Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power."

– James Madison

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint."

– Alexander Hamilton

"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."

– Victor Hugo

1. Creeping Through Hamas’s Tunnels, Israeli Commandos Bump Into a Hostage

2. After Barrage From Russia, Ukraine Calls on West to Lift Restrictions on Missiles

3. Top Biden Aide Visits China to Reinforce U.S. Strategy

4. Harris and Trump Embrace Tariffs, Though Their Approaches Differ

5. Special Operations forces want to use AI to reduce civilian deaths in combat

6. Old-school soldiers prove they can still beat tech-heavy troops

7. Ukraine Says It Has Tested A New Domestically-Designed Ballistic Missile

8. U.S. Special Operations Forces Work To Mitigate Civilian Harm

9. How did Taiwan’s President Lai perform in his first 100 days in office?

10. Chinese hackers break into American government and military accounts

11. Chief Details Shifting Special Ops Emphasis; Progress on Preventing Civilian Casualties

12. How lessons learned from the 2016 campaign led US officials to be more open about Iran hack

13. US special ops official lays out 'strategic' reason for Israel to better protect civilians

14. Don’t Ever Invade China: Xi Jinping Prioritizes Border, Coastal, and Air Defense

15. The Autocratic Allure: Why the Far Right Embraces Foreign Tyrants

16. Why Whataboutism Works: In International Politics, It Pays to Point Fingers

17. US military open to escorting Philippine ships in the South China Sea, senior admiral says

18. Ukraine has found a path to victory

19. The AUKUS submarine deal has been exposed as a monumental folly – is it time to abandon ship?

20. Myanmar military on verge of falling from power, analysts say

21. Old US Bradleys becoming 'legend' in Ukraine shows what the country can do when it gets enough of the weapons it needs

22. U.S. military’s Tinder ads in Middle East raise eyebrows

23. In The Kill Zone: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 6)

24. Hawaii soldier earns rare triple tab: Ranger, Sapper, Jungle

1. Creeping Through Hamas’s Tunnels, Israeli Commandos Bump Into a Hostage

Passion, reason, and chance. Chance is the ever present condition in war.

Creeping Through Hamas’s Tunnels, Israeli Commandos Bump Into a Hostage

A search turns into a rescue, as a Bedouin Israeli Muslim is found after 326 days in captivity

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-frees-hostage-in-rescue-mission-8c851a3f?mod=latest_headlines

By Carrie Keller-Lynn and Anat Peled

Follow and Dov Lieber

Updated Aug. 27, 2024 1:49 pm ET

The brother of the freed Israeli hostage shows a picture of the two of them on his phone after they met at a hospital in southern Israel. Photo: menahem kahana/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Israeli commandos were combing tunnels in southern Gaza when they made a startling discovery: an Israeli Bedouin who had been taken hostage on Oct. 7, alone and unguarded.

The troops had been exploring the tunnel complex for days, guided by intelligence that there could be militants or hostages there, yet wary of walking into an ambush, Israeli military officials said.

“We acted in a very careful and thorough way, because we knew we may meet terrorists, hostages or booby traps,” one of the officials said.

What they encountered instead was 52-year-old Qaid Farhan Al-Qadi, who had been a factory security guard at a kibbutz near Gaza when he was kidnapped by militants more than 10 months ago.

Qaid Farhan Al-Qadi Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The hostage “met our forces underground,” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said at a briefing on the events Tuesday.

The result was a rare hostage rescue and an even rarer one that didn’t involve a firefight in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Footage from Israeli Channel 12 showed a helicopter bringing him to the Soroka Medical Center in southern Israel and family members lining up outside the hospital waiting to see him. He emerged gaunt but smiling after 326 days in captivity and was in good medical condition, the hospital said, adding that he had an emotional reunion with his family.

“It’s like he’s been revived from the dead,” Hatem Al-Qadi, brother of the freed hostage, said in a live television interview with Israel’s state broadcaster.

He called for Israel’s government to strike a deal to free the rest of the hostages as soon as possible.

“We hope there will be a celebration not just by us, but all the families of hostages will experience this joy,” he said.

Al-Qadi, the eighth hostage to be freed by Israel’s military, is a Muslim citizen of Israel and father of 11 from the Bedouin city of Rahat. He had been kidnapped from his workplace in Kibbutz Magen, said the Hostages Families Forum, an Israeli advocacy group. It was the first time the military had recovered a live hostage from a tunnel thus far in the war.

His rescue from an apparently unguarded section of tunnel underscored the mystery around the whereabouts of the remaining hostages who are believed to be spread across the enclave. Some who have been freed said they were held both above ground and underground, usually under tight guard. Released hostage Aviva Siegel told The Wall Street Journal that she was held in 13 different locations both above and below ground during her 51 days in Gaza.

Hamas took around 250 people hostage on Oct. 7. The militant group had released 109 hostages as of the end of November, when a cease-fire agreement that included hostage-prisoner exchanges expired. Israel said 104 hostages taken by militants during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war remain in Gaza, including many dead.

Hostage Rescue: Inside Israel's Covert Units

After Barrage From Russia, Ukraine Calls on West to Lift Restrictions on Missiles

Attacks cause significant damage to Ukraine’s already-creaking power grid

https://www.wsj.com/world/missile-barrage-on-ukraine-prompts-calls-to-lift-restrictions-on-striking-inside-russia-5766109a?mod=latest_headlines

By Ian Lovett

Updated Aug. 27, 2024 1:57 am ET

Russia struck sites across Ukraine with what Kyiv called the biggest aerial bombardment of the war, inflicting damage to the country’s already-strained energy infrastructure and prompting calls from Ukraine for Western allies to help it strike back.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Kyiv’s allies to lift restrictions on the use of long-range Western-made weapons, such as the U.S.’s ATACMS missiles, to strike deep inside Russian territory.

“There cannot be long-range restrictions in Ukraine, when terrorists do not have such restrictions,” Zelensky said on Telegram. “America, Britain, France, other partners have the power to help us stop terror.”

Top Biden Aide Visits China to Reinforce U.S. Strategy

The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, will raise thorny issues like Taiwan and Russia with only months left before a new administration takes office.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/world/asia/sullivan-biden-china-xi.html

Jake Sullivan, second from right, arriving in Beijing on Tuesday.Credit...Pool photo by Ng Han Guan

By David Pierson

Reporting from Hong Kong

Aug. 27, 2024,

5:58 a.m. ET

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Making another heavy push to work with China in the waning months of the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for talks aimed at showing that the United States and China can manage their differences.

The U.S. national security adviser began his fifth meeting in less than 18 months with China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, as the Biden administration seeks to reinforce its strategy on China despite uncertainty over the future of American foreign policy.

There is much to talk about — but probably little on which they will agree.

Mr. Sullivan plans to discuss working with China on limiting the spread of fentanyl and expanding high-level military contacts. He will also stress the United States’ position on Taiwan and its concerns about China’s support of Russia.

China indicated it would raise its own objections during the talks — including over America’s support for Taiwan, the island democracy Beijing claims, and U.S. controls on exports of technology to China.

Beijing wants the United States to ease its pressure on China, in the hope that it would set the tone for smoother relations with the next U.S. administration, analysts said.

“China’s priority is to maintain the stability of China-U.S. relations in the last several months of Biden’s presidency,” said Zhao Minghao, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Fudan University in Shanghai.

The prospect of a potential meeting between President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, before Mr. Biden’s term ends, is likely to come up. (It was unclear if Mr. Sullivan would meet with Mr. Xi during his three-day visit.)

Here are some of the issues Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Wang are expected to broach:

Taiwan and Ukraine

Perhaps the biggest flash points in relations between China and the United States are Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s increasing aggression toward Taiwan.

Mr. Sullivan is likely to urge China to reduce its support to Russia, which the United States and NATO say has helped sustain Russia’s war effort, now in its third year. China buys huge quantities of Russian oil and supplies Russia with dual-use technology that can be applied to the battlefield, U.S. officials say.

Beijing is unlikely to turn its back on Moscow, its only major-power partner in counterbalancing the United States.

Chinese officials will seek to criticize U.S. support for Taiwan, which Mr. Xi has threatened to take by force, if necessary. Beijing accuses Washington of promoting “Taiwan independence” by supplying the island with arms and allowing for exchanges between American and Taiwanese officials.

China said in a statement on Sunday that the United States needed to do more to repair relations. “The United States has kept containing and suppressing China,” a foreign ministry statement said. The relationship, it said, is “still at a critical juncture of being stabilized.”

Taiwan was “the first and foremost red line that must not be crossed,” the statement read.

Technology Controls

Mr. Sullivan has championed the Biden administration’s export controls designed to prevent China from getting its hands on advanced American semiconductors, or microchips, that can be used to develop weapons or computing power that could threaten U.S. national security.

Image

President Joe Biden speaking at the opening of a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plant in Phoenix in 2022.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

That has frustrated China, which has struggled to catch up with the United States in designing advanced chips despite investing billions of dollars in research. Beijing says the export controls are aimed at stunting China’s rightful development.

The restrictions, which were first introduced in October 2022, have had far-reaching consequences by forcing countries to shift, or consider shifting, some production of semiconductors out of Asia back to North America and Europe.

It is unclear what the long-term implications of U.S. export controls will be. China has seized on the restrictions to redouble efforts to become more technologically self-sufficient. Brokers have also used proxies to smuggle banned chips into China.

Will Xi and Biden Meet Again?

Mr. Sullivan’s visit could lay the groundwork for one last summit between Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden. Discussions between Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Wang were key to organizing last November’s meeting.

Though he will only serve one term, and one that was disrupted by the Covid pandemic, Mr. Biden could be the first president not to travel to China since President Carter.

Mr. Biden has visited China before, when he was vice president in 2011, a trip remembered for his stop at a local Beijing restaurant for noodles and dumplings. If a state visit is not possible, Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden could potentially meet at the APEC summit in Peru in November.

Of course, China may not be interested in Mr. Biden’s lame duck presidency and could be focused on how best to approach the next administration. Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine this month, the Chinese international relations scholars Wang Jisi, Hu Ran and Zhao Jianwei said Beijing sees little difference between a Trump or Harris administration; they will both be driven by domestic pressure to be tough on China.

“Beijing is preparing itself for the outcome of the U.S. elections with great caution and limited hope,” they wrote.

Olivia Wang contributed reporting.

David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about David Pierson

4. Harris and Trump Embrace Tariffs, Though Their Approaches Differ

Are tariffs going to become the new easy button like sanctions. Are we going to use tariffs (like sanctions) to show we are "doing something" in response to some economic or foreign policy/national security issue?

Harris and Trump Embrace Tariffs, Though Their Approaches Differ

Both Democrats and Republicans are expressing support for tariffs to protect American industry, reversing decades of trade thinking in Washington.

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Former President Donald J. Trump’s proposals include a 10 to 20 percent tariff on most imports, as well as a more than 60 percent tariff on Chinese products.Credit...Roger Kisby for The New York Times

By Ana Swanson

Ana Swanson has covered trade during the Trump and Biden administrations.

Aug. 27, 2024

Updated 1:01 p.m. ET

Sign up for the Tilt newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, makes sense of the latest political data. Get it in your inbox.

When Donald J. Trump ran for president in 2016, there was not much love for tariffs in Washington. Many Republicans and Democrats believed that putting levies on imports created economic inefficiencies and that freer trade was the best recipe for growth.

That view has largely fallen out of fashion in 2024. While Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, differ greatly in their campaign proposals, both of their parties are increasingly embracing tariffs as an essential tool in protecting American manufacturers from Chinese and other global competitors.

It has been a sharp reversal from previous decades, in which most politicians fought to lower tariffs, rather than raise them. But the loss of American manufacturing jobs as a result of globalization and China’s focus on churning out cheap exports have created a bipartisan backlash against more open trade. Given that Mr. Trump’s 2016 win capitalized on such sentiments, Democrats have been striving to avoid losing voters opposed to free trade.

“On economic policy and trade issues, you have both major parties moving in the same direction,” said Nick Iacovella, a senior vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates in favor of tariffs and domestic investments in industry.

Mr. Iacovella said that Mr. Trump would most likely go further on tariffs than Ms. Harris would, but no matter who wins the election “it’s still going to be a tariffs administration, and an industrial policy one.”

Ms. Harris has sought to differentiate herself from Mr. Trump’s trade proposals, which include tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on most imports, as well as levies of more than 60 percent on China. Many economists say that level of tariffs would drive up prices for consumers, since companies would likely pass on higher import costs.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, Ms. Harris described the proposals as “a national sales tax — call it a Trump tax” and said the plans “would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.”

Economists’ estimates vary, but the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund calculated that the tariffs could increase costs on a middle-income family by $3,900 per year.

Ms. Harris has not said much about how she would approach tariffs, including whether she would impose additional levies on China. But Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement that Ms. Harris would “employ targeted and strategic tariffs to support American workers, strengthen our economy, and hold our adversaries accountable.”

Despite early criticisms of Mr. Trump’s trade policy, the Biden administration has kept the former president’s initial tariffs on China in place and proposed adding another $18 billion of new levies on some Chinese products, including a 100 percent tax on electric vehicles. The administration also proposed new tariffs on electric vehicle batteries, semiconductors, steel and medical products, in an effort to ensure that newly invested American factories can stay in business.

Image

Ms. Harris has sought to differentiate her trade proposals from Mr. Trump’s. A campaign official said that she would implement “targeted and strategic tariffs” in office. Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The Biden administration is set to issue its final determination on those levies before the end of August. Last month, it also imposed additional tariffs on certain metals from Mexico, seeking to block Chinese materials from a route into the United States.

Inu Manak, a trade policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that politicians of both parties were now more willing to argue that they could increase tariffs without any negative effects. She pointed to a recent poll by the Cato Institute, which showed that Republicans and Democrats had high levels of support for hypothetical tariffs imposed by their party, but not the other party.

“When Harris criticizes Trump, she’s not criticizing tariff policy, she’s criticizing his tariff policy,” Ms. Manak said. “And I’m sure if she proposed something, Democrats would think that’s great.”

The tariffs that Mr. Trump has floated are orders of magnitude larger than what President Biden’s administration has proposed, presumably covering more than $3 trillion of trade, and implying a much bigger impact on the economy.

2024 Election: Live Updates

Updated Aug. 27, 2024, 11:17 a.m. ET3 hours ago

In addition to a universal tariff on all imports and higher tariffs on China, he has suggested a reciprocal policy in which the United States will match tariffs that another nation imposes on American exports.

Speaking in Asheville, N.C., last week, Mr. Trump said he might double the 10 percent tariff he had already proposed on most foreign goods.

“We are going to have 10 to 20 percent tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years,” he told the crowd.

Economists generally agree that tariffs of this size would have a noticeable effect on consumer prices, while also raising costs for manufacturers that buy imported parts or materials. About a third of U.S. imports are inputs that go into American farms and factories.

Large tariffs could also incite retaliation from foreign countries, kicking off a damaging trade war. Earlier this year, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said that a 10 percent American import tariff could lead to a “free-for-all which would upend the stability and predictability of trade.”

Mary Lovely, an economist at the Peterson Institute, said that tariffs seemed to be the “solution de jour — a supposed remedy for a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, left-behind communities, and income inequality.”

“Unfortunately, tariffs remedy none of these ills and, sadly, higher tariffs will make them worse,” Ms. Lovely said.

Image

Paul Wellborn, the president of Wellborn Cabinet, a manufacturer of kitchen and bath cabinets in Ashland, Ala., credited tariffs with saving their company and the industry.Credit...Scott Baker for The New York Times

But the tariffs have proved popular with industries that have faced stiff competition from Chinese firms, like makers of kitchen cabinets. Paul Wellborn, the president of Wellborn Cabinet, a manufacturer of kitchen and bath cabinets in Ashland, Ala., credited tariffs with saving his company and the industry.

Wellborn Cabinet saw its sales fall after the Great Recession, when the housing market collapsed and with it demand for new cabinets. But as the economy started to recover, business was still slow, Mr. Wellborn said. The industry realized that Chinese companies had taken over about 40 percent of the market and their share was continuing to grow.

Wellborn Cabinet joined with others in its industry to mount an investigation into Chinese trade practices, which resulted in tariffs ranging from 4 percent to nearly 300 percent on Chinese cabinets. The industry was further helped as Mr. Trump added first 10 percent and then an additional 15 percent of tariffs on top.

“He’s right on the money as far as tariffs,” Mr. Wellborn said of Mr. Trump.

Other companies have been more critical. Thomas Shaw, the founder of Retractable Technologies, a maker of syringes, said he supported tariffs and American manufacturing, but that the government had not given his company time to relocate before imposing the levies.

The company makes some of its syringes and needles in a plant in Little Elm, Texas, while making others in China. Mr. Shaw claimed he had been blocked from producing more in the United States by anti-competitive behavior, and had been forced to go to China to manufacture what he described as an innovative product that had reduced needle sticks for nurses and helped the government deploy vaccines during the pandemic.

This year, the Biden administration said it would give the company only a few months before a 50 percent tariff on Chinese syringes went into effect, which was an unrealistically short period to move a factory around the world, he said.

“We were forced to go to China, and now with the tariff we’re being forced to go back,” he said. “What it’s doing is it is making it more difficult for us every day.”

Even if tariffs cause certain economic duress, they may still be a winning formula politically. One study put out earlier this year by a prominent group of economists, for example, found that Mr. Trump’s China tariffs had little effect on employment in the industries protected by the tariffs. But politically, they were a success, resulting in more support for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party in the affected areas.

“Some of the support it creates for Republicans might be due to the fact that people appreciate the government reacting to, standing up to China,” David Dorn, an economist at the University of Zurich and one of the study’s authors, said in an interview earlier this year.

Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade. More about Ana Swanson

5. Special Operations forces want to use AI to reduce civilian deaths in combat

Excerpts:

“As we've started to exercise this and build the emphasis on [reducing] civilian harm into large-scale exercises, it becomes particularly daunting when you think of the, if you will, the scale of that type of conflict, where…we've talked openly about thousands of strikes in an hour. This boggles the mind,” he told the Defense Writers Group.

U.S. special operations forces are “going to need the automation and aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning and all those things that we talk about all the time on the targeting side and the operational side…built in and baked into that with a focus on civilian harm.”

Special Operations forces want to use AI to reduce civilian deaths in combat

Automation could eventually turn “trigger-pullers into the experts that can do this,” one official said.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

While much has been said about the danger of allowing AI into military operations in a way that would allow AI to kill people, there has been far less discussion about using AI to make war safer for civilians. But that's what U.S. special operations are starting to look at now, Christopher Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, told reporters Friday.

Part of the reason for this, he said, is that preventing civilian harm in a large-scale conflict—such as a potential war with China—would be far more difficult than in the counter-terrorism missions special forces are engaged in around the globe.

“As we've started to exercise this and build the emphasis on [reducing] civilian harm into large-scale exercises, it becomes particularly daunting when you think of the, if you will, the scale of that type of conflict, where…we've talked openly about thousands of strikes in an hour. This boggles the mind,” he told the Defense Writers Group.

U.S. special operations forces are “going to need the automation and aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning and all those things that we talk about all the time on the targeting side and the operational side…built in and baked into that with a focus on civilian harm.”

The Defense Department is already doing a lot of work to reduce the number of civilian deaths, particularly in special operations mission sets, he said. One example is the new center of excellence dedicated to civilian protection in combat.

“It also means things that are critically important but not particularly glamorous, like having actually a data enterprise that can ingest a lot of different information and make it available to others so that they can look at the lessons learned of the past,” he said.

So how achievable is it to use AI to reduce civilian harm in conflict?

A 2021 International Red Cross report looked at some of the areas where AI, particularly tied to more precise targeting and better battlefield data analysis, could make conflict safer for civilians and non-combatants. Such systems “may enable better decisions by humans in conducting hostilities in compliance with international humanitarian law and minimizing risks for civilians by facilitating quicker and more widespread collection and analysis of available information,” it says.

But the report also reveals a variety of features AI will bring to the battlefield that commanders could find attractive—but that could also undermine efforts to protect civilians and possibly “facilitate worse decisions or violations of international humanitarian law and exacerbate risks for civilians, especially given the current limitations of the technology, such as unpredictability, lack of explainability and bias.”

AI could also lead to what the Red Cross called the “increasing personalization of warfare,” with digital systems bringing together personally identifiable information from multiple sources—including sensors, communications, databases, social media, and biometric data—to form an algorithmically generated determination about a person, their status and their targetability, or to predict their future actions.”

That may have already come to pass. In April, the Israeli-based magazine +972, citing a number of sources within the Israeli military, detailed the existence of an AI tool called “Lavender,” designed to designate suspected Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters. According to the magazine “During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”

Bottom line: The use of AI in warfare to prevent civilian harm is only as good as the human-specified parameters guiding it. And those parameters will reflect the intentions and priorities of the government using the system.

Still, when well-applied, AI can have positive effects on civilian harm reduction, according to a 2022 paper from CNA.

For instance: “Detecting a change from [the] collateral damage estimate by finding differences

between imagery used to determine the collateral damage estimate and more recent

imagery taken in support of an engagement,” and “alerting the presence of transient civilians by using object identification to automatically monitor for additional individuals around the target area and send an alert if they are detected.”

In other words, AI could play a crucial role in reducing uncertainty about targets, which could help commanders to better identify which targets to shoot—and which not to.

Of course, the CNA paper reminds, there are reasonable limits, since AI runs on data and not all data is perfect at the moment it’s acted upon.

“Even a perfect world—one with few or no uncertainties, with clear demarcations between ‘hostile’ and ‘nonhostile,’ and in which targeting areas (and concomitant weapon blast zones) that preclude any reasonable likelihood of collateral damage are all easily identifiable—will have a non-zero risk to civilians.”

Giving special operations forces better tools to prevent civilian casualties is part of a broader series of transformations Maier says are essential to better compete against China on the global stage, transformations special operations forces will have to make even as they face budgetary constraints and even cuts.

For instance, the Army is looking to cut as many as 3,000 special operators. Army officials speaking on background to Defense One in September emphasized the cuts would affect non-tactical roles, or so-called enablers such as headquarters staff, logistics, and psychological operations.

However, Maier said those types of enabler roles are precisely what U.S. Special Operations Forces must invest in to compete with China.

“If you've got a operation detachment alpha, the kind of core, 12 man-Green Beret team, they're going to have to go out and understand how to do cyber and get in a beam for a potential adversary satellite, and understand how to operate in the environment of ubiquitous technical surveillance, just as much as they're going to have to be able to—10 times out of 10—hit the target they intend to hit if they're going kinetic,” he said. “My fundamental view is the areas we need to invest the most are going to be in those critical enablers. In some cases, that's turning trigger pullers into the experts that can do this.”

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

6. Old-school soldiers prove they can still beat tech-heavy troops

The beauty and value of the national training centers at (Fort Irwin, Ft Johnson, and Hohenfels ) is the ability of the OPFOR to defeat the participating units. They have the freedom to act like the enemy even if that makes the units participating lose or "look bad" in the training. I believe this is what made our Army so successful in Desert Storm and beyond. The culture of allowing an aggressive, thinking, creative OPFOR to wreak havoc on the units is what strengthens our Army. I am glad to see this is continuing while we transform in contact and even when we are coding evaluation of new equipment, technology, and concepts.

Old-school soldiers prove they can still beat tech-heavy troops

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

FORT JOHNSON, Louisiana—Through the black-and-white lens of night-vision goggles, Sgt. 1st Class Mark Spirko and 1st Lt. Alex Andrade looked like phantoms as they creeped through the suffocatingly hot pine forest just after 1 a.m.

Suddenly Spirko stopped, his eyes fixed on an unseen point just ahead. With a smooth motion, he raised his rifle and fired.

“Dad,” as his men jokingly call him, had just killed three enemy soldiers. As he disappeared into the night, wildly inaccurate bursts of fire followed him in vain.

The gunfire was all from blanks, and the “deaths” were recorded via a laser-tag-like system. Spirko is a member of the reconnaissance force of Geronimo, U.S. Army soldiers who serve as the enemy in highly realistic wargames to prepare other units for deployments.

This time, Spirko was fighting a unit like none other before: the 2nd Brigade of the storied 101st Airborne, known as Strike. Like wealthy hunters on a big-game hunt, Strike had come with every modern advantage in the book, from brand-new drones to electronic warfare tools made for sniffing out an enemy’s digital trail.

But even as warfare in Ukraine suggests a major shift in land operations, an old lesson appeared to hold true: a well-led, experienced force fighting on its home turf can still win against a technologically superior enemy. Over the course of a dusk-to-dawn raid earlier this month, Defense One watched as Spirko and other members of Geronimo's “Ghost” reconnaissance unit outfoxed Strike time after time.

Ghost vs Strike

Geronimo had at least a few advantages.

Unlike Strike’s soldiers, Geronimo’s soldiers can rely on air-conditioned rooms to recover between missions, as well as ample supplies of water. Strike, by contrast, was stuck in the sweltering heat, thick with mosquitos, with limited water supply if Geronimo attacked their logistics points. The weather is so stifling that soldiers are regularly air-lifted to hospitals to recover from heat-related illnesses.

Geronimo’s soldiers also run war games with visiting units multiple times per year, gaining valuable experience working with each other and learning the training area by heart.

The unit’s rules of engagement are another advantage, said Sgt. Michael Corely, a team leader in Ghost. Recon units usually must radio to artillery units to attack any enemies they discover, then wait for headquarters to approve or veto the strike, which can be a lengthy process.

Ghost doesn’t have that problem.

Before missions, it agrees on a high-payoff list of targets that are pre-approved, such as enemy radars or artillery. If Ghost sees one of those targets, it can unload a mortar and attack it directly. The weapon has a double advantage: since it’s usually only used by regular troops, the unit under attack may believe it’s facing a large enemy formation and not just a handful of reconnaissance soldiers.

Ghost has also used first-person-view drones for fast strikes, Corely said. In a previous training rotation, he said, they used a single drone piloted by Army special operations forces to take out two valuable mine-clearing vehicles.

Still, Strike had key advantages. For one, it outnumbered Ghost three to one. And because the soldiers were inserted by helicopter, the units were also spread throughout the forest.

In addition to the physical advantage, Strike also could rely on brand-new drones, electronic warfare tools, loitering munitions, night vision goggles and Infantry Squad Vehicles (ISV)—small, quiet vehicles perfect for roving through the forest.

Ghost, by contrast, has little in the way of new tech. Each team rode on small, all-terrain vehicles, including a Maverick ATV whose engine was far louder than the ISV.

And Ghost’s only drone, a TSM-800, has a camera that’s only a small step up from a flip-phone. Rather than flying based on the pilot’s input, like Strike’s drones, it instead flies by pre-set waypoints that can not be changed to re-focus on a promising target.

The mission

Gathered a few hours before Spirko’s assault on the outpost, the Ghost soldiers looked tired as they gathered in their dingy operations room. They’d worked all night, and had just a few hours at home to shower, rest, and recover before another 24-hour mission.

Tonight’s objective: find the 101st’s Multi-Functional Reconnaissance Company (MFRC). The unit was a formidable adversary. One of only three similar units across the Army, the MFRC was decked out with new gear perfect for hunting the adversary, including drones, electronic warfare tools, deception equipment, and more. If Geronimo could find them, they’d weaken Strike’s reconnaissance capability and take a powerful unit off the board.

In a forceful, hushed voice, Corely sketched out the plan after the six-man group moved to a refueling station, his voice as urgent as if it were a real mission. Ghost would try to search for the MFRC in an area just next to Geronimo’s entry point to the training area. If they found them, they’d then call in Baker Company and surround the MFRC.

Racing out on the three dune-buggy type vehicles, day turned into night, forcing the soldiers to rely on night-vision goggles to drive. Nevertheless, the soldiers were able to move quickly, assisted by their deep knowledge of the roads.

After winding their way through the woods, the teams converged on a small clearing to release a drone. On board the drone, a Raspberry Pi computer was set up to scan the nearby forest for the tell-tale electronic signals given off by WiFi devices.

But the TS-M800 had technical problems, forcing the soldiers to wait. In the darkness came the rumbling of vehicles. A soldier glanced at an Android phone loaded with the Tactical Assault Kit software, and identified them as Baker Company.

New instructions crackled over the radio. The unit’s three vehicles disappeared into the darkness, with Spirko and Andrade racing to reconnoiter a possible enemy position.

The soldiers parked near the objective and got out of the vehicle. Spirko’s steps barely made a sound, despite the many branches underfoot. Soon, they encountered the small outpost—where Spirko “killed” the three soldiers rushing toward them.

Spirko and Andrade looped back, walking for what felt like an hour to eventually reach a large flat field where Spirko thought their targets might be. Soaked with sweat from the hike, the soldiers arrived to find the field empty.

As if in recompense, Strike then made it easy for them.

On the road back to their vehicle, the two soldiers spotted four 101st Airborne ISVs parked just a few feet off the road, with two soldiers standing just behind them. The soldiers, perhaps tired from their day, did not challenge the two figures as they passed by. Spirko radioed back to base to report the soldiers, relaying their exact position for a possible strike without even looking at a map.

Spirko and Adrade then hid their vehicle. Unlike the soldiers they’d just spotted, they parked deep within the forest—though not so deep that they couldn’t watch the road. Peering out, they watched as oblivious 101st ISVs drove back and forth.

Elsewhere, Corely’s team was also making progress.

He had found the position of a 101st company command post, and radioed the location back to base. Geronimo then used its indirect fires—the term for everything from artillery to rockets—to destroy the company base by virtually shelling it. The attack allowed Pathfinder Company, another Geronimo unit, to press forward and take back territory from the 101st.

But Corely’s work was not even close to over. After a whispered meeting with Andrade and Spirko, he and his team traveled off into the approaching dawn to continue their mission for another 12 hours.

For Spirko and Andrade, though, it was time to drive back to the base to rest and reset. Drenched in sweat from the night’s events, the air-conditioning felt almost painfully cold. “Ghost” unit had once again slipped through the enemy’s hands.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

7. Ukraine Says It Has Tested A New Domestically-Designed Ballistic Missile

Ukraine: transforming in contact.

Ukraine Says It Has Tested A New Domestically-Designed Ballistic Missile

Ukraine getting a new ballistic missile free from use restrictions could be a major advance in the country's long-range strike capabilities.

Joseph Trevithick

Posted on Aug 27, 2024 1:55 PM EDT

9 minute read

twz.com · by Joseph Trevithick

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says that his country has conducted the first successful test of a new domestically-developed ballistic missile. Ukraine is known to have at least one short-range ballistic missile (SRBM), the Hrim-2, in some stage of development, as The War Zone previously explored in detail. Such a weapon would give Ukraine’s armed forces a highly valuable new stand-off strike option unlike any other in its inventory. It would also not be subject to any foreign restrictions on its use, as it continues to be the case with many longer-ranged weapons supplied by the United States and other Western partners.

“There has been a positive test of the first Ukrainian ballistic missile,” Zelensky said at a press conference earlier today around the Ukraine 2024 Independence forum in the country’s capital Kyiv, according to AFP. “I congratulate our defense industry on this. I can’t share any more details about this missile.”

Ukraine conducted the first sucessful test of a domestic-produced ballistic missile, Ukrainian President Zelensky announced on Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/Z4t675mQ27

— Status-6 (Military & Conflict News) (@Archer83Able) August 27, 2024

Zelensky did not name the missile, but discussions have already turned to the possibility of him referring to Hrim-2 (also written Grim-2 and which translates as Thunder-2 in English). The origins of the Hrim-2 and its immediate predecessors date back to the late 2000s and development is understood to have begun in greater earnest after Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. A rocket motor test associated with the design occurred in 2018 and the two-round, 10-wheeled transporter-erector-launcher for the missile, or at least a mockup thereof, wearing Ukrainian Armed Forces markings appeared at a parade that same year.

A transporter-erector-launcher for the Hrim-2 in Ukrainian Armed Forces colors at a parade in 2018. VoidWanderer via WikimediaAn image from a 2018 test of a rocket motor tied to the development of the Hrim-2 missile. Government of Ukraine via via Mil.in.ua

The Hrim-2 and preceding related designs, as they have been shown to date, have outward appearances that are very similar to Russia’s Iskander-M. Hrim-2 could have a range of at least 174 miles (280 kilometers) and possibly up to 310 miles (500 kilometers), according to past reports.

A model of a Ukrainian ballistic missile design called “Grom,” which is related to the Hrim-2 and that has an outward look very similar to that of Russia’s Iskander-M. VoidWanderer via WikimediaA picture of a test article associated with the development of the Hrim-2 or its predecessors. Pivdenne Design BureauA Russian Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile. Russian Ministry of Defense

You can read more about what is known about the Hrim-2 and its development in this past War Zone piece, which followed speculation that Ukraine might have employed some of those missiles in an attack on Russia’s Saki Air Base in 2022. It remains unclear what weapons Ukraine used in that instance.

Last year, Russian authorities in Crimea also claimed Hrim-2s had been shot down before reaching targets on the peninsula, but images that subsequently emerged of purported wreckage of those missiles did not offer hard evidence to substantiate those claims. Furthermore, Russia’s Ministry of Defense appeared to contradict those assertions by claiming it had shot down U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) SRBMs in the same general area around the same time.

#BREAKING Sergey Aksyonov, the Russian-installed head of Crimea claims Ukrainian Grom-2/Hrim-2 short-range ballistic missile was shot down over Crimea. pic.twitter.com/2p9k0iolQg

— Clash Report (@clashreport) May 6, 2023

Good catch here: the Ukrainian Telegram channel (the only source for the strike claim) reported that this attack was carried out NOT with ATACMS, but with Ukrainian made Hrim-2 missiles (adds scepticism cause it doesn't match with the RU MoD ATACMS claim). https://t.co/VfhSCUQxH5

— Mark Krutov (@kromark) May 6, 2024

The weapon that Zelensky mentioned today could be unrelated to Hrim-2 and there is the added potential that it might not even necessarily be what many would commonly consider to be a ballistic missile. The line between guided large-caliber artillery rockets and short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) is increasingly blurry. SRBMs are generally defined as having maximum ranges of no more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers). However, the U.S. military has begun using the term close-range ballistic missiles (CRBM) to refer to a subset of SRBMs with ranges under 186 miles (300 kilometers). U.S. military sources have referred to guided artillery rockets with diameters as small as 122mm (China’s WS-22 and BRE7) as CRBMs. Ukraine’s existing 300mm Vilkha-M would also easily fit this definition.

A US Air Force graphic showing examples of what the US military categories as close-range ballistic missiles (CBRM), including Chinese 122mm WS-22 and BRE7 guided artillery rockets. USAF

Last year, then-Minister of Defense of Ukraine Oleksii Reznikov also said that the country had a new long-range missile in development that could have a range of up to 620 miles (1,000 kilometers), but did not elaborate. Ukraine has already fielded a land-attack derivative of the Neptune ground-launched anti-ship cruise missile with a claimed range of up to 225 miles (360 kilometers) and has also been employing a growing array of longer-range kamikaze drones. Just this past weekend, Zelensky said that Ukrainian forces had begun using a new longer-ranged weapon called Palyanytsya (also written Palianytsia). Details about Palyanytsya are limited, but it has been described as a jet-powered missile/drone hybrid design.

President Zelensky showed the Palianytsia drone missile, which was first revealed yesterday.

All of its specifications are classified. What is known from the information in the video:

“Palianytsia” has a turbojet engine;

is launched from a ground platform;

the… pic.twitter.com/GyIEVFw52Q

— Slava (@Heroiam_Slava) August 25, 2024

Ground-launched stand-off munitions are also particularly important for Ukraine given that the current threat air defense environment presents serious hurdles for conducting air strikes via fixed-wing aircraft against targets deeper behind the front lines in many cases.

Ukraine has been receiving small numbers of ATACMS from the United States, which it has used to good effect. The U.S. government and Ukraine’s other foreign partners have delivered additional types of ground and air-launched stand-off munitions. Despite some recent relaxation on this front, there continue to be significant limitations imposed on the use of those weapons on targets inside Russia amid ostensible concerns about provoking further escalation and fears about the possibility of the conflict spilling over beyond Ukraine. The debate has become differently pronounced since Ukrainian forces launched their incursion into Russia’s Kursk region earlier this month. Intense discussions between Ukrainian and American authorities, in particular, are reportedly ongoing over these restrictions.

“For victory, we need long-range capabilities and the lifting of restrictions on strikes on the enemy’s military facilities,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said yesterday. “Ukraine is preparing its own response [with] weapons of its own production.”

Since Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Ukrainian armed forces have been employing Soviet-era Tochka-U SRBMs, as well as even older Tochka types. Though Tochka and Tochka-U are not subject to any foreign stipulations about their use, they also only have maximum ranges of 43 miles (70 kilometers) and 75 miles (120 kilometers), respectively. Hrim-2’s development notably stemmed from a desire to supplant the aging Tochka series.

Having a new source of ballistic missiles that are more capable and longer-ranged than the Tochka family, and that are not subject to any Western restrictions, would be a major development for Ukraine. Ballistic missiles, in general, reach very high speeds in the terminal phase of flight, which presents distinct challenges for enemy air and missile defenses compared to other kinds of missiles, including subsonic air-breathing cruise missiles, as well as kamikaze drones. Ballistic missiles with unitary high-explosive warheads can also burrow down deeper into hardened targets or impart greater force on reinforced structures above ground like bridges thanks to that speed.

Ukrainian forces could also layer in ballistic missiles together with other types of missiles and drones in larger attacks to create even more complex scenarios for enemy forces. The Russian military routinely does this in large-scale attacks on targets.

The Ukrainian Air Force says Russia launched 236 missiles and UAVs today, including:

-3 Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile

-6 Iskander-M / KN-23 ballistic missiles

-77 Kh-101 cruise missiles

-28 Kalibr cruise missiles

-3 Kh-22 cruise missiles

-10 Kh-59 / Kh-69… pic.twitter.com/ShfohSfsUV

— Rob Lee (@RALee85) August 26, 2024

In the future, Ukraine’s military might also be able to make use of drones operating via airborne relays or other networks to help find targets deeper behind enemy lines or inside Russia and execute them. However, Ukraine has not demonstrated its ability to conduct this kind of targeting, though it is a tactic Russian forces have been observed employing. There are reports that Russia has been using intercepted signal emissions to help with more rapid, responsive targeting of ballistic missiles against high-value targets, as well.

Russia has also notably acquired additional SRBMs from North Korea and there continue to be reports that it is working to get more ballistic missiles from Iran to bolster its own arsenal in this regard.

Ukraine’s employment of American ATACMS within the rules set by the U.S. government further underscores the potential impact of a new source of ballistic missiles that can be used without foreign restrictions. Ukrainian ATACMS strikes have already been observed forcing major changes to Russian operating procedures, especially at air bases within range of those missiles. It has also prompted Russia to rush additional air and missile defenses to the theater, including an S-500, the most advanced surface-to-air missile system in the country’s inventory today.

Ukrainian “ATACMS strikes, along with UAF [Ukrainian Armed Forces] use of U.S.-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) have required Russian forces to reinforce their air defense systems. Following the Crimea attacks [earlier in the year], Russian forces deployed their most advanced air defense system, the S-500, to protect the Kerch Strait Bridge, the DIA [U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency] stated,” according to a U.S. Special Inspector General report released earlier this month. “The S-500 system has not yet been demonstrated to be fully operational in Ukraine, which DIA views as an indication of Russia’s struggle to provide adequate air defense of Crimea. Russian forces have also redeployed several of their S-400 assets from Crimea to Belgorod to protect Russian assets from UAF HIMARS, which can now strike Russian air defenses in Belgorod.”

#BREAKING Here's the moment of Russian S-400 battery getting knocked off by Ukrainian ATACMS strikes in Mospyne, Donetsk region.

S-400s tried to shot down ATACMS missiles, but failed. https://t.co/MWY6OxBN2X pic.twitter.com/I7AoJGCMD3

— Clash Report (@clashreport) May 24, 2024

It does remain to be seen what new ballistic missile Ukraine may have tested and how close it is to actually being fielded operationally. However, it is not hard to see the value of such a weapon for the Ukrainian military as an additional option for launching stand-off strikes without any foreign restrictions, especially against targets inside Russia.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

Joseph Trevithick

Deputy Editor

Joseph has been a member of The War Zone team since early 2017. Prior to that, he was an Associate Editor at War Is Boring, and his byline has appeared in other publications, including Small Arms Review, Small Arms Defense Journal, Reuters, We Are the Mighty, and Task & Purpose.

twz.com · by Joseph Trevithick

8. U.S. Special Operations Forces Work To Mitigate Civilian Harm

This is an important effort that seems to be getting a lot of attention recently. No one can nor should argue against trying to mitigate civilian harm. But this mitigation, while laudable, important, and the right thing to do, cannot come at the expense of mission accomplishment and protecting the force with reasonable civilian harm mitigation. If prevention of civilian casualties becomes the priority consideration then we are saying the accomplishment of the mission is not important and therefore we should not execute it. I make these comments with some risk that they will be interpreted as opposing civilian harm mitigation efforts. I do not oppose them. I just want to offer a cautionary view that if we are not careful these measures could become harmful to the mission and to our forces.

U.S. Special Operations Forces Work To Mitigate Civilian Harm

The assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict updates reporters on civilian harm mitigation in Israel and Gaza, and U.S. relations with Niger.

afcea.org

In a recent discussion with reporters, Christopher P. Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said emerging technologies are important for mitigating civilian harm.

“As the world has gotten much more complicated, and we often think about how certain domains we’re now operating in routinely never existed a couple decades ago—cyberspace, electronic warfare. These are important elements that we need to factor in as we think of the civilian environment,” Maier said.

On Aug. 23, the Defense Writers Group, an association of defense and national security correspondents, hosted Maier, who oversees things like the United States’ special operations, irregular warfare and counterterrorism efforts.

Maier briefed the reporters on the two-year anniversary of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, which lays out a series of actions the Department of Defense plans to implement to mitigate and respond to civilian harm.

“The Department of Defense has long taken civilian harm mitigation as a key tenet of how we conduct warfighting. It’s built into how we do our professional military education. It’s built into our exercises. But as we looked at the strategic environment, particularly the prospect of something like a large-scale combat operation in the context of the Indo-Pacific, in conjunction with our national defense strategy, we realized we needed to look at this problem set more holistically and probably more diligently," Maier said.

As the department’s special operations forces (SOF) continue their work on civilian harm mitigation in regions across the world, the focus will be on adding more civilian harm mitigation response officers and using new technologies.

The department has also built a center of excellence “that actually stands up regularly and brings in experts from the combatant commands and sends experts down range,” he said.

In response to a question about what lessons in warfare the United States is taking from Israel and Gaza, Maier said the security of Israel is paramount, “but at the same time, how the Israelis are conducting the operation in Gaza, I think we've been very open, has concerned us at times.”

“I think we continue to emphasize very much the principles of civilian harm as we talk at an operational level with the Israelis," Maier said. "It's very much a focus of those conversations, and I think it's why we're so focused on getting a succession to these military operations.”

Image

The Department of Defense has long taken civilian harm mitigation as a key tenet of how we conduct warfighting.

Christopher P. Maier

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict

Maier also touched on the situation in Niger. In 2023, a military junta overthrew the elected government of Niger and installed the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP) to rule the country. The CNSP called for the U.S. military to leave the country.

“Being asked to leave from Niger, which was a key hub of our counterterrorism and really crisis response footprint in West Africa, is not helpful,” Maier said. “It's quite disappointing after years of working with the Nigerien military, but we understand they've made a political decision. I think our plan going forward is to look where other partners in the region appreciate the threat that we still see from both ISIS and Al-Qaeda affiliates.”

Maier said he's hopeful about maintaining the deep "mil-mil" relationship with Niger.

He shared that U.S. service members in Niger will most likely be reallocated to North and coastal West Africa.

afcea.org

9. How did Taiwan’s President Lai perform in his first 100 days in office?

Excerpts:

His inauguration speech in May, in which he said the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are "not subordinate to each other", further angered Beijing, which viewed the message as an insinuation that the two sides are separate states.

He also rejected Beijing's sovereignty claims and said that only Taiwan's people can decide their future.

China has since stepped up military incursions around Taiwan in "punishment" drills with warplanes and staged mock attacks, further escalating tensions across the strait.

However, various surveys have shown that more than half of the Taiwanese public support Lai’s remarks.

Analysts said that is largely due to a majority of Taiwanese – particularly the youth – not being ready to accept a reunification with China currently.

“Lai would often repeat the statement that Taiwan and China are not subordinate to each other. I think it wins him the support of people younger than 40 to 45 years old,” said Wang.

He added that Lai is considered more of a firebrand with a clearer stance than his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, who kept a relatively vague position on cross-strait relations.

How did Taiwan’s President Lai perform in his first 100 days in office?

Analysts said a controversial reform Bill that was passed in May, seen as a move by the opposition to curtail the president’s powers, ignited a burst of public support for Lai.

Victoria Jen

@VictoriaJenCNA

27 Aug 2024 08:13PM

(Updated: 27 Aug 2024 08:17PM)

channelnewsasia.com

TAIPEI: Taiwan President William Lai Ching-te’s first three months in power were marred by challenges from the opposition camp and concerns over escalating cross-strait tensions.

Yet, he marked his 100th day in office on Tuesday (Aug 27) being more popular with the Taiwanese public, thanks in part to the opposition.

A recent poll by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation showed Lai’s approval rating at nearly 47 per cent, notably higher than the 40 per cent vote the doctor-turned-politician managed to garner to win the presidency in January this year.

A controversial reform Bill that was passed in parliament in May, seen as a move by the opposition-majority Legislative Yuan to curtail the president’s powers, ignited a burst of support for Lai, analysts said.

UNPOPULAR REFORM BILL

The legislation grants the parliament power to summon the president to give regular reports and answer lawmakers’ questions. The measure also extends to companies and the general public.

Tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest the law’s legitimacy.

The Bills were driven by the two main opposition parties – the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and the smaller populist Taiwan People’s party (TPP).

“The overly aggressive move by the two opposition parties to pass the Bill has annoyed members of the public,” said Wang Chih-Sheng, secretary general of Taipei-based think tank Cross-Strait Policy Association.

“The people want to see checks and balances on the ruling party. But when it was done in a very crude way, it actually made them want to support or sympathise with Lai.”

CHINESE MILITARY THREATS

Across the strait, Lai has had to deal with the persistent military threat from China.

The 64-year-old has long been branded a “troublemaker” and a dangerous “separatist” by China.

His inauguration speech in May, in which he said the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are "not subordinate to each other", further angered Beijing, which viewed the message as an insinuation that the two sides are separate states.

He also rejected Beijing's sovereignty claims and said that only Taiwan's people can decide their future.

China has since stepped up military incursions around Taiwan in "punishment" drills with warplanes and staged mock attacks, further escalating tensions across the strait.

However, various surveys have shown that more than half of the Taiwanese public support Lai’s remarks.

Analysts said that is largely due to a majority of Taiwanese – particularly the youth – not being ready to accept a reunification with China currently.

“Lai would often repeat the statement that Taiwan and China are not subordinate to each other. I think it wins him the support of people younger than 40 to 45 years old,” said Wang.

He added that Lai is considered more of a firebrand with a clearer stance than his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, who kept a relatively vague position on cross-strait relations.

CROSS-STRAIT TIES

Analysts said Lai’s remarks have already underscored his bottom line as far as cross-strait relations are concerned.

Despite moving up the opinion polls, he is unlikely to take an even tougher stance as any further actions to stand up to Beijing depends on the development of relations between China and the United States.

“It doesn't seem like the US would want to create more trouble. The US has been stepping on the brakes for Lai,” noted political science Professor Chu Chao-Hsiang from the National Taiwan Normal University.

“Even if his approval rating goes up by another 10 percentage points, I don't think he would be able to take a tougher or more aggressive position towards China.”

Cross-strait tensions are unlikely to ease any time soon, observers said. Lai has repeatedly offered talks with China under equal footing, but has been rebuffed.

Analysts said that as long as Lai refuses to accept the “One China” principle, Beijing is unlikely to engage in talks or resume official exchanges with Taiwan.

With Beijing’s military drills in the water and airspace around Taiwan becoming more regular, Taiwan is set to increase its military spending to a record US$20 billion next year to beef up its defence capability.

The Lai administration targets to maintain Taiwan's gross domestic product (GDP) growth at 3 per cent, keep the jobless rate under 3.5 per cent and cap inflation at 2 per cent.

It also plans to attract US$3.29 trillion in investments in strategic industries, which would be selected and targeted by a cross-ministry task force.

channelnewsasia.com

10. Chinese hackers break into American government and military accounts

Unrestricted Warfare. A nice welcome for the NSA to China. I am sure Wang Yi did not know anything about this. He will certainly admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter accusations. (note sarcasm)

Chinese hackers break into American government and military accounts

By Brittany Chain For Dailymail.Com and Associated Press

Published: 13:42 EDT, 27 August 2024 | Updated: 14:22 EDT, 27 August 2024

Daily Mail · by Brittany Chain For Dailymail.Com · August 27, 2024

Chinese hackers believed to be backed by the government have gained access to American government and military accounts, according to a new report.

These attacks are 'unusually aggressive and sophisticated' and have allowed hackers to gain access to at least two major internet service providers with a combined reach of millions of customers, The Washington Post reports.

The revelation comes as the United States and China take steps toward repairing their damaged relationship, with Jake Sullivan, U.S. national security adviser, travelling to the northern outskirts of Beijing for a two day meeting with Wang Yi, a senior foreign policy official for Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

'President Biden has been very clear in his conversations with President Xi that he is committed to managing this important relationship responsibly,' Sullivan told Wang before the talks got underway.

Meanwhile back home, it is understood Chinese-backed hackers have been spying on Americans via their internet service providers.

These attacks are 'unusually aggressive and sophisticated' and have allowed hackers to gain access to at least two major internet service providers with a combined reach of millions of customers

Other targets, according to the publication, are believed to include government and military personnel working undercover.

Brandon Wales, the former executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, told the publication the attacks are 'dramatically stepped up from where it used to be. It is an order of magnitude worse.'

The Chinese embassy in Washington emphatically rejected the report.

Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu instead suggested departments are amplifying suggestions of perceived risk in order to secure greater funding.

He said: 'There are signs that in order to receive more congressional budgets and government contracts, the U.S. intelligence community and cybersecurity companies have been secretly collaborating to piece together false evidence and spread disinformation about so-called Chinese government's support for cyberattacks against the U.S.'

The goal of Sullivan's visit, which lasts through Thursday, is limited - to try to maintain communication in a relationship that broke down for the better part of a year in 2022-23.

No major announcements are expected, though Sullivan's meetings could lay the groundwork for a possible final summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping before Biden steps down in January.

Wang, the director of the Communist Party´s Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office, noted that the China-U.S. relationship has gone through twists and turns in the past few years.

'The key,' he said, 'is to keep to the overall direction of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence, and win-win cooperation.'

The Biden administration has taken a tough line on China, viewing it as a strategic competitor, restricting the access of its companies to advanced technology and confronting the rising power as it seeks to exert influence over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Already frosty relations went into a deep freeze after then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a senior U.S. lawmaker, visited Taiwan in August 2022. Hopes of restoring ties were dashed the following February when a suspected Chinese spy balloon drifted across the U.S. before being shot down by the U.S. military.

The goal of Sullivan's visit, which lasts through Thursday, is limited - to try to maintain communication in a relationship that broke down for the better part of a year in 2022-23

Daily Mail · by Brittany Chain For Dailymail.Com · August 27, 2024

11. Chief Details Shifting Special Ops Emphasis; Progress on Preventing Civilian Casualties

The "Chief" should be the "Secretary" of Special Operations equivalent to the Chiefs of the Services (and the Commandant).

It’s time for a third special operations revolution

https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2020/08/01/its-time-for-a-third-special-operations-revolution/

Chief Details Shifting Special Ops Emphasis; Progress on Preventing Civilian Casualties

defense.gov · by Jim Garamone

U.S. special operators are shifting their focus to support the National Defense Strategy to "fill the gaps" of conventional forces as the world faces new challenges and threats, said Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflict.

Maier Remarks

Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, speaks to reporters at the Defense Writers’ Group in Washington, D.C., Aug. 23, 2024.

Download: Full Size (481.28 KB)

Credit: DOD photo

VIRIN: 240823-D-VW072-001A

But the old threats have not gone away, and special operators still need the expertise they displayed in the counterinsurgency fight, Maier told the Defense Writers' Group last week.

"If you compare where I think we're going versus where we have been in the past in the counterterrorism fights, [special operations forces] were generally in the lead and a lot of the rest of the conventional military was supporting SOF," he said. "That's very much reversed now."

China is the pacing challenge to the U.S. military and the Indo-Pacific is the prime theater. "As we think of the Indo-Pacific, we are focused on finding areas where the comparative advantage that the SOF enterprise brings can help enhance what the conventional forces are doing," he said.

He called it the "Swiss Army Knife approach" to defense. Special operations forces are interspersed around the Indo-Pacific working with allies and partners across the vast region, he said. These teams help train allies and partners and also have the cultural knowledge to sense the environment. If the country or region were to have a crisis or conflict, special operators would be invaluable to senior leaders on the operational challenges they could face, Maier said.

In many cases, special operators will be able to capitalize on the fact that they have generational military relationships in those nations. "Many of our senior and even mid-level [leaders] have worked for years with allies and partners in a very integrated way," he said.

Special operators are "just going to have a better understanding of that kind of human environment," Maier said. "That is already highlighted in some of the places where we are investing in capabilities, be those decision advantage or the ability to push more remote advise-and-assist capabilities farther forward."

Special Operations

U.S., Peruvian and Indian special operators work together during an exercise in Hawaii, July 2024.

Download: Full Size (204.8 KB)

Credit: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Jacquelin Frost

VIRIN: 240719-N-AN659-1015A

But even this will change, he said. "We're fundamentally going to be still working with allies and partners, but we may not be as proximate. It may not be that classic hand on the shoulder that we've had in places like Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia."

"What [special operations forces] does is not principally focused on, in all cases, conducting combat operations," he said. "We're trying to shape the environment. Our biggest value is … kind of 'left of boom.' If we're going to go to large scale combat operations, 'may the odds be in your favor, right?' And those odds are going to be set in days, weeks, months, years ahead of time."

Special operations forces' persistent engagement is key to setting those odds. Special operators work with allies and partners to improve their military capabilities and familiarize them with U.S. tactical and operational thinking, Maier said. "Improving their warfighting capabilities is incredibly important because I don't think anybody who is thinking about this seriously, thinks the United States is going to go to war just by ourselves: We're going to go with our allies and partners. We need to make sure that we've conveyed as much of our expertise to them, and they've done the same back to us."

Maier also discussed the progress made on DOD's comprehensive action plan to reduce instances of civilian casualties. DOD has long taken civilian harm mitigation as a key tenant of how the United States conducts war. Reducing civilian casualties is morally right, the assistant secretary said. The imperative to do this is built into U.S. professional military education as part of all military exercises and it is important to the strategic environment.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III ordered these changes in the policies and Maier has responsibility for "operationalizing" them. "In conjunction with our national defense strategy, we realized we needed to look at this problem set more holistically and probably more diligently," he said.

This is necessary because the tactics in any conflict will probably change. In counterterrorism operations, special operators were able "to look at individual targets for long periods of time and make decisions at a different tempo than today," Maier said. Large-scale combat operations will not allow that luxury of time. There may be thousands of kinetic actions in an hour, where in the past, conducting six operations a day seemed like a lot.

Going Down

A special operator ropes out of a Black Hawk helicopter onto the roof of a building during a base attack training exercise during Southern Strike 2024, at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, Miss., April 22, 2024.

Download: Full Size (1.78 MB)

VIRIN: 240422-Z-GQ603-7858

At the same time, U.S. experts are also looking at the lessons to be learned from Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine. "We were watching, before our very eyes, what happens when you have what we often call the Russian way of war, which is to be as brutal as one thinks it is," Maier said.

The Russians, in effect, target civilian populations and civilian infrastructure, he said.

DOD looked holistically across the department on what needed to be done. "First off, [civilian harm mitigation] is often an additional duty for combatant commanders' staffs," he said. "We are building up to give commanders more capability to think about in a strategic context, the environment they're operating in, and looking not only at whether they should or shouldn't conduct a particular strike or particular operational action but looking at in the strategic environment."

"What we've done across the department is provide not only additional instructions and additional tradecraft, to looking at the civilian environment and then mitigating the harm associated with any military actions but also put people after this," Maier said. "We've put almost 170 people that have been resourced across the combatant commands, across the intelligence enterprise and across elements of the joint staff and the office of secretary of defense."

These are people who are "experts in this space" but can also relate to the commanders and the missions they are told to execute. These civilian harm mitigation response officers — called CHMROs — are experts in security cooperation and will also help commanders to work with partners.

The CHMROs understand the longer-term implications of a proposed action. "It may look like a target is valid and very important at the time, but if you don't have somebody helping to think through the longer-term strategic implications, you may do things that have short-term benefits but result in longer-term challenges," Maier said. "We also have folks that are working in targeting cells, and this has been a key piece of what the secretary of defense has asked us to do, which is not put restrictions. This isn't about constraining our military. It's about building in more expertise to understand the operating environment."

Spotlight: Focus on Indo-Pacific

defense.gov · by Jim Garamone

12. How lessons learned from the 2016 campaign led US officials to be more open about Iran hack

It is good that we are a learning organization.

We need to recognize the strategies of our adversaries, understand, EXPOSE them, and attack those strategies.

Excerpts:

But it also likely reflects lessons learned from past years when officials tasked with protecting elections from foreign adversaries were criticized by some for holding onto sensitive information — and lambasted by others for wading into politics.

Suzanne Spaulding, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security, said agencies realize that releasing information can help thwart the efforts of U.S. adversaries.

“This is certainly an example of that — getting out there quickly to say, ‘Look, this is what Iran’s trying to do. It’s an important way of building public resilience against this propaganda effort by Iran,’” said Spaulding, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Aug. 19 statement by security officials followed a Trump campaign announcement that it had been breached, reports from cybersecurity firms linking the intrusion to Iran and news articles disclosing that media organizations had been approached with apparently hacked materials.

How lessons learned from the 2016 campaign led US officials to be more open about Iran hack

By DAVID KLEPPER and ERIC TUCKER

Updated 4:12 AM GMT+9, August 28, 2024

AP · by ERIC TUCKER · August 27, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — The 2016 presidential campaign was entering its final months and seemingly all of Washington was abuzz with talk about how Russian hackers had penetrated the email accounts of Democrats, triggering the release of internal communications that seemed designed to boost Donald Trump’s campaign and hurt Hillary Clinton’s.

Yet there was a notable exception: The officials investigating the hacks were silent.

When they finally issued a statement, one month before the election, it was just three paragraphs and did little more than confirm what had been publicly suspected — that there had been a brazen Russian effort to interfere in the vote.

This year, there was another foreign hack, but the response was decidedly different. U.S. security officials acted more swiftly to name the culprit, detailing their findings and blaming a foreign adversary — this time, Iran — just over a week after Trump’s campaign revealed the attack.

They accused Iranian hackers of targeting the presidential campaigns of both major parties as part of a broader attempt to sow discord in the American political process.

The forthright response is part of a new effort to be more transparent about threats. It was a task made easier because the circumstances weren’t as politically volatile as in 2016, when a Democratic administration was investigating Russia’s attempts to help the Republican candidate.

But it also likely reflects lessons learned from past years when officials tasked with protecting elections from foreign adversaries were criticized by some for holding onto sensitive information — and lambasted by others for wading into politics.

Suzanne Spaulding, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security, said agencies realize that releasing information can help thwart the efforts of U.S. adversaries.

“This is certainly an example of that — getting out there quickly to say, ‘Look, this is what Iran’s trying to do. It’s an important way of building public resilience against this propaganda effort by Iran,’” said Spaulding, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Aug. 19 statement by security officials followed a Trump campaign announcement that it had been breached, reports from cybersecurity firms linking the intrusion to Iran and news articles disclosing that media organizations had been approached with apparently hacked materials.

But the officials suggested their response was independent of those developments.

The FBI, which made the Iran announcement along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement to The Associated Press that “transparency is one of the most powerful tools we have to counteract foreign malign influence operations intended to undermine our elections and democratic institutions.”

The FBI said the government had refined its policies to ensure that information is shared as it becomes available, “so the American people can better understand this threat, recognize the tactics, and protect their vote.

A Wholesale Reorganization

A spokesperson for the ODNI also told AP that the government’s assessment arose from a new process for notifying the public about election threats.

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Created following the 2020 elections, the framework sets out a process for investigating and responding to cyber threats against campaigns, election offices or the public. When a threat is deemed sufficiently serious, it is “nominated” for additional action, including a private warning to the attack’s target or a public announcement.

“The Intelligence Community has been focused on collecting and analyzing intelligence regarding foreign malign influence activities, to include those of Iran, targeting U.S. elections,” the agency said. “For this notification, the IC had relevant intelligence that prompted a nomination.”

The bureaucratic terminology obscures what for the intelligence community has been a wholesale reorganization of how the government tracks threats against elections since 2016, when Russian hacking underscored the foreign interference threat.

“In 2016 we were completely caught off guard,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “There were some indications, but nobody really understood the scale.”

That summer, U.S. officials watched with alarm as Democratic emails stolen by Russian military hackers spilled out in piecemeal fashion on WikiLeaks. By the end of July, the FBI had opened an investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to tip the election. The probe ended without any finding that the two sides had criminally colluded with each other.

Inside the White House, officials debated how to inform the public of its assessment that Russia was behind the hack-and-leak. There was discussion about whether such a statement might have the unintended consequence of making voters distrustful of election results, thereby helping Russia achieve its goal of undermining faith in democracy.

Then-FBI Director James Comey wrote in his book, “A Higher Loyalty,” that he at one point proposed writing a newspaper opinion piece documenting Russia’s activities. He described the Obama administration deliberations as “extensive, thoughtful, and very slow,” culminating in the pre-election statement followed by a longer intelligence community assessment in January 2017.

“I know we did agonize over whether to say something and when to say it and that sort of thing because it appeared in the case of the Russians that they were favoring one candidate over the other,” James Clapper, the then-director of national intelligence, said in an interview.

A Bumpy Road

In 2018, Congress created CISA, the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber arm, to defend against digital attacks. Four years later the Foreign and Malign Influence Center was established within the ODNI to track foreign government efforts to sway U.S. elections.

Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington-based organization that analyzes foreign disinformation, said he’s pleased that in its first election, the center doesn’t seem to have been “hobbled by some of the partisanship that we’ve seen cripple other parts of the government that tried to do this work.”

Still, there have been obstacles and controversies. Shortly after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Trump fired the head of CISA, Christopher Krebs, for refuting his unsubstantiated claim of electoral fraud.

Also during the 2020 elections, The New York Post reported that it had obtained a hard drive from a laptop dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop. Public confusion followed, as did claims by former intelligence officials that the emergence of the laptop bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. Trump’s national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, soon after rebutted that assessment with a statement saying there were no signs of Russian involvement.

In 2022, the work of a new office called the Disinformation Governance Board was quickly suspended after Republicans raised questions about its relationship with social media companies and concerns that it could be used to monitor or censor Americans’ online discourse.

Legal challenges over government restrictions on free speech have also complicated the government’s ability to exchange information with social media companies, though Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a recent address that the government has resumed sharing details with the private sector.

Earlier this year, Warner said he worried the U.S. was more vulnerable than in 2020, in part because of diminished communication between government and tech companies. He said he’s satisfied by the government’s recent work, citing a greater number of public briefings and warnings, but is concerned that the greatest test is likely still ahead.

“The bad guys are not going to do most of this until October,” Warner said. “So we have to be vigilant.”

AP · by ERIC TUCKER · August 27, 2024

13. US special ops official lays out 'strategic' reason for Israel to better protect civilians

The "Secretary of Special Operations" is getting a lot of press on the civilian harm mitigation issues. It is interesting how the various media outlets report on this issue.

US special ops official lays out 'strategic' reason for Israel to better protect civilians - Breaking Defense

Chris Maier, assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, said how the Israeli military operates "has concerned us at times."

By Lee Ferran

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · August 27, 2024

An Israeli army soldier stands with an assault rifle hanging across his chest at a position in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel near the border with Lebanon on October 28, 2023. (Photo by JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — As Israel faces calls from activists, international bodies and the American president to better protect civilians in the Gaza conflict for humanitarian reasons, a key Pentagon official recently explained why it would benefit Jerusalem at a strategic level.

Chris Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SOL/IC), was quick to remind reporters at an Aug. 23 event that Israel lost more than 1,200 people in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. But, he said, “At the same time, how the Israelis are conducting the operation in Gaza — I think we’ve been very open — has concerned us at times.”

Maier said there have been “dozens” of conversations between US and Israeli military officials, from the “operational level” up to the level of the Secretary of Defense, about how Israeli forces are fighting, and “this civilian harm is always a feature of this, because we think it has big strategic implications.”

Maier did not dismiss the obligation to human rights, but suggested that from a geopolitical standpoint, photos of dead civilians and starving children in Gaza would make it more difficult for the US to support Israel and for Israel to build and protect other relationships, including with groups and governments already sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, if not Hamas’s tactics.

“How you conduct the military operations in Gaza really resonates with how the rest of the international community views US support for Israel, but also their own support to Israel,” he said at a Defense Writers Group event. “And on the flip side, what’s acceptable in support to Hamas. And so I think we continue to emphasize very much the principles of civilian harm.”

The death toll in Gaza is reportedly estimated at more than 40,000, including several thousand children. That has led to countries cutting off relations or military aid to Israel, as well as prompted major protests against Israel in the US, its closest ally. Israel has insisted it is doing all it can to protect civilians, who it says the US-designated terrorist group Hamas uses as human shields.

Maier said he recognized that Israel was fighting in perhaps the most complicated operational environment in modern military history — with many of its adversaries underground and amid a dense civilian population. (Earlier this month Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Hamas had embedded “itself within mosques, schools, hospitals, building a tunnel network underneath Gaza … that’s the size of New York City and goes multiple levels below the surface.”)

“I think that it’s particularly hard to ask the Israelis to use all the discretion in the world that would be, you know, ideal, understanding that they still have a military objective to remove Hamas from a number of places that they continue to operate,” Maier said. “So it’s hard to imagine a more complex environment for the application of some of the civilian harm principles.”

But it would be “foolish” to assume such an operational environment will never occur again, meaning there have to be lessons learned from the operation in terms of mitigating civilian harm. “We’re going to have to hold ourselves to applying the challenges of this environment to how we then build our warfighting capabilities informed by civilian harm principles,” he said.

America’s Own Efforts On Civilian Casualties

Maier’s recommendation to Israeli forces comes two years into the Pentagon’s own soul-searching on the subject. In August 2022, the Defense Department announced a new “Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan,” itself a response to American procedures that led to the deaths of innumerable civilians in years of fighting in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, including a high-profile August 2021 strike in Afghanistan that killed 10 noncombatants.

In an early echo of Maier’s comments, a 2022 letter from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin enclosed with the new policy [PDF] said, “The protection of civilians is a strategic priority as well as a moral imperative.”

“Our efforts to mitigate and respond to civilian harm directly reflect our values and also directly contribute to achieving mission success,” Austin wrote.

The action plan listed several directives for the American military beyond legal structures already in place, including “incorporat[ing] guidance for addressing civilian harm across the full spectrum of armed conflict into doctrine and operation plans so that we are prepared to mitigate and respond to civilian harm in any future fight.”

In his DWG talk, Maier provided an update on US efforts on civilian harm mitigation, saying it’s been going “fairly well.”

He noted that harm mitigation specialists have been peppered throughout the operational structure, including at combatant commands and the “intelligence enterprise.” They, too, are not only there for humanitarian purposes, but also to assess the broader, strategic implications of particular tactical actions: looking at “hey, if I do something over here, does that mean I’m going to complicate my strategic maneuver space in another place?”

“This isn’t about constraining our military in any way,” Maier said. “It’s about building in more expertise to understand the operating environment.”

The DoD has also embarked on establishing a new “data enterprise,” he said, to better collect information related to civilian harm mitigation, and has begun incorporating civilian harm principles into large-scale exercises, including with allies.

Overall, it’s become clear that a reassessment was needed, Maier said, in part because the envisioned next conflict, perhaps in the Indo-Pacific theater, will not be like the ones in which America has fought before.

“Probably gone are the days … in which our previous counterterrorism experience allowed us to look at individual targets for long periods of time and make decisions at a different tempo than today,” he said.

The need to potentially launch thousands of strikes an hour in such a large-scale conflict, he said, will require the Pentagon to lean on AI and automation — capabilities that “we talk about all the time on the targeting side and the operational side, but are going to have to be built in and back into that with a focus on civilian harm [mitigation].”

For an educational counterpoint to everything the Pentagon is trying to do, Maier said, just look to Moscow.

“As we were building the action plan, the Russian attack on Ukraine meant that you were watching, before our very eyes, what happens when you have what we often call the ‘Russian way of war,’ which is ‘be as brutal as one thinks is strategically important and have very little focus on the civilian environment — in fact use the civilian environment for brutal ends.'”

Kyiv has used evidence of Russian attacks against civilians to galvanize not only local resistance, but an outpouring of international support — key to Ukraine’s resistance against the much larger Russian military.

Maier called Russia’s stance “suboptimal, from a strategic perspective.”

14. Don’t Ever Invade China: Xi Jinping Prioritizes Border, Coastal, and Air Defense

Yes that would be a classic blunder:

“You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia”

– The Princess Bride (1987 film)

What be the objective of an invasion of China?

But on a serious note, this is an important analysis.

Excerpts:

Conclusion

Prioritizing border, coastal, and air defense aligns with the party’s resolution to “strengthen traditional combat forces” in Xi’s speech to the recent party Third Plenum (see section XIV). In Chinese military parlance, “traditional combat forces” refer to conscript-heavy units that make up the border and coastal defense forces and other ground combat units. Xi’s emphasis on homeland defense will almost certainly help elevate the stature of such (mainly) army elements. To give them higher profile in society, border troops have a webpage dedicated to their stories for internal consumption on the Chinese-language China military website.

Inside China, local officials and bureaucrats may read something else into Xi’s speech: that central funding is available for dual-use infrastructure construction in border regions for projects that contribute to defense readiness. This may encourage local leaders to volunteer to participate in this development as part of nationwide “military-civilian integration/fusion” (军民融合) activities. A likely example of this thinking is demonstrated in the construction of over 50 new villages and expansion of 100 others in remote regions along China’s periphery since 2016.

Xi’s speech noted that it is “important to foster neighborly relations and pragmatic cooperation with neighboring countries to create a favorable surrounding environment.” Military relations with several adjacent southeast Asian countries seem relatively stable. However, given the friction caused by China’s actions over disputed ocean territories, any call to foster neighborly relations with its offshore neighbors appears mostly empty. But maybe Xi’s emphasis of “pragmatic cooperation” signals Beijing’s willingness to adopt a more flexible approach in the coming years.

Finally, Xi stressed the need to “optimize the leadership management system.” Xi may be considering placing border operations under the Central Military Commission’s Joint Staff Department. Such a move would take it away from the National Defense Mobilization Department Border Defense Bureau and might ripple down to the theater commands’ Joint Staff Departments. Perhaps the navy and air force may create border operations staff offices. Such changes could lead to greater integration of operations along China’s periphery. In the long run, more unified control of front-line units could also reduce miscommunications and accidental encounters with foreign military and civilian entities operating in proximity to Chinese borders.

Don’t Ever Invade China: Xi Jinping Prioritizes Border, Coastal, and Air Defense - War on the Rocks

Shanshan Mei and Dennis J. Blasko

warontherocks.com · by Shanshan Mei · August 27, 2024

Major or minor

You don’t want yourself

An incident

Don’t ever invade China

Mark Knopfler, Don’t Crash the Ambulance (2004)

Become a Member

Just as the U.S. National Defense Strategy lists homeland defense as the first priority of the Department of Defense, China’s national defense policy states that the top mission of China’s armed forces is to “safeguard national territorial sovereignty (领土主权) and maritime rights and interests (海洋权益).” Other “major security domains” have been added to China’s National Defense Law — specifically space, the electromagnetic spectrum, and cyberspace in 2020 — but protecting the borders of the homeland has always been the prime directive.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping underscored mainland defense on July 30 with a speech to the Chinese Communist Party’s politburo standing committee group study session on China’s border, coastal, and air defense (边海空防). This meeting addressed the duties of a significant portion of the active-duty People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Armed Police, and the reserves and militia, which operate on the frontlines with neighboring militaries and civilian entities. Xi praised their efforts as central to China’s national security and strategic interests since he took power in 2012. The study session became the banner front page article of the Aug. 1 edition of the Chinese-language Liberation Army Daily newspaper. Xi’s speech gained symbolic heft by coming on the date celebrated for the 97th anniversary of the founding of People’s Liberation Army.

What does Beijing’s carefully crafted, high-profile political signaling tell us? First, the timing of this session suggests the Chinese leadership seeks to deter the United States, its allies, and partners (including Taiwan) by highlighting its commitment to defending China’s sovereignty and territorial claims.

Though no foreign military might actually be contemplating action against the Chinese mainland in the near term, Mark Knopfler’s musical warning resonates with the paranoia of Chinese leaders. Fear of invasion goes back long before the founding of the People’s Republic of China to the foreign occupation extending through the war with Japan in the 1930s. In the 1950s, China was threatened with nuclear weapons during the Korean War and the Taiwan Straits crisis. Beginning in 1964, a tremendously expensive program known as the Third Line (三线 or Third Front) moved strategic industries deep into the interior for protection from attack. A decade later, the military and militia practiced the “three attacks, three defenses” (三打三防, “attack tanks, aircraft, and airborne troops, defend against air, chemical, and nuclear attack”). In the 1990s, a “new” was added before the three attacks, three defenses and to keep up with technology, the targets were changed to “attacking enemy stealth, cruise missiles, and helicopters and defending against precision strikes, electronic warfare, and reconnaissance.”

The threat to China’s sovereignty was further highlighted by the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. Despite U.S. explanations and apologies, many Chinese leaders and people still consider the action a deliberate strike. We may never know for certain, but it is plausible that the Chinese Communist Party worries about another “October surprise” during the fall 2024 election season or early in a new U.S. administration. This is amplified by increasing friction in the South China Sea and across the Taiwan Strait. As of summer 2024, Chinese government continues to assess that a “certain major power [the U.S.] has resorted to power politics and bullying, and willful containment and suppression of emerging forces.” And Xi’s “explainer” for the recently concluded Third Plenum continued to warn against the dangers of “black swans” and “gray rhinos” — both are Chinese codewords for unforeseen risks and uncertainties, foreign and domestic.

Second, prioritizing China’s border, coastal, and air defense reflects Xi’s continuing belief in “People’s War,” China’s “magic weapon” (法宝), in its strategic deterrence posture and “integrated national strategic systems and capabilities” (一体化国家战略体系和能力). He is determined to mobilize manpower, resources, and technical know-how embedded in Chinese society and civilian sectors to advance the Chinese Communist Party’s security interests first at homeChina’s borders.

Third, Xi’s statement raises the possibility of more “major” Chinese activities along the country’s land borders (e.g., India, Burma) and coastal regions (e.g., Taiwan Strait, South and East China seas), potentially employing new and innovative measures. The fact that the Central Military Commission Joint Staff Department provided the briefer for the study session may portend a significant change in the responsibilities of the Chinese military chain of command regarding border operations. Expect the unexpected.

Who’s Leading the State Border and Coastal Defense Commission? Unclear.

China’s border, coastal, and air defense system is roughly equivalent to the U.S. homeland defense functions. It coordinates the enforcement of the country’s claimed territorial boundaries and integrates the party, government, military, law enforcement, and civilian assets (党政军警民) under a unified central authority. Its leaders will play a central role in any potential crisis along China’s land or sea borders. Chinese homeland defense is led by the Party Central Committee and Central Military Commission, with responsibilities shared among the armed forces, civilian law enforcement, and local governments. But who exactly is in charge seems to be in flux.

The 2006 defense white paper reported that the State Border and Coastal Defense Commission (国家边海防委员会), created in 1994, was composed of “the relevant departments of the State Council and the [People’s Liberation Army].” Many of its responsibilities include infrastructure development projects to improve the transportation and communications in border regions and to upgrade the standard of living for military personnel. However, the 2020 National Defense Law removed the State Council from that commission, implying changes to come.

Today, it is unclear who leads the State Border and Coastal Defense Commission. Previously, the minister of national defense held the position. The deputy director of the Party Central Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group (changed into a commission in 2018) has served as one of the deputy directors of the commission. Current Defense Minister Admiral Dong Jun, however, has not been associated with the commission, nor has he become a member of the Central Military Commission or a state councilor. We don’t know who oversees the commission’s foreign affairs portfolio, either.

The director of the Central Military Commission National Defense Mobilization Department (军委国防动员部) has served as deputy director of the State Border and Coastal Defense Commission since the military reform started in 2016. Within that department is a Border Defense Bureau (边防局), which coordinates with smaller border and coastal defense bureaus/divisions in the five theater armies’ joint staff departments (战区陆军参谋部边海防处) and in the army staff department (陆军参谋部边海防局). So far, we have found no similar staff organizations in the navy or air force, although those services contribute units to conduct missions along China’s borders.

Chinese Armed Forces Units Responsible for Border, Coastal, and Air Defense

The People’s Liberation Army’s Army, Navy, and Air Force all provide units and personnel to conduct daily border, coastal, and air defense operations (but not Rocket Force units except in their general nuclear and conventional deterrence role). These units are supported by elements of the People’s Armed Police, particularly the China Coast Guard, and reserve and militia units. The newly formed Military Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force, and Information Support Force provide capabilities with global reach to China’s strategic deterrence posture in support of the four services and five theaters.

The army contributes the largest force dedicated to this mission. Though the army may participate in a few exercises outside of China with foreign militaries each year and provides about 2,000 personnel annually to United Nation Peacekeeping Operations, the vast majority of its troops have never left the country.

Army units, in general, are categorized into three groups. “Maneuver operation (机动作战部队)” units are organized mostly into 13 group armies and a handful of divisions that may move from one part of the country to another as required. “Garrison forces (警卫警备部队)” comprise the system of provincial military districts, military subdistricts, and people’s armed forces departments that provide mobilization support, perform conscription functions, and command militia units.

The army’s “border and coastal defense (边海防部队)” units were mostly reorganized after 2015 into brigades (except for the western theater, where the former structure of regiments was retained). The International Institute for Strategic Studies Military Balance counts about 50 border and coastal defense brigades and regiments, which we estimate could number well over 100,000 personnel. The forces are widely dispersed in small units across the country. They primarily are responsible for patrolling and monitoring the borders for military activity. These units have been equipped with some new weapons and equipment, but remain in a defensive posture.

In hot spots, the border defense units are reinforced by “maneuver operation” combat units. For instance, the line of actual control with India has been reinforced as part of the 506 Special Mission for nearly a decade. This mission has been amplified in the years since the 2020 skirmishes in the Galwan Valley. Along the east coast, in August 2022, new army modular long-range multiple rocket launcher systems were employed in the large joint exercise in response to U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

The navy is in a period of transition, moving from “defense on the near seas (近海防御) to protection missions on the far seas (远海防卫).” The Military Balance counts more than 100 patrol craft and corvettes that are optimized for operations along China’s coast, along with many of its conventionally powered submarines. Meanwhile, roughly the same number of carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and nuclear subs can perform operations within the first island chain as well as in distant waters. The navy’s land-based coastal defense force (岸防部队) maintains multiple anti-ship cruise missile regiments and air defense, electronic countermeasures, and radar brigades, plus a significant land-based aviation force.

The air force, meantime, is “accelerating the transition of its tasks from territorial air defense (国土防空) to both offensive and defensive operations (攻防兼备).” It has “one of the largest forces of advanced long-range [surface-to-air] missile systems in the world” augmented by a large fleet of fighter aircraft to provide integrated air defense of the mainland and adjacent seas.

The “air defense” Xi referred to in his speech actually applies to civil or people’s air defense (人民防空, or 人防) and not active-duty air defenses (防空). China Civil Air Defense offices are found in local civilian governments to manage construction of facilities, such as bomb shelters and command posts, and cooperate with other government agencies in emergency management.

The China Coast Guard has “over 150 regional and oceangoing patrol vessels,” including over 20 former navy corvettes modified for coast guard operations. In May 2024, several coast guard vessels participated in the Joint Sword-2024A exercise after Taiwan’s presidential election. In addition, hundreds of maritime militia vessels operate daily in the South China Sea alone and will complicate foreign operations in time of crisis or war.

Finally, People’s Liberation Army reserve units, currently being restructured, also contribute to border and coastal defense operations, particularly in air defense and support tasks. Militia units also have been assigned air defense, rescue and recovery, and other technical and logistics tasks including operating multiple types of unmanned vehicles.

Conclusion

Prioritizing border, coastal, and air defense aligns with the party’s resolution to “strengthen traditional combat forces” in Xi’s speech to the recent party Third Plenum (see section XIV). In Chinese military parlance, “traditional combat forces” refer to conscript-heavy units that make up the border and coastal defense forces and other ground combat units. Xi’s emphasis on homeland defense will almost certainly help elevate the stature of such (mainly) army elements. To give them higher profile in society, border troops have a webpage dedicated to their stories for internal consumption on the Chinese-language China military website.

Inside China, local officials and bureaucrats may read something else into Xi’s speech: that central funding is available for dual-use infrastructure construction in border regions for projects that contribute to defense readiness. This may encourage local leaders to volunteer to participate in this development as part of nationwide “military-civilian integration/fusion” (军民融合) activities. A likely example of this thinking is demonstrated in the construction of over 50 new villages and expansion of 100 others in remote regions along China’s periphery since 2016.

Xi’s speech noted that it is “important to foster neighborly relations and pragmatic cooperation with neighboring countries to create a favorable surrounding environment.” Military relations with several adjacent southeast Asian countries seem relatively stable. However, given the friction caused by China’s actions over disputed ocean territories, any call to foster neighborly relations with its offshore neighbors appears mostly empty. But maybe Xi’s emphasis of “pragmatic cooperation” signals Beijing’s willingness to adopt a more flexible approach in the coming years.

Finally, Xi stressed the need to “optimize the leadership management system.” Xi may be considering placing border operations under the Central Military Commission’s Joint Staff Department. Such a move would take it away from the National Defense Mobilization Department Border Defense Bureau and might ripple down to the theater commands’ Joint Staff Departments. Perhaps the navy and air force may create border operations staff offices. Such changes could lead to greater integration of operations along China’s periphery. In the long run, more unified control of front-line units could also reduce miscommunications and accidental encounters with foreign military and civilian entities operating in proximity to Chinese borders.

Become a Member

Shanshan Mei, known by the pen name Marcus Clay, is a political scientist at RAND. She previously served as the special assistant to the 22nd chief of staff of the Air Force for China and Indo-Pacific issues.

Dennis J. Blasko is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel with 23 years of service as a military intelligence officer and foreign area officer specializing in China. From 1992 to 1996, he was an Army attaché in Beijing and Hong Kong. He has written numerous articles and chapters on the Chinese military, along with the book The Chinese Army Today: Tradition and Transformation for the 21st Century.

The views in this article are those of the authors alone and not those of any institution they are or have been affiliated with.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Shanshan Mei · August 27, 2024

15. The Autocratic Allure: Why the Far Right Embraces Foreign Tyrants

Excerpts:

Of course, there is at least one major difference between Bozell and Trump. Bozell was a marginal figure, widely known in conservative circles but otherwise profoundly obscure. Trump has already been president of the United States and may soon get the job again. In that sense, the key thing to be explained about Heilbrunn’s genealogy of far-right sentiment is not simply the fact that it exists. What really matters—and what distinguishes the present moment from most of what is described in America Last—is that these ideas have eventually captured a U.S. president, along with one of the country’s two major political parties.

This unlovely circumstance is what inspired Heilbrunn’s exploration. And yet the book itself pays little attention to the question of influence or power. Heilbrunn generally avoids assessing the relative position of his subjects and the ways in which their ideas did or did not enter the mainstream. “His antipathy was widely shared,” he writes of the antidemocratic businessman Merwin Kimball Hart—but how widely? Of President Franklin Roosevelt’s critics, Heilbrunn maintains that “more than a few were pro-fascist”—but how many? Heilbrunn might be forgiven for leaning vague on such questions, since quantifying influence or legacy is notoriously difficult. The result, however, is that readers have little sense of change over time, as if the history of far-right sentiment in foreign policy has been a seamless and unchanging journey.

In truth, for most of the era that Heilbrunn describes, those sentiments were deeply out of fashion—real, to be sure, but hardly drivers of policy. A handful of prominent Americans may have liked the Kaiser during World War I, but the real problem of illiberalism on the home front had more to do with Wilson’s repressive policies than with pro-Germanism. During the 1930s and 1940s, the isolationist aviator Charles Lindbergh and his supporters did admire Hitler and Mussolini, but the U.S. government mobilized the nation’s blood and treasure in an entirely different direction. The only real precedent for the current moment may be the Reagan administration, when many of the characters Heilbrunn describes got their first taste of actual power. Within weeks of his election, Reagan was poring over Buckley’s personnel recommendations, seeking out appointees, in Reagan’s words, “whose philosophy is akin to ours.” Reagan recruited beyond National Review circles as well. The neoconservative political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick—whose 1979 Commentary article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” made the case that Washington should cozy up to right-wing autocrats—became his ambassador to the UN.

By most measures, Reagan and Trump have little in common when it comes to foreign policy. Whatever one might think of his approach, Reagan was a true believer in American exceptionalism and in the persuasive power of the U.S. model. Trump describes an America in decline, the laughingstock of the world. According to Trump, Putin’s Russia at least has some of the dignity and strength and self-respect that a great nation deserves. Heilbrunn’s book shows that Trump is not the first person to make such claims—that when it comes to foreign dictators, as in so many other matters, Trump is mostly borrowing bad ideas. Perhaps inadvertently, however, America Last also underscores why the twentieth century was actually quite different from the twenty-first—and why it feels as if the United States is now heading into uncharted territory.

The Autocratic Allure

Why the Far Right Embraces Foreign Tyrants

By Beverly Gage

September/October 2024

Published on August 20, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century · August 20, 2024

Ever since the New Deal, American liberals have shown a remarkable ability to forget about the American right. In 1950, the social critic Lionel Trilling famously declared victory for liberalism, dismissing conservative ideas as nothing more than “irritable mental gestures.” The subsequent rise of McCarthyism, massive resistance against civil rights, and the John Birch Society all called that assumption into question—but when Lyndon Johnson defeated the archconservative Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, final victory was declared once again. Then Richard Nixon got elected. When he resigned, Democrats were certain that Republicans and conservatives had been vanquished for a generation. Then along came Ronald Reagan a mere six years later.

Reagan’s decisive victory made it harder to argue that conservatism and Americanism were truly incompatible. Still, many people assumed that certain ideas—explicit racism, “America first” nativism—had forever been relegated to the political fringe. That’s part of why Donald Trump caught liberals off guard; his popularity violated core assumptions about what Americans believed and how they were supposed to behave in the twenty-first century. Even now, after one Trump victory and a nail-biter follow-up, it seems hard to believe that American voters could really put him back in power. The left might view much of U.S. history as a saga of oppression, from settler colonialism to slavery and Jim Crow to immigration exclusion. But it’s entirely different to realize that a vast swath of your fellow citizens apparently still supports some of those ideas.

Historians have periodically tried to point out that conservative and far-right ideas have their own history, genealogy, and staying power. In the mid-1990s, Alan Brinkley prodded fellow scholars of history to explain—not just to denounce—the conservative surge that produced Reagan. After Trump’s election, the historian Rick Perlstein published a mea culpa in The New York Times Magazine, lamenting that the “professional guardians of America’s past,” in attempting to live up to Brinkley’s dictum, had “advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump.” Since then, scholars and journalists have tried to correct the record, producing a wealth of new studies of the John Birch Society, homegrown fascism, the Ku Klux Klan, and other avatars of the far right. Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for history, told “a saga of white resistance to federal power” as it unfolded in one Alabama county.

So far, most attempts to create a genealogy for today’s right have focused on domestic politics. As a result, they have neglected one of the most notable and troubling aspects of the Trump political brand: his embrace of foreign authoritarian leaders not merely as geopolitical allies but also as models for how to live the good life. Inside the Beltway, foreign policy experts have sounded the alarm about Trump’s chest-thumping, dictator-loving style as an assault on democratic norms, out of step with American tradition and reason and the ways things are done. But as the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn points out in his punchy and engaging new book, America Last, Trump’s America-first proclivities—including his admiration for foreign strongmen—have their own history. Once upon a time, those ideas occupied the fringes, alarming for their content but not necessarily for their influence. Today, they are going mainstream.

DEVOTED TO DICTATORSHIP

Heilbrunn came of age with the post–Cold War establishment. He began his career in 1989 at The National Interest, the house organ of the then flourishing neoconservative movement. During the Clinton administration, he became a staffer at The New Republic (arguably more neoliberal than neoconservative at the time), before returning to The National Interest in 2008 and eventually becoming its editor. From that vantage point, Heilbrunn has been both witness to and critic of an emerging far-right subculture organized around the veneration of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian President Viktor Orban. At The New Republic, Heilbrunn coined the term “theocon” to describe the hierarchical, isolationist, overtly Christian orientation that seemed to be catching on with a new generation of Republican leaders. Even so, like many Washington insiders, he did not quite see Trump coming.

Once Trump arrived, however, Heilbrunn recognized the type. “The longer I’ve listened to conservatives today talk about Hungary, Russia, ‘wokeness,’ ‘the deep state,’ abortion, immigration, and media bias, the more I’ve become convinced that many of their arguments are not novel,” he writes. “If anything, the opposite is true: these arguments represent an act of conservation, preserving in a kind of rhetorical alembic grievances and apprehensions that can be traced all the way back to World War I.” America Last is Heilbrunn’s effort to describe how the United States got from there to here, thanks to a wild array of far-right intellectuals, politicians, and would-be tyrants.

Based on the book’s subtitle—“the right’s century-long romance with foreign dictators”—one might assume that America Last addresses a familiar subject: how the U.S. government, acting with a nearly limitless view of the national interest, got into bed with dictators and demagogues throughout the twentieth century. But Heilbrunn is not interested in (or, perhaps, troubled by) moral compromises made for geopolitical reasons. He seeks instead to describe a dark history of Americans’ admiration for brutal, often racist authoritarians abroad, from Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II on up to the apartheid government of South Africa. “The tradition this book excavates is not based on realism or pragmatism,” Heilbrunn writes. “It is rooted, rather, in a sincere affinity. Its advocates avow, or at least intimate, that authoritarianism, in one form or other, is superior to democracy.” A realist might accept entangling alliances with dictators as the least of the available evils. Heilbrunn’s characters celebrate the evil itself.

Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and Reagan in Madrid, 1972

Photo 12 / Universal Images Group / Getty Images

The book begins with World War I, the first European continental war to lure the United States into a major mobilization. President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war in 1917 unleashed an outpouring of anti-German sentiment at home, from the ridiculous (sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage”) to the truly repressive (laws against “disloyal” speech and internment camps for suspicious German nationals). But as Heilbrunn points out, there were at least a few voices on the American right supporting the Kaiser as a model of nationalist vision and masculine power. Heilbrunn does not share their sentiments. The Kaiser, he writes, was “a monster” who “set the twentieth century on its path to strife, bloodshed, and calamity.” Heilbrunn nonetheless tries to explain what the Kaiser’s admirers seemed to like and how they built a story in which Germany was a geopolitical victim rather than an aggressor. Although these ideas were unpopular during the war itself, the disappointing settlement at Versailles gave them some traction in the years that followed. According to Heilbrunn, the Kaiser’s rehabilitation helped produce “many of the arguments that future generations of American apologists for authoritarian leaders would deploy.”

What were those arguments? They were, for starters, antidemocratic—committed to a hierarchical worldview in which some people counted more than others and in which the “great leader” (whoever he might be at any given moment) counted the most of all. Beyond that, Heilbrunn’s ideologues did not always agree. Some openly championed elite rule, while others claimed to be channeling the will of the people. Some were deeply Catholic, while others scorned the pretensions of both church and state. Some advocated a strong central government; others, a libertarian paradise. For some, such as the pernicious race theorist Lothrop Stoddard, it was defending the color line that mattered most. For others, it was the fight to protect traditional Christianity, or patriarchal families, or even just the idea of hierarchy itself.

These figures nonetheless found a common set of dictators to admire. Heilbrunn’s most effective chapters document the deep American fascination with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler beginning in the 1920s and extending well beyond the moment when the true depredations of their regimes were widely known. As Heilbrunn notes, several leading figures of the modern conservative movement, including the publisher Henry Regnery, started out as apologists for Hitler, far preferring his anticommunism, hypernationalism, and racism to a joint antifascist front with Joseph Stalin. Hitler returned the compliment. As the legal scholar James Whitman pointed out in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model, the Nazi regime looked to the Jim Crow system and to the United States’ robust supply of eugenic theorists as inspiration for its racial order.

ANTI-ELITE IVY LEAGUERS

With the end of World War II, the boundaries of the far-right authoritarian tradition identified by Heilbrunn become somewhat fuzzier. The U.S. government itself embraced the anti-Stalinist position, allying with almost anyone who cared to agree. Far from being a language reserved for the far right, anticommunism became the lingua franca of American politics. Still, there were variations. Heilbrunn rightly includes Joseph McCarthy as one of his Trumpian precursors, less because the Wisconsin senator opposed communism than because he expressed that opposition in a distinctively right-wing way. For McCarthy, as for many of his heirs, the problem was not just the Communist Party or the Soviet Union but also the entire complex of liberal elites, fancy-university professors, and administrative-state bureaucrats who stood in the way of a Cold War victory.

Nobody made more out of that constellation of ideas than William F. Buckley, the wunderkind of the midcentury conservative movement. Buckley got his start by denouncing his alma mater as a bastion of socialist, anti-Christian indoctrination in his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale. He then went on to back McCarthy as an embattled American hero, someone uniquely equipped, in Heilbrunn’s words, to vanquish “the gatekeepers of the 1950s consensus society—the Ivy League intellectuals, the Wall Street bankers, the liberal media.” In 1955, in the wake of McCarthy’s downfall, Buckley founded National Review, convinced that others would have to take up the struggle against a treacherous, soft-on-communism elite.

Over the next several decades, National Review would endorse a true parade of horribles: Francisco Franco of Spain, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, the apartheid governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. The magazine would also perfect an all-too-recognizable version of the conservative political style. “Trolling the libs, denouncing political correctness, and overthrowing the deep state—all had their sources in Buckley’s early efforts,” Heilbrunn writes.

Like Buckley, a surprising number of Heilbrunn’s subjects come out of the Ivy League, especially Harvard and Yale (with Columbia a distant third). This overrepresentation may have something to do with Heilbrunn’s process of selection, which seems to run toward quirky high-born pseudo-intellectuals. But there is also something notable about the Ivy League dissident as a right-wing political type. Today’s politics are filled with Ivy-educated men who love nothing so much as to denounce liberal elites and the universities that employ them. Think of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (Yale), Senators J. D. Vance and Josh Hawley (both Yale Law), the former Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (Yale Law again), and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (who has not one but two Yale degrees). Or even Trump, the fine product of a University of Pennsylvania education and now the great foe not only of left-wing campus activists but also of the entire enterprise of factual expertise and truth-seeking.

Heilbrunn relates some bizarre stories of what can happen when this sense of insider grievance goes awry. One is the tale of Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, Jr., who received his bachelor’s and law degrees from Yale and seemed well on his way to a nice life of National Review–style elite-bashing. Then, in 1965, he moved to Franco’s Spain, where he increasingly embraced a high-Catholic theocratic worldview. On returning to the United States, he threw himself into the militant antiabortion movement, helping to organize one of its first major demonstrations in Washington in 1970. At that protest, he assaulted a police officer with a five-foot wooden cross and had to be dragged off in handcuffs, all while shouting in Spanish, “Long live Christ the King!”

FRINGE NO MORE

Of course, there is at least one major difference between Bozell and Trump. Bozell was a marginal figure, widely known in conservative circles but otherwise profoundly obscure. Trump has already been president of the United States and may soon get the job again. In that sense, the key thing to be explained about Heilbrunn’s genealogy of far-right sentiment is not simply the fact that it exists. What really matters—and what distinguishes the present moment from most of what is described in America Last—is that these ideas have eventually captured a U.S. president, along with one of the country’s two major political parties.

This unlovely circumstance is what inspired Heilbrunn’s exploration. And yet the book itself pays little attention to the question of influence or power. Heilbrunn generally avoids assessing the relative position of his subjects and the ways in which their ideas did or did not enter the mainstream. “His antipathy was widely shared,” he writes of the antidemocratic businessman Merwin Kimball Hart—but how widely? Of President Franklin Roosevelt’s critics, Heilbrunn maintains that “more than a few were pro-fascist”—but how many? Heilbrunn might be forgiven for leaning vague on such questions, since quantifying influence or legacy is notoriously difficult. The result, however, is that readers have little sense of change over time, as if the history of far-right sentiment in foreign policy has been a seamless and unchanging journey.

In truth, for most of the era that Heilbrunn describes, those sentiments were deeply out of fashion—real, to be sure, but hardly drivers of policy. A handful of prominent Americans may have liked the Kaiser during World War I, but the real problem of illiberalism on the home front had more to do with Wilson’s repressive policies than with pro-Germanism. During the 1930s and 1940s, the isolationist aviator Charles Lindbergh and his supporters did admire Hitler and Mussolini, but the U.S. government mobilized the nation’s blood and treasure in an entirely different direction. The only real precedent for the current moment may be the Reagan administration, when many of the characters Heilbrunn describes got their first taste of actual power. Within weeks of his election, Reagan was poring over Buckley’s personnel recommendations, seeking out appointees, in Reagan’s words, “whose philosophy is akin to ours.” Reagan recruited beyond National Review circles as well. The neoconservative political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick—whose 1979 Commentary article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” made the case that Washington should cozy up to right-wing autocrats—became his ambassador to the UN.

By most measures, Reagan and Trump have little in common when it comes to foreign policy. Whatever one might think of his approach, Reagan was a true believer in American exceptionalism and in the persuasive power of the U.S. model. Trump describes an America in decline, the laughingstock of the world. According to Trump, Putin’s Russia at least has some of the dignity and strength and self-respect that a great nation deserves. Heilbrunn’s book shows that Trump is not the first person to make such claims—that when it comes to foreign dictators, as in so many other matters, Trump is mostly borrowing bad ideas. Perhaps inadvertently, however, America Last also underscores why the twentieth century was actually quite different from the twenty-first—and why it feels as if the United States is now heading into uncharted territory.

BEVERLY GAGE is John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University and the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.

Foreign Affairs · by G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century · August 20, 2024

16. Why Whataboutism Works: In International Politics, It Pays to Point Fingers

Should be a no brainer but it seems easier said than done to make policy align with values and principle.

Finally, going forward, the United States should try to avoid policy choices that do not align with stated American values and principles. Washington, for example, should work to avoid mistreating detainees. It should reject economic sanctions that cause significant and gratuitous harm to civilians. And in most cases, it should not launch invasions or otherwise try to topple foreign governments without UN Security Council approval.

Avoiding such decisions is far easier said than done. The United States cannot simply shake off deeply entrenched injustices. Reasonable people can disagree about whether certain decisions are morally acceptable. And breaking normative rules can help Washington achieve goals that might otherwise prove elusive, which makes doing so attractive to officials. But the shortsighted use of U.S. power can backfire for years. The CIA, for example, aided coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 that swiftly eliminated perceived communist threats and secured Western interests in these countries. The 2003 invasion of Iraq quickly deposed an autocrat who hated the United States. But each of these actions severely violated the bedrock international norm of state sovereignty, and they have become potent examples of Washington’s double standards. To this day, these cases are trotted out by foreign powers when the United States decides to inveigh against them.

Foreign governments can and do utilize the United States’ record against Washington. Their critiques erode domestic and international support for U.S. actions. Consequently, the United States would be wise to avoid making unethical decisions in pursuit of narrow, short-term objectives. Doing so is the only way to spare future U.S. officials from having many uncomfortable meetings with the ghosts of America’s past.

Why Whataboutism Works

In International Politics, It Pays to Point Fingers

By Wilfred M. Chow and Dov H. Levin

August 27, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Wilfred M. Chow and Dov H. Levin · August 27, 2024

On March 25, 2024, the U.S. embassy in Budapest took aim at Hungary. In a video posted to Facebook, embassy officials decried the country’s government for continuing to purchase Russian oil and gas when most of Europe was weaning itself off Moscow. “The Hungarian government has chosen to augment its reliance on Russian energy . . . at any expense,” the video declared. “Only the Hungarian political leadership has decided to keep the country dependent on Russian energy.”

A little more than a month later, Hungary fired back. It did so not by addressing the substance of Washington’s complaint, or by arguing that there was nothing wrong with buying gas from Russia. Instead, it criticized the United States. “Who was the number one supplier of uranium [to] the United States last year?” Hungarian Foreign Affairs Minister Péter Szijjártó indignantly asked. “Russia.” Americans had spent “more than $1 billion” on Russian uranium in 2023, he continued. And yet “they are putting pressure on us not to buy fuel from there.”

Szijjártó is hardly the only foreign official to counter U.S. criticisms by engaging in “whataboutism”—the tactic of deflecting criticism of one’s own bad behavior by pointing to another actor’s bad behavior. When U.S. officials accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of meddling in the 2016 American elections, Putin noted that the United States has a long record of electoral interference abroad. After Washington blasted Turkey for its crackdown on the media, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan released a report detailing violations of press freedom in the United States, including the arrests of journalists during the 2014 Black Lives Matter protests.

At first glance, it may seem as if whataboutism is a weak way to respond to critiques. After all, it has long been considered a logical fallacy: two wrongs do not make a right. And the U.S. government has hardly been chastened. American officials routinely, continuously, and openly condemn foreign governments, friends and foes alike.

But in first-of-its-kind research, we have found strong evidence that whataboutism is, in fact, highly effective, both domestically and in the international arena. When the United States criticizes a country and that country issues a whataboutist retort, U.S. public support for penalizing it declines. Allied populations become less supportive of joining American-led condemnations or sanctions. These findings were true whether whataboutism was deployed by U.S. adversaries or allies. The tactic, in other words, is a valuable tool for any states looking to challenge American policies and negate Washington’s narratives.

Yet although whataboutism works, it is not all-powerful. Our research found that whataboutism was highly successful when foreign governments pointed to more recent U.S. actions which mimicked their own—in other words, when Washington was being hypocritical. But it was less effective when foreign governments were citing an abuse that happened long ago, and it was almost entirely ineffective when they cited an unrelated bad act. American policymakers, therefore, can successfully rebuke others so long as their criticisms cannot easily be flipped back.

In some instances, however, U.S. officials should accept that silence can be golden. Often, it may be better to simply allow another country’s actions to speak for themselves. And going forward, American leaders should try to keep Washington’s own domestic and international record as clean as possible. At the end of the day, doing so is the only sure way to avoid whataboutism.

CALL-OUT CULTURE

Since the nineteenth century, states have responded to external admonishments by pointing the finger back at the accuser. After the British government denounced Russia’s state-sponsored pogroms against Jews in 1881–82, for example, a Russian newspaper closely affiliated with the tsarist regime upbraided London for its own crimes against humanity: “The concern of England, which has beggared the population of India and Egypt, which has poisoned the people of China with opium, which destroyed, like indigenous insects, the natives of Australia . . . the concern of a people who do such things is certainly astonishing.”

In the twentieth century, whataboutism became even more common. During World War I, the Allied powers accused Germany of engaging in war crimes; in response, the German government had 93 prominent German academics write an open letter condemning the allies for using expanding bullets and for killing civilian women and children. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union frequently deployed whataboutism in its struggle against Washington, regardless of the specific U.S. charge. Moscow harangued the United States, in particular, for its mistreatment of Black people. To this day, the phrase “and you lynch Black people” is commonly used in Russia and many eastern European countries to denote the use of whataboutism.

Today, whataboutism is an even more powerful tool of public diplomacy, thanks to the amplification allowed by the Internet. It is used by countries to condemn their adversaries, such as when Russia rebukes the United States for its human rights failings. It is used between states with mixed relationships. It is even used by states to denounce their allies. In May 2023, for instance, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin criticized Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, for being “incapable of solving the migration problems on which she was elected.” In response, Italian officials and media highlighted France’s failure to send more than a handful of police officers to help frontline states stop the influx.

Whataboutism by U.S. adversaries is just as effective as whataboutist retorts by close allies.

Governments have long been concerned about whataboutist criticisms. In 1985, for example, the Reagan administration organized and funded a special conference in Washington, D.C., dedicated to refuting comparisons of the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But analysts had yet to systematically study whether whataboutism works as a tool of international statecraft. To fill that gap, we conducted two surveys with more than 2,500 respondents a piece, both of which drew from representative samples of the American public. In each, we gave respondents hypothetical examples of the United States criticizing other countries for electoral interventions and the mistreatment of refugees. We asked to what extent they approved of Washington’s statements, and whether they supported imposing sanctions. We randomly divided respondents into two groups. Some randomly selected respondents received these questions without first posing a whataboutist retort. Other participants answered them again after reading hypothetical whataboutist replies from outside states.

Our finding was clear: whataboutism is highly effective in undercutting U.S. public support for foreign policy initiatives. It significantly reduced support for criticizing foreign countries. Before hearing a whataboutist critique, for example, 56 percent of respondents approved of Washington’s criticism of the foreign country’s actions. But after hearing it, approval fell to 38 percent. Whataboutism also drove down support for imposing sanctions. Before hearing a whataboutist retort, 59 percent of respondents supported sanctions in response to the foreign country’s actions. After, support fell to 49 percent. And whataboutism led Americans to treat the decisions Washington condemned as more morally acceptable. The percentage of respondents viewing that state’s actions as equally justifiable to the United States’ choices rose from 32 percent to 41 percent.

In subsequent research (with the political scientist Atsushi Tago), we tested whether whataboutism had the same effect on countries allied with the United States. To do so, we recruited a representative sample of residents in the United Kingdom and Japan and asked them to answer a similar survey. Once again, we found that whataboutism worked. After hearing whataboutist retorts aimed at the United States, British and Japanese respondents became significantly less likely to support joining in Washington’s critiques. Before hearing a whataboutist critique, for example, 59 percent of British respondents and 46 percent of Japanese respondents approved of joining U.S. criticisms. After hearing it, support fell to 37 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Respondents were also less supportive of their government joining any U.S. sanctions: support fell from 58 percent to 41 percent in the United Kingdom and from 34 percent to 27 percent in Japan. Finally, whataboutism increased respondents’ tendency to see the United States and the whataboutist actor as morally equivalent. The percent of British respondents viewing the actions as equally justifiable rose from 30 percent to 42 percent. Among Japanese respondents, it went from 27 percent to 34 percent.

Interestingly, the identity of the whataboutist actor did not matter to the American, British, or Japanese publics. Whataboutism by U.S. adversaries, such as Russia, proved just as effective as whataboutist retorts by close allies. Likewise, the U.S. government could not counter whataboutism by arguing that its misdeed had supposedly benevolent intentions, such as promoting democracy. As a result, American efforts to fight back against whataboutism, like at the 1985 conference, have probably failed. So has apologizing for past misdeeds. (According to our research, U.S. government apologies, at best, very modestly counteract whataboutism’s negative effects.) There is simply no rhetorical strategy that can eliminate the technique’s power.

GLASS HOUSES

For Washington, these findings are, at a minimum, very inconvenient. U.S. officials see criticizing unfriendly foreign governments as a highly appealing, relatively low-cost way to damage such actors’ international standing and to appease various domestic constituencies. As a result, they liberally engage in public condemnations. But when foreign powers can easily deflect these critiques by referencing some U.S. action, such declarations are unlikely to land. In fact, they may ultimately do more harm than good; whataboutist reactions, after all, draw attention away from other governments’ actions and toward Washington’s own bad behavior.

Yet the effectiveness of whataboutism can vary. According to our research, it is heavily dependent on the nature and timing of the American act in question. Whataboutism that referred to recent, similar U.S. deeds had strong effects. But U.S. deeds of much older provenance—such as from the interwar period or the early Cold War era—had less influence. And whataboutism that referred to American acts that were not substantively related to the initial charge had very weak effects, and sometimes none at all. This was the case even when foreign powers raised very infamous and recent U.S. misdeeds, such as the torture of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.

U.S. policymakers, therefore, should rethink their approach to whataboutist accusations. Rather than shooting from the hip, they must first carefully check their country’s own record and calibrate their messages to avoid accusations of hypocrisy. To do so, U.S. government departments could direct staffers to carefully work with colleagues that have institutional memory and relevant expertise before issuing statements. Officials could also request whataboutism impact assessments before making major speeches or unveiling new initiatives, just as they conduct economic and humanitarian ones.

To see why American policymakers should adopt such measures, consider the speech that the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, delivered in March 2022 excoriating Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. During her remarks, Thomas-Greenfield rebuked Moscow for using cluster munitions. But this was a serious rhetorical mistake: the United States, like Russia, never signed the international convention banning these weapons, and according to a 2017 Defense Department memorandum, U.S. war plans still allow for their use under certain conditions. As a result, Washington had to issue a statement walking back the cluster-munitions criticism. It did so swiftly enough to avoid a Russian response.

U.S. officials must calibrate their messages to avoid accusations of hypocrisy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is broad enough and bad enough that it is possible for the United States to denounce it in ways that do not invite whataboutist charges. In some cases, however, it may not be possible for Washington to issue non-hypocritical reprimands. In these instances, it may be best for U.S. officials to say nothing at all. Doing so may prove difficult for American actors accustomed to speaking freely. But they should remember that, by staying silent, they avoid pronouncements that can potentially harm their wider foreign policy agendas.

Finally, going forward, the United States should try to avoid policy choices that do not align with stated American values and principles. Washington, for example, should work to avoid mistreating detainees. It should reject economic sanctions that cause significant and gratuitous harm to civilians. And in most cases, it should not launch invasions or otherwise try to topple foreign governments without UN Security Council approval.

Avoiding such decisions is far easier said than done. The United States cannot simply shake off deeply entrenched injustices. Reasonable people can disagree about whether certain decisions are morally acceptable. And breaking normative rules can help Washington achieve goals that might otherwise prove elusive, which makes doing so attractive to officials. But the shortsighted use of U.S. power can backfire for years. The CIA, for example, aided coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 that swiftly eliminated perceived communist threats and secured Western interests in these countries. The 2003 invasion of Iraq quickly deposed an autocrat who hated the United States. But each of these actions severely violated the bedrock international norm of state sovereignty, and they have become potent examples of Washington’s double standards. To this day, these cases are trotted out by foreign powers when the United States decides to inveigh against them.

Foreign governments can and do utilize the United States’ record against Washington. Their critiques erode domestic and international support for U.S. actions. Consequently, the United States would be wise to avoid making unethical decisions in pursuit of narrow, short-term objectives. Doing so is the only way to spare future U.S. officials from having many uncomfortable meetings with the ghosts of America’s past.

WILFRED M. CHOW is an Assistant Professor in the School of International Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.
DOV H. LEVIN is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong.

Foreign Affairs · by Wilfred M. Chow and Dov H. Levin · August 27, 2024

17. US military open to escorting Philippine ships in the South China Sea, senior admiral says

Well this would be a counter to the "strategic concept of timidity." This could require substantial political will.

I wonder if the White House thinks CINCPAC is out ahead of his (water) skis here?

Excerpts:

Paparo and Brawner spoke to reporters after an international military conference in Manila organized by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, at which China’s increasingly assertive actions in the South China Sea were spotlighted. Military and defense officials and diplomats from the U.S. and allied countries attended but there were no Chinese representatives.

Asked if the U.S. military would consider escorting Philippine ships delivering food and other supplies to Filipino forces in the South China Sea, Paparo replied, “Certainly, within the context of consultations.”

“Every option between the two sovereign nations in terms of our mutual defense, escort of one vessel to the other, is an entirely reasonable option within our Mutual Defense Treaty, among this close alliance between the two of us,” Paparo said without elaborating.

Brawner responded cautiously to the suggestion, which could run afoul of Philippine laws including a constitutional ban on foreign forces directly joining local combat operations.

“The attitude of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, as dictated by the Philippine laws, is for us to first rely on ourselves,” Brawner said. “We are going to try all options, all avenues that are available to us in order for us to achieve the mission…

US military open to escorting Philippine ships in the South China Sea, senior admiral says

AP · by JIM GOMEZ · August 27, 2024

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The U.S. military is open to consultations about escorting Philippine ships in the disputed South China Sea, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said Tuesday amid a spike in hostilities between Beijing and Manila in the disputed waters.

Adm. Samuel Paparo’s remarks, which he made in response to a question during a news conference in Manila with Philippine Armed Forces chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr., provided a glimpse of the mindset of one of the highest American military commanders outside the U.S. mainland on a prospective operation that would risk putting U.S. Navy ships in direct collisions with those of China.

Chinese coast guard, navy and suspected militia ships regularly clash with Philippine vessels during attempts to resupply Filipino sailors stationed in parts of the South China Sea claimed by both countries. As these clashes grow increasingly hostile, resulting in injuries to Filipino sailors and damage to their ships, the Philippine government has faced questions about invoking a treaty alliance with Washington.

Paparo and Brawner spoke to reporters after an international military conference in Manila organized by the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, at which China’s increasingly assertive actions in the South China Sea were spotlighted. Military and defense officials and diplomats from the U.S. and allied countries attended but there were no Chinese representatives.

Asked if the U.S. military would consider escorting Philippine ships delivering food and other supplies to Filipino forces in the South China Sea, Paparo replied, “Certainly, within the context of consultations.”

“Every option between the two sovereign nations in terms of our mutual defense, escort of one vessel to the other, is an entirely reasonable option within our Mutual Defense Treaty, among this close alliance between the two of us,” Paparo said without elaborating.

Brawner responded cautiously to the suggestion, which could run afoul of Philippine laws including a constitutional ban on foreign forces directly joining local combat operations.

“The attitude of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, as dictated by the Philippine laws, is for us to first rely on ourselves,” Brawner said. “We are going to try all options, all avenues that are available to us in order for us to achieve the mission…in this case, the resupply and rotation of our troops.”

“We will then seek for other options when we are already constrained from doing it ourselves,” Brawner said.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has said there has been no situation so far that would warrant activating the treaty, which requires the allies to come to each other’s aid if they come under external attack.

President Joe Biden and his administration have repeatedly renewed their “ironclad” commitment to help defend the Philippines under the 1951 treaty if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.

Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr said at the conference that China is “the biggest disruptor” of peace in Southeast Asia and called for stronger international censure over its aggression in the South China Sea, a day after China blocked Philippine vessels from delivering food to a coast guard ship at the disputed Sabina Shoal in the contested waters.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said that “the label of undermining peace can never be pinned on China,” blaming unspecified other actors for “making infringements and provocations in the South China Sea and introducing external forces to undermine the large picture of regional peace and stability.”

Teodoro later told reporters on the sidelines of the conference that international statements of concern against China’s increasingly assertive actions in the disputed waters and elsewhere were “not enough.”

“The antidote is a stronger collective multilateral action against China,” Teodoro said, adding that a U.N. Security Council resolution would be a strong step, but unlikely given China’s security council veto.

He also called for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to do more. The 10-nation Southeast Asian bloc includes the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, which have South China Sea claims that overlap with each other, as well as China’s and Taiwan’s.

“ASEAN, to remain relevant and credible, cannot continue to ignore what China is doing in the South China Sea,” Teodoro said.

In the latest incident in the South China Sea, Philippine officials said China deployed “an excessive force” of 40 ships that blocked two Philippine vessels from delivering food and other supplies to Manila’s largest coast guard ship in Sabina Shoal on Monday.

China and the Philippines blamed each other for the confrontation in Sabina, an uninhabited atoll claimed by both countries that has become the latest flashpoint in the Spratlys, the most hotly disputed region of the South China Sea.

China and the Philippines have separately deployed coast guard ships to Sabina in recent months on suspicion the other may act to take control of and build structures in the fishing atoll.

The Philippine coast guard said Chinese coast guard and navy ships, along with 31 suspected militia vessels, obstructed the delivery, which included an ice cream treat for the personnel aboard the BRP Teresa Magbanua as the Philippines marked National Heroes’ Day on Monday.

In Beijing, China’s coast guard said that it took control measures against two Philippine coast guard ships that “intruded” into waters near the Sabina Shoal. It said in a statement that the Philippine ships escalated the situation by repeatedly approaching a Chinese coast guard ship.

China has rapidly expanded its military and has become increasingly assertive in pursuing its territorial claims in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims virtually in its entirety. The tensions have led to more frequent confrontations, primarily with the Philippines, though the longtime territorial disputes also involve other claimants, including Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei.

Japan’s government separately protested to Beijing on Tuesday, saying that a Chinese reconnaissance plane violated its airspace and forced it to scramble fighter jets.

___

Associated Press journalists Joeal Calupitan and Aaron Favila in Manila, Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and David Rising in Bangkok contributed to this report.

JIM GOMEZ

Gomez is The AP Chief Correspondent in the Philippines.

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AP · by JIM GOMEZ · August 27, 2024

18. Ukraine has found a path to victory

The big "IF" is in the subtitle. Will the west overcome "strategic timidity?"

Ukraine has found a path to victory

If given sufficient quantities of Western aid, Kyiv could have the capability to begin restoring its territory in 2025

Michael Bohnert

23 August 2024 • 4:15pm

The Telegraph · by Michael Bohnert 23 August 2024 • 4:15pm

Comment

If given sufficient quantities of Western aid, Kyiv could have the capability to begin restoring its territory in 2025

Credit: Ukrainian soldiers take part in a training exercise

Make no mistake: recent Ukrainian operations in the Kursk Oblast of Russia have the potential to significantly stretch Russian forces not just in that region, but everywhere. I say this as someone whose job it is to monitor them and other matters in the industrial-military sphere. Ukraine has pulled of an operation that could buy much needed time for Western aid to arrive and allow replenishment of Ukrainian forces. Furthermore, in an aspect little discussed, the incursion puts in doubt Russia’s ability to launch any major offensives for the remainder of the year.

Russia, lest we forget, has devoted its entire force into Ukraine, and especially the Donbas. I believe it will be forced to choose between securing the Kursk Oblast and continuing offensives in the Donbas. Prior to the Kursk incursion, Russia was absorbing roughly 1,000 casualties a day, with corresponding equipment losses. Meanwhile, Russia’s recruitment efforts at 20,000 to 30,000 a month and vehicle production were roughly matching losses. This fact has left Russia with few reserve units capable of countering manoeuvring Ukrainian armour in Kursk and Belgorod.

Moscow faces a choice. It would likely require several months of recruitment and military production to stop Ukrainian advances and begin the process of securing Kursk. Ukrainian forces in that region have the advantage of not needing to defend Ukrainian territory, which means Kyiv can choose optimal locations to defend in the region, making Russian counter-offensives exceptionally costly. Alternatively, Russia could continue operations in the Donbas and pay the domestic price of ignoring the Ukrainian incursion and effectively ceding parts of Kursk and Belgorod to Ukraine. It is too early to say which Putin will opt for.

Crunching the numbers and assessing the satellite imagery, it was clear to me and others that throughout the war, restrictions from the West on Ukrainian incursions, with no such reciprocal restrictions on Russia, forced Ukraine to fortify its entire line, while Russia enjoyed the luxury of safety along its border. This allowed Russia to devote more troops to fighting in the Donbas. The recent Ukrainian operation into Kursk now changes the equation, requiring Russia to reinforce its entire border. That would require tens of thousands of troops, hundreds of vehicles, and fortification resources. To do so will require the Kremlin to devote months’ worth of recruitment and resupply.

Ukraine’s incursion is also altering Russian air operations. For months, Russia has been able to safely drop glide bombs onto fixed Ukrainian positions in the Donbas. Ukrainian mobile operations in Kursk require much more dynamic air operations. Ukrainian drones have downed numerous Russian drones, blinding Moscow to battlefield conditions. Russian helicopters have proven to be vulnerable to Ukrainian drones in Kursk while Ukrainian drone strikes on airfields in western Russia have limited fixed wing aircraft presence. Russia is now forced to fly longer distances in attempts to stop Ukraine in Kursk. Longer flights translate to fewer Russian bombs dropped a day. We are already seeing fewer daily strikes in the Donbas.

In short, Russian ground and air forces are stretched in a way they have not been throughout the war. This will slow Russian operations over the next few months, bleeding into the rainy autumns and bitter cold winters that halt operations in Ukraine. Stricter and broader enforcement of Western sanctions by Ukraine’s allies and increased Ukrainian strikes on Russian airfields, energy infrastructure, and logistics will only further stretch Russian forces and defence industrial base. This provides Ukraine the opportunity to regenerate and reequip forces between now and the Spring of 2025.

But Western aid is crucial to this, and if given in sufficient quantities could significantly improve Ukrainian capabilities to begin restoring its territory in 2025.

Ukraine has regained a path forward to victory. Ukraine’s allies should not squander this opportunity. Ending the conflict quickly is the goal, but it must be from a position of Ukrainian strength.

Michael Bohnert is an engineer at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution

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The AUKUS submarine deal has been exposed as a monumental folly – is it time to abandon ship?

Author

Mark Beeson
Adjunct professor, University of Technology Sydney

Disclosure statement

Mark Beeson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

theconversation.com · by Mark Beeson Adjunct professor, University of Technology Sydney

Nautical metaphors are irresistible, I’m afraid, when talking about Australia’s seemingly endless submarine saga. But as investigative journalist Andrew Fowler makes clear in Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty, his excellent and excoriating analysis of the genesis of the AUKUS pact, there isn’t much room for levity otherwise.

Anyone who doubts the accuracy of former Labor luminaries Paul Keating and Gareth Evans, who have argued that AUKUS is, as Keating put it, “the worst deal in all history”, really ought to read this book.

Review: Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty – Andrew Fowler (Melbourne University Publishing)

The plan for Australia to acquire eight nuclear-powered submarines, built locally in partnership with the United Stated and the United Kingdom, is projected to cost up to A$368 billion. But it is not just the cost of the AUKUS project that is astounding.

While many people should hang their heads in shame, the principal architect of this monumental folly is Scott Morrison, whose reputation will be deservedly further diminished by the revelations contained in Fowler’s carefully researched volume. One question the book does not address in detail is the abysmal quality of political leadership in this country, especially, though not exclusively, on the conservative side of politics.

Whatever the reasons for this, the end result was that

the huge shift in Australia’s foreign policy alignment was hatched by a Christian fundamentalist former tourism marketing manager with no training in strategic or foreign affairs but a great gift for secrecy and deception.

The shift in question was the decision to abandon an agreement to buy much cheaper, arguably far more suitable and deliverable submarines from France, with the aim of “welding Australia’s military to the United States”. In retrospect, it is hard to believe how badly the French were misled, or how shortsighted the rationale for the switch actually was.

In Fowler’s view, buying the French submarines would have been a “remarkable achievement”. It would have given Australia “greater independence and a more influential position in the world”.

Properly explaining Australian policymakers’ fear of strategic and foreign policy independence would take another book. But what clearly emerges from Fowler’s account is how irresponsible and self-serving Australia’s approach to national security became under Morrison. The fate of the Australian people, not to mention the endlessly invoked “national interest”, was of less concern than short-term political advantage.

“The fact that the increasing US military presence in the Indo-Pacific could draw Australia into a conflict,” writes Fowler, “seemed of little consequence in Morrison’s desire to wedge Labour on national security.”

Of course, being painted as “weak” on security, and the US alliance in particular, was the stuff of nightmares for the Australian Labor Party. It still is. Consequently, the ALP’s leadership has gone to extraordinary lengths to try and convince voters, and its own increasingly sceptical rank and file, that not only are they equally committed to national security, but that the AUKUS agreement is the best way of achieving it.

Scott Morrison at an AUKUS press conference, Parliament House, Canberra, September 16, 2021. Mick Tsikas/AAP

High costs, significant risks

Given AUKUS was the brainchild of a discredited conservative prime minster who, Fowler suggests, “believed he was on a divine mission”, one might have hoped the Albanese government could have at least conducted a perfunctory cost–benefit analysis. AUKUS is the largest single military acquisition the nation has ever undertaken, after all. Recent defence acquisitions have become known for massive cost blowouts and failures to operate or arrive in the advertised manner.

But the Labor Party has not only walked into Morrison’s trap; it has willingly, even enthusiastically, “embraced a decision taken after a deeply flawed process”. Even more consequentially, as Fowler points out, “with the major parties in lockstep on AUKUS, the most complex and expensive spend in Australian military history would never be publicly investigated”.

At the very least, this is an astounding failure of good governance and accountability. Perhaps even more remarkably, it also demonstrates a singular lack of political judgement, driven by short-term political concerns rather than long-term strategic interests.

“Labor lost the one chance it had to identify itself as independent and courageous and put the interests of the country ahead of its understandable desire to win government,” argues Fowler. “The consequences of the fear that drove the ALP leadership to embrace AUKUS with barely a second thought will haunt them for years to come.”

Serves them right. When there is little discernible difference between the major political parties on issues of profound national importance, voters – especially the younger variety – may understandably despair about their futures.

Even if we put aside the fragile, unpredictable and polarised nature of US politics, it is not too controversial to suggest that the US alliance has some potential frailties and significant costs. Not the least of these is fighting in wars that have no obvious strategic relevance to Australia.

AUKUS will further complicate Australia’s relationship with China, our major trading partner. But it carries other significant risks. This not just because, as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says, it is “inconceivable” that we would not fight alongside the US in any conflict with China over Taiwan.

If the naval base at Garden Island, just down the road from me off the coast of Fremantle, is not already a nuclear target, it assuredly will be once US and UK nuclear-powered submarines routinely operate from there. Whether my neighbours realise they risk being vaporised as part of our commitment to the alliance and a “great nation building project” is a mystery that has not been explored.

Local politicians, universities and defence representatives certainly recognise the short-term benefits that may flow from new investment. But this means there is likely to be next to no informed debate about, much less opposition to, the AUKUS pact, no matter what the ultimate costs may be for a nation that can’t even provide adequate housing for its own people. Indeed, the lack of debate, not to say outrage, about the sheer cost of the AUKUS project is perhaps the most remarkable feature of the sorry submarine saga.

And that is before we get to the growing doubts about the reliability, deliverability or strategic relevance of nuclear-powered submarines. Perhaps people find technical discussions stupefyingly dull or incomprehensible. Perhaps they don’t realise that if we spend all that money on submarines, not only will our sovereignty and capacity to act independently be significantly eroded, as Keating and Malcolm Turnbull have claimed, but we won’t be able to spend the money on more immediate and tangible threats – repairing our rapidly degrading natural environment, for example.

I am not convinced Australia needs to buy any submarines. This will no doubt strike those in Canberra’s strategic bubble as heretical, ill-informed and irresponsible. But it is noteworthy that our overall security did not seem to suffer while the ageing Collins class submarines were unavailable for four years.

Even those with widely respected expertise in such matters, such as Hugh White, have cast doubt on the feasibility of AUKUS. White has written that “long delays and cost overruns are certain. Outright failure is a real possibility.”

Defence Minister Richard Marles confirmed Australia’s commitment to AUKUS at a press conference on March 14, 2023. Lucas Coch/AAP

Drunken sailors

Fowler has produced quite the page-turner for a book on strategic policy. His account provokes occasional gasps of disbelief, especially about the conduct of the Morrison government and its coterie of carefully chosen, like-minded advisors, many of them from defence companies likely to benefit from government spending.

Many former Morrison ministers – as well as Morrison himself – have exited through the revolving door between government and business to take up lucrative positions in the defence industry. Who would have thought?

Nuked is worth a close reading to see how Fowler arrives at his damning conclusion:

the level of incompetence in the government of Australia was breathtaking, as were the repercussions. The United States would be calling all the shots on what kind of submarines would be sold to Australia, how old they would be, how many there would be, when they would be delivered, and even if they would be sold at all.

It was to be expected that Washington would act in its own best interests. What is extraordinary is the possibility that Morrison truly believed that what was best for the United States was best for Australia. Just as extraordinary is the fact that the Labor Party, perhaps fearful of history embraced the deal that made Australia so vulnerable, undermining its independence and sovereignty.

Another nautical metaphor about spending like drunken sailors comes to mind. It wouldn’t be quite so galling if the nation’s political leaders weren’t using our money or were motivated by something other than short-term political advantage or the fear of being wedged.

The good news, perhaps, is that it is difficult to imagine the nuclear-powered submarines will ever arrive. The bad news is we will still have to pay the Americans and the British to prop up their overburdened and underperforming shipyards in the meantime. With friends like these, who needs to make new enemies?

It beggars belief that a country with unparalleled geographical advantages and no obvious enemies thinks it is a good idea to spend $368 billion on offensive military capabilities, which may or may not work or be delivered. Nuked explains how this situation came about. But we may need to ask psychologists why our political leaders have turned us into what the diplomat Alan Renouf famously called a “frightened country” and allowed such follies to flourish.

theconversation.com · by Mark Beeson Adjunct professor, University of Technology Sydney

20. Myanmar military on verge of falling from power, analysts say

Are we ready for what comes next?

Myanmar military on verge of falling from power, analysts say - Indo-Pacific Defense Forum

ipdefenseforum.com

Dr. Miemie Winn Byrd

The Myanmar military junta faces imminent collapse, even though many analysts believed it was “too big to fail” at the start of the country’s armed resistance to restore democracy. The junta seized power in a February 2021 coup, but the resistance coalition’s ongoing Operation 1027, named for its launch date of October 27, 2023, has weakened the military to an unprecedented degree, analysts say.

The military’s recent loss of the northeastern command headquarters in Lashio, a town of about 150,000 people in the mountainous Shan state, highlights the junta’s weakened condition. The resistance coalition has liberated 75 towns and cities, is fighting to free 75 more and has surrounded 105 others. That leaves fewer than 100 of the nation’s 352 towns (28% of the country) under the military junta’s control as of mid-August 2024, according to the Defense Ministry of the pro-democracy National Unity Government (NUG).

This unforeseen shift in the conflict has shocked those who initially underestimated the resistance, including in neighboring countries such as Bangladesh, India, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Thailand. Those nations misjudged the impact of Myanmar’s decade-long democratic transition and clung to overrated views of the military’s strength.

The conflict has shattered the illusion of the military’s might. Despite having more resources, the once-feared junta is being overpowered by the People’s Defense Forces and ethnic armed organizations (EAO).

The resistance’s resilience and effectiveness are attributed to five factors:

Historic Collaboration: EAOs and the NUG have formed an unprecedented alliance, combining combat experience with strategic insight.

Defections: Significant numbers of defectors from the military and civil service have provided the resistance with crucial insider information and weakened the junta’s operational capabilities.

Popular Support: Widespread support across segments of society has been vital in sustaining and expanding the resistance.

Diaspora Mobilization: The international diaspora has mobilized support and resources, further bolstering the resistance.

Women’s Participation: Women have been instrumental in the movement, constituting an estimated 60% of the resistance.

The PRC, like other neighbors, initially expected the Myanmar military’s superior firepower to ensure its dominance. Beijing engaged with the junta, pressuring northern EAOs to remain neutral. However, the emergence of junta-backed scam hubs and related criminal activities in Myanmar near the Chinese border shifted the PRC’s stance. Tens of thousands of mainly Chinese people have been held hostage in the hubs and forced to defraud victims with internet schemes.

With its interests at stake due to the criminal activities, the PRC stopped pressuring the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BHA) against launching Operation 1027 to target the junta’s outposts near the nations’ border. The operation, which liberated thousands of trafficked victims, inspired other resistance groups, shifting momentum in favor of the pro-democracy coalition forces and altering Beijing’s perception of the junta’s viability.

The PRC, however, then resumed pressuring the 3BHA to agree to a cease-fire in January 2024. The junta immediately violated the agreement, and the PRC has been unable to enforce the military’s compliance.

Historically, cease-fires with the junta have served as tactical pauses rather than genuine peace efforts. Such pressure tactics foster distrust of the PRC among the Myanmar people.

The PRC now appears to doubt the junta’s chances of victory but remains reluctant to fully support the pro-democracy movement. Beijing is pressuring the junta’s chief, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, to step down and continues to advocate for a military-administered election under Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution as an exit strategy.

At the outset of the coup, the people of Myanmar rejected the 2008 Constitution, which grants all power to the military and reserves 25% of parliamentary seats for it. Over 90% of the populace is committed to removing the military from politics and exerting civilian control over the armed forces, polls indicate.

After the loss of the command headquarters in Lashio, the junta blamed the PRC for providing lethal support to the 3BHA. Also, the military has sought to further inflame anti-China sentiment by portraying the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, which is primarily ethnically Kokang Chinese and a member of the 3BHA, as Beijing’s proxy invasion force. The junta has organized anti-PRC protests in Yangon and Mandalay.

Simultaneously, the Myanmar pro-democracy diaspora worldwide is protesting Beijing’s support for the pro-junta constitution enacted in 2008 and for continuing the authoritarian regime.

Beijing appears to be out of touch with the sentiments of the Myanmar people if it believes that a military-administered election will bring back stability. The PRC’s attempt to play all sides will likely leave it in a highly unfavorable position with all sides, exacerbating anti-China sentiment among the Myanmar populace.

It would be in the PRC’s long-term interest in Myanmar to align with the people’s desires, adopt a less resistant stance toward democracy and take a more pragmatic approach to resolving the protracted conflict.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Miemie Winn Byrd is a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii.

ipdefenseforum.com

21. Old US Bradleys becoming 'legend' in Ukraine shows what the country can do when it gets enough of the weapons it needs

I remember going through Badley transition in 1983 in Germany. I remember watching 60 Minutes sometime in the 1980s to learn about how dangerous the Bradley was (We did roll one and we sunk another in a river crossing so I guess they were somewhat dangerous but I doubt that is what the analysts and naysayers meant).

The Bradley has come a long way since then. And we should learn from our Ukrainian friends.

Old US Bradleys becoming 'legend' in Ukraine shows what the country can do when it gets enough of the weapons it needs

Business Insider · by Sinéad Baker

Military & Defense

Analysis by Sinéad Baker

2024-08-26T09:18:01Z

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Ukrainian soldiers patrol with a Bradley Fighting vehicle as the Russia-Ukraine war continues in Avdiivka, Donbas, Ukraine. Anadolu

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .

Ukraine's success with Bradley vehicles has led to a new "legend" around it, a warfare expert said.
He said its wins are partly down to Ukraine having enough of them, while other gear is drip-fed.
Experts criticize Western delays and drip-feeding of aid, saying it makes Ukraine less effective.

The success Ukraine has seen using old American Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles against Russia shows what Ukraine can do when it is given enough of the weapons it needs, a warfare expert told Business Insider.

The US has given Ukraine more than 300 Bradleys, significantly more than some other armored combat vehicles, like the Abrams tanks; the US only sent Ukraine 31 of those.

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.

Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander for the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear forces, said that the numbers available have given Ukraine the ability to use its Bradleys far more effectively than the tanks.

"They've got a lot of them," Hamish said of the Bradleys. "And if they had a lot of Abrams and a lot of Challengers, they would use them differently."

47th Mechanized Brigade via Telegram

The way Ukraine's Western partners have supplied weapons, often in small numbers and after significant delays, has come with heavy criticism throughout the war.

Having enough of a weapon is important for militaries as it allows them to use those weapons more flexibly. It means being able to put the weapons in risky situations where they could achieve big breakthroughs, and if any are lost, it's not a major tactical and PR disaster.

With the US-provided Bradleys that Ukraine is using, "because they've got a lot of them, they can afford to lose a few. When you've only got 14 Challenger 2s, you can't really afford to lose many," de Bretton-Gordon said. "So I think that is key."

He said that it's a lesson for the West, where a belief grew that fewer, very technical pieces of kit would beat a larger number of weaker pieces. "We're now realizing that you sort of need a balance," he said.

Bradleys were built as a response to the Soviet infantry fighting vehicles and first entered service in the 1980s. They are not the most advanced armored vehicles available, but they are versatile and highly capable. And Ukraine's successes in battle with this vehicle have resulted in a "Bradley legend," de Bretton-Gordon said.

"So when you look at the Bradleys, it's their mass and the way that they're used, which is why they're so successful," he said. In Ukraine, Bradleys have fought against infantry in bunkers, troop carriers, drones, and even top tanks.

'Drip feeding' Ukraine

Many warfare experts, soldiers, and even some allied governments have criticized the way many of Ukraine's partners give it aid. Weapons often arrive after months of debate (during which Russia can prepare), in small numbers, and in packages that don't give Ukraine a clear picture or certainty on future deliveries.

"The drip feeding of kit to Ukraine," de Bretton-Gordon said, means "they've been fighting with one hand behind their back."

An American soldier fighting in Ukraine told BI earlier this year that Western aid arrives in "tidbits" and after lengthy debates, with different levels of support arriving in different packages.

He said that "it feels like everything that we've been getting has been either too late or just enough to barely hold on. It feels like whenever they donate things, it's kind of just enough to keep Ukraine standing but without thought of the long term."

That means Ukraine's soldiers often can't develop long-term strategies, he said, adding his belief that Ukraine would be in a better place without this issue.

Narciso Contreras/Anadolu via Getty Images

De Bretton-Gordon said that when it comes to weapons like Western tanks, "had we not waited a year and given them tanks straight away, and had we given them hundreds of tanks, not a hundred, of course it would make a huge difference."

"And I think the frustrating thing is there are thousands of Western tanks sitting in tank sheds rusting across Europe, be they American German or whatever," he said.

The larger number of Bradleys available to them has given the Ukrainians more to work with in varied operations and the ability to lose them. According to the Oryx open-source tracker, Ukraine has lost at least 90 of these vehicles. It's unclear if any of those were recovered and repaired. Ukraine still has to be smart with them, and it has been, but it has the option to take some risks.

The numbers just aren't there for other weapons like the Abrams, which even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said came in insufficient numbers to make a substantial difference.

Bradleys are excelling

Bradleys have thus, at times, proven to be more useful than Abrams tanks, BI previously reported, with warfare experts noting that their light frames make them particularly well-suited to the style of warfare seen in Russia's invasion.

Despite having lighter armor, they have been effective against Russian tanks. Experts previously told BI that Ukraine has been good at adapting with the vehicles to the needs of this war.

Global Images Ukraine | Getty Images

Nicholas Drummond, a former British Army officer who now works as a land warfare analyst, told BI they are effective because they are lighter than tanks and can go places those tanks struggle to go, and they have a flexible cannon with a high-rate of fire that can provide fire support and immobilize tank sensors.

De Bretton-Gordon described them as "a really good piece of kit because it's reliable, it's easy to use, it moves around quickly, and it is fairly well protected."

As a result of their successes in Ukraine, they are seen as better weapons than they were before this war, he said, with people talking about it "in very positive terms, which I wouldn't have done four or five years ago."

"When I was a tank commander in the first Gulf War, there were Bradleys around, and we didn't think that they were that great then," he said, but now, "they're creating a bit of a legend."

De Bretton-Gordon said that Ukraine's Bradley wins against Russian tanks came because it has "worked out the real vulnerabilities of Russian tanks." Ukraine has surprisingly used Bradleys "to actually hunt down tanks as well," he noted.

He said there have been moments when "two or three Bradleys are attacking a T-90 or a T-80"—some of Russia's most advanced tanks. A video earlier this year showed two Bradleys hitting a T-90M before its crew abandoned the tank. A drone appeared to finish it off.

De Bretton-Gordon said that Ukraine has exploited the weaknesses that exist in many Russian tanks. On these tanks, the places where the turret meets the hull "are very vulnerable because there's virtually no armor there."

Hence, even if Bradleys have small rounds compared to what a tank can fire, "if you fire enough of those at the right place, it can take out a tank."

And, again, having more Bradleys to use means Ukraine can be extra effective.

"And, of course, if you've got two or three Bradleys firing at one T-90 — and the Russians haven't been very clever the way they've used their tanks — that overwhelming firepower means that they're taking these T-90s out and the Bradley is sort of becoming a bit of a mythological beast."

Russia Ukraine analysis

Business Insider · by Sinéad Baker

22. U.S. military’s Tinder ads in Middle East raise eyebrows

Another black mark. This illustrates that it is hard to conduct clandestine influence operations at scale. I also think much of the clandestine influence activity is conducted by contractors and not purely by the uniformed military. We should think about whether we are using our uniformed PSYOP professionals effectively.

I do believe we need to spend more time and resources on overt PSYOP and influence. But it is the clandestine that gets people's attention (though not the right people)

In 2022, the Pentagon’s policy chief ordered a sweeping audit of clandestine military psyops after social media companies removed accounts based on fake personas that they suspected were created by the U.S. military. The Post verified that the accounts were indeed the work of the military, including Centcom. One fake account claimed Afghans received the dead bodies, organs having been removed, of relatives who fled Iran, according to a report published by Stanford University. Some of the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. The accounts were removed in 2020.

The review resulted in tighter policies regarding the use of clandestine information operations, which now require sign-off by senior Pentagon officials, the CIA and the State Department, The Post reported last year. Following that policy change, the practice of deploying sham accounts to influence overseas audiences was dramatically reduced, officials said.

U.S. military’s Tinder ads in Middle East raise eyebrows

An advertisement warning that U.S. fighter jets were ready to respond to provocations showed up on a dating app in Lebanon.

6 min

Séamus Malekafzali, a freelance journalist based in Lebanon, encountered Tinder advertisements purportedly from U.S. Central Command warning against joining Iranian-backed militants on Aug. 22. This ad was linked to a Central Command post on X, Malekafzali said. (Screenshot by Séamus Malekafzali)

By Ellen Nakashima and Alex Horton

August 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The warning appeared online last week in Arabic beneath pictures of U.S. warplanes: “Do not take up arms against the United States or its partners,” it said, noting that America “will protect its partners in the face of threats from the Iranian regime and its proxies.”

And to underscore the message: Central Command is “fully prepared” and ready to employ F-16 and A-10 aircraft “currently in the region.”

As fears grow of a wider conflict between Iran and its proxies, and Israel and its backers, the warning — apparently aimed at young disaffected men in the Middle East — may not have been that surprising.

What raised eyebrows was the platform: Tinder.

The ad on the U.S.-based dating app, which gave the world the phrases “swipe right” (to approve a match) and “swipe left” (to reject), has raised fresh questions about the U.S. military’s online information operations, which are aimed at influencing the views of overseas audiences and countering what the government perceives as misleading narratives from foreign adversaries.

Part of a broader campaign in what is commonly called psychological operations or military information support operations, the ad belonged to Centcom, according to one U.S. official familiar with the matter, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Following World news

Following

It was an explicit threat that the Pentagon would take action if Iran or its proxies threatened the United States or its ally Israel, an extraordinary warning — one that some experts saw as ham-fisted — and a reminder that American forces helped bring down scores of Iranian drones and missiles in an April attack.

Central Command declined to comment, saying it generally does not discuss information operations. The Pentagon had no comment on the specific post.

But separately, a defense official told The Washington Post “broadly speaking and as a matter of policy, the Department of Defense does conduct military information operations in support of our national security priorities. These activities must be undertaken in compliance with U.S. law and DOD policy, and we are committed to enforcing those safeguards.”

Tinder removed the ad after The Post inquired about it on Thursday. Philip Fry, a company spokesperson, said that it “violated our policies” on violent and political messaging.

Séamus Malekafzali, a freelance journalist based in Lebanon, encountered the advertisement when he opened Tinder last Thursday, he said. Swiping right redirected him to a Central Command post on X, he told The Post, with a similar message written in Arabic describing the presence of attack aircraft in the region.

He posted screenshots of the ad on X. The post went viral.

“Who on earth approved this and how high was everyone in their chain of command?” Timothy Kaldas, the deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, posted on X.

One U.S. military psyops officer scoffed at the effort. “On its face I doubt it would be very effective,” said the officer, who has worked on information operations campaigns and was not authorized to speak on the record. “What message is it that they think will resonate here?” the officer said. “This is just an in-your-face ‘don’t mess with me.’”

As for the advertisement appearing on Tinder, another U.S. official quipped: “That’s called ‘meeting people where they are.’”

The message itself could be effective, said Gittipong “Eddie” Paruchabutr, a retired Army psyops officer who worked on information operations policy, if “it’s part of a long-term campaign supporting a continuous policy, and not a one-off ad buy.”

But, he added, Tinder was probably a poor pick of a venue. “I’m guessing the average belligerent is probably among a very small subset of Tinder users,” said Paruchabutr, now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

A more effective approach, he said, would be to seek to identify the online venues or platforms frequented by the target audience, which in this case, he said, might be “military-age males.” Those might include a closed Facebook group or Telegram account, he said.

Centcom often uses contractors to create and disseminate the message to a particular audience, using various tools to help identify platforms, he said.

In 2022, the Pentagon’s policy chief ordered a sweeping audit of clandestine military psyops after social media companies removed accounts based on fake personas that they suspected were created by the U.S. military. The Post verified that the accounts were indeed the work of the military, including Centcom. One fake account claimed Afghans received the dead bodies, organs having been removed, of relatives who fled Iran, according to a report published by Stanford University. Some of the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. The accounts were removed in 2020.

The review resulted in tighter policies regarding the use of clandestine information operations, which now require sign-off by senior Pentagon officials, the CIA and the State Department, The Post reported last year. Following that policy change, the practice of deploying sham accounts to influence overseas audiences was dramatically reduced, officials said.

Separately, the military ran a secret information operations campaign at the height of the covid-19 pandemic during the Trump administration, creating phony accounts to counter Chinese influence efforts in the Philippines, Reuters reported in June.

A defense official told The Post in a statement that the current administration, when it was made aware of the campaign in 2021, “paused activities, we did a thorough review of our information operations, and we stopped all COVID vaccine related information operations. We’ve continued to refine our processes to improve accountability and oversight for information operations.”

The Tinder ad, by contrast, is apparently not a clandestine campaign: Centcom’s logo was clearly visible.

All military psyops campaigns, whether overt or clandestine, are subject to an approval process governed by a policy set by the Pentagon. That policy addresses the objectives, potential target audiences and circumstances under which a campaign must be coordinated with another U.S. government agency and at which level. Approvals for overt campaigns are usually handled at the combatant command level.

The Tinder ad “is either an unforced error or laziness,” said Paruchabutr. “To push back against adversaries in the information space, we need more trained influence professionals and we need to hold their leaders accountable when they mess up.”

Kareem Fahim in Istanbul and Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut contributed to this report.

23. In The Kill Zone: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 6)

I hope Sean and Jack turn this series into a full biography of WIllie Merkerson.

In The Kill Zone: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 6)

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/in-the-kill-zone-the-life-and-times-c77?r=7i07&utm

Part 6: In The Wind

Sean D. Naylor and Jack Murphy

Aug 27, 2024

∙ Paid

Sudanese President Jaafar Nimeiri (left) meets U.S. President Ronald Reagan (right) at the White House on April 1, 1985. Five days later Nimeiri was deposed in a military coup as he belatedly tried to rush home to save his presidency. (U.S. Government photo)

One April evening in 1985, Milt Bearden, the CIA’s Sudan station chief, answered the doorbell at his Khartoum home to find on his doorstep two Israelis who were remarkably calm given their predicament.

The pair, together with a third officer who arrived later that night, had been operating under non-official cover for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. While establishing a foothold in Africa, they had been helping to coordinate the evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel from refugee camps in Sudan, an Arab-dominated country with which the Jewish state had no diplomatic relations.

In a tightly controlled operation, the Mossad and the CIA had paid corrupt figures at the very top of Sudan’s government to ignore – and even to assist – the successful evacuation of virtually all the Jewish refugees. But that regime had just been toppled in a military coup, those leaders were in exile or prison, and one of them had sold out the Israeli spies and the location of their safe house to the new government, which was less well-disposed to the Jewish state than was its predecessor.

The mobs whose protests had sparked the coup were still in the streets, which were now also crawling with nervous soldiers and newly arrived Libyan gunmen.

Their cover identities as Western professionals blown, the Mossad officers had been forced to abandon their safe house in haste. In intelligence parlance, they were now in the wind.

The effort to save their lives was about to consume the CIA station in Khartoum.

Downfall

Unrest against Sudanese President Jaafar Nimeiri had been building for several years.

For neither the first nor last time during the Cold War, in Nimeiri the United States was backing a client who had little appreciation for Western-style capitalism. “[Y]ou had a president with a deep-seated prejudice against market economics,” Hume Horan, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, told a State Department historian.

“The economy was a wreck,” Horan said. “Gasoline was almost unobtainable, and [electrical] power was something only for the rich.” Scarcity of bread and other basic goods, and the consequent inflation, brought mobs onto the streets.

With his political base shrinking, Nimeiri had tried to make common cause with the Muslim Brotherhood, culminating in September 1983 with his declaration that Sharia would be the law of the land. But after his very public shift towards Islamism, the disclosure in late March 1985 that his regime had repeatedly allowed the United States and Israel to arrange the airlift of thousands of Jews to Israel dealt another blow to his popularity.

Sudanese President Jaafar Nimeiri (second from right) arriving at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, during a November 1983 visit to Washington. U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Hume Horan is standing center in the tan coat. (U.S. Department of Defense photo)

Inexplicably, Nimeiri chose this moment to visit Washington (“trying to get a little more money out of the United States,” Bearden told The Team House podcast). As was the norm in Khartoum, the leaders of the city’s diplomatic corps gathered at the airport on the morning of March 27 to bid the white suit and Panama hat-clad Nimeiri farewell on his trip. They were greeted by a scene described to the State Department historian as “Kafkaesque” by David Shinn, who was normally the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy but was at the airport that day the U.S. charge d’affaires, Horan having already returned to Washington to be there for Nimeiri’s visit.

“The mobs, knowing that the president was leaving, began to torch cars and a few buildings,” Shinn told the historian. “By the time the presidential plane was going down the runway for take-off, you could see fires burning in the city,” he said. “Here was the president leaving his country for a visit to the U.S. and his capital was burning.”

The protests only grew the longer Nimeiri was away. William Pierce, chief of the embassy’s political section, sent a cable to Washington on April 1 saying that Nimeiri’s chances of containing the situation “looked very slim,” he later told the State Department historian. The cable arrived two hours before Nimeiri met with President Ronald Reagan, he added.

Nimeiri was “O.K.,” Reagan wrote in his diary that day. “I think we’re going to be able to help him.” But he was mistaken.

“The street was in effect forcing a change in Sudan,” Shinn told The High Side. “Nimeiri had totally misread the situation and as a result flew off to the U.S. and basically ended up losing control of the government.”

On April 4, continuing his visit to Washington as his own capital burned, Nimeiri met with Vice President George H.W. Bush at the latter’s residence. “I was on my satellite radio with headquarters all the time on my roof because of the revolution going on,” said Bearden in an interview with The High Side. “I told Washington, ‘If you don’t get him on an airplane now, he’s going to be a houseguest for the vice president for ever, because this thing is going down.’”

On April 6, 1985, with Khartoum teetering on the edge of anarchy, Defense Minister Abdel Rahman Suwar al-Dahab overthrew his president in an almost bloodless coup as Nimeiri raced back from Washington. The ousted leader made it only as far as Cairo, where he went into exile.

Abdel Rahman Suwar al-Dahab, who organized and led the military coup that overthrew Nimeiri, under whom he had served as defense minister. Dahab’s coup marked an end to the United States’ cozy relationship with the Sudanese government.

The CIA suffers a blow

The coup caught the CIA station by surprise, according to Bob Baer. As the station’s leading Arabic speaker, Baer was brought in that night to translate intercepted Sudanese military communications while Dahab and his fellow coup plotters positioned their units across the capital. The unfolding story of Nimeiri’s downfall heralded a disaster for the United States, and particularly for the CIA, which had invested heavily in Nimeiri and his security services.

Within days, the coup had deprived Bearden and his team of their primary advantage in Khartoum – their deep penetration of the State Security Organization, Nimeiri’s civilian intelligence agency.

The SSO and the army had been locked for years in a power struggle. As a result, one of the first steps taken by the army officers who toppled Nimeiri, and who called themselves the Transitional Military Council, was to abolish the SSO and lock up its personnel.

“They arrested all of them,” said Willie Merkerson. “They called them in, told them to report to duty, and arrested every one of them – even those who were posted abroad.”

The TMC held Nimeiri’s spies in a jail from which the CIA received daily reports, sometimes in person. “One of the guys, who was very close to me, was able to break out every night,” said Bearden. “I’d meet him on a dark street and he’d brief me on how everybody’s doing.”

Keen to ensure the well-being of its agents who were now behind bars, the station “made sure they got food and drink,” Merkerson said. According to Bearden, his contact who could break out ensured that the agency’s support went even further. “After the second night, I would have to bring him all the latest VHS movies,” he said.

The agency also looked after the SSO families. “Nobody [in Khartoum] was getting gas so I had a gas truck … that would make sure that their cars were full and their families were taken care of,” Bearden said.

Nonetheless, the impact of the detentions on the station’s flow of intelligence was immediate and severe. “They disrupted everything when they arrested those guys,” Merkerson said. “The only information we were getting was … second hand [from] those under deep, deep cover.”

“Everybody I know in Sudan is in jail,” Bearden wrote in a cable to CIA headquarters, according to an article by former CIA officer Jack Kassinger in the Winter/Spring 2024 edition of The Intelligencer, a journal published in hard copy only by the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. (In an email exchange with The High Side, Bearden acknowledged that he had had written “something like that.”)

To Jim Senner, who later that year replaced Bearden as station chief, the situation reflected poorly on his predecessor’s decisions on how to allocate the agency’s resources in Sudan. “All the station’s eggs were in that one basket with the security service and they were just left completely blinded,” he said. “They were so invested in the security service that they had ignored every other aspect of the government.”

Bearden pushed back hard on this perspective. “That’s horseshit,” he told The High Side. “I…had some very, very solid coverage, [including agents] some of which were so sensitive that some of the people you’re talking to probably didn’t even know about.”

One of Bearden’s most valuable contacts was a paratroop lieutenant colonel named Omar al-Bashir, whose oversight of the 144 ^th Special Forces Battalion brought him into Merkerson’s – and therefore Bearden’s – orbit. “I had Omar Bashir, who was just a colonel but waiting his time,” Bearden said.

Bashir, who would go on to rule Sudan between 1989 and 2019, first as a military dictator then as a civilian, was not a paid, recruited agent for the CIA, according to both Bearden and Merkerson. “No, no, no, no, he wasn’t, but he was a good contact,” said Bearden, adding that his relationship with Bashir continues “to this day.”

When Bearden, who retired from the CIA in 1994, visited Bashir “a couple of times in the late ‘90s” when he was still president, the dictator met him with “a big hug,” he said. “We never fell out.”

But Bearden acknowledged that he owed the beginning of that relationship to Merkerson, who specialized in building relationships with the army and the presidential guard. “Willie did in fact set me up with Bashir,” he said. (Merkerson had first met Bashir through a Sudanese officer who had been one of his students at the Special Forces Officer Qualification Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1977.)

As for Senner’s criticism that under Bearden the station had over-prioritized its relationships with the SSO, “the first thing any [chief of station] does in a country like that is you recruit the security service and make it almost an extension of yours,” Bearden said. However, in addition to the SSO, “we had great contacts in the army,” he said.

Baer confirmed this. “Milt had a source in the military … the people that came to power – an outstanding source,” he said, adding that he could not remember the source’s identity. Asked about Baer’s comment, and whether it was a reference to Bashir, Bearden replied: “I had other things, none of which I’ll probably expand upon.”

Despite the blow to the station’s source network that the coup represented, the damage was by no means complete, according to Mike Shanklin, a case officer who arrived in the station shortly after the coup. “We had this incredible asset stable,” Shanklin said, adding that the station’s case officers were each meeting assets at least three times a week. “We were busy as hell.”

Merkerson’s memory matches Shanklin’s. In the weeks after the coup, “I was meeting agents in graveyards,” he said. “I was meeting agents on my motorcycle.”

But Baer agreed with at least one facet of Senner’s observation. Despite the agency’s assets in the Sudanese military, “we didn’t really know what was going on once Nimeiri was overthrown,” he said. “Our main guys were the Sudanese intelligence.”

The downward shift in the agency’s status from an organization that could do almost anything it wanted in Sudan to one struggling not to get caught on the outside looking in was virtually instantaneous, a change that Baer got to experience on the day of the coup.

“I was playing tennis the day [Nimeiri] was overthrown and I came to a military roadblock and showed [the guard] my military ID card,” Baer said. The card was one of several laminated IDs the Nimeiri regime had distributed to the handful of “declared” CIA officers in Khartoum (i.e., those officers whose CIA status the station had willingly shared with Nimeiri’s State Security Organization).

They functioned as “get-out-of-jail cards,” Bearden and Baer each said. “Any time you wanted to get in anywhere in Sudan, you showed that [card],” Bearden said.

But the coup marked the cards’ expiry date, as Baer realized when he handed his to the soldier. “He threw it back in the car and said, ‘That’s not good anymore.’”

The laminated ID card given to Bob Baer by Sudan’s State Security Organization. Intended as “get out of jail cards” to help CIA officers navigate local officialdom, the cards lost their usefulness when President Nimeiri was deposed. (Photo courtesy Bob Baer)

Out of the shadows and into the mobs

It took weeks for the TMC to bring order to the streets. “The town was coming completely unstuck,” Bearden told The Team House. “The military wasn’t holding everything together.”

During this period, after nightfall, ghostly figures in turbans and white jellabiyas would dart from the shadows on Bearden’s block and slip silently into his house.

“Every[one] would come to me in the middle of the night,” Bearden said. “Coup plotters and counter-plotters.” At times, he said, his house resembled “a dentist’s office,” as he was forced to keep those vying for power separated in different rooms, with him running back and forth.

“There would be people from the army, and then people from the security service,” he said. “Some of them would sort of look to the left and look to the right and see if I still had a little nice scotch for them.”

Events were still “very much in flux,” and the visitors were looking for the CIA’s support, but Bearden said he was careful not to get involved. “I never went to one group and said, ‘Do a coup because the other group is a bad group,’” he said. “I was really in a listening mode rather than wanting to offer any support or advice, because you don’t want to get into that.”

Through these conversations, Bearden was able to keep Horan, the ambassador, with whom he enjoyed a good relationship, well informed as to the shifting alliances among the coup plotters. “I had a pretty good day-to-day account of what was going on with the coup,” Bearden said.

“We didn’t really have a heads up on the coup,” said Baer. “But certainly, it was Milt’s show after it happened.”

With the city engulfed in riots, Bearden sent two officers who could visually pass for locals into the mobs. One of those was Baer. “He would look like a light-skinned Sudanese … when he was dressed in the long white jellabiya and the little skull cap and his black beard, and his Arabic was very, very, very good,” Bearden said. “I would have him out in the mob, keeping an eye on that, and he would have a radio tucked in under his tunic … Bob was a guy that wasn’t afraid of many things.”

The other officer dispatched into the crowds to monitor events was Willie Merkerson. “He was the one that Bearden sent out into the streets to see which way the mobs were going,” Baer said.

“Willie would be out there,” Bearden confirmed. “He could put on a jellabiya and a turban and look pretty good.”

In the previous regime, knowledge of the Mossad and CIA operations to evacuate the Ethiopian Jews was limited to Nimeiri and a very few of his senior officials. Nimeiri was safe in exile in Egypt, but those aides now represented massive vulnerabilities for the handful of Mossad officers who remained in Khartoum.

The beginning of the end for Mossad operations in Khartoum came when the new regime’s security forces arrested “one of Nimeiri’s closest advisers … trying to escape with a suitcase full of $100 bills,” Bearden said. To save himself, the captive quickly divulged all he knew about the Mossad’s Khartoum safe house and the spies operating from it. From that moment, the hunt for the Israelis was on.

A prescient hotel lunch

The Mossad officers’ appearance at Bearden’s front door a couple of days after the coup had its origins in a fall 1983 lunch meeting in downtown Khartoum’s Meridien Hotel between Bearden, who’d taken charge of the station in early July, and three Mossad officers, including the Israeli service’s chief of operations and his senior man in the Sudanese capital.

The meeting occurred shortly after Nimeiri, as part of his cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, had declared Shariah to be the national law and had overseen the pouring of thousands of gallons of alcoholic beverages into the Nile. This limited the lunch options for Bearden and his dining companions.

“The waiter apologized [and said] the pork items were no longer on the menu and neither were the beer and wine,” to which one of the Israelis replied, “We can do without the pork,” Bearden said.

But the senior Mossad officer hadn’t requested the meeting (which Bearden’s bosses had directed him to attend) and flown in from Israel just to sample the local cuisine. “It wasn’t a courtesy meeting,” said Bearden. “I think they wanted absolutely to meet me, look me in the eye, and then understand that I was their fail-safe.” The Mossad chief of operations “more or less explained that he had his guys here and that their instructions were if things really ever went to shit, they go to Milt Bearden’s house.”

What had been a hypothetical scenario in September 1983 was now, in April 1985, a life-and-death reality.

Bearden acknowledged to The High Side that he might have been initially reluctant to get his station too entangled with his Israeli counterparts. “I might have said that – ‘I don’t want to get involved in whatever these guys are up to, because sooner or later you’re going to be in the same blast radius as them’ – that kind of thing,” he said.

However, in a later interview, Bearden said he had only meant that he didn’t want anyone else from the station to become involved with the Mossad officers. “I wasn’t going to let them [i.e. the Mossad] ease in any more beyond me,” he said.

Once the Mossad operatives were in trouble, however, “there was never a question” of not helping them, he said.

Despite the senior position Dahab had held in the Nimeiri government, the TMC differed significantly from its predecessor, nowhere more so than in the areas of internal security and foreign affairs.

Following a more nonaligned policy, the new government quickly moved to distance itself from the United States while smoothing relations with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. “They certainly were not our pawns,” Baer said.

While some CIA officers and diplomats were circumspect or even laudatory when discussing the new regime, Bearden’s deputy, Alan Platt, left no doubt where he stood. “The good guys were removed and then the bad guys came in,” he told the Operation Crest podcast. “The government became unfriendly to the United States.”

Gaddafi took advantage by flying scores of Libyan spies and gunmen into Khartoum almost immediately after the coup. These operatives were now helping Sudanese military intelligence hunt down the Israelis, according to Merkerson. (The Los Angeles Times and Gad Shimron, who served in Sudan with the Mossad, also confirmed the Libyan role). The threat to the Mossad officers came from “the Libyans, the new government [and] the [Sudanese] military, which was pro-Palestinian,” Baer said.

It is unclear how the Mossad officers found out that they had been compromised early enough to vacate their safe house before the Sudanese security forces got there. “They may have gotten a quick warning from somebody,” Bearden said.

But with the city in turmoil and the airport closed – the military had parked tanks and garbage trucks across the runway – the Israelis had no way to escape. Things had indeed gone to shit, so they fell back on their plan of last resort: head to Milt Bearden’s house.

That was how the first two Mossad operatives ended up on Bearden’s doorstep. It was also why their arrival was not completely unexpected.

“The town was falling apart,” Bearden said. “The revolution was on, and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to have this [Mossad] issue very quickly,’ and then all of a sudden the first group shows up at the door.”

The two Israelis, who were carrying some bulky communication gear, had driven to Bearden’s neighborhood but parked down the street. “They showed up and said, essentially, ‘The balloon is up and we’re activating our emergency [plan] with you,’” he said.

Bearden hustled them – and the third operative who arrived shortly afterward – inside and sent them upstairs, handing them some VHS movies to pass the time and “a couple of guns” just in case.

Other than Bearden’s French-born wife, Marie-Catherine, the house was empty. “I had sent my servants home,” he said.

But the house staff would return the next morning, and Bearden was worried that they would be pulled in for questioning by suspicious Sudanese security forces hunting the Israelis. He therefore gave the Mossad officers some Dallas Cowboys baseball caps to wear and told his servants that the new houseguests were “TDYers” – CIA personnel on temporary duty in Khartoum whom he was putting up in his house. This story wasn’t completely implausible, according to Bearden. As station chief, he didn’t often have subordinates as overnight guests, “but it happened,” he said.

“Two days later, another guy shows up,” Bearden told the Team House. Marie-Catherine answered the door, to be greeted by a man speaking her native tongue. “He says, ‘My name is Jean-Pierre, I am French,’ and she says, ‘Come in quickly, you’re not French – I am French, but go up with the rest of them.” (Mossad had dispatched “lucky Pierre,” as Bearden jokingly referred to him, to Khartoum to attempt to rescue the three fugitives, but the Sudanese security forces had quickly blown his cover and he too was now on the run.)

Cleaning up and stripping down

From a house in Khartoum, the Mossad officers had been running what amounted to a station, albeit a station under non-official cover. (When an intelligence officer works out of an embassy under the guise, for instance, of being a consular or political officer, and has a diplomatic passport, he or she is under “official cover.” When the officer’s cover is as an employee of a private firm or a non-governmental organization, that is known as “non-official cover.”)

The Israelis’ cover was something “like an NGO,” or non-governmental organization, Bearden said – “agricultural and different kind of things.” But, he said, it was also “kind of flimsy.”

However, the Mossad officers’ presence was known and tolerated by a handful of very senior officials in the Nimeiri regime, who were being paid handsomely by the Mossad to allow the Jewish refugees to transit through Sudan en route to Israel. These officials included Nimeiri’s immediate number two, according to Bearden.

“They were … in fact known to the first vice president of Sudan, Omar Tayeb, as being Israelis,” Bearden said. Because Sudan and Israel had no diplomatic relations, this put the Mossad officers in the odd situation of being, in a way, “declared” to the host nation while under non-official cover, he added.

The Mossad officers were doing more than just tidying up after the final rescue of Ethiopian Jews from Sudan, according to Baer. “We assumed … that all these Mossad people were not [just] collecting there, but they were cleaning them up to” operate elsewhere in the Arab world, he said.

In other words, the Israelis’ aim was not just to gather intelligence on Sudan, but to give their officers a chance to build “legit backgrounds” – i.e., credible backstories that they could use when assigned under non-official cover elsewhere, he said. “They establish credit cards and … bank accounts [in Sudan] and so when they’re assigned to Lebanon … or Jordan … They say, ‘Oh yeah, I was in Khartoum,’ and they have references.”

Bearden agreed that the Israelis in Khartoum “had a broader interest” than the evacuation of the Ethiopian Jews. However, unlike Baer, he thought their ambitions might have been directed south and west, rather than north and east.

The Mossad was trying “to secure a reasonable foothold on African soil,” Bearden said. “Khartoum was … across the Red Sea for them and a stepping stone into Africa and very important.”

Once he had the Mossad officers upstairs at his home, Bearden, in his words, “stripped them down,” which yielded numerous forged U.S. and Canadian passports, plus money in different currencies, including U.S. dollars. “They gave it all to me,” Bearden said.

The discovery that the Israelis were using forged U.S. and Canadian passports helped explain a couple of curious episodes that, according to Merkerson, had occurred a few weeks previously.

In one of these instances, the commander of Nimeiri’s presidential guard had asked for his help. “He said, ‘We have a guy who’s working on our Xerox machine and some other things, and I don’t know who he is … [but] he’s American.’”

The commander gave Merkerson a copy of the mystery repair man’s U.S. passport. The station sent copies back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and up to the agency’s large base in Frankfurt, Germany, according to Merkerson. “Come to find out, no one had any records on him,” he said.

At around the same time, another of Nimeiri’s security officials had a similar request for the CIA: would the agency mind checking out two “Canadian” consultants who were installing security cameras at Nimeiri’s residential compound – “cameras that covered all points of entry and exit,” Merkerson said. Agency officials could find nothing on the two men, so they asked their Canadian counterparts, with whom they “had a pretty good relationship,” Merkerson said. “They didn’t know anything about it, so we knew something was [suspicious].”

However, the CIA’s first guess was not that the “Canadians” were Israeli intelligence officers. “We weren’t thinking Mossad, we were thinking probably just some crooked international businessmen,” Merkerson said.

Of course, the “Xerox technician” and the “Canadian security consultants” were Mossad officers, according to Merkerson, and quite possibly were now among Bearden’s emergency houseguests. (Asked about this, Bearden said he was “having real trouble remembering that story.”)

A tense “shell game”

The Mossad officers’ arrival at Bearden’s home precipitated a flurry of “flash messages” (the CIA’s highest priority communications) between the station and Langley, where the effort to extricate the Israelis from the mess into which they had gotten themselves was receiving a lot of high-level attention.

Bearden kept in touch with his boss, the chief of the agency’s Africa Division, Dorwin Wilson, throughout the crisis. However, he said, copies of any cable he sent to Wilson would also go to the deputy director of operations (and previous Africa Division chief) Clair George, “and you can be sure, once this thing got going, the director,” William Casey.

“The only guidance I got was, ‘Good luck, what do you need?’” Bearden said, adding that Langley satisfied his every request. “If I had said I needed an M1A1 tank, Casey would have said, ‘Why does he want it? But give it to him.”

William Casey, director of central intelligence from 1981 to 1987, who closely followed the effort to exfiltrate the Mossad officers from Sudan, and gave Milt Bearden, the CIA’s Khartoum station chief, everything he asked for. (U.S. government photo)

Bearden and his colleagues spent the next few weeks playing what he called “a shell game” with the Mossad officers, using a van to shuttle the Israelis between safe houses as the Sudanese and Libyan teams hunted them. Merkerson’s contacts in the Sudanese military were key to staying one step ahead of the hunters. “We know exactly what part of town they’re searching every night, and Willie was bringing that [intelligence] in,” Bearden told The High Side. “Willie was all over this.”

Throughout what he called this “intensive” period, Bearden continued using the thin cover that the Israelis were U.S. government “TDYers” working on a modification to the embassy, a role into which the Mossad officers threw themselves enthusiastically, he said.

One of the places that Bearden stashed the Israelis was the home of Garrett Jones, the station’s Miami vice cop turned CIA operative, which had a separate section (used by Jones as a bar) where they could be housed. “We hid them in there for a couple of nights,” Bearden said.

Sometimes the Mossad operatives were divided between the different safe houses, always accompanied by at least one CIA officer. Baer recalled being assigned to “babysit” a “young, European-looking” Mossad officer at a safe house, equipped with only a 9 mm pistol and a Motorola radio to call the station for help “in case … a mob came our way.”

Despite the fact that he and his colleagues were hunted men, the Mossad officer betrayed no fear, according to Baer. “He didn’t seem scared,” Baer said. “He was very calm.”

That typified the Mossad officers’ behavior, according to Bearden. “They were pretty calm, courageous guys,” he said.

The “diplomatic” option

Meanwhile, the station’s officers brainstormed how to get their Mossad counterparts out of Sudan safely, a procedure spies call exfiltration. Two options presented themselves, according to Bearden.

One was for the four Mossad officers to try to somehow reach the Red Sea near Port Sudan, 415 miles to the northeast. “We have a built-in plan if we can make it to the beach out by Port Sudan,” Bearden said the Mossad officers told him. “Our people will fly a C-130 and land it on the beach and get us.”

Bearden was unimpressed. “That’s probably the dumbest option you’ve got,” he said he told them.

The other option, which originated with the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, was for the station to put the Israelis in four wooden crates, sealed and labeled as U.S. diplomatic cargo (which, by international law, cannot be inspected by a host government). Official U.S. aircraft would fly the crates into Khartoum, and then, if the plan worked, sometime later fly them out again with the Mossad men inside, right under the gaze of the Sudanese security and customs officials.

Bearden decided to leave the decision to the four men whose lives were riding on the outcome. “I said … ‘You go in that room there, and you talk to each other, and when you come out, tell me what you want to do,’” he said. “And they came out and said, ‘We’ll go with you.’”

The station put in a request via the CIA’s Air Branch for an Air Force C-141 to fly in the boxes and large diplomatic pouches, according to Bearden, adding that the station had a habitual relationship with the Air Force that allowed for such flights. “It’s a contract operation between CIA and the United States Air Force,” he said.

But with the airport still closed, the station would need to provide the new Sudanese authorities with a plausible reason to allow a U.S. plane to land. Bearden decided to keep things as simple as possible by having the embassy go through normal channels to inform the airport that a State Department resupply flight would be arriving on a certain day.

This was not unusual. The Air Force frequently flew C-141s into Khartoum for the U.S. Embassy. Suspecting nothing, the Sudanese authorities approved the request and the four boxes duly arrived, accompanied by “four oversized diplomatic pouches, nice big orange diplomatic pouches,” Bearden said.

The pouches – easily recognizable to airport customs officials the world over – were key. The plan revolved around convincing the Sudanese authorities that the large outbound packages were just routine diplomatic cargo. “The diplomatic pouch is still kind of sacrosanct,” Bearden said.

The same plane that brought the boxes also carried an officer from Frankfurt Technical Services, or “Fran Tech,” the Office of Technical Services’ forward location in Europe. “We brought a guy from Fran Tech from Germany, with these boxes,” Merkerson said. “He was there to teach us how to use them.” (The officer’s name was “Jesse,” according to Bearden.)

Although this was probably the first time that any of the officers in the station had used this exfiltration technique – and almost certainly represented a first for the four Mossad officers – it was not a new experience for the CIA. In fact, according to Baer, OTS had taught the technique to his class at the Farm in 1977.

“They just talked about it in our training,” he said. “‘Hey, you got an agent, he gets in trouble, you’ve got to get him out, he’s worthwhile, we’ll put him in this box.’ We were very familiar with the technique … The CIA is very good at these boxes.”

Bob Baer in 1977 during parachute training while attending the operations officer course at the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, known as “The Farm.” In the course he also learned about the agency’s technique of exfiltrating spies using wooden boxes and giant diplomatic pouches.

“Apparently, they’d done that before, so they just perfected it for our use,” Merkerson said. “A couple of East European exfiltrations in diplomatic boxes … Yeah, that had happened before,” Bearden confirmed.

After putting the individual to be exfiltrated into the box “with oxygen and water … you put an orange [diplomatic] pouch around it and you seal it,” Baer said. “It’s a fail-safe way [to get someone out of a country] as long as American diplomatic rights are recognized.”

The boxes’ heavy weight could be plausibly explained to any curious airport customs officer, according to Baer. “You just say [it’s] communications equipment,” he said. “If you have encryption machines … you’ve got to bring them in [and out] by giant pouches, so at the airport it will look completely normal – ‘Oh, the Americans are sending out their communications equipment in these heavy pouches’ – and rarely do airports insist on looking at them, because the courier has got a letter from the ministry of foreign affairs, even the new [Sudanese regime] one, saying, ‘this is a diplomatic pouch,’ and they’re sealed.”

But maintaining operational security was critical to the technique, according to Baer. “It was risky,” he said. “They could have ripped them open, had they known, so you had to keep utter secrecy that this is how you were getting the guys out.”

Fooling the Sudanese security forces and their new Libyan friends was only half the challenge, however. The other half was ensuring that the men inside the boxes emerged alive.

Jesse assembled the boxes in the station’s vault, according to Bearden. The main breathing apparatus for each box was a thin plastic tube that went through the top of the box with its open end hidden in the gathering of the diplomatic pouch fabric, he said. As a backup, each box contained a solid-state oxygen generator. That device’s drawback was that it became very hot when turned on, so it was to be used only in an emergency. Finally, the boxes had some small holes drilled in them and contained water supplies.

“Less than a week” after the boxes arrived, Bearden said, the station was ready to exfiltrate its Israeli guests. It was showtime.

To be continued in Part 7: Exfiltration

Editor’s Note: This series contains Amazon hyperlinks for books. If you buy the books after clicking on the links, as part of the Amazon Affiliates program, The High Side will earn a small commission.

24. Hawaii soldier earns rare triple tab: Ranger, Sapper, Jungle

Hawaii soldier earns rare triple tab: Ranger, Sapper, Jungle

1st Lt. Mackenzie Corcoran became the 135th woman to earn her Ranger tab and the 8th woman to wear both Ranger and Sapper tabs.

Patty Nieberg

Posted on Aug 26, 2024 3:01 PM EDT

4 minute read

taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg

A Hawaii-based combat engineer became ‘triple-tabbed’ by completing three of the Army’s most demanding courses, Ranger and Sapper school, and a Hawaii-based Jungle course. Earning all three is rare for any soldier, and nearly unprecedented for a woman.

1st Lt. Mackenzie Corcoran completed the triple-training journey when she graduated from Ranger School at Fort Moore. She is the 135th woman to graduate from Ranger School since 2015, and just became the 8th woman to also finish Sapper school.

Corcoran earned the Jungle tab in late 2022 by completing the Jungle Operations Training Course, which is run by the 25th Infantry Division’s Lighting Academy in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, where Corcoran is assigned. Soldiers who complete the course can wear the Jungle tab, though only while assigned to Army units in the Pacific. The Army did not clarify if any other women have earned all three tabs.

Corcoran joined the Army in May 2021 after graduating from William & Mary college in Williamsburg, Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Getting through as many Army training courses as possible, she said, was always a goal.

“You are going to be your biggest advocate,” she said, “the best time to go is yesterday.”

Corcoran told the Army in a release that the toughest moment she faced was, perhaps surprisingly, in Sapper school, during a cold, rainy night of training. The course teaches combat engineers to develop their leadership skills and advanced engineering techniques on limited rations and sleep. With just an hour to sleep and eat during a day, she said, her class was told to run laps in pouring rain, cutting their usual one hour down to 20 minutes.

When finally allowed, Corcoran huddled under her poncho, wet and exhausted, choosing to eat while she could rather than sleep.

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“It was miserable, we were all miserable,” Corcoran said. When a friend joined her, he confided that he was thinking of quitting.

1st Lt. Mackenzie Corcoran at Ranger School graduation in March. (Photo from X.com)

“We are three days away from finishing,” she told him. “We’re not quitting.”

At Ranger School, she drew inspiration from other women who had graduated the course, including a friend from college, 1st Lt. Erin O’Hara.

O’Hara graduated from Ranger School in 2023. She and Corcoran were two of three women on William & Mary’s 12-person Army ROTC Ranger Challenge team in 2019. In that year’s regional competition, the team took second place out of 50 teams.

“Ranger was physically easier than Sapper, but with so much time to my thoughts, it made it more mentally challenging,” Corcoran said.

Ranger School is considered one of the Army’s most challenging courses for soldiers where students get pushed to their physical and mental limits. The course emphasizes individual combat skills while implementing leadership principles. Ranger School candidates learn how to plan and conduct military operations at a small unit level and take their experience back to their home units to pass along lessons learned.

Ranger School is made up of three phases that lasts 62 days: Benning, Mountain, and Florida. Darby Phase and Mountain Phase takes place in the woods and mountains of Georgia, and the final phase takes place in the coastal swamps of Florida. Soldiers have two attempts to pass each phase but if they fail, they must start over. Corcoran herself had to redo the Benning Phase.

“Having people that truly believe in you,” Corcoran said, “is the biggest step towards Ranger.”

Corcoran’s second tab came after attending the 12-day Jungle Operations Training Course in January 2022 where soldiers learn how to navigate and operate in jungle environments. She finished the Lightning Academy and immediately hungered for more so she went on to pursue her Sapper tab.

“It taught me that I can accomplish an Army school and inspired me to really pursue Sapper,” she said.

Corcoran said she wants to attend Air Assault School and Pathfinder School, and earn her Expert Soldier Badge. She also plans on attending the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program 2, a three-week course that selects soldiers for assignment with the 75th Ranger Regiment.

“No one realizes how far our bodies and minds can actually go until we push them to the limit,” Corcoran said.

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Patty Nieberg

Sr. Staff Writer

Patty is a senior staff writer for Task & Purpose. She has covered the military and national defense for five years, including embedding with the National Guard during Hurricane Florence and covering legal proceedings for a former al Qaeda commander at Guantanamo Bay. Her previous bylines can be found at the Associated Press, Bloomberg Government, Washington Post, The New York Times, and ABC.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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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