwan Cannot Win if the U.S. Does Not Help Strengthen Taipei’s Will to Fight

16. How revisiting naval aviation's lessons can (and cannot) inform military AI innovation

17. Fox News apologizes to Gold Star family after facing backlash over false story

18. Communist Party Priorities Complicate Plans to Revive China’s Economy

19. Russia confirms Wagner chief Prigozhin’s death after DNA tests

20. U.S. Joint Chiefs' Gen. Milley cites Ukrainian counteroffensive 'breakthrough'

21. The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters

22. Opinion Is fixing democracy partisan? Here are answers to this and more questions.

23. Read Sacha Baron Cohen's Speech on Standing Against Hate

24. Landmines Threaten Agriculture In Ukraine And Azerbaijan but, Innovative Solutions Are On The Way

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 26, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-26-2023

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces have made further tactically significant gains in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and several Ukrainian and Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces are advancing through what Ukrainian and US sources suggested may be the most challenging series of prepared Russian defensive positions.
Ukrainian forces now appear within striking distance of the next series of prepared Russian defensive positions, which may be weaker than the previous set of Russian defenses but still pose a significant challenge.
A Ukrainian source indicated that Russian forces have laterally redeployed elements of a relatively elite formation from the Kreminna area in Luhansk Oblast to the Robotyne area in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
Russian irregular formations remain willing to threaten to withdraw from combat unilaterally despite recent efforts by Russian military command to purge and suppress insubordination.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly prosecuting the junior officers and soldiers of a Russian unit that complained about senior commanders’ inattention to frontline issues.
No prominent channels known to be directly affiliated with Wagner shared additional information on the future of the group, while the majority of Russian sources have focused their attention on kinetic activity on the frontline.
Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Donetsk Oblast but did not make any confirmed advances.
Russian regional governments continue to facilitate the forced deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine to occupied Crimea.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 26, 2023

Aug 26, 2023 - Press ISW

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 26, 2023

Riley Bailey, Nicole Wolkov, Grace Mappes, Christina Harward, and Mason Clark

August 26, 2023, 6:45pm 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 12:15pm ET on August 26. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 26 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces have made further tactically significant gains in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and several Ukrainian and Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces are advancing through what Ukrainian and US sources suggested may be the most challenging series of prepared Russian defensive positions. Geolocated footage published on August 25 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced 1.5km southward northeast of Novoprokopivka (13km south of Orikhiv).[1] US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley stated on August 25 that Ukrainian forces are currently attacking through the main set of Russian defensive preparations along the axis of Ukrainian advance.[2] Reuters reported on August 26 that a Ukrainian commander fighting in southern Ukraine stated that Ukrainian forces believe they have broken through the most difficult line of Russian defenses in the area and will now be able to advance more quickly.[3] The Ukrainian commander reportedly stated that Ukrainian forces have entered areas where they encountered only Russian ”logistics groups" and that he expects that further Ukrainian breakthroughs in these areas will be easier.[4] A Russian milblogger claimed on August 25 that Ukrainian forces were attacking in the direction of rear defensive lines near Verbove (18km southwest of Orikhiv), suggesting that Ukrainian forces may be near tactical rear areas within the series of Russian defensive positions that they are currently penetrating - though these reports should not be misinterpreted to indicate Ukrainian forces have entered Russian rear areas at the operational level.

Ukrainian forces now appear within striking distance of the next series of prepared Russian defensive positions, which may be weaker than the previous set of Russian defenses but still pose a significant challenge. The series of defensive positions that Ukrainian forces are currently advancing through were comprised of dense layers of minefields and fortifications to which Russian forces committed considerable manpower, materiel, and effort to hold.[5] The series of Russian defensive positions now ahead of Ukrainian forces likely consists of a relatively more contiguous array of anti-tank ditches; dragon’s teeth anti-tank obstacles; and additional minefields - with Russian fighting positions behind these obstacles - much like the first Russian line of defense. However, the extent of the minefields in the area of this series of prepared defensive positions is unclear, although they may be less heavily mined to give Russian forces operating north of these positions the ability to retreat.[6] ISW additionally recently assessed that this series of prepared defensive positions may be less heavily defended than the positions Ukrainian forces already penetrated to the north, although this remains unclear.[7]

Each of these Russian “lines” are layered defensive positions with their own forward and rear area positions, and it is important to differentiate between the rear areas of individual Russian defensive positions and of Russian defenses in southern Ukraine as a whole. Russian defensive “lines” are additionally notional in the sense that Russian prepared positions are not uniform across the front in southern Ukraine, and are not fully manned. There are additional series of prepared Russian defensive positions further south of the current Ukrainian advance, although Russian forces will only be able to fully leverage these positions if they have the available personnel and materiel to incorporate them into cohesive defensive operations.

A Ukrainian source indicated that Russian forces have laterally redeployed elements of a relatively elite formation from the Kreminna area in Luhansk Oblast to the Robotyne area in western Zaporizhia Oblast. A Ukrainian reserve officer reported on August 26 that Russian forces transferred elements of the 76th Guards Air Assault (VDV) Division to the Robotyne area from the Kreminna area.[8] ISW has observed elements of the 76th VDV Division operating in the Kreminna area but cannot confirm if all elements of the 76th VDV Division were deployed in the area or what elements remain near Kreminna.[9] ISW has now observed elements of almost every Russian VDV formation operating in areas where Ukrainian forces are conducting offensive operations, including elements of the 7th Guards Mountain VDV Division operating in southern Ukraine; and elements of the 98th Guards VDV Division, 106th Guards VDV Division, 11th Guards VDV Brigade, and 83rd Guards VDV Brigade operating near Bakhmut.[10] A Russian source has claimed that elements of the 31st Guards VDV Brigade are also defending in the Bakhmut area, although ISW has not observed further indicators that these elements are present.[11] Lateral redeployments of elements of the 7th Guards Mountain VDV Division from Kherson Oblast to the frontline in Zaporizhia Oblast and elements of the 76th VDV Division from the Kreminna area to the Robotyne area suggest that Russian forces may be using relatively elite units to reinforce critical sectors of the front. This additional lateral redeployment, if true, further supports ISW’s assessment that a lack of sizeable operational reserves would force the Russian command to conduct further lateral redeployments and make decisions about what sectors of the front to prioritize.[12] Elements of these VDV formations may be more heavily committed in certain sectors of the front than others and each formation is unlikely to be operating as a cohesive brigade or division-level asset, and all reports should be understood as referring to elements of the relevant formation.

Russian irregular formations remain willing to threaten to withdraw from combat unilaterally despite recent efforts by Russian military command to purge and suppress insubordination. The "Rusich” Sabotage and Reconnaissance Group, a far-right Russian irregular paramilitary unit, announced on August 25 that the group will refuse to conduct combat missions in Ukraine until the Russian government secures the release of Rusich commander and founding member Yan Petrovsky, who is currently in Finnish custody.[13] Ukrainian authorities requested the extradition of Petrovsky from Finland to Ukraine, where he is suspected of various charges related to terrorism.[14] The Rusich Group accused the Russian government of not meeting its obligations to protect Russians abroad by not securing Petrovsky’s release earlier, and asked why Rusich personnel should protect Russia if the Russian government will not protect Russians.[15] The Rusich Group indicated that it is likely operating on the Robotyne-Verbove line in western Zaporizhia Oblast, a critical area of the frontline where the Russian military command likely cannot afford for any units to rebel and refuse to conduct combat missions.[16] The Russian MoD has notably previously struggled with insubordination and threats of desertion from other Russian units in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[17]

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly prosecuting the junior officers and soldiers of a Russian unit that complained about senior commanders’ inattention to frontline issues, following a MoD pattern of deflecting blame away from senior officers. Russian milbloggers claimed on August 26 that an assistant to an unspecified Russian deputy defense minister arrived in Kherson Oblast to investigate complaints associated with the 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade (49th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) that sparked outrage within the Russian information space on August 25.[18] These milbloggers claimed that the Russian MoD official is protecting the 205th Brigade’s commander and punishing protesting company commanders.[19] These Russian milbloggers expressed continued anger at this deflection of responsibility and at the broader Russian officer system that does not allow for officers with new command styles.[20] These claims are unconfirmed, but the speed at which the Russian military command is reportedly responding likely demonstrates their deep concern about insubordination in the military, as well as of public criticism of the Russian military command. The Russian MoD has previously shown a propensity for deflecting blame away from senior officers and holding lower-level soldiers responsible for problems.[21] The Russian military has recently suffered from multiple public instances of insubordination, and ISW has previously assessed that the Russian military chain of command is deteriorating.[22]

No prominent channels known to be directly affiliated with Wagner have shared additional information on the future of the group despite speculation from nominally pro-Wagner channels, while the majority of Russian sources have focused their attention on kinetic activity on the frontline. Insider sources have continued to report details about the flight crew killed in the crash as well as the ongoing Russian government investigation into the crash.[23] Russian sources that are not aligned with Wagner have largely stopped speculating about Prigozhin’s death and the future of the Wagner Group and have focused their reporting on operations on the frontline.

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces have made further tactically significant gains in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and several Ukrainian and Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces are advancing through what Ukrainian and US sources suggested may be the most challenging series of prepared Russian defensive positions.
Ukrainian forces now appear within striking distance of the next series of prepared Russian defensive positions, which may be weaker than the previous set of Russian defenses but still pose a significant challenge.
A Ukrainian source indicated that Russian forces have laterally redeployed elements of a relatively elite formation from the Kreminna area in Luhansk Oblast to the Robotyne area in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
Russian irregular formations remain willing to threaten to withdraw from combat unilaterally despite recent efforts by Russian military command to purge and suppress insubordination.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly prosecuting the junior officers and soldiers of a Russian unit that complained about senior commanders’ inattention to frontline issues.
No prominent channels known to be directly affiliated with Wagner shared additional information on the future of the group, while the majority of Russian sources have focused their attention on kinetic activity on the frontline.
Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and in western Donetsk Oblast but did not make any confirmed advances.
Russian regional governments continue to facilitate the forced deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine to occupied Crimea.

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 Ukrainian 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 continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 26 but did not make any confirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Novoyehorivka (16km southwest of Svatove) and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).[24] Russian Western Grouping of Forces Press Officer Yaroslav Yakimkin claimed that Russian forces captured three unspecified strongholds in the Kupyansk direction.[25] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated on August 25 that Russian forces shifted their tactical focus from the Kupyansk direction to the Novoyehorivka area.[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced near Synkivka (9km northeast of Kupyansk) and in the direction of Petropavlivka (6km east of Kupyansk), although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[27]

The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) stated on August 26 that Russian forces may launch an operational level offensive in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions in the next two months, though ISW assesses such an offensive operation remains unlikely.[28] The UK MoD stated that Russian forces will possibly try to regain the initiative amidst Ukrainian counteroffensive operations by launching such an offensive operation.[29] The UK MoD assessed that Russian forces will possibly try to advance west to the Oskil River and create a buffer zone around occupied Luhansk Oblast.[30] Russian forces have been conducting localized offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk and southwest of Svatove in recent weeks, but there are no indications that Russian forces are committing the necessary manpower and materiel required to turn such localized offensive operations in this sector of the front into an operational offensive effort.[31] Ukrainian Ground Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated on August 25 that Russian forces are transferring elements of newly formed brigades and divisions to the Kupyansk and Lyman directions after a month of significant losses in order to resume active offensive operations in these directions, although ISW has not observed confirmation of these transfers.[32] The resumption of localized Russian offensive operations likely aims to fix and draw Ukrainian forces to this axis and away from more critical areas of the front and has little likelihood of securing major territorial gains.[33] Russian forces concentrated manpower for months in this sector of the front before launching their unsuccessful winter-spring 2023 operational offensive effort, and ISW has observed no similar preparations in the area.[34] Russian forces are highly unlikely to be able to seize the operational initiative in the next two months.

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited unsuccessful ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 26. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled five Ukrainian assaults near Synkivka, Novoyehorivka, Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove), and Raihorodka (13km west of Svatove).[35] The Russian MoD and the Russian Central Grouping of Forces Spokesperson Alexander Savchuk claimed that Russian forces repelled seven Ukrainian assaults in the Lyman direction, including near Dibrova (6km southwest of Kreminna).[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces also repelled Ukrainian attempts to restore lost positions near Torske (17km west of Kreminna) and in the Serebryanske forest area south of Kreminna.[37]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut on August 26 and reportedly advanced. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut), Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut), and Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[38] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces captured positions near Klishchiivka, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[39] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Russian 4th Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd Luhansk People’s Republic Army Corps) captured positions north of Klishchiivka.[40]

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut and advanced on August 26. Geolocated footage published on August 26 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced further into Klishchiivka.[41] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Minkivka (15km northwest of Bakhmut) and Klishchiivka.[42] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Klishchiivka.[43] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked near Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[44] The Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash reported on August 25 that Ukrainian forces are advancing 100-300 meters per day in the Bakhmut direction.[45]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line and reportedly advanced on August 26. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka), Stepove (8km northwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka (on the western outskirts of Donetsk City).[46] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces captured territory south of Novomykhailivka (10km southwest of Donetsk City).[47] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful assaults in the southwestern outskirts of Avdiivka, in Marinka, and northeast and southeast of Novomykhailivka.[48]

The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Krasnohorivka (either directly west of Donetsk City or 8km northwest of Avdiivka) on August 26.[49]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Vuhledar in western Donetsk Oblast on August 26.[50]

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted offensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area but did not advance on August 26. Russian sources, including the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka).[51] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces also conducted unsuccessful attacks south of Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) and near Pryyutne (16km southwest of Velyka Novosilka), Staromlynivka (14km south of Velyka Novosilka), and Kermenchyk (16km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[52] The Russian “Vostok” Battalion expressed concern that Ukrainian forces would attack its area of responsibility after finishing attacks south of Urozhaine, suggesting that elements of the Vostok Battalion are no longer operating in the immediate Urozhaine area.[53]

Ukrainian forces advanced closer to the next series of Russian defensive positions in western Zaporizhia Oblast as of August 26. Geolocated footage published on August 26 shows that Ukrainian forces made further advances west of Verbove (18km south of Orikhiv).[54] Russian milbloggers also claimed on August 26 that Ukrainian forces advanced northwest of Verbove.[55] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks in Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv), and some claimed that Russian forces managed to recapture some unspecified positions in the settlement.[56] Other Russian and Ukrainian sources indicated that Russian forces only control part of Robotyne, however.[57]

Russian milbloggers continued to claim that fighting is ongoing on islands in the Dnipro River delta in Kherson Oblast on August 26. A Russian milblogger claimed that small Ukrainian landing groups landed on unspecified islands in the delta.[58] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted a failed landing on Borschovyi Island (14km southwest of Kherson City) on August 25.[59]

A second civilian vessel left port through the Ukrainian humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea on August 26 as part of Ukraine’s ongoing effort to circumvent Russia’s attempts to curtail maritime traffic.[60] The Primus cargo ship, which had been in the port of Odesa since February 2022, departed for Varna, Bulgaria under a Liberian flag.[61] BBC’s Russia service reported that the Primus returned to port a few hours after departing for unknown reasons, but that the Primus still intends to sail to Varna.[62] ISW has previously assessed that Russia likely intends to curtail maritime traffic to Ukraine through the Black Sea without enforcing a full blockade.[63]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Ukrainian intelligence reported that the Russian government is considering mobilizing another 450,000 personnel in a possible second mobilization wave. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Kyrylo Budanov told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty project Krim Realii in an interview published on August 25 that the Russian government is considering mobilizing an additional 450,000 personnel but has not yet decided to commit to the effort.[64] Budanov also reported that Russia continues to mobilize 20,000 to 22,000 people in crypto-mobilization efforts each month.

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 regional governments continue to facilitate the forced deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine to occupied Crimea. The Kherson Oblast occupation administration amplified a post on August 26 claiming that the Pskov Oblast administration helped organize a 14-day trip for children from occupied Ukraine, likely occupied Kherson Oblast, to the “Zhemchuzhina” children’s camp in Yevpatoria, occupied Crimea.[65]

Russian occupation authorities reportedly continue to steal Ukrainian grain in occupied territories and sell it on the Russian market. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on August 25 that Russian occupation officials have facilitated the theft of 3.7 million tons of grain in all occupied areas except for Crimea, including 1.4 million tons from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[66] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian occupation authorities force Ukrainian farmers to sell their grain at prices below the market rate, then Russian authorities sell the grain at market price on the Russian market.[67] Russian theft of Ukrainian grain notably continues following Russia's withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative on July 17 and amidst subsequent Russian strikes on Ukrainian grain infrastructure that have destroyed 270,000 tons of grain as of August 23.[68]

Russian authorities continue efforts likely aimed to artificially increase voter turnout in occupied Ukraine for the September 10 regional elections. Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported that Russian occupation authorities are planning to transport residents of Russia and occupied Crimea to occupied Ukraine to increase voter turnout numbers in the coming Russian regional elections.[69]

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)

Nothing significant to report.

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’s Navy 'Might' Have Lost A Submarine Crew In a Truly Horrific Way: No Air?

Calling the Glomar Explorer.

China’s Navy 'Might' Have Lost A Submarine Crew In a Truly Horrific Way: No Air?

The rumors just keep swirling. If the latest from social media is to be believed, and that is always a tough thing for sure, the crew of a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Type 093 Shang II class nuclear submarine may have suffocated to death after sinking in the Yellow Sea off the coast.

19fortyfive.com · by John Rossomando · August 26, 2023

Key Point: So far, the Chinese and Taiwanese authorities have denied the incident took place.

Note: 19FortyFive cannot confirm these reports, so let us at least rundown the latest that is out there on social media and why we should be skeptical of such reports.

What The Rumor Looks Like

The Type 093 is among the most modern components of the Chinese fleet and is known for its lower noise level compared with other Chinese submarines. According to reports, the PLAN 093-417 submarine was commanded by Colonel Xue Yong-Peng, a veteran of the Chinese submarine force.

If it did occur, and a big if at this point, the sinking allegedly took place during anti-submarine warfare exercises in approximately 229 feet of water off the coast of China’s Shandong Province at approximately 35°38.962’N/121°19.562’E, according to an unconfirmed report posted on Twitter by Dr. Li-Meng Yan.

“At 8:12am, on Aug 21 (of 2023), 417 （#LongMarch417, 09III nuclear-powered attack submarine) was hooked by “anchor and chain” (a type of CCP’s anti-submarine equipments) and caused the mechanical malfunction, during an assessment task of loading, diving and operation. The malfunction led to depressurization in the submarine cabin and slowly going up,” Yan wrote on X.

Yan claims the submarine’s crew reportedly suffocated following the failure of the boat’s air purification system. The crew – again, allegedly – succumbed to hypoxia caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide or another toxic gas.

Some crew members were allegedly rescued after the boat surfaced; however, 22 military officers, 7 students, 9 petty officers, and 17 soldiers were reported to have died.

She claims the information came from a source linked to China’s Central Military Commission.

Report Credibility Questioned

Heritage Foundation naval expert and retired U.S. Navy Capt. Brent Sadler questions the credibility of the tale. Sadler is a veteran submariner himself. He questions how Yan, who is a virologist, could have obtained a supposedly classified report on the submarine’s alleged sinking.

Sadler told 19FortyFive that the submarine community is a highly classified and closed community, and reports like Yan’s do not add up.

The PLAN 093-417 allegedly sank in extremely shallow waters. Consequently, it would have been fairly easy to surface the ship. There was not any major report of a Chinese salvage operation in the area where it was alleged to have sunk in the past few days.

“The silence about it is one thing … but things are all kind of convoluted,” Sadler said regarding the alleged circumstances. “It’s eerily reminiscent of a submarine that did have the entire crew asphyxiate. It was on a diesel … submarine back like in 2010 … and they all died because they didn’t have the proper ventilation lined up ― when the diesel exhaust was funneled back into the boat.

Sadler continued, “It sounds like some people are trying to bring up those old stories for a nuclear submarine, which could happen too … There is no new information that would be characteristic of a nuclear submarine.”

He does not see any evidence that would be the hallmark of a hush-hush rescue or salvage operation.

“This is all kind of fishy because … the scrubbing equipment if it fails, you come right to the surface,” Sadler said.

Chinese Media Condemns Submarine Report

The Chinese news website SOHU.com published a strong denial of the sinking.

“This may be the main reason why overseas anti-China media are keen to fabricate the Type 093 nuclear submarine. This nuclear submarine has always been relatively mysterious, with few clear photos and little news about participating in various PLA exercises. Therefore, it has attracted the attention of military fans around the world,” SOHU.com said. “Fabricating news related to the Type 093 nuclear submarine and setting the location of the so-called ‘accident” near the sensitive Taiwan Strait is easier to attract the attention of the outside world, so a carefully woven rumor was born.

John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.

Note: The image above is a Chinese SSBN Nuclear-Powered Submarine.

From the Vault

The Navy Sent 4 Battleships To Attack North Korea

‘Sir, We Hit a Russian Submarine’: A U.S. Navy Sub Collided with a Nuclear Attack Sub

Did A Russian-Made Missile ‘Strike’ an F-35 Fighter?

19fortyfive.com · by John Rossomando · August 26, 2023

3. How a whistleblower says Booz Allen Hamilton defrauded the government

How a whistleblower says Booz Allen Hamilton defrauded the government

Sarah Feinberg’s complaint about the company’s billing practices led to a $377 million settlement with the Justice Department

By David Nakamura

August 26, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by David Nakamura · August 26, 2023

Only a few months into a new finance job, Sarah Feinberg felt stunned when a senior manager with a Northern Virginia-based defense contractor called federal auditors “too stupid” to notice overcharging, according to a federal complaint she filed.

Feinberg said she had warned the manager that the company, Booz Allen Hamilton, was losing tens of millions of dollars and, in her view, billing more than it should on U.S. government contracts to cover the losses.

During the ensuing nine months, she repeatedly raised concerns with senior executives, including internal compliance officials and the chief financial officer, according to the 37-page civil complaint she filed against Booz Allen in 2016 under the federal False Claims Act.

In July, the Justice Department, which investigated her complaint, announced that Booz Allen had agreed to pay $377 million — $209 million in restitution to the federal government and the rest in penalties — to settle the matter, one of the largest awards in a government procurement case in history.

Feinberg, who said she felt vindicated and was to receive nearly $70 million for making the case known to authorities, nevertheless could not help feeling doubts about whether justice was served.

Feinberg had filed a “qui tam” lawsuit in which whistleblowers are awarded a portion of any financial judgment or settlement as incentive to come forward with evidence of fraud against the U.S. government. While the system dates back to the Civil War, when authorities sought to root out corruption in the production of war materials, the number of whistleblowers has grown significantly since Congress strengthened the law in 1986.

According to federal data, 652 people filed qui tam complaints last year, and the Justice Department recovered $2.2 billion in false claims by companies from 351 of those cases, the second-highest number of cases ever. The largest awards have come in health care, procurement and mortgage-lending, federal officials said.

Legal analysts have questioned whether the system has been effective in delivering a strong enough message of deterrence to companies that operate within the federal government’s vast contracting network. In civil cases, they say, companies are rarely required to admit liability, senior executives often do not face personal accountability, and investors typically react with a shrug, sometimes pushing stock prices higher because the legal cloud is lifted.

“Assuming the company is not debarred and can continue to do business with the government, there’s a real question, in terms of the system as a whole, of whether the consequences are significant enough,” said Seton Hall University law professor Jacob T. Elberg, a former federal prosecutor.

Booz Allen holds thousands of federal contracts, offering consulting and technical support in defense, cybersecurity, analytics and engineering to the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence divisions and other agencies.

Executives have said in statements that they deny wrongdoing by the publicly traded company, which has 32,000 employees and an annual revenue this year of $9.3 billion. The Justice Department closed a criminal investigation in 2021 without charges, and the civil settlement did not require Booz Allen to admit liability.

Company officials told investors on an earnings call in late July that they settled the case to avoid protracted litigation. Horacio Rozanski, the president and chief executive, said the company “acted lawfully and responsibly.”

Thirteen days after the settlement, Booz Allen’s stock price reached an all-time-high closing price of $124.06 per share.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Booz Allen spokeswoman Jessica Klenk said that when Feinberg raised her concerns, the company “promptly facilitated meetings for her with third-party experts as well as its financial, compliance and accounting teams to examine her concerns. Over the next year, these experts repeatedly affirmed that the company’s practices were lawful and compliant.”

The company “has always believed it acted lawfully and responsibly, guided by its strong culture of ethics and accountability, and its position has been consistently grounded in facts,” Klenk said in the statement.

Feinberg, who had resigned from her job as a financial analyst at Booz Allen ahead of filing the legal complaint, and her lawyer, William Pittard of KaiserDillon, signed off on the settlement. In a recent interview, she said she considered seeking a higher amount but feared that doing so would have put her at odds with federal prosecutors and forced her to face Booz Allen’s significant legal firepower on her own.

She said she believes the settlement, which covers the period from 2011 to 2021, required Booz Allen to pay far less than what may have served as a deterrent.

“The settlement has to be more than the damages or you’re giving them an interest-free loan, not a penalty,” Feinberg said.

A senior Justice Department official who was involved in the settlement negotiations disputed her contention. Prosecutors reviewed thousands of Booz Allen’s internal financial documents, this person said, and the settlement reflects a good-faith estimate of how much the government could prove in damages if the case went to trial.

“We think this sends a strong message of deterrence that the government will pursue even the most complex fraud cases,” said the Justice official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. “We think it is fair and reasonable in all respects.”

******

Feinberg, 39, who worked for three years in financial planning operations at The Post after leaving Booz Allen, lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, Evan, and their three sons. She works as chief financial officer at National Journal and Bradley Media Holdings.

She is from Columbus, Ohio, and has taken on big challenges in her life. Weeks before graduating from King’s College in New York City in 2006, she walked up to a military recruiting station in Times Square and signed up for the Marine Corps reserves. She fractured her pelvis while carrying 90-pound backpacks at officer candidate school. She was commissioned and volunteered in 2009 for a tour of duty in Iraq.

Assigned to Anbar Province, Feinberg led a logistics convoy that transported military equipment to Ain al-Asad air base in western Iraq. During one patrol, she coordinated the recovery of a civilian vehicle after a grenade attack. In late December 2009, she received the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for “superior performance of her duties.”

Amaury Gallais, a Marine officer who served with Feinberg, recalled her attention to detail to help ensure the convoy’s safety: “I remember going to the motor pool to see her get ready, and watching her running through every drill, every scenario, doing rehearsals to prepare and be ready for every contingency.”

Feinberg returned to the United States in 2010 and joined Booz Allen, a popular landing spot for military veterans. There, she spent four years on Pentagon contracts helping the Marine Corps improve its war operations in Afghanistan. (The Feinbergs helped resettle an Afghan refugee family with three children in a condominium they own in Shirlington, Va.)

In 2014, she completed a master’s in business administration at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Returning to Booz Allen in spring 2015, she was assigned to a new job on a three-person team in the finance department.

Feinberg said in her complaint and in an interview that she discovered within months that Booz Allen was losing millions of dollars on its commercial sector, which included international work, and, she contends, using a deceptive tactic to keep those operations solvent.

******

Feinberg’s lawsuit presented a picture of a company eager to satisfy investors with a diversified growth strategy.

In 2008, Booz Allen had separated its commercial operations from its government consulting business ahead of an initial public offering two years later. By 2011, the company moved to reestablish the commercial business. It wasn’t easy, according to Feinberg’s lawsuit, which cited losses of tens of millions of dollars annually.

To cover the deficits, she alleged, Booz Allen was lumping government and commercial work together in combined “costs centers” or “cost bands” — and then billing the Pentagon higher amounts than was permitted under federal compliance rules.

Feinberg said that in late October 2015, she emailed her boss, R. Timothy Lawrence, then a vice president for financial planning and analysis, calling attention to a “major legal … compliance issue.”

Lawrence, according to the lawsuit, replied that he believed the company was in financial compliance. He suggested she meet with two senior managers, including Warren Kohm, then the company’s director of financial analytics and strategy.

It was Kohm, Feinberg alleged in the lawsuit, who told her three days later that federal auditors were “too stupid” to figure out what Booz was doing. He called the compliance rules ambiguous and said the auditors would not be motivated to collect all of the overcharges even if some billing was not permitted, according to Feinberg’s complaint.

Kohm, who left Booz Allen in February 2016, did not respond to messages seeking comment. Lawrence, who still works at the company, was not available for comment, a company official said.

According to her lawsuit, Feinberg raised the issue for months with senior executives. Among them were Lloyd Howell Jr., who served as chief financial officer from 2016 to 2022, and one of his deputies, Matthew Calderone, who succeeded Howell as finance chief.

Booz Allen executives said in the statement to The Post that they took Feinberg’s views seriously, bringing in legal and accounting experts from outside the company who assured them that their accounting practices were within federal guidelines.

Feinberg’s complaint cast the company’s leadership as defensive. Calderone, she said, questioned why she put her concerns in writing after she briefed him in a PowerPoint presentation in June 2016, according to her lawsuit. She says he also suggested she not share the written material in an upcoming meeting with Howell.

In another instance, Feinberg said in her legal complaint, a manager asked her to alter language in a PowerPoint slide that she viewed as an attempt to soften her criticism.

“The thing that frustrated me was that so much focus was on avoiding putting anything in writing, rather than on fixing the problem,” Feinberg said in the interview.

Booz Allen officials declined to discuss the specifics of Feinberg’s allegations that managers discouraged her from putting her concerns in writing. They pointed to the company’s values statement that instructs employees to “do right” and “maintain conviction no matter the circumstances.”

A former Booz Allen executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive legal matter, said Feinberg, because of her combat service, was considered credible by retired Marines who worked at the company. At the same time, she clashed with senior executives because she “gets committed to certain views and institutions,” this person said.

“My understanding had been that Booz believed she was overly pedantic and making a mountain out of a molehill,” said the former executive, who was not involved in the legal case.

On July 22, 2016, Feinberg and several colleagues met with Howell, who told them he would devote no more resources to the issue, according to the complaint.

Less than three weeks later, Feinberg resigned in protest. Howell, who retired from Booz last year after a 34-year career, was named executive director of the NFL Players Association in June. He declined to comment for this story, according to a representative.

******

Feinberg said she kept documentation, including PowerPoint presentations and email records, in case federal auditors came calling. Booz Allen lawyers sent letters asking her to return or destroy all proprietary information and threatening criminal or civil action if she failed to comply.

That’s when she hired a lawyer, and her husband encouraged her to inform federal authorities.

“I loved Booz,” she said in the interview. “The idea that all the people I respected were doing the wrong thing was devastating to me. I did not want to further dwell on that. But my husband said, ‘This can’t be about you. You have to do the right thing.’”

A month after resigning, she filed the legal complaint. In qui tam cases, the Justice Department can elect to intervene, as it did in Feinberg’s case, but legal complaints can move forward without federal help. Whistleblowers are entitled to 15 percent to 25 percent of financial awards if federal prosecutors take the case and up to 30 percent of they do not.

Feinberg estimated in her legal complaint that Booz Allen had overcharged the Pentagon by nearly a quarter-billion dollars by the time she left in 2016.

Legal analysts said False Claims Act cases typically settle for double the damages. Feinberg said Justice Department prosecutors should have been seeking up to $1 billion.

“If the False Claims Act is going to deter this type of conduct … the settlement number has to be high enough,” said Thomas M. Greene, a Boston-based attorney. He represented Michael Bawduniak, whose 2012 qui tam complaint against Biogen, a pharmaceutical company, resulted in a $900 million settlement last year.

Denise M. Barnes, a former federal prosecutor who worked on fraud cases but was not involved in the Booz Allen case, called the $377 million settlement significant and said it signaled to the public that the company was implicitly conceding liability.

“It’s almost $400 million — if that doesn’t dissuade you [from fraud], what would?” Barnes said.

In 2021, Booz Allen completed a restructuring of its accounting and billing systems, company officials said

For Feinberg, the personal award is life changing. After paying her lawyers, she cleared a pretax amount of $42 million — up to $12 million of which she intends to put into a charitable trust. Some funds will go to supporting her church, she said, and she is interested in investing in underserved communities.

Despite these opportunities, Feinberg can’t help thinking about the Booz Allen manager who allegedly told her the government would never get all its money back.

“The thing that’s really demoralizing about it is that that’s what Booz knew would happen at the beginning,” she said in the interview. “That’s kind of how it played out.”

The Washington Post · by David Nakamura · August 26, 2023

4. How Russia's War in Ukraine Could 'Collapse'

Excerpts:

The odds still favor Russia, both by Moltkean logic and by virtue of Russia’s massive demographic, economic, and military preponderance over Ukraine. But combatants are human, and human beings are nothing if not fallible. The strong have been known to squander their advantages, setting conditions for the weak to win. Past performance suggests that Russia could follow the same path to ignominy.

Now is no time to go wobbly.

How Russia's War in Ukraine Could 'Collapse'

Sarah Feinberg’s complaint about the company’s billing practices led to a $377 million settlement with the Justice Department

By David Nakamura

August 26, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · August 26, 2023

Key point from the author: “Russia doesn’t have the luxury of keeping its defensive lines short, unless it chooses to relinquish the ground behind them. And if Ukrainian forces can starve their opponent of firepower by interrupting its supplies, they could collapse the line altogether.”

Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, the military architect of German unification and one of history’s most famed soldiers, would instantly grasp the state of affairs in this summer of Ukrainian discontent. After Kiev and its Western backers hyped the prospects for the spring counteroffensive against Russia, the counteroffensive has posted fitful progress to date. Moltke would ascribe the disappointing results to the fact that the Ukrainian military confronts a foe waging the strongest form of warfare.

Strategic offense coupled with tactical defense.

Moltke lays out the logic succinctly: “The tactical defense is the stronger [form of war], the strategic offensive the more effective form—and the only one that leads to the goal.” In other words, the contender that seizes or occupies some object or parcel of territory, then defends it tactically, primes itself for strategic and ultimately political success. In colloquial terms: grab something and hold it, and dare your enemy to come and take it back while fighting at a daunting disadvantage. For the German sage, in short, waging offense through defense blazes a path to triumph.

Advantage: Russia. Last year the Russian Army went on the strategic offensive, seizing ground coveted by the leadership in Moscow. After a startling series of reverses in the east last fall the army spent months preparing dense, elaborate defenses-in-depth to make it difficult and costly if not impossible for Ukrainian forces to recover lost turf in Ukraine’s eastern and southern reaches. That’s the tactical-defense component of Russia’s scheme. Mission accomplished: this summer has seen a tough slog for Ukrainian warriors.

So would Moltke counsel despair for Ukraine? Does his logic mean the defender—the occupant of the contested real estate, in this case Russia—always wins?

Well, no. Little is fated amid the maelstrom of war. Pursuing Moltkean methods does bias the outcome in Russia’s favor, but in the annals of military history many defenders have been dispossessed of geographic space. Dislodging an entrenched defender simply takes some extra doing by a well-resourced, inventive, spirited attacker. Take an example close to home: the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War. The Union wanted to not just vanquish the Confederacy but eradicate its political existence as an independent nation, much as Russia hoped to topple the Ukrainian political regime and install one subservient to Moscow.

That meant conquering the Southern foe and unseating its government.

The Confederates accomplished their strategically offensive goal by banding together to secede from the Union. Secession left them holding the disputed country from an interior position while Union forces ranged around the continental and maritime periphery. Southern generals proved shifty. They were adept at moving around the defensive perimeter on interior lines to counter Union offensives that were uncoordinated with one another in space or time. Only when meddlesome President Abraham Lincoln urged his generals to concentrate in time, striking around the Confederate periphery, in force, at the same time, did Union forces manage to punch through Confederate defenses.

Lincoln reasoned that Confederate field commanders could never blunt every one among a series of assaults that descended at different locations along the perimeter simultaneously. Union armies would score a breakthrough into the Confederate backfield somewhere along the line. And so it turned out, albeit not without years of grueling combat and hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Union Navy worked with the Army to wrest control of Southern rivers from the Confederacy, enabling U.S. forces to move around at will. Ultimately General George Tecumseh Sherman was able to march to the sea through Georgia, demolishing much of the South’s warmaking potential while disheartening the populace.

So all is not lost for Ukraine despite this summer’s disappointing results. Victory isn’t foreordained for the combatant that couples strategic offense with tactical defense. War isn’t that pat.

How do you overcome the advantages that go to the tactical defender? Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the British chief of defense staff, describes Ukraine’s strategy as “starve, stretch, and strike.” Starve means lashing out at Russian logistics hubs and “lines of communication,” meaning transportation routes that convey ammunition and stores to occupied territories and troops manning the frontlines. Deprive people of what they need to live and fight and you enfeeble Russia’s grasp on Ukrainian land. Starvation tactics also give Ukraine an indirect way to get at occupied Crimea. If Ukrainian forces manage to advance far enough toward the Sea of Azov to the south, they will bring the supply line connecting Crimea with Russia under rocket artillery fire.

Sever that supply line and Russian commanders to the west will find themselves thrust onto the horns of a dilemma. They can choose between evacuating the peninsula and western Azov coast and preparing the army and civilian inhabitants for wintertime privation.

Stretch means taking advantage of Russia’s distended defensive lines. Moltke’s great predecessor, Carl von Clausewitz, warns caustically against what he calls “cordon warfare.” A cordon is a line, and a line is made up of infinitely many points in series. It’s hard to be stronger than the foe at infinitely many points on the battleground. Trying to hold all points along an extended line thins out the defenders while allowing the attackers to mass superior combat power somewhere along the frontier to break through. If forced into cordon warfare Clausewitz advises commanders to keep the lines short and provide ample fire support in case the enemy threatens to puncture the line. Russia doesn’t have the luxury of keeping its defensive lines short, unless it chooses to relinquish the ground behind them. And if Ukrainian forces can starve their opponent of firepower by interrupting its supplies, they could collapse the line altogether.

If the starve and stretch phases work, Ukraine will generate an opportunity to strike deep into Russian-hold territory. So is Ukraine poised for victory? It remains to be seen. The American Civil War suggests that the offense, no matter how savvy, still needs the weight of numbers and capability to crash through into the enemy backfield and win the war. The denouement of World War I, which has come up often in commentary on the Russo-Ukraine war, likewise shows that mass is imperative. It took American manpower arriving on the battlefield in 1918 to enable the Allies to prevail. Starve and stretch all you like, but you need manpower and firepower to make good on any tactical success.

The odds still favor Russia, both by Moltkean logic and by virtue of Russia’s massive demographic, economic, and military preponderance over Ukraine. But combatants are human, and human beings are nothing if not fallible. The strong have been known to squander their advantages, setting conditions for the weak to win. Past performance suggests that Russia could follow the same path to ignominy.

Now is no time to go wobbly.

About the Author

Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · August 26, 2023

5. Time and Logistics are Working Against Ukraine

Excerpts:

While Western analysts have hoped for a decisive breakthrough in the recent Ukrainian counter-offensive, this has not been the pivotal battle they assumed it would be. The fighting in Ukraine may drag on for years with no clear end in sight. The Putin government also appears to be preparing for another wave of conscription, which will only increase the Russian advantages on the battlefield. In the words of an Atlantic Council report, “Putin is preparing for the long war.” These realities are not lost on some former top U.S. security officials, though they are negotiating with the Russians in opposition to the Biden administration. The logistical reality is not changing in favor of Ukraine, and there is doubt as to whether the West has the will to mobilize to the same extent as the Russians. Because of this, time is on Moscow’s side, and Western policymakers who hope that waiting will bring a more favorable settlement are in for a rude awakening.

Time and Logistics are Working Against Ukraine

If Ukraine is to hold a candle to Russia, the Western coalition must re-industrialize its military supply chains on a mass scale. Whether it has the capability or will to do so is far from certain.

The National Interest · by Zachary Yost · August 25, 2023

Americans have grown up with the idea of the underdog. The dashing rebels that defeat a more powerful opponent through sheer determination and nobility is a staple cliche in popular culture. Unfortunately, the reality is that better-equipped armies usually beat those less equipped regardless of the strength of their cause. General Omar Bradley once said, “Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.” The current discourse around the Ukraine conflict usually focuses on feats of heroism or the righteousness of the cause and less on the practical matters of munitions, production capabilities, and overall manpower issues.

Munitions, armaments, and manpower are the currency in this conflict, and the Western bloc is running out of all three. Russian drones, artillery, and air strikes have hammered Ukraine’s industrial base. The economic cost is astronomical. Congress has approved an estimated $113 billion in defense and financial aid to Ukraine since February 2022—more than half of Ukraine’s annual GDP.

The United States and NATO are becoming painfully aware of this fact every day as Western armories become increasingly depleted, and there is no existing industrial capacity to replenish the stockpiles, let alone continue to arm Ukraine.

The Return of Industrial Wars of Attrition

Following the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly fashionable for military policymakers to argue that “hybrid warfare” had replaced large-scale conventional warfare. As Patrick Porter explores in his recent Journal of Global Security Studies essay, hybrid warfare is fought with or against non-state or proxy actors, often using subterfuge tactics and cyber and economic warfare. In 2009, then UK Chief of Defence Staff, General David Richards, dismissed the idea that China or Russia would dare to confront the West with conventional military arms, claiming instead that “there is a good case for believing that even state-on-state warfare will be similar to that we will be conducting against non-state groupings.” As Porter proves, even a cursory glance at recent history proves this thesis is demonstrably false.

One of the clearest examples of this mindset manifesting in war planning is the requirement that NATO members stockpile enough material to sustain high-intensity combat for a mere thirty days. This optimistic pre-war planning is typical for peacetime policymakers. In The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman notes how governments before the First World War hoarded stockpiles of artillery shells that they believed would last them throughout a hypothetical war. However, following the events of August 1914, the armories of the Allied and Central Powers were depleted within months, and domestic production increased considerably.

One of the current war’s defining features is the overwhelming reliance on artillery barrages and massive infantry reserves. Hence, the West has been caught unprepared, waging a proxy war of attrition with no industrial base to do so. On the other hand, the Russian defense industry is, in the words of John Mearsheimer, “designed to fight World War I.”

We’re Out of Weapons

President Joe Biden has openly admitted that the military is sending cluster munitions to Ukraine because it cannot provide the quantity of artillery shells that Ukraine needs. The Pentagon intel leaks from earlier this year indicated that the United States pressured South Korea to send 330,000 155mm shells to Ukraine, likely via Poland. There are reports that South Korea loaned the United States half a million 155mm shells. But even if South Korea sent one million shells to Ukraine, it would hardly make up for the immense artillery imbalance. This lack of balance is only a symptom of a more significant issue: the West’s inability to transition into a war economy.

A recent Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report estimates that Russia fired 12 million artillery shells in 2022 and estimated the military would discharge seven million in 2023. This could indicate that Soviet-era stockpiles are thinning out. Still, the report notes that Russia is producing 2.5 million shells a year, in addition to munitions imports from North Korea and Iran.

In stark contrast, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated in January that the United States could only produce 93,000 155mm shells a year, all of which go to training exercises. If the military achieves an accelerated production schedule, it will produce 240,000 shells yearly, still less than 10 percent of Russia’s current production. Ukrainian artillery fires 8,000 rounds daily, consuming an entire month of current U.S. munitions production. Even if the Pentagon achieves its stated goal of manufacturing 90,000 shells a month by FY 2025, it still is only half of Russia’s current production level.

Other NATO members are in even worse shape. In June, the German Bundeswehr discovered that only 20,000 155mm shells remained in its entire arsenal. The United Kingdom cannot produce high-caliber gun barrels for tanks and artillery. Vast amounts of the equipment NATO has sent to Ukraine have been ill-maintained junk, calling into question the quality of the arsenals left behind. Meanwhile, at least 20 percent of the frontline equipment that the West scraped together for the Ukrainian counter-offensive was destroyed in the first week alone.

This is not even to mention the vast issues inherent in creating an army from the world’s spare stockpiles. Armored vehicles that are destroyed or damaged at the front are not easy to repair because of the range of materials, maintenance, and training required to service every piece of hardware. Ukraine is utilizing fourteen different 155mm howitzers alone.

Facing the Hard Realities of War

The Western public is not adequately informed about the nature of the conflict in Ukraine. Emotion and micro-level analysis of individual engagements overshadow discussion of the broader strategic situation. “Nothing is beyond our capacity” may sound good on a bumper sticker, but as a warfighting strategy without execution, it is fanciful. Realities on the ground will not allow us to pursue any goal without enormous cost to ourselves and our allies, who require our continued assistance.

The chance for a favorable settlement for Ukraine is vanishing due to the lag in armaments and manpower mobilization. The zenith of Ukraine aid has passed, and it will not be matched in subsequent months and years. The opportunity for a negotiated peace or even a ceasefire on terms favorable to Ukraine will become more unlikely as Russia’s advantage on the battlefield grows.

While the strategy of putting strain on the regime of President Vladimir Putin to the point of internal collapse may have been credible at the early stages of the war, there is scant evidence that it is working now. The Wagner mutiny, despite appearances, has only strengthened Putin’s authority over his decision-making subordinates.

If events continue as they are, Ukraine’s position will likely deteriorate. The structural imbalances that pervade the conflict will not improve with sporadic shipments of arms and equipment. If Ukraine is to hold a candle to Russia, the Western coalition must re-industrialize its military supply chains on a mass scale. Whether it has the capability or will to do so is far from certain.

While Western analysts have hoped for a decisive breakthrough in the recent Ukrainian counter-offensive, this has not been the pivotal battle they assumed it would be. The fighting in Ukraine may drag on for years with no clear end in sight. The Putin government also appears to be preparing for another wave of conscription, which will only increase the Russian advantages on the battlefield. In the words of an Atlantic Council report, “Putin is preparing for the long war.” These realities are not lost on some former top U.S. security officials, though they are negotiating with the Russians in opposition to the Biden administration. The logistical reality is not changing in favor of Ukraine, and there is doubt as to whether the West has the will to mobilize to the same extent as the Russians. Because of this, time is on Moscow’s side, and Western policymakers who hope that waiting will bring a more favorable settlement are in for a rude awakening.

Matthew Bryant graduated with a BA in Global Affairs from George Mason University. He is currently a joint Graduate student at the University of Trento & the Higher School of Economics. He researches and writes about the post-Soviet area as well as U.S.-Russia relations.

Zack Yost is a freelance writer and a Fall 2021 Marcellus Policy Fellow with the John Quincy Adams Society. He has been published in a variety of outlets, including The National Interest, The Washington Times, and The American Conservative. He is the co-host of the Mises Institute’s monthly foreign policy podcast, War, Economy, and State, and writes at his Substack blog, The Yost Post.

Image: Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by Zachary Yost · August 25, 2023

6. Ukraine — Victory Is Closer Than You Think

Excerpts:

With Russia’s land bridge disrupted or closed by Ukrainian indirect fire or even its threat, Crimea would be solely supplied by the Kerch Bridge or by sea. At that point, the Kremlin would have to make ugly choices — either the Crimean population will suffer significant shortages during the upcoming winter, or the army will go short. The Kerch Bridge’s capacity, will likely not be enough to supply both the western part of the front and the civilian population.

So, how will Russians in Crimea react? We don’t know, but past Ukrainian attacks have led to an exodus of civilians. That’s hardly a message the Kremlin would welcome.

All of which is ahead of us. In the meantime, everything focuses on those 7-10km advances from Robotyne and other frontline areas. As always, the fighting and the dying will be done by Ukrainians, but the West absolutely must ensure that there are sufficient rocket artillery systems, ammunition, and support to do the job.

Ukraine — Victory Is Closer Than You Think

Ukraine’s counteroffensive is making substantial progress. Russia’s generals will know this, even if the West doesn’t.

cepa.org · by Jan Kallberg · August 23, 2023

The bleakness of the Western commentariat’s recent output is striking — Ukraine’s counteroffensive has made little progress, they say. Major US news outlets cite intelligence agencies opining that things are “grim” and that hopes are fading that Ukraine can reach its (supposed) objective of Melitopol, more than 50 miles away.

This is simply wrong. Intelligence analysts may look at the map of Southern Ukraine and see distances; military planners will apply the military math and see something very different. They know that to crush the Russian army and strangle the troops in frontline fortifications, they don’t need to advance 50 miles. 10 miles will do it.

Why? Because although it would be great if Ukrainian troops broke through to the shores of the Sea of Azov, they do not have to. Instead, they can achieve a significant operational outcome by bringing Russia’s ground line of communication (GLOC) under their guns.

On or around August 22, Ukraine’s troops liberated the village of Robotyne, some 90km (around 55 miles) from the Sea of Azov, a major accomplishment given the enormous efforts of the Russian invaders to fortify and hold it.

From here, the Ukrainians need to advance by a further 10–15 km (7–10 miles), in order to range their guns on Russia’s east-west transport routes that are critical to the ability of its army and armed forces to fight. If Ukraine can interdict these road and rail links, it’s very hard to see how the Russian army can continue to fight.

This will not be easy, but it’s reasonable to think it will happen. This will be achieved using its indirect capability — first the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), whose reach is about 80km-90km, and later its 155 mm artillery with a range of over 40km. These are hugely more capable than Ukraine’s pre-war 152mm Soviet-style artillery that have a range of only 17–20 km.

Russia’s GLOC does not run along the sands of the Azov Sea’s shores but rather inland and, therefore, closer to Ukraine’s advances. The M14 highway running east-west, and largely parallel to the coastline, is about 7km–10km from the shore. Nearby is the broader logistics corridor where the Russians place supply and ammunition dumps, fuel storage, higher-echelon command posts, reserve units, and logistic railheads.

This logistics corridor becomes increasingly narrow for every inch the Ukrainians liberate. Once the Russian assets mentioned above are within Ukrainian MLRS reach, the Russian senior leadership will have an almost impossible choice to make — will they be able to sustain operations west of Melitopol when every aspect of their fighting effort is under fire?

As winter approaches, the logistic situation west of Melitopol is likely to get worse and worse. As occurred on the western bank of the River Dnieper last fall, even Vladimir Putin will be forced to acknowledge reality – he can fight on and risk mass troop surrenders, or pull back. Either way, the so-called land bridge from Russia to Crimea will be snapped.

So Russian commanders will not think they have 90km of space to play with behind their backs. Their only consolation is that the Ukrainians can’t place MLRS artillery at the forward edge of the battle area; these units are extremely valuable and must be used from safer positions 10km–15km behind the frontline.

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Operational commanders on both sides will know the math: if the Ukrainian army is 90km from the Sea of Azov, and MLRS has a maximum range of 90km but needs to be placed 10km behind the frontline, then the Ukrainians must advance another 10km southward to cover all the terrain between them and the Sea of Azov.

Ukraine is now closing in on this goal at several spots along the frontline, offering the possibility that its rocket artillery will be able to strike the Russian land bridge from different angles.

Once this happens, there is (forgive the use of this old term) a domino effect. All east-west roads and railroads will be in range, and at this point, Russian private companies will no longer be interested in risking their drivers and $150,000 trucks for a $700 cargo payment from Mariupol to Kherson oblast.

Russia has used civilian haulage contractors for many months now and offers good rates. But the chance of an artillery strike changes the calculation, creating the risk of driver deaths and financial disaster.

A modern private 18-meter truck can carry 15–30 tons of supplies, compared to a Russian Army Kamaz truck, which can carry only a few tons in an unstructured pile on the truck bed. Private companies can, of course, be ordered, nationalized, or otherwise coerced to supply the army, but that carries its own risk of disenchantment or outright anger aimed at the Kremlin.

There are other problems. While Russia’s occupation authorities claim a Crimean population of 2.5 million, the true number on the peninsula is likely closer to 1.5 million.

With Russia’s land bridge disrupted or closed by Ukrainian indirect fire or even its threat, Crimea would be solely supplied by the Kerch Bridge or by sea. At that point, the Kremlin would have to make ugly choices — either the Crimean population will suffer significant shortages during the upcoming winter, or the army will go short. The Kerch Bridge’s capacity, will likely not be enough to supply both the western part of the front and the civilian population.

So, how will Russians in Crimea react? We don’t know, but past Ukrainian attacks have led to an exodus of civilians. That’s hardly a message the Kremlin would welcome.

All of which is ahead of us. In the meantime, everything focuses on those 7-10km advances from Robotyne and other frontline areas. As always, the fighting and the dying will be done by Ukrainians, but the West absolutely must ensure that there are sufficient rocket artillery systems, ammunition, and support to do the job.

Jan Kallberg, Ph.D., LL.M., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the United States Military Academy. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Follow him at cyberdefense.com and @Cyberdefensecom.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Military Academy or the Department of Defense.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Europe's Edge

CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.

cepa.org · by Jan Kallberg · August 23, 2023

7. Why Tribalism Took Over Our Politics

Please go to the link to see the interactive web site and charts and graphs.

I fear the only way to reduce hostilities between the parties is if members of the parties want to reduce the hate because they understand that it is important for the good of our nation to do so. But I fear both sides are committed to the "correctness" of the ideologies and that creating hatred of the "other" is a critical part of their messaging and the way th t political leaders maintain control of their parties. I think it would be important for the rank and file of both parties to realize they are not in charge of their parties and that they are being controlled by their political leaders. And a key part of the ideology, both the extreme left and extreme right, is the hatred of the other and that because of that hate there can be no compromise because they believe their ideology is absolute and they believe compromise means compromising their ideology and their identities to the other (i.e., enemy)

Why Tribalism Took Over Our Politics

Social science gives an uncomfortable explanation: Our brains were made for conflict

By Aaron ZitnerFollow

Updated Aug. 26, 2023 12:00 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/why-tribalism-took-over-our-politics-5936f48e?mod=hp_lead_pos9

Ahead of his arrest on Thursday in Georgia, Donald Trump repeatedly told his supporters about the legal peril he faced from charges of election interference. But the danger wasn’t his alone, he said. “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you,” he told a campaign rally.

It was the latest example of the Republican former president employing a potent driver of America’s partisan divide: group identity. Decades of social science research show that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape how we view facts and affect our voting decisions. When our group is threatened, we rise to its defense.

The research helps explain why Trump has solidified his standing as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination despite facing four indictments since April. The former president has been especially adept at building loyalty by asserting that his supporters are threatened by outside forces. His false claims that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, which have triggered much of his legal peril, have been adopted by many of his supporters.

Democrats are using the tactic, too, if not as forcefully as Trump. The Biden campaign criticized Republicans in Wednesday’s presidential debate as “extreme candidates” who would undermine democracy, and President Biden himself has accused “MAGA Republicans” of trying to destroy our systems of government.

The split in the electorate has left many Americans fatigued and worried that partisanship is undermining the country’s ability to solve its problems. Calling themselves America’s “exhausted majority,” tens of thousands of people have joined civic groups, with names such as Braver Angels, Listen First and Unify America, and are holding cross-party conversations in search of ways to lower the temperature in political discourse.

Share of those in each party who view the other party very unfavorably

Republicans

Democrats

2022: 62%

54%

21%

17%

1994

2000

’10

’20

1994

2000

’10

’20

Note: Doesn't include independents/others who lean toward each party

Source: Pew Research Center phone and panel surveys, most recently of 6,174 adults conducted June 27–July 4, 2022; margin of error: +/- 1.8 pct. pts.

Yet the research on the power of group identity suggests the push for a more respectful political culture faces a disquieting challenge. The human brain in many circumstances is more suited to tribalism and conflict than to civility and reasoned debate.

The differences between the parties are clearer than before. Demographic characteristics are now major indicators of party preference, with noncollege white and more religious Americans increasingly identifying as Republicans, while Democrats now win most nonwhite voters and a majority of white people with a college degree.

“Instead of going into the voting booth and asking, ‘What do I want my elected representatives to do for me,’ they’re thinking, ‘If my party loses, it’s not just that my policy preferences aren’t going to get done,’ ” said Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist. “It’s who I think I am, my place in the world, my religion, my race, the many parts of my identity are all wrapped up in that one vote.”

Trump, in responding to his indictment in Georgia for conspiring to overturn his 2020 loss in that state, amplified the sense of threat by telling a party gathering that they were engaged in a “final battle” that he described as “an epic struggle to rescue our country from the sinister forces within who hate it.” The criminal prosecutions, his campaign said in a fundraising email Thursday, were designed “to intimidate you out of voting to save your country.”

More than 60% of Republicans and more than half of Democrats now view the other party “very unfavorably,” about three times the shares when Pew Research Center polled on it in the early 1990s. Several polls find that more than 70% within each party think the other party’s leaders are a danger to democracy or back an agenda that would destroy the country.

'Unexpected Hit': Russia's 'Special Military Operation' in Ukraine Has a New Problem

Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine suffered an unexpected hit when Yevgeny Prigozhin and the leadership of the Wagner Group private military company were killed in an airplane crash on Wednesday.

19fortyfive.com · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · August 26, 2023

Russian President Vladimir Putin used the Wagner Group to great effect in the war in Ukraine. But after Prigozhin launched a mutiny and rolled with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in Russia in June, his days were numbered.

As the days pass, the picture of what took place becomes clearer.

Anti-Aircraft Missile or a Bomb?

According to a preliminary assessment by the U.S. Intelligence Community, an intentional explosion caused the Embraer Legacy 600 business jet that was carrying Prigozhin and the Wagner Group’s leadership to crash.

But the Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community are refuting this version of the story and suggest that something else, such as a bomb or drone, was responsible.

It is almost certain that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the assassination. Initial reports indicated that an anti-aircraft missile took down Prigozhin’s plane.

The business jet crashed near the town of Tver, between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. According to the official Russian narrative, ten people, including Prigozhin, were killed in the crash.

The Day After for Wagner Group

On Wednesday, the Wagner Group lost its leader and leadership.

The loss of Prigozhin will “almost certainly” change the private military company and have a destabilizing effect on its operations, according to the British Military Intelligence.

“There is not yet definitive proof that Prigozhin was onboard and he is known to exercise exceptional security measures. However, it is highly likely that he is indeed dead,” the British Military Intelligence assessed in its latest estimate of the war.

Prigozhin was responsible for most of (the very few) Russian successes in Ukraine, including the capture of the town of Bakhmut in the Donbas. He was widely respected by his mercenaries but also by the Ukrainian forces because he was a brutal but largely fair adversary.

“His personal attributes of hyper-activity, exceptional audacity, a drive for results and extreme brutality permeated Wagner and are unlikely to be matched by any successor,” the British Military Intelligence stated.

The Wagner Group is now a force without a leadership and without any heavy weapon systems. With these conditions, it has stopped being a serious major player in the conflict. The Kremlin might try to retain a use for the mercenary group for overseas missions in Africa and the Middle East. However, it remains to be seen how the Wagner Group’s council of commanders reacts to the death of the leadership.

“Wagner’s leadership vacuum would be compounded by the reports that founder and field commander Dimitry Utkin and logistics chief Valery Chekalov also died,” the British Military Intelligence added.

There are already indications that Wagner Group mercenaries are reacting badly to the loss of Utkin—indeed, some are taking it worse than the loss of Prigozhin. A brutal neo-Nazi commander, Utkin was widely respected by the Wagner Group’s rank and file. His loss will likely be as important to the Wagner Group’s operations as the loss of Prigozhin.

A 19FortyFive Defense and National Security Columnist, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations and a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ). He holds a BA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MA from the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and is pursuing a J.D. at Boston College Law School. His work has been featured in Business Insider, Sandboxx, and SOFREP.

From the Vault

The Navy Sent 4 Battleships To Attack North Korea

‘Sir, We Hit a Russian Submarine’: A U.S. Navy Sub Collided with a Nuclear Attack Sub

Did A Russian-Made Missile ‘Strike’ an F-35 Fighter?

19fortyfive.com · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · August 26, 2023

9. Our military is being held as political hostages

Our military is being held as political hostages

BY KATHY ROTH-DOUQUET, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 08/26/23 9:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4166959-our-military-is-being-held-as-political-hostages/

Imagine this: One person wielding arbitrary power over 1.5 million military family members. But surprise, it’s not the president — it’s Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

His move to block more than 250 officer promotions not only robs the military of valuable talent, it’s left two military branches leaderless: the Marines, without an official chief for the first time in 164 years, and the Army. The consequences are far-reaching, impacting those who defend our freedoms.

But don’t take it from just me. “We will lose talent because of those challenges,” Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. told Congress about the hold’s impact on military families. He’s slated to be our next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — if and only if Tuberville’s hold lifts.

But that’s just one takeaway and overlooks a more critical point. Spouses and families of service members play a significant role in their partners’ service and decisionmaking, and Sen. Tuberville’s promotion blockade will have a dire ripple effect on our nation’s recruitment and retention crisis.

In fact just 37 percent of active-duty families are likely to recommend military service, down from 55 percent less than a decade ago. People tell us they love military service, but lifestyle challenges and lack of trust for civilian leadership undermine their willingness to recommend it to others.

As co-founder of Blue Star Families, I’ve heard poignant stories from spouses about the impact of these holds. Some shared how their Air Force husbands may be forced to retire if they cannot rank up in time, potentially derailing their career goals and taking them away from the service they love. Another spouse from North Carolina mentioned how her husband in the Navy had his promotion announced in June but could face a delay of 15 months due to promotions starting in the next fiscal year. The direct costs for these families are enormous, with each likely losing out on tens of thousands of dollars.

Sadly, they are not alone. We launched a survey to gather information about the impact of the promotion block, expecting a few hundred people to respond. Within a few days we had 1,145 respondents, a testament to the pain of promotion inaction. Eighty percent of currently serving officer family respondents (from all officer ranks) were hurt in some way by the promotion block. And those not directly impacted recounted stories of the ripple effects the block was having on friends, colleagues and neighbors.

Military life is already full of uncertainty. It undermines morale and readiness to pile on with this promotion block. Right now military families may not move in time for a child to try out for sports or for a spouse to accept a job, or may make the financial gamble to put down a security deposit for a house knowing they may not move. It’s no surprise our survey respondents were discouraged, angry and scared.

As someone whose husband was in the Marine Corps for 30 years and went on multiple combat deployments, these reactions hit much too close to home. Our family navigated nine moves in 16 years, each bringing real challenges — emotionally, financially and professionally. Uprooting our lives, me losing my job, our kids changing schools and adapting to new surroundings were part of the journey to make each community we lived in feel like home, while my husband helped keep Americans safe in their homes.

Sen. Tuberville’s promotion block exacerbates the challenging lives of those who chose to serve, making already existing issues like under-employment, food insecurity and the dislocation of moves — i.e., temporary homelessness — worse. It makes us feel that we are on the tip end of a whip, being manipulated for reasons unattached to anything we can control.

In Congress, political grandstanding is nothing new, but when it comes to military promotions, Senate approval is usually and ought to be bipartisan and routine. Having a commandant for the Marine Corps, promoting senior leaders — these are all essential to good order and discipline. Sen. Tuberville maintains that his hold does not hurt readiness or recruiting, but military recruitment is already trending down, and using our armed forces as collateral in partisan fights will only accelerate that trend.

As recently as seven months ago, Sen. Tuberville boasted of his support for the military and his efforts to improve recruitment. I am sure he means what he says. So I am asking him, and the families who serve are asking him, to think again about the effect he is having on the morale of the military and of the families who are truly a component of our force today.

There are 8,712 active-duty military members in his home state and about 26,000 military members and families in his state alone, and hundreds of thousands more across the country. It’s time to release the hostages.

Kathy Roth-Douquet is the co-founder and CEO of Blue Star Families.

10. What Does Victory Look Like for Ukraine?

Excerpts:

What, then, would a Ukrainian victory look like? The minimum would be a withdrawal of Russian forces from the territories it occupied in 2022. The maximum would be a complete withdrawal of the territories Russia seized in 2014—the Crimea and Donbas. Both scenarios would have to entail Russian reparations, which could be as high as $3 trillion, continued Western armament of Ukraine, some form of security guarantees, and serious movement toward European Union and NATO membership.

Would Russia agree to such terms? If it loses the war, yes: it would have no choice. If Putin is deposed and a more or less pro-Western coalition succeeds Putin, then also yes: Russia would want a durable peace.

To repeat: Ukraine can win, but only if the West lets it win. A Ukrainian victory would obviously enable Ukraine to rebuild, but it would also provide Russia with a historic opportunity to abandon fascism and imperialism and take a serious stab at democracy.

What Does Victory Look Like for Ukraine?

19fortyfive.com · by Alexander Motyl · August 26, 2023

What would a Ukrainian victory look like, and is it achievable? Seemingly demoralized by the ongoing Ukrainian offensive’s slow progress, many analysts have predicted that a Ukrainian victory is impossible.

Russia, so the argument goes, can hold its defensive lines indefinitely because its resources are greater than Ukraine’s.

Hence, a long-lasting war of attrition is unwinnable for Ukraine—as well as, possibly, for Russia.

Since stalemate is unavoidable, negotiations should begin sooner rather than later. Neither side may get what it wants, but at least fewer lives will be lost.

Ukrainians roundly reject this scenario, while Russians generally endorse it, even if not openly. That’s significant, testifying to Ukrainian confidence that they can win and Russian uncertainty about their current capacities.

Naturally, both sides could be wrong, so a closer look at the reasoning outlined above is worthwhile.

Ukraine’s Offensive in Trouble? Not Exactly

Has Ukraine’s offensive stalled? Yes, but only if one measures progress in territorial gains, which, though not insignificant, have been modest. If, alternatively, one broadens one’s notion of progress to include Russia’s entire war-fighting capabilities—which include ammunition dumps, infrastructure, communications, fuel depots, and the like—then the answer has to be a resounding no.

As the United States Military Academy’s Jan Kallberg rightly says:

Intelligence analysts may look at the map of Southern Ukraine and see distances; military planners will apply the military math and see something very different. They know that to crush the Russian army and strangle the troops in frontline fortifications, they don’t need to advance 50 miles. 10 miles will do it.

Why? Because although it would be great if Ukrainian troops broke through to the shores of the Sea of Azov, they do not have to. Instead, they can achieve a significant operational outcome by bringing Russia’s ground line of communication (GLOC) under their guns.

Indeed, says Kallberg, having liberated the village of Robotyne, some 55 miles from the Sea of Azov, “the Ukrainians need to advance by a further … 7–10 miles, in order to range their guns on Russia’s east-west transport routes that are critical to the ability of its army and armed forces to fight.”

Kallberg’s conclusion is worth underscoring: “If Ukraine can interdict these road and rail links, it’s very hard to see how the Russian army can continue to fight.”

There is every reason to think that Ukraine’s General Staff shares Kallberg’s analysis, especially as they know that a large-scale frontal offensive of the kind impatient Western analysts and commentators would like to see would be suicidal without the air power the West has refused to supply.

Russia’s Resources: Greater Than Ukraine?

Are Russia’s resources—as measured in numbers of soldiers, armaments, etc.—greater than Ukraine’s? Well, of course they are, and they always were. And yet, as the failure of last year’s invasion showed, the quality and morale of the fighting forces, leadership, and equipment are arguably more important than sheer numbers. Ukraine demonstrated the truth of this proposition four times in 2022: when it stopped Russia at Kyiv’s doorstep, when it forced the Russians to withdraw from Kyiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv provinces, and when it recaptured parts of Kharkiv and Kherson provinces.

Moreover, Ukraine’s resources aren’t all that matters. Western assistance to Ukraine has been of immense importance and to no small degree accounts for Ukraine’s ability to liberate about half the territory seized by Russia in the months immediately after the attack. The West’s resources aren’t infinite, and its willingness to provide them may also be limited, but the West could, if it wanted, ensure a Ukrainian victory.

Can Russia Fight Forever?

Finally, can Russia fight indefinitely?

Well, yes, if one simply looks at the numbers. With a population of about 140 million, Russian casualties appear tiny. But numbers, again, aren’t all that matters. Will Russian men continue to go blindly to their deaths? Will the Russian population tolerate indefinitely such a self-slaughter? Will Russian elites?

After all, the elites know that this is Vladimir Putin’s war. His position, as both the Prigozhin Mutiny and his seeming demise have demonstrated, is shaky at best. Will Russia continue to fight if Putin dies or is killed? Just asking these questions suggests that the answers are anything but obvious.

What, then, would a Ukrainian victory look like? The minimum would be a withdrawal of Russian forces from the territories it occupied in 2022. The maximum would be a complete withdrawal of the territories Russia seized in 2014—the Crimea and Donbas. Both scenarios would have to entail Russian reparations, which could be as high as $3 trillion, continued Western armament of Ukraine, some form of security guarantees, and serious movement toward European Union and NATO membership.

T-90M from Russian Military in Ukraine.

Would Russia agree to such terms? If it loses the war, yes: it would have no choice. If Putin is deposed and a more or less pro-Western coalition succeeds Putin, then also yes: Russia would want a durable peace.

To repeat: Ukraine can win, but only if the West lets it win. A Ukrainian victory would obviously enable Ukraine to rebuild, but it would also provide Russia with a historic opportunity to abandon fascism and imperialism and take a serious stab at democracy.

About the Author, Dr. Alexander Motyl

Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”

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A Second American Civil War?

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19fortyfive.com · by Alexander Motyl · August 26, 2023

11. UPDATED: 3 U.S. Marines Killed in Australian MV-22 Crash

UPDATED: 3 U.S. Marines Killed in Australian MV-22 Crash - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Heather Mongilio · August 27, 2023

U.S. Marine Corps MV-22B Osprey pilot with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 265 (Rein.), 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, transports Royal Australian Air Force and Navy senior leadership during Talisman Sabre 23, in the Coral Sea, July 22, 2023. US Marine Corps Photo

Three Marines were killed in a Sunday MV-22B Osprey crash off the coast of Darwin, Australia, according to the service.

The tilt-rotor with 23 Maines aboard crashed around 11 a.m. local time on Melville Island while Marines were participating in Exercise Predators Run, according to a statement from Marine Rotational Force – Darwin.

“The incident took place at approximately 9:30 a.m. There were a total of 23 personnel on board. Three have been confirmed deceased while five others were transported to Royal Darwin Hospital in serious condition,” reads the statement.

There were no Australians aboard the MV-22B.

Exercise Predators Run includes 2,500 personnel from the U.S., Australia, Philippines and Timor-Leste.

“Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the three U.S. service personnel who lost their lives those who have been injured, the rest of the crew and indeed the entire United States armed forces,” reads a statement from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defense Minister Richard Marles.

An Australian Defense spokesperson told both outlets that the focus is on the incident response.

This is the second aircraft crash in a week for the Marines. Late Thursday, Maj. Andrew Mettler died after his F/A-18D Hornet crashed near Miramar, Calif., during a training flight.

news.usni.org · by Heather Mongilio · August 27, 2023

12. Hollywood Rewrites History Again: What the Oppenheimer Deification Movie Didn’t Tell You

A long read.

Excerpts:

Sir Winston Churchill feared thermonuclear weapons, possibly as much as Dr. Oppenheimer did. According to Graham Farmelo, a historian of the British nuclear weapons program, “The H-bomb was, Churchill believed, the greatest threat to civilization since the Mongols began their conquests three quarters of a millennium before.”[45] Yet he saw that his main task “…was to argue that the UK must acquire the weapons he feared so much, as a deterrent to the Soviet Union.”[46] Dr. Oppenheimer was not wise enough to do the same.

Why is there a such push to deify Dr. Oppenheimer? Perhaps it is that much of the current radical left wing irresponsibility concerning the U.S. nuclear deterrent is directly traceable to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. So is the left wing attitude toward nuclear power. The impact of the left on the U.S. nuclear deterrent has been growing for decades. While Putin’s vicious war against Ukraine and his constant nuclear war threats have at least temporarily increased support for nuclear deterrence, the radical left has not given up and they will be aided by Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

We owe a great debt to Dr. Oppenheimer for his role in the development of the atomic bomb and preventing more millions of deaths before the final defeat of Japan. However, he was clearly a Communist and the revocation of his security clearance in the context of the most dangerous decade of the Cold War was quite justified. Irrespective of whether or not he was actually a Soviet spy or an agent of influence, his postwar impact on U.S. security was largely negative. In particular, he made the decade of the 1950s more dangerous than it would otherwise have been. We survived that decade and the early 1960 Cuban missile crisis because of nuclear deterrence, not because of Dr. Oppenheimer’s fantasy about ending nuclear weapons secrecy and depending upon the global brotherhood of high-minded peace-loving scientists.

Late in his life his views may have changed. In 1965, the year before his death, Dr. Oppenheimer said in an interview, “The existence of the bomb has reduced the chances of World War III and has given us valid hope.”[47] You won’t find this in the Mr. Nolan’s movie.

Hollywood Rewrites History Again: What the Oppenheimer Deification Movie Didn’t Tell You

By Mark B. Schneider

August 25, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/08/25/hollywood_rewrites_history_again_what_the_oppenheimer_deification_movie_didnt_tell_you_975398.html

Mr. Christopher Nolan’s movie on J. Robert Oppenheimer is a mixed bag. It is certainly entertaining and well-directed. Its depiction of Dr. Oppenheimer’s role as the head of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory is fairly accurate, although it was hardly a one-man show. From the start of movie, it was obvious that the evidence of his Communist Party affiliation was much understated. Dr. Oppenheimer’s defense of his loyalty was generally presented as fact, while the case against him was largely ignored. Yet, Dr. Oppenheimer had every reason to minimize his Communist Party involvement and certainly did so. Even disregarding the ridiculous sex scene that Mr. Nolan depicts at the Oppenheimer security clearance hearing (which should alone discredit the movie), his treatment of the case against Dr. Oppenheimer was minimal and sanitized. In my view, no reasonable person can read the transcript of the Oppenheimer security hearing (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer[1]) without concluding that Oppenheimer was a Communist despite his denials.

The movie ignores the scope of Dr. Oppenheimer’s involvement with numerous Communist front groups. Dr. Robert Conquest, the distinguished British-American historian who first exposed the scope of Stalin’s mass murder in the 1930s, wrote that, “As with Oppenheimer, it is impossible to understand how anyone who read the original American investigation which led to his losing his security clearance can doubt that he maintained very close and inappropriate connections with those whose allegiance was to the USSR. And he let unauthorized people see secret material.”[2]

In general, the movie either ignored or cleaned up the skeletons in Dr. Oppenheimer’s closet, including the episode involving his attempted murder of his mentor, which reportedly was “…prevented by his parent[s]’ decision to step in and not by Oppie’s own guilt.”

In his review of Mr. Nolan’s Oppenheimer movie (which he characterized as a “A dishonest masterpiece”), Dr. Bruce Bawer, a respected author and critic, noted “…Soviet spy chief, General Pavel Sudoplatov, who in his 1994 memoirs stated that Oppenheimer, while at Los Alamos, had passed nuclear secrets to the Soviets without which they’d never have been able to build their own A-Bomb so quickly. Also ignored…was a 1944 letter from a Soviet security official, Boris Merkulov, to Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s notorious chief of secret police, in which he stated that Oppenheimer had reported to the Soviets on his work at Los Alamos via CPUSA [Communis Party of the United States of America] president Earl Browder….Whatever the case, none of the evidence of his perfidy finds its way into American Prometheus, or into Oppenheimer or into any of the numerous legacy-media reviews of the movie.”

Notwithstanding its Pulitzer Prize, American Prometheus (by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin), the book on which the movie is mainly based, has a strong liberal bias. The authors endorse two of the most extreme interpretations relating to Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan: 1) that the use of the atomic bomb was unnecessary to end the war promptly; and 2) that Dr. Gar Alperovitz’s “atomic diplomacy” theory was correct. (According to the authors, “…Alperovitz argued that atomic diplomacy against the Soviet Union was a factor in President Truman’s decision to use the bomb against a Japanese enemy that appeared defeated militarily…”[3]). Bird and Sherwin write Alperovitz’s interpretation is based on, “…such newly open archival sources as former secretary of War Henry L. Stimson diaries and State Department materials related to former secretary of state James F. Byrnes…”[4] There is little or no evidence of “atomic diplomacy” in these sources and the theory is inconsistent with the post-war policy of the Truman Administration which involved: 1) very rapid military demobilization; 2) the inadequate funding of national defense; 3) an effort to ban nuclear weapons; 4) minimal progress in the development and production of U.S. nuclear weapons until the Korean War; and 5) the continued presence of Dr. Oppenheimer in an influential position over atomic weapons policy. Indeed, through 1947, all the United States had was “stockpile of weapons parts…” In April 1947, President Truman was shocked when he was told how few U.S. nuclear weapons existed and that none of them were assembled. The number was only 13 in 1947.

A chapter of my Ph. D. dissertation was devoted to “atomic diplomacy.” I read through these sources and checked every footnote relating to it in Dr. Gar Alperovitz’s book. I found that the core of “Atomic Diplomacy” was quoting out of context the three paragraphs in Truman’s memoirs on the decision to use the atomic bomb (one sentence was quoted in a number of variations over ten times). The approach was to use innuendo to give Truman’s words a meaning that Truman clearly did not intend. While there were a few people in the Truman Administration who saw nuclear weapons as giving the United States an advantage, they were not at the top or determined policy. The opening of Soviet archives has demonstrated that there were large numbers of Stalin supporters and agents of influence in the Roosevelt Administration that President Truman inherited.

Concerns about Dr. Oppenheimer’s involvement with Communism developed during World War II. Lieutenant Colonel Boris H. Pash, a counterintelligence officer, was convinced that Dr. Oppenheimer was a secret Communist Party member and possibly a spy.[5] (He is attacked in the movie for doing his job with determination.) In 1994, Lieutenant General Pavel Sudoplatov of the Soviet NKVD (People Commissariate for Internal Security later called the Committee on State Security or KGB) who managed the Soviet Atomic Espionage effort in the United States, in a memoir that was a best seller around the world except in the United States, stated, “I set up a network of illegals who convinced Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Bruno Pontecorvo, Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, and other scientists in America and Great Britain to share atomic secrets with us.”[6] He characterized the information provided by Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Fermi and Dr. Szilard as, “The most vital information for developing the first Soviet atomic bomb…” The book which has an entire chapter on Soviet atomic espionage, details how Dr. Oppenheimer was recruited, what information he provided, and his role in retarding the development of the United States nuclear deterrent after World War II.[7]

Lieutenant General Sudoplatov’s claim to have recruited Oppenheimer as a source was not a recent revelation when his book was published in 1994. In 1982, he stated that he had obtained nuclear weapons information “…from such sources as the famous nuclear physicists R. Oppenheimer, E. Fermi, K. Fuchs and others.”[8] The fact that this assertion was made in an appeal of his conviction (Sudoplatov had been jailed by Khruschev) to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and former head of the KGB Yuri Andropov gives it particularly credibility since there would be no value in his lying about this matter which could easily be verified by Andropov.

Journalist Jerrold L. Schecter and writer Leona P. Schecter later provided evidence supporting General Sudoplatov’s claim. They obtained an October 1944 originally Top Secret message from NKVD officer Boris Merkulov to the infamous head of the NKVD Lavretenty Beria, that stated, “In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on [uranium] in the USA, Professor Oppenheimer while being an unlisted (nglastny) member of the apparat of Comrade Browder] [handwritten] informed us about the beginning of work [on atomic weapons].” At a Wilson Center Round Table, the Schecters stated, “Former intelligence officers we interviewed in Moscow stressed that Oppenheimer’s assistance was of great importance during the 1942-1944 period.” The Schecters characterized Oppenheimer’s role as that of a “facilitator” of Soviet espionage rather than a traditional spy and said that the question of whether he was a Soviet agent was a matter of definition. General Sudoplatov also recorded that Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Fermi and Dr. Szilard were not recruited or handled in the traditional manner; rather, they were appealed to on the basis of defeating Hitler, emphasizing that the Soviet Union was an ally.[9]

I find less then convincing the counter argument by historian Dr. Gregg Herken that “…it is difficult to know whether this cable is evidence of Oppenheimer’s complicity or reflects the (understandable) desire of Kheifetz and other NKVD operatives to curry favor with their boss.” Yet, the promised information from Dr. Oppenheimer was either going to appear or not appear. Hence, any deception of Beria would have been short-lived. The penalty for lying to someone like Beria might very well have been a bullet in the head. Moreover, I can see no reason to lie about Dr. Oppenheimer’s Communist party affiliation.

Mr. Nolan’s non-treatment of this important issue is consistent with the American left’s denial of the fact of, and the importance of, Soviet nuclear espionage, which goes back to the U.S. atomic spy trials. Today, even Russian state media admit that Soviet espionage “…helped Soviet scientists to reduce the time it took to develop their own nuclear weapons by several years.” The liberal/left’s response to Sudoplatov’s revelations was a savage effort to discredit him based on minor errors mainly (unrelated to his espionage charges) that are inevitable in a book written by a man in his middle eighties writing from memory about events four decades in the past. Mr. Conquest observed that that the dismissal of the new evidence on the basis of the belief that “…good scientists cannot behave as Sudoplatov claims is absurd…. Thus everyone concerned acted in what they believed to be the best interests of humanity. Their fault was not moral but intellectual. They were wrong and their governments were right.”[10]

Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro points out that Dr. Oppenheimer’s pro-communist views were common among contemporary nuclear physicists. This is very important because being a Communist in the 1930s meant swearing allegiance to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Today, it is possible to debate whether Stalin, Hitler or Mao was the most murderous dictator in human history but in the 1930s Hitler and Mao were still in the bush leagues. Even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which started the deadliest war in world history and resulted in the prompt Soviet invasions of five countries (Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland) grand illusions about the Soviet Union and the nature of Communism persisted. President Franklin Roosevelt’s characterization of Stalin as “Uncle Joe” was indeed foolish. Shockingly, Ambassador William Burns, who represented the United States in Moscow in the late 1930s, actually stated that the Soviet Union “…in self defense, has every moral right to seek atomic bomb secrets through military espionage if excluded from such information by our former fighting allies.”[11]

When I was researching my Ph. D. dissertation about 50 years ago, I went through the Oppenheimer papers at the Library of Congress. I had already read Dr. Oppenheimer’s national security articles. What struck me was that Dr. Oppenheimer appeared to be making arguments of convenience. His support of tactical nuclear weapons, something the left would savage today, displayed no understanding that fusion weapons made the best types of tactical nuclear weapons because they can be made clean (i.e., do not produce fallout). Dr. Oppenheimer’s vaunted morality did not extend to his advocacy of clean nuclear weapons. Pure fission bombs cannot be made clean. Instead, Dr. Oppenheimer supported fission bombs that were much lower in yield than the weapons of the Strategic Air Command. However, some of these tactical nuclear weapons had yields comparable to the Hiroshima bomb. You won’t find this in the Nolan movie.

Similarly, Dr. Oppenheimer’s support of strategic defenses against the Soviet Union would also be attacked by his present day supporters. His support of a half megaton fission bomb as an alternative to thermonuclear weapons was foolish particularly for someone who was supposed to be a genius. This will be discussed below.

Despite the fact that it was discussed in the Oppenheimer security clearance hearing and a major part of the defense of Dr. Oppenheimer and even announced by President Eisenhauer,[12] the Nolan movie does not even mention the half megaton “Super Oralloy [enriched uranium] Bomb,” the highest yield all fission bomb the U.S. ever built.[13] At the time of this decision, Dr. Oppenheimer was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee (AEC GAC) and was extremely influential on weapons development decisions. Treating this episode would have tarnished the deification agenda of the movie. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book also fails to mention the half megaton “Super Oralloy Bomb” in their discussion of the AEC GAC report recommendations.[14] Nor do they discuss the implications of the AEC GAC recommendations if they had been adopted.

In the AEC GAC’s thermonuclear weapons report, we have group of distinguished scientists (two of them on Lieutenant General Sudoplatov’s list of Soviet spies) making recommendations not to accelerate work on thermonuclear weapons not mainly based upon science (even their inaccurate technical assessments) but rather politics, ideology, preferred military strategy and personal morality. In these areas, they had no special expertise. Their perception of what thermonuclear weapons would be like turned out to be largely inaccurate. The report stated:

It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations. It is of course true that super bombs which are not as big as those here contemplated could be made, provided the initiating mechanism works. In this case, however, there appears to be no chance of their being an economical alternative to the fission weapons themselves. It is clearly impossible with the vagueness of design and the uncertainty as to performance as we have them at present to give anything like a cost estimate of the super [hydrogen bomb]. If one uses the strict criteria of damage area per dollar and if one accepts the limitations on air carrier capacity likely to obtain in the years immediately ahead, it appears uncertain to us whether the super will be cheaper or more expensive that the fission bomb.

This assessment turned out to be almost entirely wrong. As physicist and father of the neutron bomb Sam Cohen pointed out, “Somewhat less than two years after the zenith of doubting [over the hydrogen bombs feasibility] the doubters were silenced by the ‘thermonuclear breakthrough’ at Los Alamos.”[15] The AEC GAC report said that there was a better than even chance that a hydrogen bomb could be developed within five years but recommended “strongly against such action.” In effect, what they were recommending was a national security policy in which there was a better than even chance that the Soviet Union would get the hydrogen bomb first and have a monopoly on it for some period of time. This is why the GAC lost in the Washington policy battle.

A viewer of the Oppenheimer movie will not find any such assessment; nor does one find it in the book upon which it is based. The viewer is shown Dr. Oppenheimer understating the scope of his opposition to thermonuclear weapons. Sam Cohen, while favorably disposed to Dr. Oppenheimer and critical of Dr. Edward Teller, physicist and father of the hydrogen bomb, stated, “…Oppenheimer also was devoting as much time as he could spare to fight this development” and his opposition was “mainly for ideological reasons….” He also said, “Oppenheimer and his colleagues, most of whom were distinguished scientists who didn’t know from beans about the military business….Oppenheimer’s [study] was almost childlike in its simplicity and military naiveté.” You won’t find this in the Nolan movie either.

As it was, the Soviets were the first to actually test a deliverable thermonuclear bomb. Reportedly, the bomb was about the size of the World War II Fat Man bomb and yielded 400-kt. It reportedly was a different design concept, a “single-stage bomb,” in which “compression was achieved by using high explosives.” A model of the bomb is on display at the Sarov nuclear weapons museum, and it appears consistent with this description. This design concept was also invented by Dr. Teller but not pursued in the U.S. because it was less capable than Teller’s other concept. The Soviets reportedly tested Teller’s other concept (“a two-stage radiation implosion [aka Sakharov’s ‘Third Idea’, and Teller-Ulam) design]” with a yield of 1.6 megatons in 1955.

The Oppenheimer movie’s treatment of the issue of thermonuclear weapons development is based upon the myth very prevalent in the AEC GAC report (and still very common today) that all hydrogen bombs were multimegaton weapons. (The minority annex by Dr. E. Fermi and Dr. I. I. Rabi, which was even more strongly opposed than the GAC majority report, established the record for technical inaccuracy.) It is noteworthy that the yields commonly reported for current U.S. thermonuclear ballistic missiles are all under the reported 500-kiloton yield of the “Super Oralloy Bomb.” The downward trend in strategic nuclear warhead yield has been going on for about six decades.[16] Small numbers of B53 multimegaton bombs were retained until the 1990s for special missions. Thermonuclear weapons with reported maximum yields of just over one megaton were reportedly available by the late 1950s. Reported minimum yields for current U.S. thermonuclear weapons are as low as 300 tons. In 1967, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated that, “Our alert forces alone carry more than 2200 weapons, averaging more than one megaton each.” The MIRVing of our strategic ballistic missiles reportedly further reduced the yield of our thermonuclear weapons to a small fraction of a megaton. The U.S.’ Poseidon missile nuclear warhead (W68) reportedly had a yield of only 40-50 kilotons. This same trend occurred in the Soviet Union but at a much slower pace.[17] The Soviet Union reportedly deployed high yield weapons much longer than the United States did and in greater numbers.[18] This points out a reality that Dr. Oppenheimer never recognized – restraining the United States did not restrain the Soviet Union. As the late Dr. Harold Brown, then-Defense Secretary during the Jimmy Carter Administration, stated, “Soviet spending has shown no response to U.S. restraint — when we build, they build; when we cut, they build.”

In 2003, Dr. Viktor Mikhaylov, former Russian Atomic Energy Minister and then-Director of the Sarov nuclear weapons laboratory, stated regarding thermonuclear weapons that, “There are weapons in the megaton class, and weapons yielding hundreds of tons.” The identification of thermonuclear weapons with high multimegaton yield simply reflects the fact that in the early 1950s the size and weight of the fission triggers (or primaries) of thermonuclear weapons were so great that they were just about the only types of bombs that could be built with Dr. Teller’s design concept. This was in part a result of the impact of Dr. Oppenheimer’s “blood on our hands” speech. (Another version of this concept was Dr. Oppenheimer’s 1948 assertion that, “Physicists have known sin.”) on the U.S. post-World War II fission weapons program. In the 1950s, particularly after the removal of Dr. Oppenheimer from a position of influence, this rapidly changed. The American left does not like the result and often attempts to keep the myth alive. In this regard, the Oppenheimer movie will unfortunately likely be of great assistance.

The Oppenheimer “Super” fission bomb, (not to be confused with the thermonuclear bomb which in 1949 was called the “Super”) the Mark 18, reportedly weighed 8,600 pounds and had a yield of 500-kilotons. Only 90 were produced and it had one of the shortest service lives of any U.S. nuclear bomb. From a moral standpoint there is little difference between a half megaton fission bomb and even a dirty (high fission content) one megaton thermonuclear bomb. From a safety and delivery vehicle cost standpoint the difference is monumental. The older lower-yield U.S. fission bombs served much longer. There is no indication in the available literature that they had the same safety problem as the Oppenheimer driven Mark 18, at least when they were delivered by bombers.

Inherently safe nuclear weapons are referred to in the U.S. nuclear weapons community as “one point safe.” According to the U.S. Department of Energy, “A nuclear explosive that, in the event a detonation is initiated at any one point in the high explosive system, presents no greater probability than one in a million of producing a nuclear explosive yield of greater than 4 pounds of TNT equivalent.” Reportedly, the Mark 18 nuclear bomb, “With a natural uranium tamper layer, the bomb had over four critical masses of fissile material in the core, and was unsafe: the accidental detonation of even one of the detonator triggers, would likely cause a significant (many kilotons of energy yield) explosion.” During the Cold War, nuclear-armed U.S. B-52 bombers were placed on airborne nuclear alert (Chrome Dome) and several of them crashed. In one of the crashes, a Mark 28 (not to be confused with the Mark 18) thermonuclear bomb exploded without creating any nuclear yield. It does not take a genius to figure out what likely would have happened if Dr. Oppenheimer had won the fight over the development of thermonuclear weapons and the Mark 18 had become a standard U.S. nuclear weapon carried by these bombers.

In the course of my doctoral dissertation research, I interviewed Mr. Cohen who had worked in Los Alamos during the Manhattan project. I had previously met him through my mentor Dr. William Van Cleave. He was very candid with me. His description of Dr. Edward Teller was very close to what was portrayed in the Nolan movie. His description of Dr. Oppenheimer’s victory speech after the bombing of Hiroshima was close to that depicted in the movie. (Sam Cohen later wrote about something that does not appear in the movie, that Dr. Oppenheimer said that “… he did have one deep regret, that we hadn’t completed the Bomb in time to use against the Germans. That really brought down the house.”)

In his farewell address at Los Alamos, I believe Dr. Oppenheimer shrewdly played on the views of his audience about secrecy to achieve his objectives. His speech was a sophisticated attack on the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The focus was an assault on nuclear weapons secrecy which the scientists didn’t like: “It is not good to be a scientist, and it is not possible, unless you think that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge, to share it with anyone who is interested. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences.”

Dr. Oppenheimer spoke about the unique power of atomic weapons and the fact that they would get more powerful. The speech emphasized the danger of nuclear weapons, argued it was easy and cheap for other states to build nuclear weapons, yet proposed to make it easier and cheaper by releasing nuclear weapons information. Was it really a good idea to give every tin pot dictator on the planet detailed information concerning how to build nuclear weapons? How about nuclear terrorists? And Chairman Mao?

Dr. Oppenheimer’s assertions about the ease and inexpensiveness of other nations developing nuclear weapons was a considerable exaggeration in 1945. Even today, while it is much easier and cheaper to obtain nuclear weapons, at least in small numbers, it is not easy and cheap to do so. Nuclear proliferation was certainly a substantial long term threat, but Communist totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and then in China dwarfed it. Much later, nuclear proliferation was actually aided and abetted by left wing scientists who leaked vast amounts of nuclear weapons design information starting in the 1970s and a Department of Energy which took few steps to contain this.

Dr. Oppenheimer continued, “The only unique end can be a world that is united, and a world in which war will not occur.” This would be a world where there would be “common bond with other men everywhere.” Such illusions were prevalent in this time period. According to Dr. Oppenheimer, our salvation was supposed to be in the global fraternity of high-minded peace- loving scientists. While Dr. Oppenheimer gave lip service to the need to defend democracy, his speech displayed no understanding that the Soviet Union was not run by high-minded scientists, that it was the worst surviving totalitarian dictatorship in the world, that it was in the process of imposing its form of Communist totalitarianism on Eastern Europe and that it was an immediate threat to the very survival of democracy in Europe, and indeed, in the world. His basic recommendation reflected little more than a fantasy about the nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Nolan’s movie virtually ignores most of the content of Oppenheimer’s farewell speech, cleaning it up in a manner that concealed its extremely naive content (naive may be a considerable understatement.) An accurate portrayal would have hurt the movie’s deification agenda.

Mr. Nolan’s movie completely ignored Oppenheimer “blood on our hands” speech. This is strange because Dr. Oppenheimer’s feeling that “…I have blood on my hands”[19] had a dramatic impact on the U.S.’ nuclear weapons policy. Moreover, “blood on my hands” is major theme in the book upon which the movie is based. When I interviewed Sam Cohen, he described it as among one of the greatest speeches in history (he compared it to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) and said it nearly ended weapons work at Los Alamos because of the outflow of people which it caused, including Cohen himself. Cohen later wrote, “After he [Oppenheimer] left Los Alamos I remember him returning to Los Alamos and again addressing the staff…This time he beseeched those who still remained at the lab to work with him toward disarmament and remove the moral stain of the Japanese bombings. Although I wouldn’t question his sincerity at the time, or any time afterward, I didn’t believe a word he said. I’m sure he did, every last word of it, delivered not with the stridence of military conquest but with the somberness of someone who, to cite him ‘had known sin’.”

I believe this was Cohen’s honest assessment of the impact of the speech particularly when the audience and the intended purpose of the speech are taken into account. Sam Cohen had no animus toward Dr. Oppenheimer. Indeed, much later, he wrote that he “worshipped Oppenheimer, for very good reasons,” although he could be intolerant and downright sadistic…” (This comment concerned his treatment of a brilliant young scientist with a speech defect.) He was very critical of the revocation of Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance.

I believe the fact that Dr. Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos to make this speech is a clear indication of his political agenda. He did not have to deliver this speech. I believe it reflected his political agenda of attempting to minimize U.S. nuclear capabilities. It had a great impact. The official history of the Atomic Energy Commission records that the scientists left Los Alamos without leaving “…production lines or printed operating manuals, but only a few assistants, some experienced technicians, some laboratory equipment and a fragmented technology recorded in thousands of detailed reports.” This does not prove that Dr. Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent of influence, but is clearly what the Soviet Union wanted to happen.

Was Dr. Oppenheimer’s really as obsessed about “blood on my hands” as depicted in the Nolan movie? Dorothy Oppenheimer Vanderford, Dr. Oppenheimer’s granddaughter, says he not psychologically tortured by his development of the atomic bomb but rather was proud of his achievement. There is no apparent reason to doubt her observation. He actually had every reason to be proud of his accomplishment although it was not the accomplishment of a sole individual as the movie suggests.

As early as February 1946, Stalin, in a major speech, made it clear to “…the entire world that there could be no peaceful coexistence of the economic systems of communism and capitalism.”[20] In Special Tasks, Lieutenant General Sudoplatov observed that “…for us, confrontation with the Western allies begun when the Red Army liberated Eastern Europe.”[21] After the war, the Soviets retained a much larger military than the United States and Britain, creating a very serious threat to Western Europe throughout the Cold War. Nuclear deterrence was critical to the survival of freedom in Europe. Soviet “peaceful coexistence,” which was never that peaceful, was a direct result of the development of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

In his epic history of World War II, historian Dr. Victor David Hansen noted that, “The postwar world seemed to have forgotten that Stalin killed almost as many of his own Russians as did Hitler.”[22] (Soviet loses were estimated at about 27 million including civilian deaths.)[23] It its obituary of Dr. Conquest, the New York Times noted that, “The scope of Stalin’s purges was laid out: seven million people arrested in the peak years, 1937 and 1938; one million executed; two million dead in the concentration camps. Mr. Conquest estimated the death toll for the Stalin era at no less than 20 million.” Late in the Soviet era even a major Soviet publication documented 20 million dead. Dr. Oppenheimer’s ideological blinders prevented him from recognizing Stalin’s malevolence and his mass murder or advocating national security policies that took these factors into account. By contrast, Dr. Edward Teller did.

In 1947, Dr. Teller wrote, “The men in the Kremlin showed by their actions that in the world to come military power will be of greatest importance.”[24] This was because what the Soviet Union was “…practicing is imperialism, pure and simple.”[25] He supported the Truman administration’s effort to put atomic weapons under international control. However, Dr. Teller cautioned that “…we must not propose less than the Baruch plan [placing nuclear weapons under international control]. We should propose more. We must work for world law and world government.”[26] This was not based on Dr. Oppenheimer’s illusion that friendly Soviet scientists would protect us from Soviet imperialism and the nuclear threat. Dr. Teller recognized that for a world government to be effective it would have to have the military power to keep the peace.[27] In reality, of course, world government was impossible as we have learned from the history of the United Nations.

While Dr. Oppenheimer’s world view was reminiscent of President Woodrow Wilson’s idealism, President Wilson never suggested that something with the military significance of atomic weapons should be disseminated without restriction or that the United States would be protected by the globalist coalition of high-minded peace-loving scientists. Dr. Oppenheimer’s real message to the assembled scientists and engineers was not to work on U.S. nuclear weapons.

Dr. Oppenheimer’s “blood on my hands” pitch did not go over well with President Harry Truman, although Mr. Nolan’s portrayal in the movie of Truman making the “crybaby” remark within Oppenheimer’s hearing never happened. (President Truman reportedly responded, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”) The “crybaby” remark was made a year after the Truman-Oppenheimer meeting in a letter to Dean Acheson, Truman’s foreign policy advisor. However, President Truman still appointed Dr. Oppenheimer to be Chairman of the AEC GAC. “Blood on our hands” continued to have a significant impact on U.S. nuclear weapons development until Dr. Oppenheimer was removed from a position of power.

Why is there such interest in Dr. Oppenheimer today? Most of the admiring audiences in our air conditioned theaters have never been shot at and probably have little or no understanding of what was happening on the Pacific “Island Infernos” just before President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb. Truman was very much aware of this. In the first three months of the Truman Administration, the United States had suffered almost as many casualties in the Pacific War as it had suffered in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to the death of President Rosevelt.[28] This is virtually ignored in the Nolan movie. Most U.S. soldiers fighting in the Pacific did not believe they would survive an invasion of Japan.

The Japanese resistance at Okinawa was fanatical. The Japanese military tried out the tactics it planned to use against the invasion of Japan and they worked. Japan launched over 1,000 suicidal Kamikaze attacks. The Japanese military fought nearly to the last soldier, which was common, but also forced the civilians to do the same, which was not common. In some instances, they forced civilians to commit suicide rather than surrender. The cost to the United States was about 50,000 casualties and Japan lost an estimated 110,000 soldiers and up to 150,000 Okinawan civilians. This is more than the death toll from both atomic bombs.

Okinawa foreshadowed an incredible bloodbath if the home Islands were invaded. Adam Lowther, Stephen Cimbala, and Curtis McGiffin have recently pointed out that the Navy estimated that losses to the United States in an invasion would have been 1.7-4 million casualties and 400,000-800,000 deaths. The wartime estimate of Japanese casualties from an invasion were conservatively estimated at as high as 10 million.[29] There were other estimates and no one can know for sure, but the Okinawa experience (the most costly operation in the Pacific War) does suggest that even the high estimates of casualties in an invasion of the home Islands may be been much too low. The civilian casualties on Okinawa were not the result of collateral damage but rather resulted from their fighting the Americans, their refusal to surrender and forced suicides by the Japanese military. There is no question that before the use of the atomic bombs, Japan was not ready to surrender, and that even after atomic weapons use Japanese surrender was a close run thing. Even after the Emperor ordered the surrender, some Japanese forces refused to obey the order and there was an attempted military coup to prevent surrender.

Even without an invasion of Japan (which would have happened) famine and conventional bombing would have killed many more Japanese as did the atomic bombs. Dr. Hansen has pointed out that if U.S. and British bomber forces had been transferred to the Pacific, conventional bombing would have inflicted the damage of ten World War II atomic bombs every month in 1946.[30] General Curtis LeMay was planning to destroy all major Japanese cities by January 1946.

Dr. Tom Lewis, an Australian military historian and retired Naval officer, in a very interesting book entitled Atomic Salvation, estimated far higher levels of casualties from an invasion of Japan if the atomic bombs had not been used. He estimated that more than 4.5 million allied casualties and 22 million Japanese would have died in the course of a 14 month conventional invasion.[31] In addition, there would have been millions of Chinese deaths and presumably Russian deaths. This may seem high, but the Okinawa experience suggests that it would have been necessary to virtually exterminate Japan to end the war without nuclear weapons use. Nuclear weapons created the face saving way for Japan to surrender.

If the United States had not developed thermonuclear weapons, the survivable U.S. nuclear deterrent composed of Minuteman ICBMs and Polaris missile submarines may never have been developed, at least in the critical time frame that they were. Neither of these missiles could possibly have carried a Mark 18 bomb or any high yield pure fission bomb. While improved versions of the smaller 1950s fission bombs might have been carried, these weapons potentially could have had similar safety problems if they been adopted for use on strategic ballistic missiles. In this case, it would not be possible to separate the fissile material from the high explosives. Unlike the bombers, ballistic missile nuclear warheads could not be assembled in flight. The poor accuracy of the late 1950s and early 1960s strategic ballistic missiles might have deterred their very development in the United States if only fission weapons were available. It was precisely the smaller and lighter yet powerful thermonuclear weapons that made these systems both feasible and affordable.

The reported accuracy of the Polaris A-1 was 900 meters. The Minuteman I ICBM reportedly had an accuracy of 1,100 to 1,500 meters. With such accuracy, relatively small yield fission bombs would frequently be unable to destroy the precise targets they were aimed at. To deliver the Oppenheimer “super” fission bomb, a missile similar to the very expensive Russian SS-9 heavy ICBM would have had to be developed. While an improved version might have been carried by a Titan II ICBM, the cost would have been very high to build a force comparable to the 1,000 strong Minuteman force. (The American left cares little about cost since they use it as an excuse to cut the U.S. nuclear deterrent.) There is no way to build a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) large enough to deliver the “Super Oralloy Bomb.” It was apparently a dead end approach to nuclear weapons development as well as being dangerous. Putting a very large amount of high explosives around a great deal of fissile material is a really bad idea.

Dr. Oppenheimer opposed the development of atomic power and the nuclear submarine, which Dr. Harold Agnew, a Director of Los Alamos, found inexplicable. While defending Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the U.S., Dr. Edward Teller also found his policy recommendations “in a great number of cases” were “exceedingly hard to understand.”[32] Even with all his warts, Teller is a better candidate for a deification movie than Dr. Oppenheimer. Dr. Teller probably saved Western civilization which Dr. Oppenheimer may have put at risk.

Sam Cohen reported that Colonel (later General) Bernard Schriever, the father of the U.S. ICBM force, wanted a thermonuclear warhead with “…a yield of a megaton in a 1500 pound warhead” weight. Because of the attitude Los Alamos held toward the Air Force, which had been made all the worse because of the Oppenheimer case, “Bradbury [the laboratory director] wasn’t about to give any assurances his lab could accomplish this in any reasonable period of time.”

According to Thomas C. Reid, former Secretary of the Air Force and Danny B. Stillman, former Director of Intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. John Foster (later Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) believed that nuclear weapons safety “should be built in” to our nuclear weapons; he succeeded in inventing “one-point safety” in the early 1960s despite the reliability problems involved.[33] According to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Dr. Foster at age 31 “and his Hectoton Group produced two designs for much smaller, more compact devices than the larger weapons that Los Alamos had become expert at designing.” He developed a warhead concept for the Polaris missile that “…was such a leap forward that it became the basis of most of the nuclear devices that followed in the stockpile.” Dr. Harold Agnew also played a major role in enhancing nuclear weapons safety.

Even a genius like Dr. Foster could not have produced a one-point safe version of the “super” fission bomb because physics would not allow it. These gentlemen deserve a deification movie a lot more than Dr. Oppenheimer does.

Lieutenant General Sudoplatov had some very interesting observations concerning Soviet perception of U.S. nuclear weakness and the impact it had on the early Cold War crisis situations. He wrote that through espionage the Soviet Union discovered in the 1940s and 1950s that the United States “…was not prepared for a nuclear war with us…”[34] Lieutenant General Sudoplatov stated that Stalin’s “tough policy of confrontation” was based upon this assessment.[35] Only in 1955 did the Soviet Union assess that the U.S. and British nuclear inventory “was sufficient to destroy the Soviet Union.”[36] U.S. nuclear weakness helped assure the Communist victory in China in 1947-1948. Lieutenant General Sudoplatov said that Stalin initiated the 1948 Berlin blockade crisis to divert attention from Mao’s conquest of China because of the Soviets assessment of an inadequate U.S. nuclear capability. The Soviets believed that the United States would use nuclear weapons to prevent Soviet conquest of Berlin but initiated the Berlin blockade crisis anyway because the “…Americans did not have enough nuclear weapons to deal with both Berlin and China.”[37] Much of this was Dr. Oppenheimer’s legacy.

The Soviet assessment was correct. The declassified numbers for the U.S. nuclear weapons from 1945 to 1955 are consistent with the Soviet assessment. Even as late as 1952, General of the Army Omar Bradley, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed the U.S. nuclear arsenal was not large enough to defeat a Russian invasion of Western Europe.[38] This assessment is very interesting in light of the fact that by 1952 there had been a significant increase in the number of U.S. nuclear weapons compared to 1950 when Communist forces supported by Russia and China invaded South Korea initiating the Korean War. The U.S. nuclear weapons inventory in 1952 was 841 compared to 299 in 1950 when the Korean War began and 170 in 1949 the year that Russia tested its first atomic bomb. U.S. nuclear-capable delivery vehicles were small in number and in 1950 included no operational jet bombers. In part thanks to Dr. Oppenheimer’s “blood on our hands,” by 1950, there had been little U.S. progress in the improvement of its nuclear weapons. The late Dr. Ralph Lapp, a nuclear physicist very much in the Oppenheimer camp, recorded that “…in these first few relatively quiet years after the war there was no dramatic advances in bomb design or yield.”[39] This allowed the Soviets to almost catch up in technology if not in numbers. In 1950, the U.S. nuclear stockpile included only the World War II designs and the Mark 4 which was only a modest improvement. It reportedly was slightly heavier than the World War II Fat Man (although easier to build) and its maximum yield reportedly increased only to 31 kilotons.

The following chart depicting U.S. nuclear weapons numbers was released by the State Department in 2021. The very slow buildup in U.S. nuclear weapons at the start of the Cold War is very much a part of Dr. Oppenheimer’s legacy.

U.S. State Department Data

Dr. Oppenheimer’s “blood on our hands” may have impacted the Korean War and the Chinese Communist intervention. Across border conventional invasions by Communist forces during the Cold War were infrequent. The psychological boost from the successful Soviet nuclear test in 1949 may have contributed to the Soviet and Chinese Communist support of the North Korea invasion. In October – November 1950, the Chinese Communists adopted as an official position that the atomic bomb was of limited effectiveness, comparable to 2,000-3,000 tons of TNT, too powerful to use on the battlefield and it became less effective the larger a nation was.[40] In particular, Mao’s attitude toward the atomic bomb was fanatical. He believed China could fight and survive a nuclear war because, “All it is a big pile of people dying.”[41] Mao once even told Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that, “If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist; in a number of years there would be 2,700 million people again and definitely more.” (Emphasis in the original). At least 45 million Chinese died in Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” China’s peace-loving high-minded scientists didn’t prevent this. This points out the need to have a deterrent strong enough to deal with vicious real world dictators not Western armchair intellectuals.

While alternative history is speculation, it is fair to ask what would have happened in the severe crisis situations that lead up to the very dangerous Cuban missile crisis if the Soviet Union had a monopoly on thermonuclear weapons? This would have been the effect of Dr. Oppenheimer’s AEC GAC report if he had prevailed and the decision was not promptly reversed. Indeed, in 1953, Dr. Oppenheimer, in an unusual article, stated he believed that “…the USSR is about four years behind us” in nuclear weapons development.[42] This was just a month before the Soviet Union would detonate its first thermonuclear bomb. The situation would have been much worse if Dr. Oppenheimer had not lost his campaign against the hydrogen bomb.

Conspicuously absent from Dr. Oppenheimer’s thinking on nuclear weapons was the very concept of nuclear deterrence and a recognition of its vital importance. What was presented in the movie concerning the conflict between Dr. Oppenheimer and Rear Admiral (ret.) Lewis Strauss and Strauss’s supposed personal vendetta against Oppenheimer was substantially overstated. While the fact that Dr. Oppenheimer “publicly ridiculed Strauss’s lack of scientific expertise,” which presumably did not exactly endear him to Admiral Strauss, the main issue between them was centered on nuclear deterrence. Strauss’s biographer Richard Pfau writes:

Oppenheimer subsequently was a leading opponent of moving ahead with the hydrogen bomb and proposed a national security strategy based on atomic weapons and continental defence; Strauss wanted the development of thermonuclear weapons and a doctrine of deterrence…Oppenheimer supported a policy of openness regarding the numbers and capabilities of the atomic weapons in America's arsenal; Strauss believed that such unilateral frankness would benefit no one but Soviet military planners.

While Dr. Oppenheimer often spoke about the horrible effects of the use of nuclear weapons in future warfare, he largely ignored their ability to deter war. For example, in October 1945, he declared, “If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a waring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”[43] Dr. Oppenheimer’s famous comparison of the United States and the Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle” displayed little understanding concerning what the Cold War was about and, indeed, on the nature of fighting and the existence of conflict in the world.

In July 1953, in an interesting article in which he characterized the Soviets as the “enemy,” Dr. Oppenheimer denounced the existing air defense strategy as “folly” because it “…was our policy to attempt to protect our striking force but it was not really our policy to attempt to protect this country.”[44] The reason for this was resource limitations and the potential vulnerability of our strategic bomber force on which our deterrent almost completely rested in 1953. Today, of course, the Oppenheimer worshipers of the left would savage the very idea of defending against Russia or China or deploying tactical nuclear weapons either to deter a Russian invasion of NATO Europe or to deter Russian or Chinese nuclear escalation. Sam Cohen said that Dr. Oppenheimer’s support of tactical nuclear weapons was based on moral grounds. He quotes Dr. Oppenheimer as saying, “Only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful insofar as it is an integral part of military operations, will it really be of much help in the fighting of a war, rather than in warning all mankind to avert it.” Once again he was downplaying the importance of deterrence. You won’t find this in the Nolan movie.

Dr. Oppenheimer also ignored the role of the hydrogen bomb in assuring our allies who were very concerned about a Soviet invasion. Walton S. Moody, in his history of the early years of the Strategic Air Command, wrote:

The case for the hydrogen bomb as a deterrent to Soviet aggression acquired special significance in the eyes of many Europeans, who were convinced that a Soviet attack spelled inevitable disaster. For them, the question was not whether to defend themselves or be overrun. A war would entail a “liberation” even more devastating than the one in 1944. In that view only deterrence made sense.

Sir Winston Churchill feared thermonuclear weapons, possibly as much as Dr. Oppenheimer did. According to Graham Farmelo, a historian of the British nuclear weapons program, “The H-bomb was, Churchill believed, the greatest threat to civilization since the Mongols began their conquests three quarters of a millennium before.”[45] Yet he saw that his main task “…was to argue that the UK must acquire the weapons he feared so much, as a deterrent to the Soviet Union.”[46] Dr. Oppenheimer was not wise enough to do the same.

Why is there a such push to deify Dr. Oppenheimer? Perhaps it is that much of the current radical left wing irresponsibility concerning the U.S. nuclear deterrent is directly traceable to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. So is the left wing attitude toward nuclear power. The impact of the left on the U.S. nuclear deterrent has been growing for decades. While Putin’s vicious war against Ukraine and his constant nuclear war threats have at least temporarily increased support for nuclear deterrence, the radical left has not given up and they will be aided by Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

We owe a great debt to Dr. Oppenheimer for his role in the development of the atomic bomb and preventing more millions of deaths before the final defeat of Japan. However, he was clearly a Communist and the revocation of his security clearance in the context of the most dangerous decade of the Cold War was quite justified. Irrespective of whether or not he was actually a Soviet spy or an agent of influence, his postwar impact on U.S. security was largely negative. In particular, he made the decade of the 1950s more dangerous than it would otherwise have been. We survived that decade and the early 1960 Cuban missile crisis because of nuclear deterrence, not because of Dr. Oppenheimer’s fantasy about ending nuclear weapons secrecy and depending upon the global brotherhood of high-minded peace-loving scientists.

Late in his life his views may have changed. In 1965, the year before his death, Dr. Oppenheimer said in an interview, “The existence of the bomb has reduced the chances of World War III and has given us valid hope.”[47] You won’t find this in the Mr. Nolan’s movie.

Dr. Mark B. Schneider is a Senior Analyst with the National Institute for Public Policy. Before his retirement from the Department of Defense Senior Executive Service, Dr. Schneider served as Principal Director for Forces Policy, Principal Director for Strategic Defense, Space and Verification Policy, Director for Strategic Arms Control Policy and Representative of the Secretary of Defense to the Nuclear Arms Control Implementation Commissions. He also served in the senior Foreign Service as a Member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff.

Notes:

[1] In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, April 1971).

[2] Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Suoplatov with Jerrold L Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks, The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster, (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1994), p. XV.

[3] Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, (New York, Vintage Books, 2006), p. 588.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jeffrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), p. 52.

[6] Sudoplatov et. al., Special Tasks, op., cit., p. 3.

[7] Ibid., pp. 173, 175, 183, 207-209.

[8] Roger Donald, “Dissenting Thoughts on `A KGB Memoir': [FINAL Edition],” The Washington Post, May 19. 1994, p. A-20, available at https://dialog.proquest.com/professional/docview/307765660/fulltext/189086398 A468DAB770/6?accountid=155509&accountid=155509&t:ac=189086398A468DAB770/1&t:cp=maintain /resultcitation blocksbrief&t:zoneid=transactionalZone_952c1cbd7db7f7.

[9] Sudoplatov et. al., Special Tasks, op. cit., pp. 75-176.

[10] Ibid., p. XVI.

[11] Quoted in James D, Hornfisher, Who Can Hold The Sea, (New York: Bantam Books, 2022), p. 33.

[12] In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, op. cit., pp. 400, 432.

[13] Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons The Secret History, (Arlington Tx: Aerofax, 1988), p. 34.

[14] Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, op. cit., pp. 418-423.

[15] S. T. Cohen, The Peaceful Neutron Bomb: A New Twist on Controlled Nuclear Fusion, (Santa Monica Ca.: The Rand Corporation, P-5510, June 1967), p. 2.

[16] Dr. Mark B. Schneider, “SALT and the Strategic Balance: 1974,” Strategic Review, Fall 1974, p. 42.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Charles Tyroler, II, ed., Alerting American The Papers of the Committee on The Present Danger, (Washington D.C.: The Pergamon Brasey’s, 1984), p. 46.

[19] Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons The Secret History, (Arlington Tx: Aerofax, 1988), p. 34.

[19] Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, op. cit., p. 323.

[20] Hornfisher, Who Can Hold The Sea, op cit., p. 32.

[21] Sudoplatov et. al., Special Tasks, op. cit., pp. 221.

[22] Viktor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars, (New York: Basic Books, 2017), p. 523.

[23] Ibid., p. 516.

[24] Edward Teller, “The Two Responsibilities of Scientists,” in Morton Grodzins and Eurgene Rabinowitch, The Atomic Age, Scientists in National and World Affairs, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 122.

[25] Ibid., p. 123.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Major General Charles W. Swenty, Wars End: an Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission, (New York: Avon Books, 1997), p. 235.

[29] William L. Lawrence, “The Scientists: Their views 20 years later, The New York Times, Hiroshima Plus 20, (New York: Delacorte Press, 1965), p. 123.

[30] Hanson, The Second World Wars, op. cit., p. 117.

[31] Tom Lewis, Atomic Salvation, (Havertown PA.: Casemate Publishers, 2020), pp. 229, 239.

[32] Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, op. cit., p. 534.

[33] Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman, The Nuclear Express, (Minneapolis Mn.: Zenith Press), pp. 134, 140.

[34] Sudoplatov et. al., Special Tasks, op. cit., p. 210.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Hornfisher, Who Can Hold The Sea, op. cit., p. 312.

[39] Ralph Lapp, Kill and Overkill The Strategy of Annihilation, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962), p. 27.

[40] Alice Langley Hsien, Communist China’s Strategic In The Nuclear Era, (Santa Monica CA.: The Rand Corporation, 1962), p. 2.

[41] Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, MAO The Unknown Story, (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), p. 406.

[42] J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” in in Morton Grodzins and Eurgene Rabinowitch, The Atomic Age, op. cit., p. 289.

[43] Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb, (New York, Basic Books, 2013), p. 3.

[44] Oppenheimer, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” op. cit., p. 193.

[45] Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb, op. cit., p. 3.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Lawrence, “The Scientists: Their views 20 years later,” op, cit., p. 116.

13. Poland investigates cyber-attack on rail network

Is this a new Russian form of deep attack?

Excerpts:

Poland is a major transit hub for Western weapons being sent to Ukraine.

Saturday's incident occurred when hackers transmitted a signal that triggered an emergency stoppage of trains near the city of Szczecin, PAP reported.

Poland investigates cyber-attack on rail network

BBC · by Menu

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption,

Some trains were brought to a standstill for a few hours

Polish intelligence services are investigating a hacking attack on the country's railways, Polish media say.

Hackers broke into railway frequencies to disrupt traffic in the north-west of the country overnight, the Polish Press Agency (PAP) reported on Saturday.

The signals were interspersed with recording of Russia's national anthem and a speech by President Vladimir Putin, the report says.

Poland is a major transit hub for Western weapons being sent to Ukraine.

Saturday's incident occurred when hackers transmitted a signal that triggered an emergency stoppage of trains near the city of Szczecin, PAP reported.

About 20 trains were brought to a standstill, but services were restored within hours.

Stanislaw Zaryn, a senior security official, said Poland's internal security service ABW was investigating. "For the moment, we are ruling nothing out," he told PAP.

"We know that for some months there have been attempts to destabilise the Polish state," Mr Zaryn added. "Such attempts have been undertaken by the Russian Federation in conjunction with Belarus."

A number of Western countries have called for increased cyber-security precautions as the Ukraine conflict unfolds.

Some experts have said Russia is carrying out cyberattacks in Ukraine in an apparent attempt to test its hacking tools.

Russia has previously called such allegations "Russophobic".

More on this story

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19 April
The Russian ships accused of North Sea sabotage
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The three Russian cyber-attacks the West most fears
Published
22 March 2022

BBC · by Menu

14. Ukraine-Russia War: The Changing Trends In Modern Warfare

Conclusion:

Every war in the past has had its trends. However, the war in Ukraine has introduced some new lethal and devastating trends. For instance, pilotless drones, communication from satellites to hit with precision, and highly lethal ammunition are used. The advancement of technology has impacted the trends of war, because of the quest for extension of range of weapons, the volume and precision of fire, and the transparency at the battlefield. Those armies that do not acquire such advancements will face failure in future wars. As Toffler said: “Armies that could reach further, hit harder, and get there faster usually won, while the range-restricted, less well-armed, and slower armies lost. For this reason, a vast amount of human creative effort has been poured into extending the range, increasing the firepower, and accelerating the speed of weapons and armies.”

Ukraine-Russia War: The Changing Trends In Modern Warfare – OpEd

eurasiareview.com · by Sana Ullah · August 26, 2023

Since the innovation in high-tech, the means of warfare are evolving, the weaponry of war is changing, and new strategies are developing. The Ukraine-Russia war has highlighted – new trends in warfare. It is the largest war in Europe since 1945. The war has shattered all the illustrations, such as, that the modern war would be constrained to counterinsurgency campaigns or evolve toward low-casualty struggles in cyberspace.

In contrast, the war triggered a new kind of high-intensity war that is far different from the illustrations that were accompanied by wars. The new war combines leading-edge technology on the industrial scale that is manufactured by -civilian, allies, and private firms used for the killing of human masses on a large scale. One can be sure that autocratic regimes are studying how to gate an edge in any upcoming skirmishes. Instead of recoiling the deaths and destruction, liberal societies must recognize the fact that war between industrialized states in all its prospects is real and start preparing for that.

The destruction of infrastructure, the killing of unarmed people, and the ruin of civilian life in Ukraine hold three big lessons. The first lesson is that the battlefield is more transparent than it was before, at any time in history. In the age of satellites and drone fleets, forget about the old maps and binocular microscopes; all things are censored from space. Inexpensive and everywhere, they yield data for processing by ever-improving logarithms that can pick out needles from the haystacks: the mobile signals of a general standing on the front line or the contents from the camouflaged tank in the jungle. This information can be passed via satellite to any soldier standing on the front line or used to aim artillery and rockets with unprecedented precision and range.

Such a high quality of transparency means that future wars will be centered on communication and information. In this age of war, the priorities will be to detect the enemy before they spot you; disturb their means of communication lines used for sending data in the field; blind their sensors, whether satellites or drones, whether by using cyberattacks or by old methods of explosion. While evolving methods of war, the soldiers will also adopt new methods of hiding, staying, and fighting. The armies that failed to invent high-tech or fail to develop new doctrines will be overwhelmed by those that do.

In the current era of artificial intelligence, the second lesson is that even the war in the high-tech era may still contain hundreds of thousands of individuals and millions of machines and ammunition. The number of causalities in Ukraine has been severe; the ability to locate targets and hit them precisely needs more humans, which is soaring because of intensive fighting and deaths on the battleground. To defend themselves, troops have sifted mountains of mud to dig trenches similar to those of World War I and II. The consumption of ammunition and equipment is staggering: in a year of war, Russia has fired 10 million shells; Ukraine loses 10,000 drones per month. At the same time, to help its counter-offensive operation, Ukraine is demanding from its allies’ old-school cluster ammunition. In the long run, technology may alter the requirement for the physical mass of individuals on the battlefield, and it would be filled by robots.

On one occasion, General Mark Miley, America’s most senior soldier, predicted that in the coming next 10-15 years, a major part of advanced forces would be robotics. For example, think of pilotless aircraft and crewless tanks, yet armies need to fight in this decade or the decades to come. Keeping that in mind, while building stockpiles and transforming industries to make hardware on a large scale, armies still required that their armies had the manpower to fight in the battle. A NATO summit on the 11th and 12th of July vivid showed that Western powers are inclined toward the trends of the Cold War: pledge of 2 percent of GDP for NATO defense spending, notion of collective security, and confirmation of financial, logistical, and ammunition support for Ukraine, an Iron curtain of the 21 st century.

The third lesson, the one that was much applied in the 20th century, indicates that the boundaries of the big wars are wide and indistinct. For instance, the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were different as they were fought by small professional armies that imposed a burden on the civilian population. In contrast, the war between Moscow and Ukraine sucked the civilian population as war victims, over 9000 people died including participants: For example, a grandmother sitting in the province of Ukraine can guide the artillery fire using her smartphone. And beyond the old defense classical-industrial complex of mercenaries, a new cohort of Private Military Corporations (PMCs) has proved crucial. Ukraine’s battlefield software is held on big tech’s cloud servers abroad; Finnish companies provide targeting data and American ones’ satellite communications. Moreover, having a large network of allies, Ukraine was supported through supply and various commitments, for example, sanctions and embargo on Russian trade.

Hence, the overall discussion implies that every war is not the same; as technology evolves, the modes of warfare are also transforming. To fight a war, you need allies that provide ammunition, weaponry, technology, and financial support, such as friendly neighbors or big powers that supported Ukraine throughout the war. Historically, since the evaluation of man, the trends of warfare have been evolving. In human history, there are various waves of war: the primitive war fought with blowguns and swords; industrialization introduced machinery in warfare; and the Gulf War introduced new trends in war such as long-range missiles, lethal-fire use, and precision-guided missiles.

Every war in the past has had its trends. However, the war in Ukraine has introduced some new lethal and devastating trends. For instance, pilotless drones, communication from satellites to hit with precision, and highly lethal ammunition are used. The advancement of technology has impacted the trends of war, because of the quest for extension of range of weapons, the volume and precision of fire, and the transparency at the battlefield. Those armies that do not acquire such advancements will face failure in future wars. As Toffler said: “Armies that could reach further, hit harder, and get there faster usually won, while the range-restricted, less well-armed, and slower armies lost. For this reason, a vast amount of human creative effort has been poured into extending the range, increasing the firepower, and accelerating the speed of weapons and armies.”

eurasiareview.com · by Sana Ullah · August 26, 2023

15. Taiwan Cannot Win if the U.S. Does Not Help Strengthen Taipei’s Will to Fight

What a title. We cannot want it more than them. If the people do not have the will to fight then we cannot instil it in them. We cannot help the Tawian overcome its crisis over its identity. We cannot steel Taiwan's resolve.

My critical comments aside, this is a very useful essay based on first person interviews in Taiwan.

The four responses are very interesting and useful. There are some interesting comments - to include the comparison with Korea about forces being under US control (though author gets the Korean C2 relationship wrong - peacetime OPCON was returned to South Korea in 1994 but the ROK/US CFC, a bilateral comand exercise OPCON of ROK and US forces and it answer to both countries and not the US only). The author does recognize that it would be politically unacceptable for Taiwan forces to be under US control, What he should consider is whether a bilateral military command would be appropriate for Taiwan.

Also I think the the author glosses over some of the major political divisions on defense in South Korea.

And I have to call out this last point: "war-tested Kim Jong Un regime." I do not think north Korea or Kim Jong Un's regime has been war tested since 1953.

Conclusion:

Thus far the U.S. has failed to focus sufficient effort to steel Taiwan’s wavering will to fight. A people’s will to fight is the single most important variable in determining victory, more so than technology or geography. The defeats of the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949), Vietnam (1965-1975), Afghanistan (2001-2021), and the survival of South Korea (1950-1953), Israel (1948-1949, 1967, 1973), and Ukraine (2022-), are all demonstrations of this. History would likely have turned out differently if there had been an Anglo-French effort to embolden the Czechoslovaks to defend their country in 1938, or had Zelensky built-up the Ukrainian army before rather than after the Russian invasion. A public defense debate in Taiwan will create the politically-broad consensus that has been so stably accepted across the spectrum of South Korean society, and will lead to the defense-weapons mix that precludes the need for the U.S. to even deploy in Taiwan for deterrence.

Taiwan Cannot Win if the U.S. Does Not Help Strengthen Taipei’s Will to Fight

By Julian Spencer-Churchill

August 26, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/08/26/taiwan_cannot_win_if_the_us_does_not_help_strengthen_taipeis_will_to_fight_975534.html

Taiwan will not be able to resist a Chinese invasion without first resolving a paralyzing political crisis over its identity, for which the Taiwanese need Washington’s helpful intervention. U.S. leadership has been wasting its scarce political capital, trying to convince Taiwan to improve the relevance of its armaments purchases, when it should instead be focused on resolving Taiwan’s crisis of self-confidence, which will impact more immediately on Taiwan’s will to prepare and fight. The findings of The Dupuy Institute have consistently shown that intangible political and cultural factors have a bigger impact on combat outcomes than any other variable, as is now self-evident in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This surprisingly pessimistic and provocative conclusion is the result of a three-week research trip in May-June of 2023, in which I interviewed over 75 persons from every major city, north to south, in Taiwan. Equipped with an ethics certificate from my university and a translator, this author drove over 3,000 km, passing through every city with a population greater than 40,000. I approached persons while they were walking, and asked them a simple open-ended question: would they fight, did they expect their fellow citizens to fight, and what, if anything, do they want America to do? Interviews varied between 10 minutes to several hours, and included retired officers from the Taiwanese air force, army and navy, and a quarter of the interviews took place on the campus of National Taiwan University, the country’s top-ranked institution of higher learning. Only two individuals refused to participate, both university professors. The advantage of in-person open-ended conversations over formal surveys, revealed that Taiwanese insecurity is primarily the result of a lack of open political discussion about the security of Taiwan, rather than the impact of Beijing’s propaganda.

Washington’s apprehension of interfering in the domestic affairs of another country emerges out of the anxiety of provoking a local nationalist blowback, which it fears could further divide Taiwanese society, paralyzing its preparations for war, or even push it closer to Beijing. Chinese propaganda already portrays the U.S. as a “hegemonic” Western imperialist power, seeking to divide an originally united and brotherly Chinese community. However, these fears are unfounded. Instead, Taiwanese recall a sense of abandonment and insecurity when the U.S. departed in 1979.

Furthermore, since the assertion of the principle of self-determination during the decolonization wave of the 1960s, and the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War, the Washington planners have resigned themselves to accepting whatever domestic political situation prevails in its ally. The heavy handed and successful U.S. intervention in Korea’s anti-Communist counter-insurgency, military command, and economic development, is largely forgotten. Failed U.S. attempts to mobilize sympathetic insurgent movements in Indonesia, Nicaragua, Angola, Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, are often explained in a way that fits with the widespread view of Washington’s total ignorance of local cultural conditions. This reluctance is evident in Washington’s persisting lacklustre anti-corruption conditions on arms transfers to Kyiv. However, an emphasis on anticorruption is being pursued by the European Union, in exchange for financial support to Ukraine, which promises to pay enormous dividends in terms of regime legitimacy if they are successful in securing the rule of law.

My interviews yielded four responses. First, a majority of those individuals with family links to the former Kuomintang (KMT) regime were deeply alienated from the Taiwanese push to reform the island’s identity as both a democracy and distinct from China. This division is far more profound than simply the political difference between between the Green (Democratic Progressive Party of President Tsai Ing-Wen) and Blue (KMT) parties, as they differ over the ethnic basis for their support, the former primarily Min Nan-speaking locals, and the latter mostly transplanted mainlanders. It needs to be understood that the KMT’s deep-set ideology of persistent civil war against Communist China, has been entirely cancelled by the Greens. In large part, this is because the KMT failed to appreciate the profound and persisting hostility generated by the KMT’s use of violence and police-state repression during its rule, which ended in 1996. Given the emigration back to China of nearly one million former KMT supporters, there is virtually no chance they will ever win a national election, although their long experience in power means their technical expertise leads them to win regularly in local elections. This KMT resentment against the active restructuring of Taiwanese society, is manifesting itself as pro-Beijing sentiment, being primarily expressed as anti-Americanism. This poses a severe problem, because a significant portion of senior military and foreign ministry officials are former KMT officials, whose allegiances are not stable.

Second, there is a general pessimism about the future in Taiwan, despite the unprecedented growth of its hi-tech economy in centers such as Taoyuan, New Taipei, and Hsinchu. Taiwan’s GDP per capita surpassed that of South Korea in 2022, and is expected to pass Japan’s by 2027. However, without physical security, most university students I spoke to were seeking to immigrate abroad, although the tight job market was also mentioned as a factor. By comparison, in mainland China, a far lower per capita in the coastal provinces was sufficient to depress emigration during the pre-Covid period.

A third sentiment is the low faith that other Taiwanese would fight, at least for very long. For young reservists, the uneven quality of military training has the political effect of signalling that the Taipei government does not believe it can prevail and has deferred its security to U.S. decision-makers. For small and medium business owners, which were generally comprised of the older generations, there was little expectation of any change resulting from a Chinese occupation, and considerable disruption if there was a war. However, the bulk of the shift in Taiwanese identity is among the under-40s, who are the most likely to resist invasion if properly organized and led. Some of the better informed student respondents, who had completed internships in the Defense Ministry, were critical of a procurement focused on high-status weaponry in lieu of basic armaments such as artillery and anti-tank rockets, seen in use in the defense of Ukraine. Taipei typically invests in technologically intensive weapons to avoid the political costs of social mobilization for war, whereas the war in Ukraine has demonstrated that basic infantry weapons and well-supplied artillery provide the most cost-effective defense. Taiwan should trust that the U.S. will more effectively deploy the type of ordnance that will destroy fleets, and air bases and ports on the Chinese mainland.

A fourth aspiration, which was voiced by a third of respondents, and not well articulated, was for the U.S. to simply “help.” Some of these, mostly young university students, said that the U.S. should deploy its forces in Taiwan (as it had until 1979). In most cases, respondents lacked the vocabulary to describe precisely what the U.S. should do militarily, which gets to the principal cause of Taiwan’s morale problem. Most respondents volunteered that a U.S. deployment in Taiwan would be highly provocative to Beijing, and lead to an otherwise avoidable conflict.

The prevailing view among Taiwan pundits and experts is that low morale is the result of so-called “cognitive warfare,” in the form of effective propaganda being directed by Beijing. Its message and slogans are very similar to the justifications for the exclusion of the U.S. I was told by those aforementioned supporters of the KMT, which are largely conspiratorial and seem to fit well within a group suffering decline in their social status. Beijing’s messaging of manipulation is merely mirror-imaging Beijing’s own mistreatment of its citizens, so is easily understood, and the description of foreigners as essentially hostile to Chinese is a slogan that works well among Chinese who have immigrated to foreign countries when their integration is compromised by their poor language skills. To Western born Chinese with an average education, and to the cosmopolitan Taiwanese, Beijing’s “cognitive warfare” comes across as either unsophisticated at best, or at worst the embarrassingly unworldly perceptions of authoritarian apologists. While the clumsy policies of the Communist government of Xi Jinping may now delay China’s surpassing of the U.S.’s nominal GDP for a decade or more, Taiwan is about to outstrip Japan’s GDP per capita.

The cause of Taiwan’s morale problem is the failure of the Tsai Ing-Wen government, and the Green Party in particular, of engaging in a public debate over the issue of national security. The Democratic Progressive Party (The Greens) is a progressive left-leaning and nominally gendered government that relies heavily on shifting identity issues in Taiwan, leading to pronouncements that approach declarations of independence, that are no less provocative than if the U.S. were to deploy military forces on Taiwan. On the other hand, the Green Party is profoundly anti-militarist, many of its members having been imprisoned as dissidents against KMT rule in the 1980s. Taipei therefore finds itself in the paradoxical position of not being able to resist provoking Beijing while not being able to deter a Chinese response. Unlike South Korea, where an equally immediate threat in the form of the nuclear-armed and war-tested Kim Jong Un regime, has created a cross-party consensus on mass military mobilization, Taiwan has not yet found a sustainable political formula to achieve this. It is a common phenomenon that progressive leaders, like Prime Minister Leon Blum of France in the 1930s, fail to prepare for war, because their accumulated hostility against the elites that were backed by the military. The same ideological weakness led to the failure of the elected government in Madrid against the military revolt under Francisco Franco.

Taiwan is in a crisis of political self-confidence that needs U.S. intervention if it is to resist and deter a Chinese invasion. What the U.S. needs to do, as a condition of continued arms transfers to Taiwan, is to put pressure on President Tsai Ing-Wen to make three public policy changes. This is not U.S. meddling, but rather resolving a collective action problem that the Taiwanese cannot solve for themselves. First, there needs to be a public debate on defense policy that moves against the Taiwanese inclination, inherited from the decades of KMT-led war preparation against Communist China, of allowing defense policy to be considered in secrecy. On which beach China decides to focus its efforts, or on which airbases will land most of the DF-17 and DF-26 missiles, depends far more on the speed of mobilization and the eagerness of citizens to defend their cities, than on where the key caves will be that will hide the high-tech jam proof mobile radar systems. Almost by definition, the U.S. will be preoccupied defending bases in Okinawa and the Philippines and unable to fully intervene against the expected scale of a Chinese air and sea attack, unless it has exceptional human intelligence, for at least two weeks. Once equipped with a national security vocabulary, citizens will feel less powerless against traditionally secretive Taiwanese defense planning and will feel more willing to define their progressive society as the object worthy of defending.

Second, the U.S. needs to approach the degree of joint planning and operations with Taiwan, which it currently shares with its NATO allies and South Korea. Until the 1990s, South Korea’s peacetime military was actually operationally under U.S. command, which is desirable but politically unachievable with Taiwan. This degree of operational integration will be highly provocative to Beijing, but because it has low visibility, there is no redline around which China can retaliate. Here, the threat of Taiwan chain-ganging the U.S. into a war with China is desirable as a form of enhanced extended deterrence. This will also be an opportunity to transfer the values of tactical and technical professionalism from the U.S. to Taiwan, but will require Washington to provide significant subsidies. As I was told, in the early 2000s, Taiwan’s F-16 pilot training in the U.S. was constrained by the limited funds provided by Taipei, and the U.S. did not provide additional financing. Given the inadvisability of establishing a large presence of foreign training cells in Taiwan, this will also provide U.S. allies an opportunity to host Taiwanese officers in this effort. For example, given how little Canada contributes to defense of the West, with just 3 frigates deployed to Asia and a battalion in the Baltics, Washington should advise Ottawa that it is time to step up and help train Taiwanese artillery, armored and engineer officers, who need large training bases unavailable in Taiwan.

Third, the U.S. must ask Tsai Ing Wen to expunge the Taiwanese military of its legacy influence of senior anti-independence KMT officers. There are pitfalls here, because these individuals are not easily identified, and in a democratic state guided by rule of law, they may not be retired cheaply. Secondly, there will be a transition period in which the military will lack sufficiently skilled non-KMT officers, and the remaining KMT officers will be uncooperative. Third, both KMT and non-KMT Taiwanese frequently travel to the Chinese mainland or have relatives and even close family that do so, and this traditionally expected freedom will need to be curtailed.

Thus far the U.S. has failed to focus sufficient effort to steel Taiwan’s wavering will to fight. A people’s will to fight is the single most important variable in determining victory, more so than technology or geography. The defeats of the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949), Vietnam (1965-1975), Afghanistan (2001-2021), and the survival of South Korea (1950-1953), Israel (1948-1949, 1967, 1973), and Ukraine (2022-), are all demonstrations of this. History would likely have turned out differently if there had been an Anglo-French effort to embolden the Czechoslovaks to defend their country in 1938, or had Zelensky built-up the Ukrainian army before rather than after the Russian invasion. A public defense debate in Taiwan will create the politically-broad consensus that has been so stably accepted across the spectrum of South Korean society, and will lead to the defense-weapons mix that precludes the need for the U.S. to even deploy in Taiwan for deterrence.

Julian Spencer-Churchill, Ph.D., is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University (Montreal), former army engineer officer, and has written extensively on Pakistan, where he conducted field research for over ten years.

16. How revisiting naval aviation's lessons can (and cannot) inform military AI innovation

How revisiting naval aviation's lessons can (and cannot) inform military AI innovation - Breaking Defense

Researcher Owen J. Daniels argues that to harness AI, the Pentagon should take a lesson from the Second World War.

breakingdefense.com · by Owen J. Daniels · August 25, 2023

What aircraft carriers can teach the Pentagon about AI. (Breaking Defense graphic; DVIDS/Getty Images)

Military leaders haven’t been shy about the ways they expect artificial intelligence could revolutionize modern warfare. But it won’t just happen. In the op-ed below, researcher Owen J. Daniels argues that the Pentagon will have to harness AI with a purpose, much like how one of the services did with another technological leap decades ago.

Imagine this scenario: United States military forces are advancing westward across the Pacific Ocean, responding to a provocation, to confront an adversary in the country’s near abroad. US forces will need to project power to conduct and sustain operations at great distances, complicating prolonged involvement in the conflict.

The adversary has targeted American outposts around the Indo-Pacific to deny US forces access to the conflict zone and hamper logistics and resupply, aiming to score a quick victory. How might the United States use the emerging capabilities to overcome the obstacles posed by its opponent, particularly when the adversary is similarly trying to exploit new technologies?

The Indo-Pacific competitor in the above scenario is not China. The emerging capabilities are not related to artificial intelligence (AI), hypersonics, or other headline-grabbing technologies.

Rather, the adversary is Imperial Japan, and the emerging capability is carrier aviation. Historical analogies are imperfect and can be easily over-generalized to fit current lenses; the above scenario is not perfectly reflective of a US-China contingency over Taiwan, for example.

Nonetheless, the naval aviation revolution in military affairs (RMA), which arose from US-Japan interwar competition, offers valuable insights for how the Department of Defense can conceptualize and develop military AI applications across the services and joint force. These include the importance of realistic experimentation, effectively navigating bureaucracy, and empowering visionary personnel.

Equally importantly: understanding the analogy’s limitations can help policymakers better grasp the scope of AI’s potential military impact.

The Carrier Aviation Analogy And US-China Competition

The revolutions in military affairs framework captures how technological and intellectual innovations fundamentally disrupt patterns of military operations. Alongside carrier aviation, which ended the battleship’s nearly 500-year dominance over naval warfare in two decades, other examples include the development of precision-strike operations, blitzkrieg warfare, and the nuclear revolution.

RMAs have four key characteristics—technological change, military systems evolution, operational innovation, and organizational adaptation—that illustrate how transformations require new thinking about military problems and technology’s role in solving them, not technological advancements alone.

In the case of AI, whose present impact on warfare is still being fully understood, policymakers can glean valuable insights into how to spark innovation from the historical US experience of developing naval aviation technologies. Carrier aviation’s transformative impact was the product of experimentation, bureaucratic savvy, cultural adaptation, and even luck. Despite the hype surrounding it, AI will not transform US military operations without similar intellectual and organizational growing pains. In addition, the carrier aviation RMA is a rare case where the dominant military actor—in this case the United States—maintained its status amid a revolutionary military shift.

First, the carrier aviation RMA demonstrates how identifying a highly specific operational context and competitor can sharpen experimentation around military applications of emerging technologies. American strategists identified Imperial Japan as the United States’ primary Pacific competitor as early as 1905, which gave the US Navy a concrete military problem, combat theater, and adversary to innovate against.

As aircraft and carrier technology evolved rapidly through the 1920s and 1930s, the Navy framed experimentation around specific, realistic scenarios, informing innovative thinking about naval aviation’s applications with real-world data about operational conditions and Japanese capabilities. Hypotheses from US Naval War College wargames were used in real-world Fleet Problem, helping the Navy reconceptualize carriers as offensive attack platforms rather than battleship protectors. Rigorous post-experiment analysis of carriers’ performances in new concepts was highly important and differentiated the US and Imperial Japanese Navy approaches: Admiral Yamamoto Isoruku shifted his strategy on the eve of World War II partially because he lacked confidence in Japanese wargames’ findings.

What can the United States learn for AI competition? Focusing on China as a primary adversary against whom future AI-enabled capabilities might be used helps ground strategy, planning, and experimentation around specific, real-world capabilities and operating environments. In order to provide the most value, simulation and experimentation should incorporate as high a degree of realism as possible, especially related to expected operating conditions and new capability performance.

Unless informed by rigorous experimentation, abstractions in wargames or exercises that could miscalculate the impact of AI-enabled capabilities—or assume AI will perform consistently—will ultimately prove unreliable for truly understanding its operational potential, especially where experimentation is intended to inform concept or strategy development. Trial, error, and constructive self-criticism will be key.

A second lesson for technology adopters is the importance of effectively navigating bureaucracy to drive institutional change. Admiral William Moffett, who spearheaded US naval aviation amid calls for a separate air force, ingrained appreciation for planes and carriers throughout the wider service by incorporating naval aviators into the officer corps, allowing them to ascend to future carrier and fleet commands. He used experimental results to evangelize carriers’ offensive potential in the early 1930s and to shift thinking among Navy leaders.

Embracing analytical evidence, the Navy incorporated naval aviation into innovative doctrine, generating new operational roles and force structures for carriers that were bolstered by wartime successes. Navy leaders grasped how aviation was disrupting the battleship’s dominance and adapted the force accordingly in roughly two decades.

In contrast, the Imperial Japanese Navy ultimately failed to develop officers with aviation experience, and its entrenched naval hierarchy missed the carrier’s value compared to the battleship. After the US victory at Midway, which showcased the newfound criticality of air control to naval conflict, Japan produced only seven carriers between 1942 and 1943; the United States produced ninety.

Today, both the United States and China have new bureaucratic organizations aimed at better incorporating AI into their militaries; whether either side can do so effectively will depend on cultural attitudes to tech adoption and organizational politics and interests. The carrier aviation RMA required buy-in from senior US Navy officers to experimental findings and concepts, as well as working familiarity with emerging flight technologies and their military and policy implications.

AI adoption will face these tests at a DoD-wide scale, and the extent of AI literacy among defense policymakers and military leaders is unclear. US hurdles to AI progress include the sheer size of the Defense Department, as well as rotations, service culture, and differences in the way DoD policymakers and the services approach innovation from top-down or bottom-up perspectives. In China, a traditionally siloed military culture, a broad lack of joint thinking and inexperience, and political pressures and a desire for centralized, hierarchical control could affect military AI adoption.

Finally, circumstances and luck affect whether a country capitalizes on transformative military technologies. The US Navy was not guaranteed visionary leaders like Moffett; Pearl Harbor arguably forced the Navy to embrace aircraft carriers due to battleship losses; US victory at Midway stemmed from doctrinal innovations, but also benefited from risky Japanese carrier designs and tactics.

With AI, the US or Chinese private sector could produce a game-changing technological application for one country; one state’s leaders might be more open to encouraging and adopting innovation; or one military might adopt a new AI application more quickly than the other. Culture, training, and norms influence these three examples, and luck in realizing an AI RMA could fall to the best-prepared side.

The Limitations Of The Analogy

The carrier aviation RMA is rightfully considered a major success story of US military innovation. It is a reassuring example of an American military service intellectualizing and adopting a new capability more effectively than a competitor. It feels relevant to this particular moment in US-China competition as an instance where the United States transformed its operations before a Pacific competitor could overtake it. Further, the relevance of analyzing the Pacific theater today is not limited to the United States, with Chinese strategic thinkers also looking to its insights.

But for all of the carrier RMA’s applicable lessons, AI presents fundamental differences for developing game-changing capabilities and operational concepts today. Highlighting these disconnects can help the defense establishment better address the intellectual task of harnessing AI.

First, the military applicability of AI will reach far beyond a single domain, service, or even theater compared to past revolutionary systems like aircraft carriers. AI’s value presently lies in its application to specific problems, of which many are militarily relevant: autonomous navigation, computer vision, decision support, big data analytics, and natural language processing are but a few.

While the phrase “AI has revolutionized military operations” might one day be true, it is less specific and descriptive than “the aircraft carrier revolutionized naval warfare by displacing the battleship.” In reality, any near-term transformative AI applications would probably be hyphenated, like an AI-autonomy, AI-ISR, or AI-cyber RMA. Identifying such applications will require experimentation and trial-and-error.

The manner of AI innovation is also new. Since AI is not a massive platform or piece of military hardware and it spans domains, seizing on innovation will be bureaucratically challenging. Unlike with carriers, the bureaucratic organization leading on AI—the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office—is seated at the policy level.

Yet the services, not policymakers, will create most of the actual technological AI solutions to solve military problems and develop their own experimentation and thinking for operationalizing them. In addition, AI applications that work in one operational context are not guaranteed to work in another. As such, joint AI-enabled capabilities under development that are advertised as game-changing may require unprecedented coordination of data resources, models, and algorithms across the services, policymakers, and defense enterprise in order to scale.

The private sector’s role driving AI progress is yet another nuance. As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, tech companies have new roles in developing capabilities and warfighting. The actors developing core AI technologies and applications vary widely, from major tech companies to universities to startups, and the military is not at the cutting edge of this development. The DoD and services can still provide funding to attract talent and incentivize private sector collaboration, but current acquisition models for securing cutting-edge tech access struggle to keep pace with tech development and to integrate innovation. New thinking about how to acquire and integrate AI is needed.

Despite these breaks from the past, people still create the concepts and changes to organizations necessary for harnessing new capabilities’ full potential. Adapting, intellectualizing military problems, and devising new plans and strategies currently remain human responsibilities. It will be up to humans—policymakers, strategists, technologists, and others—to ensure that we carry the most relevant insights from history forward.

Owen J. Daniels is the Andrew W. Marshall fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).

breakingdefense.com · by Owen J. Daniels · August 25, 2023

17. Fox News apologizes to Gold Star family after facing backlash over false story

Fox News apologizes to Gold Star family after facing backlash over false story

By Oliver Darcy, CNN Business

Updated 8:29 PM EDT, Sat August 26, 2023

CNN.com

CNN —

Fox News apologized Saturday to a Gold Star family for publishing a false story last month claiming that the family had to pay $60,000 to ship the remains of their fallen relative back from Afghanistan because the Pentagon refused to pay.

“The now unpublished story has been addressed internally and we sincerely apologize to the Gee family,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement, referencing the family of fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, who was one of 13 service members killed in a terror attack at the Kabul airport in 2021 while assisting with US withdrawal efforts.

The apology came after a Military.com report this week drew attention to the issue and indicated that the right-wing outlet’s top executives had repeatedly been notified by senior members of the Marine Corps that it was pushing a false story.

In an email to Fox News President Jay Wallace and other network personnel, Marine Corps spokesman Maj. James Stenger privately accused the outlet of capitalizing off Gee’s death “to score cheap clickbait points,” according to documents obtained by Military.com through a public records request.

In this August 20, 2021, image provided by the US Marine Corps, Sgt. Nicole Gee is seen calming an infant during an evacuation at Kabul airport in Afghanistan. Officials said on August 28, 2021, that Gee was among the Marines killed in a bombing at the airport.

Sgt. Isaiah Campbell/US Marine Corps/AP

Stenger, who is the top spokesman for the Marine Corps, added that he viewed the behavior of Fox News as “disgusting,” according to Military.com.

Initially, after being notified about the false report, Fox News only changed the headline on the story to attribute the claims to Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida, who had advanced the narrative but later recanted. The outlet later scrubbed the story from its website without a correction or explanation. It remained deleted on Saturday after the apology.

Deleting an entire story is exceedingly rare in news media and is seen as a last-ditch measure if the entire premise of the article is incorrect. Deleting a story without offering readers an explanation or correction is widely considered to be unethical.

In this case, Fox News did not publicly address the incident until the Military.com story ignited backlash against the outlet.

While unethical, the behavior is typical for Fox News. The outlet often breaks traditional news ethics and traffics in dishonest reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, Fox News settled a defamation case with election technology company Dominion Voting Systems over lies related to the 2020 election. Fox News paid Dominion a historic $787 million to avoid a trial.

Fox News, however, still faces a $2.7 billion lawsuit from voting technology company Smartmatic. That lawsuit is making its way through the courts system.

This story has been updated with additional information.

Fox News apologizes to Gold Star family after facing backlash over false story

CNN.com

18. Communist Party Priorities Complicate Plans to Revive China’s Economy

The only thing I remember from my economics classes is that no centrally controlled economy is ever successful in the long term.

Communist Party Priorities Complicate Plans to Revive China’s Economy

Western experts say more stimulus is needed, but Xi Jinping resists handouts to consumers, fearing they could lead to ‘welfarism’

By Lingling WeiFollow

and Stella Yifan XieFollow

Updated Aug. 27, 2023 12:06 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/communist-party-priorities-complicate-plans-to-revive-chinas-economy-84a156d7?mod=hp_lead_pos2

HONG KONG—Ideology is driving China’s economic policy to a degree not seen since the country’s opening to the West nearly half a century ago, deterring its leaders from taking steps to spur the sputtering economy.

Economists and investors have been calling on Beijing to make bolder efforts to boost output—especially by promoting consumer spending, if necessary, by offering cash handouts, as the U.S. did during the pandemic.

Accelerating China’s transition to a more consumer-led economy—such as that of the U.S.—would make growth more sustainable in the long term, economists say.

But top leader Xi Jinping has deep-rooted philosophical objections to Western-style consumption-driven growth, people familiar with decision-making in Beijing say. Xi sees such growth as wasteful and at odds with his goal of making China a world-leading industrial and technological powerhouse, they say.

Xi believes Beijing should stick to fiscal discipline, especially given China’s deep debt. That makes stimulus or welfare policies akin to those in the U.S. and Europe less likely, the people said.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping objects to consumption-driven growth. PHOTO: DING HAITAO/ZUMA PRESS

Also unlikely are major market-oriented changes, or a dramatic reversal in the multiyear shift toward more centralized control of the economy. Although Beijing has eased off efforts to clamp down on consumer internet firms and other private companies—a campaign that led to weaker private investment—it remains skeptical of their unregulated expansion.

Meanwhile, China’s economic outlook continues to darken.

Manufacturing activity has contracted, exports have declined, home prices are weakening and consumer prices have dipped into deflation. Youth unemployment has reached record highs.

Xi signaled Beijing’s intent to avoid more Western-style stimulus in a speech published on Aug. 16 by the Communist Party’s premier journal, Qiushi. He urged “patience” and stressed the need to avoid following a Western growth model.

Timing of the publication was intentional, according to two of the people familiar with Beijing’s decision-making. Xi gave the speech in February, but it was made public only after China released new data showing continued economic weakening.

By publicizing the speech now, the people said, the leadership intended to push back on voices at home and abroad urging Beijing to do more to help the economy, particularly with a fiscal package targeting households rather than government projects.

Another party journal, Study Times, chimed in with an article that specifically argued against handing out cash to consumers.

“While such measures could work in stimulating consumption to some extent, the cost of doing so is too great and it is absolutely unfeasible in China’s case,” the publication said.

The State Council Information Office, which handles press inquiries for senior leaders, didn’t respond to questions.

Any further stimulus should fit party goals

Beijing might eventually back more-aggressive stimulus, especially if it risks significantly missing the government’s growth target of 5% or so for this year. Some economists note how Beijing initially refused to abandon tough Covid-control measures, only to abruptly change course when costs grew too high.

More likely options now include greater spending on infrastructure and other government-favored projects, as well as further credit loosening—following several recent interest-rate cuts—economists and people familiar with Beijing’s thinking say.

Such moves reflect Beijing’s preference for having the government play the central role in goosing growth, either by investing in infrastructure or by channeling funds to selected sectors such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence that can advance Communist Party aims.

Consumer prices in China have dipped into deflation. PHOTO: CFOTO/ZUMA PRESS

Investing in infrastructure is one of the government’s preferred ways of boosting growth. PHOTO: TINGSHU WANG/REUTERS

The Aug. 16 Study Times article emphasized the benefits of the longstanding investment-led model, saying “investment not only generates immediate demand, but also serves as the true driving force for growth.”

But many economists worry more is needed to get China clicking again. Investment in roads, factories and other hard assets to drive growth has been yielding diminishing returns as the government runs out of useful projects to build.

Consumption remains a smaller part of the economy, and could drive years of growth if properly encouraged, economists say.

The risks of not acting

The longer China waits, the more it risks slipping into prolonged stagnation, some economists warn, potentially turning the country from a reliable source of global growth into a risk to the world economy.

“Investors are waiting for signs that Beijing will adopt significantly more forceful and effective stimulus policies,” said Michael Hirson, head of China Research at New York-based consulting firm 22V Research. “The latest signals suggest continuation of a conservative approach despite the risks that it is insufficient to address China’s current challenges.”

Beijing’s stimulus options are further constrained by high debt levels, especially among local governments. The people familiar with Beijing’s decision-making say Xi and his team believe they must be careful with stimulus so they don’t undermine efforts to limit debt and curb speculation, especially in the property sector.

What stimulus Beijing has provided has come in dribs and drabs, and to limited effect. Several interest-rate cuts have failed to expand activities because of tepid demand for credit.

A long-running fear of ‘welfarism’

Beijing’s reluctance to bet more heavily on consumption goes back years. Chinese officials resist policy changes that would encourage people to save less and spend more, such as expanded health and unemployment benefits. The lack of spending on social welfare runs counter to some stated goals of China’s Communist Party, which has staked its legitimacy on delivering continued prosperity for the people.

Chinese households’ cash benefits from the social-security system make up only 7% of the country’s gross domestic product—about a third of the ratio in the U.S. and the European Union, according to Bert Hofman, head of the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute.

China’s leaders are wary of undermining efforts to limit debt and curb speculation, especially in the property sector. PHOTO: QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS

“In terms of concrete measures aimed at expanding demand, nothing much has been done,” said Hofman, the World Bank’s former country director for China. “The principal reluctance to do so is ideological, and Xi Jingping has repeatedly said that China should not create a Western-style welfare state.”

People familiar with Beijing’s thinking say Xi made his feelings on the matter known as far back as 2016.

“Our country does not have insufficient demand,” Xi said in a speech that year, shortly after launching overhauls meant to expand Chinese industry.

Rather than giving priority to demand, he said, China should address “insufficient effective supply capacity”—in essence, build more factories and industry—so as not to become overly dependent on “overseas shopping” for goods supplied by the West.

In speeches and writings since, Xi has emphasized the need to reduce China’s reliance on other nations and warned about the risks if Beijing does too much to prop up households to promote consumption. In a 2022 Qiushi article, he warned local governments against making “excessive guarantees” that could make the country fall into “welfarism.”

After rising steadily for several years, household consumption in China has plateaued since 2016 at about 38% of GDP, according to the World Bank. The U.S. rate is 68%.

Chinese families put 33.5% of their disposable income in savings last year, up from 29.9% in 2019, according to UBS. China’s household savings rate has consistently ranked among the world’s highest.

Household consumption as a portion of GDP has plateaued in China. PHOTO: TINGSHU WANG/REUTERS

Zhiwu Chen, a professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong, said China’s policy makers have long believed that diverting resources to the state sector can generate growth more quickly and more reliably than handing money to people. They see consumers as more fickle and less easy to control than state companies, he said, not certain to spend more money even if they had it.

Chinese officials have brought up that argument when explaining to multinational institutions why they don’t want to just hand out money or coupons as the U.S. did during the pandemic, according to people familiar with those exchanges.

During those meetings, Chinese officials also emphasized avoiding a current-account deficit, which would signal greater dependence on the outside world at a time of simmering tensions between Beijing and the West. That, the people said, means China should keep focused on promoting investment and its own sources of supply.

Chinese officials told their counterparts at multinational institutions that the many hardships Xi survived during the Cultural Revolution—when he lived in a cave and dug ditches—helped shape his view that austerity breeds prosperity, the people said.

“The message from the Chinese is that Western-style social support would only encourage laziness,” one person familiar with the meetings said.

Write to Lingling Wei at [email protected] and Stella Yifan Xie at [email protected]

19. Russia confirms Wagner chief Prigozhin’s death after DNA tests

Unfortunately we cannot "trust but verify" in this case.

Russia confirms Wagner chief Prigozhin’s death after DNA tests

The Washington Post · by Robyn Dixon · August 27, 2023

Russian investigators confirmed Sunday that Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin and top leaders of the group were killed when his plane crashed in the Tver region of Russia, announcing the results of DNA testing on the bodies of victims.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said it was continuing its investigation into the causes of the crash, although Western analysts believe the true cause may never be known because of Russia’s opaque and often politicized investigations system.

All 10 people onboard, including Wagner military commander Dmitry Utkin, were killed in the crash on Wednesday. The U.S. intelligence community is examining the possibility an explosion brought down the plane, with many in Russia’s elite convinced Prigozhin’s presumed death was an assassination ordered by the Kremlin.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday dismissed rampant speculation of Kremlin involvement in the crash as punishment of Prigozhin for the rebellion as “all lies.”

Prigozhin led a short-lived June rebellion by Wagner in an effort to topple his rivals, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the chief of the Russian general staff Valery Gerasimov. He had since been struggling to keep his mercenary empire afloat, amid reports that figures associated with the Ministry of Defense were quietly jostling to take over Wagner’s lucrative operations in Africa and the Middle East.

President Vladimir Putin spoke of Prigozhin in the past tense on Thursday, calling him a “talented” man who “achieved the necessary results,” but “made mistakes.” Other prominent Russian politicians and writers followed his lead, praising Prigozhin as a tough fighter and extolling Wagner, which is seen as Russia’s most ruthless and successful assault force in the Ukraine war.

The group’s future is in doubt after the demise of Prigozhin and its top leaders, with its operations likely to be taken over by Kremlin-friendly figures, likely to be given far less latitude than Prigozhin was allowed in aggressively expanding Wagner’s commercial, geopolitical, and military power.

Wagner achieved Russia’s only substantial military gain this year, helping capture the eastern Ukrainian city in May, albeit at a massive cost in Russian casualties — many of them convicts recruited from prisons and sent to the frontline. The minority who survived were pardoned by Putin, and in turn, strongly supported Prigozhin for enabling them to redeem themselves as Russian “heroes” by fighting in Ukraine.

State Duma lawmaker Vitaly Milonov called for Prigozhin’s funeral and burial to be held in war-torn Bakhmut, a tactic that would prevent the thousands of Wagner members and their families from paying tribute, and would ensure his grave does not turn into a popular shrine for hardline pro-war nationalists. But such a move would also make it dangerous for Prigozhin’s own family to attend the funeral and visit the grave.

Russian analysts have predicted that the funerals of Prigozhin and Utkin could see an outpouring of support and potentially anger, in what could prove an awkward moment for Putin, who called the Wagner leader a “traitor” during the rebellion – before offering Prigozhin and his fighters a deal in return for calling off the mutiny.

Thousands of Wagner fighters moved to Belarus after the rebellion in June and Prigozhin was preparing to expand his operations in Africa, while some signed contacts with the Ministry of Defense and others went home. Most of the convicts were let go, after reaching their required six months of service on the battlefield.

After the deal, Peskov said that Prigozhin’s security had been guaranteed by Putin’s word, and the Wagner boss continued to travel freely in Russia and to Africa, disposing of some assets and preparing to expand his African operations. Some analysts predicted that his death was only a matter of time, given his many powerful enemies.

Russia’s elite, meanwhile, has been cowed by what many of them believe was a hit ordered directly or indirectly by the Kremlin, and analysts agreed that Russia experts agreed that Prigozhin’s death will stamp out any remaining impulse among Russia’s elite to speak out against the war or challenge Putin.

Natalia Abbakumova in Riga Latvia contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Robyn Dixon · August 27, 2023

20. U.S. Joint Chiefs' Gen. Milley cites Ukrainian counteroffensive 'breakthrough'

U.S. Joint Chiefs' Gen. Milley cites Ukrainian counteroffensive 'breakthrough' - UPI.com

By Simon Druker

upi.com

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Ukraine’s soldiers have broken through the first line of Russian defense in spots along southern front between the two countries, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said in an interview. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo

Aug. 26 (UPI) -- Ukrainian military forces are making progress in their counteroffensive against Russia on the battlefield, breaking through an important defensive line according to a top U.S. military official.

Ukraine's soldiers have penetrated the first line of Russian defense in spots along the southern front between the two countries, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley said Friday during a television interview with a Jordanian news outlet.

"Specifically on the axes of advance that (Ukrainian forces) are attacking right now, (Ukrainian forces) have attacked through the main defense belt," Milley told Al-Mamlaka Television.

Ukrainian troops earlier in the week captured the strategic village of Robotyne in the Zaporizhzhya Oblast in Southeast Ukraine.

Russian military outlets were citing heavy losses on the Ukrainian side, according to CNN, which reported that signs of progress in the counteroffensive are evident in the Zaporizhzhia region as Ukrainian forces seek to expand a wedge toward the strategic town of Tokmak.

Attacks on Russian-occupied Crimea are also being stepped up. Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate official Andriy Yusov said Friday an attack was made on Russia's Black Sea Fleet at the village of Perevalne, destroying the fleet's 126th Separate Guards Coastal Defense Brigade.

Milley admitted during the interview that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has moved at a slower than expected pace -- Ukraine first launched the long-awaited military counteroffensive in June.

The U.S. general said it remains far too early to be able to call the counteroffensive a success or failure, characterizing the effort as "very bloody, slow, long and difficult."

"It is still too early to judge the success or failure of the attack...It is clear that so far partial success has been achieved," he said.

Many other top military leaders continue to reserve judgment on the counteroffensive, although Giampaolo Di Paola, Italy's former defense minister and chairman of NATO's military committee, said Ukraine has seized the initiative from invading Russian forces.

"The pace is slow. The Ukrainians keep saying it's going as planned. I don't know whether it's true or not," he said in an interview Friday with Radio Free Europe. "What has been achieved is that Ukraine has retaken the initiative from the enemy. We saw the long-awaited counteroffensive finally happening."

upi.com

21. The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters

Some interesting analysis.

The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters

The New York Times · by Nate Cohn · August 17, 2023

The Traditional Conservatives

26% of Republicans

The Right Wing

26% of Republicans

The Libertarian Conservatives

14% of Republicans

The Moderate Establishment

14% of Republicans

The Blue Collar Populists

12% of Republicans

The Newcomers

8% of Republicans

By Nate Cohn Produced by Alicia Parlapiano and Rumsey Taylor

Aug. 17, 2023

After eight years of Republican fealty to Donald J. Trump, few would argue that the party is still defined by Ronald Reagan’s famous three-legged stool of the religious right, fiscal conservatives and neoconservative hawks.

But if the Republican Party is no longer in Reagan’s image, it’s not necessarily a populist-conservative MAGA monolith, either.

The last New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 37 percent of Republicans count as part of Mr. Trump’s loyal base.

And while majorities of Republicans side with Mr. Trump on almost every issue, those majorities are often quite slim: Around 40 percent of Republican-leaning voters support aid to Ukraine, support comprehensive immigration reform or say abortion should be mostly or always legal.

But if the Republican Party isn’t quite a MAGA monolith, what is it? To better understand the party today, we split Republican and Republican-leaning voters into groups, based on the results of our Times/Siena poll. The groups were defined by how Republican-leaning voters felt on the issues — not how they felt about Mr. Trump.

The results depict a Republican coalition that consists of six groups:

The Moderate Establishment (14%). Highly educated, affluent, socially moderate or even liberal and often outright Never Trump.

The Traditional Conservatives (26%). Old-fashioned economic and social conservatives who oppose abortion and prefer corporate tax cuts to new tariffs. They don’t love Mr. Trump, but they do support him.

The Right Wing (26%). They watch Fox News and Newsmax. They’re “very conservative.” They’re disproportionately evangelical. They believe America is on the brink of catastrophe. And they love Mr. Trump more than any other group.

The Blue Collar Populists (12%). They’re mostly Northern, socially moderate, economic populists who hold deeply conservative views on race and immigration. Not only do they back Mr. Trump, but he himself probably counted as one a decade ago.

The Libertarian Conservatives (14%). These disproportionately Western and Midwestern conservatives value small government. They’re relatively socially moderate and isolationist, and they’re on the lower end of Trump support compared with other groups.

The Newcomers (8%). They don’t look like Republicans. They’re young, diverse and moderate. But these disaffected voters like Democrats and the “woke” left even less.

Mr. Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party is founded on an alliance between the Right Wing and Blue Collar Populists, two groups that combine to represent nearly 40 percent of Republicans — and about two-thirds of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base of seemingly unshakable support.

The Blue Collar Populists and the Right Wing don’t always agree. In particular, they split on the issues of the religious right, like same-sex marriage and abortion. But these two groups are big Trump supporters. They mostly agree with him on his defining issues and they share his deeply pessimistic, even cataclysmic view of the direction of the country, including fear of the declining white share of the population.

The alliance between Blue Collar Populists and the Right Wing has left Mr. Trump’s potential opposition in disarray. Before Trump, the party’s mainstream prevailed against Right Wing candidates by uniting Traditional Conservatives and the moderate factions — both Establishment and Blue Collar. That blueprint for victory appears to be closed, at least for now.

Without a natural factional base, Ron DeSantis has struggled to maintain a steady foothold in the race. In fact, Mr. Trump leads Mr. DeSantis among every group of Republican voters identified in the analysis. The rest of the party, beyond Mr. Trump’s base, may not always back Trump policies, but it’s not necessarily anti-Trump. And the closest thing to an anti-Trump group in the party — the Moderate Establishment — has become alienated from the rest of the party.

Here’s a deeper look at the groups that will make up the Republican Party of 2024:

The Moderate Establishment

14 percent of Republicans

Examples: Susan Collins, Charlie Baker, Chris Sununu.

Trump 28 percent, DeSantis 12 percent

Anti-establishment
Isolationist foreign policy
Populist economics
Racial conservatism
Social conservatism
Trump loyalty

It’s socially moderate. It’s highly educated and affluent. It still embraces Reagan-Bush views on immigration, trade and foreign policy. And it does not like Mr. Trump.

The Never Trumpers make their home in this group. In a hypothetical general election matchup, the Moderate Establishment backs Mr. Trump over President Biden by a mere 46 percent to 27 percent.

In theory, the Moderate Establishment might seem to represent the natural foundation for any opposition to Mr. Trump. If we had done this exercise eight years ago, many of these voters probably would have backed the likes of John Kasich and Marco Rubio.

Share who support providing additional aid to Ukraine

But this group is so much more moderate and anti-Trump than the rest of the party that it’s hard to earn this group’s support without alienating the rest of the party. And on the flip side, it’s hard to appeal to the rest of the party without alienating the Moderate Establishment. It’s a problem Mr. DeSantis seems to know all too well: He wins only 12 percent of its votes, our polling shows.

The Traditional Conservatives

26 percent of Republicans

Examples: Rick Perry, Tim Scott and Mr. Rubio.

Trump 55, DeSantis 20

Anti-establishment
Isolationist foreign policy
Populist economics
Racial conservatism
Social conservatism
Trump loyalty

Of all the groups, this is the one that most closely resembles the pre-Trump Republican Party.

It is the only group that both opposes abortion and prefers pro-business tax cuts over Mr. Trump’s tariffs. In each case, it does so by a wide margin. It favors immigration reform and aid to Ukraine. It retains some of Reagan's sunny optimism as well. Only 32 percent said that the nation's problems were so bad that the nation was in danger of failure, compared with more than two-thirds of the rest of the party.

Share who favor cutting taxes on corporations over raising tariffs on imports

Not surprisingly, this isn’t Mr. Trump’s strongest group. Only 39 percent have a very favorable opinion of him. In earlier primaries, this group would have backed the likes of John McCain and Mitt Romney, who each fought Mr. Trump while he was president.

But this is not an anti-Trump group. For every McCain, Romney or Liz Cheney, there are 10 once-mainstream conservative politicians who have stuck by Mr. Trump. Overall, Mr. Trump holds more than 50 percent of support in the primary among this group. He did cut corporate taxes and select the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, after all.

The Right Wing

26 percent of Republicans

Examples: Ted Cruz, the Freedom Caucus and Newt Gingrich

Trump 71, DeSantis 10

Anti-establishment
Isolationist foreign policy
Populist economics
Racial conservatism
Social conservatism
Trump loyalty

This group of Fox News, Newsmax and talk radio fans needs no introduction. It is relatively old and working class. It’s convinced that the nation is on the brink of catastrophe. And it’s deeply loyal to Mr. Trump.

Three-quarters of this group identify as “very conservative”; no more than a quarter of another group does so. Not surprisingly, it’s likeliest to say compromise is just “selling out.” Virtually none believe Mr. Trump — who was recently indicted for the fourth time — has committed serious federal crimes.

Share who identify as very conservative

If it feels as if this group dominates the Republican Party beyond its numbers, that’s because it does. This is the most highly engaged group of Republicans, routinely making it a kingmaker in Republican primaries. Overall, the Right Wing represents over a third of the Republican primary electorate, even though it’s about a quarter of Republican-leaning registered voters.

There aren't many fissures within this group of MAGA hat owners and Trump flag fliers, at least not on the questions we asked in this survey. In the scheme of the Republican Party today, their differences don't loom especially large.

But in the past, the Right Wing has been quite divided. It most likely split between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz eight years ago. Earlier this year, many in this group probably entertained supporting Mr. DeSantis as well.

Whatever their reservations were about Mr. Trump in the past, they seem to have largely coalesced behind him today. That's bad news for Mr. DeSantis, who might count himself as a member of this group.

The Blue Collar Populists

12 percent of Republicans

Examples: Rudy Giuliani, Paul LePage, Lou Barletta, Michael Grimm

Trump 71, DeSantis 12

Anti-establishment
Isolationist foreign policy
Populist economics
Racial conservatism
Social conservatism
Trump loyalty

Over the last half century, some of them have been called the “backlash” vote, “white ethnics,” “Middle American Radicals,” Reagan Democrats and Obama-Trump voters. Today, they’re an important part of the Trump base.

Whites without a degree make up nearly three-quarters of this predominantly Northern group. But the Blue Collar Populists are surprisingly moderate on many of the issues that define the religious right. A clear majority of them say abortion should be legal, and they support same-sex marriage. Just 18 percent identify as “very conservative.”

Share who think abortion should be always or mostly legal

But this group has conservative-populist views on trade and economics and, perhaps most important, on race. No group was likelier to oppose immigration reform. A full 35 percent of this group’s members were willing to explicitly say the declining white share of the population was bad for America, compared with 13 percent of the rest of the party.

Share who oppose comprehensive immigration reform

This group may hold moderate views on religious-tinged social issues, but not because it is liberal. No group valued “freedom” less when put in conflict with other values. Of all the groups, they were by far the likeliest to prefer protecting traditional values over individual freedom, even though many social conservatives might question whether a group that supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage really holds traditional values in the first place.

The Blue Collar Populists back Mr. Trump by a wide margin — nearly as wide as the Right Wing does. Indeed, Mr. Trump himself might have belonged to this group a decade ago, before he embraced the views of social conservatives to win the nomination.

Like Mr. Trump, one in five members of this group hails from the tristate area around New York City.

The Libertarian Conservatives

14 percent of Republicans

Examples: Rand Paul, Jason Chaffetz, Dave Brat

Trump 43, DeSantis 12

Anti-establishment
Isolationist foreign policy
Populist economics
Racial conservatism
Social conservatism
Trump loyalty

At first, this group doesn’t clearly stand out from the rest of the party. It’s near the middle of the pack on almost every set of issues.

But our algorithm nonetheless plucked out these voters and set them apart for one reason: On questions pitting freedom against other values, these conservatives always chose freedom.

Share who favor the protection of individual freedom over traditional values

Nine percent said they would vote for some other candidate in a hypothetical general election matchup between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden. An even larger 13 percent of this group identified as “some other party,” compared with 3 percent of other Republicans. We didn’t ask them which party that was, but I’ll guess it’s the libertarians.

And after a second look at their answers, the subtle tug of their commitment to freedom and small government becomes easier to see: While they may be near the middle of the pack, they’re relatively moderate on social issues, relatively likely to oppose economic populism, and isolationist.

Other than the establishment, this group is the least supportive of Mr. Trump. But surprisingly, it’s not a great group for Mr. DeSantis either — a telling indication of the troubles facing a candidate who once built his national reputation on freedom from coronavirus restrictions.

The Newcomers

8 percent of Republicans

Examples: Vivek Ramaswamy, or perhaps a politician still to come

Trump 56, DeSantis 11

Anti-establishment
Isolationist foreign policy
Populist economics
Racial conservatism
Social conservatism
Trump loyalty

This is the youngest and most diverse group of Republicans. Just 59 percent are white, and 18 percent are Hispanic. More than a quarter are 18 to 29.

Nearly three-quarters identify as moderates or liberals. They overwhelmingly support immigration reform and say society should accept the identity of transgender people.

With these characteristics, it can be hard to see why these voters are Republican-leaners at all. But unlike the similarly moderate establishment, this is an unequivocally Republican group. They back Mr. Trump against President Biden and they’re deeply unhappy with the state of the country: Nearly 90 percent said the economy was poor, placing them just behind the Right Wing in their economic pessimism. A similar number said the country was heading in the wrong direction.

Share who want a candidate who would fight corporations that promote woke left ideology

So while they may not be conservatives in any traditional sense, they’re certainly not happy with Democrats. They were the likeliest group to say they would rather back a candidate who focused on fighting the radical “woke” left than one focused on protecting law and order. By a two-to-one margin, they said they would rather vote for a candidate who promised to stop “woke” business, rather than a candidate who said businesses should have the freedom to decide what to support.

They’re the smallest group of Republicans today, but this group of relatively moderate but anti-woke voters might play an important role in the Republican Party in the years ahead.

The New York Times · by Nate Cohn · August 17, 2023

22. Opinion Is fixing democracy partisan? Here are answers to this and more questions.

Some food for thought during the weekend.

Opinion Is fixing democracy partisan? Here are answers to this and more questions.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/23/democracy-renovation-faq-danielle-allen/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/23/democracy-renovation-faq-danielle-allen/

By Danielle Allen

Contributing columnist

August 23, 2023 at 7:52 a.m. EDT

(Washington Post staff illustration)

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Since the start of this year, I’ve been making the case that it’s time to renovate our democracy. But the very idea presumes several things. These include: (1) that constitutional democracy is good for human beings; (2) that we should want to keep and improve the one we’ve got; (3) that long-term work on the health of our democracy is worthwhile even as we face the near-term stress of a pretty unpalatable upcoming presidential election; and (4) that change is possible.

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As I’ve been writing these columns, several questions have cropped up repeatedly that touch on those underlying propositions. Here are some answers to frequently asked questions.

How will you help renovate our democracy? Tell The Post.

WHAT TO KNOW

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Why constitutional democracy?

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Human beings thrive when they can steer their own lives — both in their private lives and by acting together in the public sphere. Constitutional democracy is the only form of government that makes this possible for all. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s the best that’s humanly imaginable.

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How to renovate American democracy

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Contributing columnist Danielle Allen, a political theorist at Harvard University, is calling for a democracy renovation. She says it’s time to update the old house we all share to 21st-century standards. Her new series explains how to do it.

Why does our democracy need updating? In the first entry in the series, she explains why — and why she cares.

We need to expand the House of Representatives, Allen writes in the second entry of the series. She gives four reasons this would be a great first step.

Now the question becomes how big the House should be: 585 seats? Perhaps as big as 9,400 seats? In the third entry of the series, she explores different options.

If the House expands, the existing Capitol would likely need renovations. Allen worked with an architect and other experts to show what the redesigned building could look like.

Emerging technology can also harm democracy if not governed properly. Allen writes about the next level of artificial intelligence and whether American democracy is healthy enough to counter the misinformation it could spread.

You can’t have a democracy unless people want one, and the kids don’t particularly want a democracy right now, Allen writes. To fix this, she looks at how to reboot civics education.

Gerrymandering and an out-of-balance electoral college also menace our democracy. Allen explains how to fix them both with one change.

Throughout the series, readers have asked similar questions, including whether this democracy renovation is really worth the effort. Allen answers that and more in this FAQ.

The series will continue throughout 2023. Sign up to receive email alerts for Danielle Allen’s columns to make sure you don’t miss the next installment.

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Why shouldn’t we just chuck ours and start over?

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A democracy is a technology for collective, human decision-making. In the 18th century, people made some breakthroughs in understanding how to organize decision-making in fairer ways. We’ve continued to improve our understanding ever since. There’s a lot of wisdom and learning packed into our existing system that we shouldn’t throw away. Did electric carmaker Tesla throw away all previous models of the automobile and start from scratch in innovating to better address today’s needs? No. It built on learning to date and added new breakthroughs. Improving democracy works the same way.

Why isn’t the democracy we have fine the way it is?

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The constitutional democracy set up in the 18th century started from the idea that power could be reserved to some (mainly White, male holders of property, with some exceptions) while nonetheless being deployed for the good of all. This proposition is false. The only way to ensure that a political system serves the good of all is to ensure that power is shared by all. We’re still learning how to build a political system that genuinely supports fully inclusive power-sharing.

But was it actually a democracy in the 18th century? Wasn’t it a republic?

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The debate over this never ends, but the question is a red herring. Both terms were used in the 18th century in advocating the new system. James Madison used the term “republic” in advocating the new Constitution in the Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton described the new system as a “representative democracy” when advocating it at the New York state constitutional convention.

What is democracy renovation?

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Democracy renovation is made up of two things: (a) reconnecting people to civic service, civic collaboration, civic engagement, and their civic power and responsibility; and (b) reforming our political institutions and civic infrastructure so that people have the tools they need to be responsible and effective citizens — and politicians have the incentives they need to deliver responsive and accountable representation.

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Danielle Allen on renovating democracy

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What are the most important strategies for reconnecting people to their civic power?

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Broadly, forums for deliberation, civic education, organizing experiences and pathways to participation in the many available civic roles. Those roles include voting, running for office, jury duty, serving on boards and commissions at municipal, county, state and federal levels. They include writing letters to the editor and other expressive efforts to influence opinion. They include participating in nonviolent demonstrations and protests, and in civil society organizations with advocacy and civic missions, including local chapters of political parties. The list goes on.

What are the most important strategies for renovating our political institutions and civic infrastructure?

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Some of these I’ve written about already; some will be explored in columns to come. Employing unified all-comers preliminaries in place of party primaries, and having those preliminaries move four or five finalists forward to a final round where there is an instant runoff using ranked-choice voting; increasing the size of the House of Representatives; eradicating news deserts; ensuring full voter access; and embedding citizen deliberation in our representative system.

Is democracy renovation partisan?

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No, but it is cross-partisan. Any stable democracy must have a supermajority of citizens who are willing to invest time, talent and treasure in the healthy operation of the system itself, and that supermajority will necessarily span ideological divisions. The supermajority has to work together on democracy renovation to ensure that we have a stable system for contesting matters of substantive policy. This part we inevitably do along partisan lines. A core proposition of democracy is that continuous contestation of substantive policy enables us to discover solutions to our hard challenges over time.

A word on supermajorities. That standard is misused in parts of our democratic system — for instance, in the Senate filibuster, whereby ordinary legislation is held to a supermajority vote. But the fact that the concept is misused in some places does not make it a useless one. Having a stable, durable, sustainable constitutional democracy depends on there being a supermajority of citizens who support its existence and some of its bright-line ethical boundaries, including universal participation and inclusion in that democracy, rule of law and nonviolence as the standard for dispute resolution.

I’m an active partisan. Can I also be a democracy renovator?

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Yes, it is possible to be both an active partisan and a democracy renovator. One does this by advocating within one’s party for the policy choices and the candidates who support democracy renovation. One can also advocate party rules and policies that help your party connect people to civic experience and provide healthy incentives for elected officials and thereby support institutions for responsive representation.

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Opinions on democracy

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But our democracy is on the verge of breaking down. How does any of this help protect it?

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To achieve healthy 21st-century democracy, we must both protect and renovate democracy. Protection requires achieving election integrity. It requires leaders who set norms of respect for elections, the law and opponents. And it requires projects to bridge social and ideological divides, deliver civic education and encourage public service, along with a healthy information ecosystem. Renovation, in turn, requires redesign of institutions to support good incentives for elected officials and responsive representation, as well as reanimation of civic experience for the disconnected and alienated, which is most people. The two tasks go hand in hand and reinforce each other.

This all sounds like hard work. Why should I make the effort?

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It feels good! Civic engagement and empowerment are good for mental health. Also, having a secure political system that protects freedom and equality improves our chances of achieving policy outcomes that permit one generation after the next to have better lives than their parents.

Okay, so we need both protection and renovation, and pitching in might even make me feel better. But how do I decide how and what to do?

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Think of your engagement with our democracy as a civic portfolio. Every single one of us should have one of these. This involves choosing how we allocate our time, talent or treasure to civic pursuits.

Maybe you decide to allocate zero hours or zero dollars. That’s fine, so long as it’s an active choice — something you have actively chosen and have reasons for.

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If you do choose to allocate time, talent and treasure to a civic portfolio, you have to decide how much of each you can contribute, and then you have to decide how to spread your contributions across a portfolio of democracy protection, democracy renovation and partisan electoral work.

One person might allocate 30 minutes a week or $500 a year, or an hour a week or $1,000 a year, or 10 hours a week or $10,000 a year, or both time and treasure. I apportion a good deal of my nights and weekends, as well as 20 percent of my workweek, to civic pursuits. In addition, my professional area of focus is democracy renovation; I’m fortunate that I can do basic research and teaching on this subject as my job.

As a result, I’ll admit, democracy work takes up nearly all my time beyond eating, sleeping, exercising, walking the dogs and spending time with my family. Many would say I have overallocated to civic life. I am sure they are right. I wish our current politics didn’t make this feel necessary, but to me it does — urgently so.

Most people aren’t in a position to dedicate that large a portion of their lives to their own civic portfolio. But I believe nearly everyone can find some way to engage in this work. Across my own civic portfolio, I allocate 25 percent to democracy protection (via work on civic education), 5 percent to partisan work (via service as the chair of my local party committee) and 70 percent to democracy renovation. So my civic portfolio looks like this:

I’m curious to know more about your civic portfolio. How much time do you spend on civic pursuits? What is the balance of your allocation among democracy protection, democracy renovation and partisan pursuits? May I ask you to fill out this survey with a self-assessment? I’ll review and report back on your responses down the road.

How will you help renovate our democracy? Tell The Post.

Selfishly, for the sake of my own health and longevity, I am grateful every time I see another person pitch in on democracy renovation. It’s very clear that the more of us there are doing this work, the sooner we will get to a place where we can take a collective breath and have confidence in the health of our constitutional democracy.

And since that’s the best available form of government to support human thriving, how can we not do what we can to deliver yet another new birth of freedom and ensure that constitutional democracy shall not perish from the Earth?

How will you help renovate our democracy? Tell The Post.

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Can’t see the form? Click here.

23. Read Sacha Baron Cohen's Speech on Standing Against Hate

Excerpt:

We always have a choice.

Read Sacha Baron Cohen's Speech on Standing Against Hate

TIME · by Sacha Baron Cohen · August 26, 2023

Comedian and advocate Sacha Baron Cohen gave a speech at the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington Saturday, asking people to choose truth and empathy over lies and hate.

Here is the full text of the speech, as prepared.

—

Reverend Sharpton, members of the King family—thank you for inviting me to join you today. This is an incredible honor.

I’m indebted to the legacy of Dr. King and the work of the King Center. When I was a 19-year-old university student doing my thesis on the civil rights movement, I visited Atlanta and stayed at the historic Butler Street YMCA. I’ve never forgotten how I was welcomed by the staff of the King Center and the people of Atlanta.

There, I learned about how Black Americans and Jewish Americans—and people of so many faiths—linked arms together, went to jail together, sacrificed their lives together, and achieved historic victories together for civil rights. Their brave alliance teaches a powerful lesson that we can never forget: when we are united, we can hasten the day—as Dr. King proclaimed—when all of “God’s children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor.”

The power of our unity is exactly why those who stand in the way of equality and freedom seek to divide us. They appeal to the worst instincts of humanity, which often simmer just below the surface. I’ve seen it in my own work.

As Borat, the first fake news journalist, I interviewed some college students—three young white men in their ballcaps and polo shirts. It only took a few drinks, and soon they were telling me what they really believed.

They asked if, in my country, women are slaves. They talked about how, here in the U.S., “the Jews” have “the upper hand.” When I asked, do you have slaves in America?, they replied, “we wish!” “We should have slaves,” one said, “it would be a better country.”

Those young men made a choice. They chose to believe some of the oldest and most vile lies that are at the root of all hate. And so it pains me that we have to say it yet again. The idea that people of color are inferior is a lie. The idea that Jews are dangerous and all-powerful is a lie. The idea that women are not equal to men is a lie. The idea that queer people are a threat to our children is a lie.

At other times, I’ve seen people make a different choice.

As Borat, I once got an entire bar in Arizona to sing, “Throw the Jew down the well”—which revealed people’s indifference to anti-Semitism. But when I tried to film that same exact scene at a bar in Nashville, something different happened. People started to boo. And then they chased me right out of that bar.

Those people made the choice that brings us all here today—they chose to belief the truth: the truth that we are all deserving of respect, dignity, and equality, no matter who we are, what we look like, how we pray, or who we love.

We always have a choice.

Today, the choices we make are more important than ever because the forces of hate have a new weapon that was not available in 1963—social media. These social media platforms deliberately amplify content that triggers outrage and fear, including fear of “the other.”

This technology gives an advantage to the intolerant. They’ve gone from Klan rallies to chat rooms, from marches to message boards. It’s how they spread their filth, recruit new members, and plan their attacks. And we’ve all seen the deadly results. A surge in hate crimes. The murder of religious and ethnic minorities. And, on the other end of this Mall, an attack on democracy itself—hate and violence that should have no place in our pluralistic societies.

Today, we make a different choice—and we call on people everywhere to join us in standing up to hate, conspiracies, and lies, especially on social media.

To every person online, when someone tries to blame the problems of the world on vulnerable groups, don’t believe it. Don’t click on the conspiracy. Don’t “like” the lie. Learn the facts. “Education”—as Nelson Mandela said—“is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

To every corporation that advertises on social media, these platforms cannot survive without your dollars. Without your revenue, racist “influencers” cannot spew the lie that immigrants and people of color are trying to “replace” white Christians. Corporations—pull your ads from platforms that spread racism, hate, and bigotry.

To every social media CEO who has gotten rich off algorithms that help fuel the mental health crisis among our children and the polarization of our societies—change your business model. Stop hate for profit. For once, use the billions of dollars you’ve made to build a product that is not toxic, but safe.

Finally, to elected officials… Here in the United States, it’s been nearly 30 years since Congress passed meaningful internet regulations, in large part because social media companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars blocking them. Meanwhile, from Pittsburgh to Buffalo and now Cedar Glen, hate in the virtual world kills in the real world. How many more people have to die? Congress, it’s time to hold these social media companies accountable for the harm they cause.

We always have a choice. Today, as others spread lies, we choose truth. As others stoke conspiracies, we choose facts. As others fuel hate and division, we choose the empathy and the unity that allows us to make progress together, for equality, for decency, and for democracy, especially here in U, S, and A.

Thank you all very much.

TIME · by Sacha Baron Cohen · August 26, 2023

24. Landmines Threaten Agriculture In Ukraine And Azerbaijan but, Innovative Solutions Are On The Way

Landmines Threaten Agriculture In Ukraine And Azerbaijan but, Innovative Solutions Are On The Way

Forbes · by Zenger News · August 26, 2023

By Joseph Hammond

In ordinary times, Ukrainian farmer Oleksandr Kryvtsov would not be a viral celebrity. Krystov, frustrated by the fact that much of his farmland was contaminated with landmines, has taken matters into his own hands, turning his tractor into a remote-controlled demining vehicle. Videos and images of his light blue tractor demining fields near Hrakove, Ukraine went viral earlier this summer.

As the tide turns against Russia in its war against Ukraine, it is increasingly relying on massive fields of land mines to prevent Ukraine from liberating its territory. Today, an area roughly the size of Florida within Ukraine is contaminated. A large portion of those landmines are in prime agricultural land whose continued presence is a hindrance to investment, food security, and a continuing endangerment to human life.

Ukraine has an ambitious plan to is increasingly turning its attention to the challenge of de-mining large swathes of the country to resume agriculture production, with ambitious plans to de-mine at least the most valuable 470,000 hectares of agricultural land over the next four years. But by some estimates, landmines will lay dormant there for decades, if not centuries.

The scale of the problem cannot be underestimated. But another post-Soviet country, which has been breaking new ground in the face of a seemingly insurmountable landmine problem, could provide part of the solution.

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Azerbaijan recaptured large swathes of its internationally recognized territory that had been seized by Armenian separatists in the closing days of the Soviet Union and occupied for three decades in 2020.

Like Ukraine, those lands are now heavily contaminated with Soviet-era landmines. And like Ukraine, that land too has agricultural potential that Azerbaijan hopes to tap. Thanks to ongoing de-mining efforts, some 50,000 hectares there were planted with grain crops last year, according to Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Agriculture.

Azerbaijan has made de-mining a top priority because hundreds of thousands of former internally displaced people (IDPs) hope to return to their homes and rebuild ruined towns. The region was once known for its agricultural products.

“As a result of the liberation of territories of Azerbaijan, we are now in the active phase of development of those lands with respect to infrastructure, including agricultural development. Because the agricultural potential in the liberated areas is really very impressive,” the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev said earlier this year.

This urgent need to de-mine the liberated territories is one of Azerbaijan’s “most important issues” was reiterated by President Aliyev during an appearance at the Azerbaijan’s Global Media Forum last month. Addressing hundreds of international delegates in the city of Shusha – itself also in an area still heavily contaminated by mines – that some 300 Azerbaijanis have been killed or injured by landmines since Azerbaijani recovered the region. It’s a similar story in Ukraine with a grim twist. According to Save The Children, an NGO, one in eight of those injured in Ukraine are children.

... [+]Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

But one of the biggest hurdles to de-mining is cost. While the cost of producing a landmine is relatively cheap from $3 to $75 dollars according to the International Red Cross, the cost of removing a single mine can range from $300 to $1000 dollars. Even for Azerbaijan, a relatively wealthy country owing to its abundant natural gas resources, this poses a major challenge. For Ukraine, it will be worse.

“We received several proposals from several international companies to work in this area but unfortunately the price was very high…on average 8 to 10 times [the local cost],” President Aliyev said.

The Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action (ANAMA) – established in 1998 with a mandate to de-mine the country with the support of the United Nations has developed innovative approaches to de-mining. Over the years it has also been supported by the U.S. government. Today the agency is training new volunteers from amongst IDPs.

“They are clearing their own land,” says Samir Poladov, the Deputy Chair of ANAMA. “They know they are doing this work for themselves. Outsourcing the same jobs to foreign companies would cost 10 times as much.”

ANAMA has also been involved in other projects such as micro-lending initiatives to help restore the livelihoods of IDPs.

This is a model that could work well In Ukraine, where many farmers like Oleksandr Kryvtsov are already taking matters into their own hands to clear their lands, frustrated by the painstakingly slow pace of de-mining. In Azerbaijan other frustrations exist.

“The Armenian authorities have consistently failed or refused to hand over maps detailing where mines have been laid. Where they have done so, the maps are incomplete. All too often, our mine clearance professionals are forced to work with impartial records, rendering their work even slower and deadlier than it would otherwise has been.” Armenia has long-denied this charge and the fate of the maps became tied up in negotiations over POWs from the 2020 conflict.

Should Ukraine emerge victorious in its war with Russia, it is unlikely Putin will be any more forthcoming with the provision of mine maps. In both cases the chaos of the battlefield, changing weather patterns, floods, and other issues could lead to such maps having limited utility. Especially in cases where landmines were planted years if not decades in the past.

Azerbaijan has also tapped APOPO to help its fight against landmines. The organization is a U.S.-registered non-profit with a headquarters in Tanzania. APOPO is famous in the de-mining community for its use of both dogs and giant African pouched rats in the demining process. Both animals have sensitive noses which can be trained to sniff out hints of explosives. Some APOPO rats have also been trained to sniff out tuberculosis in patients. The large rats work for peanuts – literally.

“In Azerbaijan, there is a willingness to try new things and innovative solutions,” said Itamar Levy, a director with APOPO, who has worked on demining efforts in both Azerbaijan and Ukraine.

This year a Ukrainian mission visited Azerbaijan to better understand Azerbaijan’s approach to de-mining. Middle Eastern representatives have also visited Azerbaijan to better understand its mine-clearance strategy. A joint Saud-Azeri company has been formed to apply Azerbaijan’s know-how and technologies in other parts of the world. Some 61 countries around the world are still contaminated with landmines — mostly from wars that ended years ago. In many cases landmines are located in prime agricultural land. Thus, landmines pose a threat to both human and food security around the globe.

"Azerbaijan is ready to present a new humanitarian package, including mine-cleaning equipment. Demining is one of the important directions of our cooperation with our partners. Ukraine needs to receive this equipment from its partners. It should also be production-based in Ukraine so that we can clear our land of Russian mines," Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky said in an address thanking Azerbaijan earlier this month.

In both countries however, the battle against landmines will take years if not decades. In the case of Ukraine some grim analysts suggest it could take centuries unless new and innovative solutions are tried to decontaminate the roughly 30% of Ukranian territory that is currently mined. Yet, in niether country is it an impossible struggle as both countries are home to diligent individuals and organizations committed to ensuring farmers like Oleksandr Kryvtsov can one day plant again.

Forbes · by Zenger News · August 26, 2023

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: [email protected]

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: [email protected]

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 26, 2023

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The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters

The Moderate Establishment

14 percent of Republicans

Share who support providing additional aid to Ukraine

The Traditional Conservatives

26 percent of Republicans

Share who favor cutting taxes on corporations over raising tariffs on imports

The Right Wing

26 percent of Republicans

Share who identify as very conservative

The Blue Collar Populists

12 percent of Republicans

Share who think abortion should be always or mostly legal

Share who oppose comprehensive immigration reform

The Libertarian Conservatives

14 percent of Republicans

Share who favor the protection of individual freedom over traditional values

The Newcomers

8 percent of Republicans

Share who want a candidate who would fight corporations that promote woke left ideology

Opinion Is fixing democracy partisan? Here are answers to this and more questions.

WHAT TO KNOW

Why constitutional democracy?

Why shouldn’t we just chuck ours and start over?

Why isn’t the democracy we have fine the way it is?

But was it actually a democracy in the 18th century? Wasn’t it a republic?

What is democracy renovation?

Danielle Allen on renovating democracy

What are the most important strategies for reconnecting people to their civic power?

What are the most important strategies for renovating our political institutions and civic infrastructure?

Is democracy renovation partisan?

I’m an active partisan. Can I also be a democracy renovator?

Opinions on democracy

But our democracy is on the verge of breaking down. How does any of this help protect it?

This all sounds like hard work. Why should I make the effort?

Okay, so we need both protection and renovation, and pitching in might even make me feel better. But how do I decide how and what to do?

How will you help renovate our democracy? Tell The Post.