Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“I am not influenced by the expectation of promotion or pecuniary reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary for the public good, becomes honorable by being necessary. If the exigencies of my country demand a peculiar service, its claim to perform that service are imperious."

– Nathan Hale

"Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic."

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"The purpose of propaganda is to make one set of people forget that other sets of people are human."

– Aldous Huxley

1. Army using 'transformation in contact' to make case for new weapons, formation decisions

2. Army launches brain health testing for new recruits as Pentagon eyes improved blast exposure care

3. Combat tours don’t cause permanent readjustment issues for vets: Study

4. Building on Kursk: Can Ukraine and the US agree on a plan? by Sir Lawrence Freedman

5. The Greats Agree: Ukraine's Kursk Offensive Is Strategic Malpractice

6. Biden authorized troubled Gaza pier operation as officials warned of weather and security challenges, watchdog finds

7. Army Preps for "Transparent" Future Battlefield - Nowhere to Hide

8. Marine Corps infantry’s secret weapon: A $9.95 unofficial website

9. Army Preps for "Transparent" Future Battlefield - Nowhere to Hide

10. EAGLS: US Army gets new anti-drone systems featuring laser-guided 70mm rockets.

11. A dangerous new flashpoint is fast emerging in the South China Sea

12. The False Promise of Ukraine’s Deep Strikes Into Russia

13. America Has More Latitude With Israel Than It Thinks

14. The Cacti and the Grass: The Collapse of Afghanistan's Security Forces

15. We Are All Agents: The Future of Human-AI Collaboration

16. How America Lost its Global Connectivity Lead and Why the Future Depends on Getting it Back

17. Chinese government hackers penetrate U.S. internet providers to spy

18. Opinion How Rep. Mike Gallagher, a rising GOP star, was driven out of politics

19. Did Ukraine just call Putin’s nuclear bluff?

20. US military planning shifts from terrorism to fighting China, Russia

1. Army using 'transformation in contact' to make case for new weapons, formation decisions

"Transforming in contact." That is our new mantra. That is the difference between 1975-1990 and the present period. While we were engaged in the Cold War and had forces in key locations in Europe and Asia, we were not engaged in ay way like we are today. Also, the period that may be more analogous is the ten year period from 1991-2001. Some thought we had a peace dividend and did not need to invest in defense since 'peace was breaking out all over after the end of the Cold War while others thought we could leap ahead with the revolution in military affairs but these little crises kept breaking out all lover from Provide Comfort in northern Iraq along with sustained no fly zones, to the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti, etc. And the 9-11 and it was all GWOT all the time and all transformation" focused on how to fight terrorism and conduct COIN at the expense of large scale combat operations (LSCO). Now we are in a period of sustained global engagement while having to prepare for LSCO. We have no respite from strategic competition and the growing threats from the Dark Quad that necessitates (while terrorism continues unabated). But now we have Putin's War in Ukraine and we are watching new technology and capabilities perhaps "revolutionize" military operations which have applications from irregular warfare to LSCO. And perhaps the current period rhymes with the Crimean war period. How will the current period impact the next "big war" like the Crimean war impacted the US CIvil War. And there is the period from the US Civil War to World War I. So much rhyming history to consider and now we have to factor in the major requirement for deterrence (or integrated deterrence).. So I think now there is the understanding that we no longer have the luxury of time to transform and we have to learn lessons from ongoing conflicts around the world to understand how we can most effectively conduct military operations from IW to LSCO. We have to transform in contact and we have to make sure as the late Sir Michael Howard said that we just do not get it too wrong. ("The duty of military planners is not necessarily to get the future exactly right. Rather, it's just not to get it too terribly wrong,")

However, one of the differences between today and all the past history is that we seem to be relying on our soldiers doing the transforming in contact. Or at least telling and showing us what works and what doesn't. I think this is especially important in the new "drone fight" which is going to be the ubiquitous part of the future of war. And I do not think we are just paying lipservie to soldier testing and providing feedback on what works and does not work. The knowledge of our young soldiers and their ability to contribute to the future of war is far superior, especially from a technology perspective, than when Iwas on active duty.

Apologies for the stream of consciousness from Seoul. Please excuse all errors in logic due to jet lag.

Excerpts:

“We just do not have the density or the quality of our counter-UAS [unmanned aerial systems] that we would really need … for the future fight,” 101st Commanding General Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, told reporters Aug 22.

“I believe that we’re moving in the right direction, that the limited capabilities that we’ve gotten are better than they’ve been, but we just don’t have the density … we would want,” he later added.

...

“We have to provide the best Army that we [can] with the people we have, with the budget that we have,” George told reporters. “Those will require tough decisions to say what we’re not gonna [do].”

“Our soldiers that are out there employing this are gonna tell us what … [are] not the best systems,” the four-star general added.

Army using 'transformation in contact' to make case for new weapons, formation decisions - Breaking Defense

“We cannot [just] rely on ... bring out the laser and it'll fix it all,” said the 101st Airborne Division’s Commanding General Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · August 27, 2024

A US Army soldier stands in front a command post on Aug. 22, 2024 during the 101st Airborne Division’s rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center. (Breaking Defense/Ashley Roque).

FORT JOHNSON, La. — Following a 500-mile air assault from Ft. Campbell, Ky., down to a heavily wooded training site in Louisiana, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division spent a chunk of August testing out new tech and formations against an opposing force dubbed Geronimo.

The early verdict: More equipment is needed to prepare for a drone-riddled battlefield, while the division needs to relook its logistics footprint for an island-hopping campaign in the Indo-Pacific.

“We just do not have the density or the quality of our counter-UAS [unmanned aerial systems] that we would really need … for the future fight,” 101st Commanding General Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, told reporters Aug 22.

“I believe that we’re moving in the right direction, that the limited capabilities that we’ve gotten are better than they’ve been, but we just don’t have the density … we would want,” he later added.

Likewise, Sylvia said he is walking away from the event knowing that as his division prepares for a long-range air assault in an area like the Indo-Pacific region, it needs to be prepared to better spread out its forward arming and refueling points — more of a training and manning task.

Sylvia’s two initial homework takeaways came nine days into a rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center, or JRTC. His division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team is part of the Army’s new “transformation in contact” initiative designed to get soldiers’ feedback on new equipment faster, figure out how formations could use it and help guide leadership decisions. One of those key deciders is Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George who hosted nearly a dozen reporters last week on a quick trip down to visit the division towards the tail end of the training event.

“We have to provide the best Army that we [can] with the people we have, with the budget that we have,” George told reporters. “Those will require tough decisions to say what we’re not gonna [do].”

“Our soldiers that are out there employing this are gonna tell us what … [are] not the best systems,” the four-star general added.

While it will take time to collect observations from the JRTC rotations and decide how to proceed, Army officers and soldiers there provided a peek of the new tech and use cases being explored.

On the C-UAS front for example, soldiers with the 101st used tested handheld options including Dronebuster and DroneDefender to attack UAS out to about 750 meters.

“These are … very new capabilities for us that we’re still integrating and learning from and determining how we reorganize ourselves,” Sylvia said.

And while there remains a dearth of options ready for fielding, Col. Matthew Hardman, the commander for the JRTC operations group, noted that takeaways extend beyond new capabilities and towards concealing soldiers’ locations through dispersion, camouflage, noise and light discipline, and electromagnetic signature discipline.

“There is no silver bullet for counter-UAS,” Sylvia said, adding “We cannot [just] rely on … bring out the laser and it’ll fix it all.”

While the burgeoning UAS threat is a hot topic for the Army, it is also eyeing the electronic warfare threat, and how to make it work to its advantage, sometimes with drones.

Part of that equation revolves around testing out smaller command posts designed to be set up in 15 minutes and torn down in the same amount of time. To minimize or completely eliminate the post’s electromagnet signature, the Army is placing “antenna farms” up to two kilometers away and then tying them together via a fiber cable. If the opposition detects emittance, the idea is that it will strike the antenna farm instead of the soldiers inside the camouflaged command post.

An antenna farm is set up away from soldiers inside the command post. (Breaking Defense/ Ashley Roque)

As service leaders like George eye today’s conflicts and future ones, they are rushing to test out offensive and defensive EW capabilities. One cheaper one that showed promise during the recent training is the “raspberry pi” — small single-board computers — that was used as both a decoy to draw the opposing force out of hiding and for offensive operations.

Sylvia explained that after acquiring the commercially available circuit boards, the soldiers formed “a couple dozen” clusters designed to act as command post decoys.

Then when Geronimo, the opposing force, volleyed a large amount of fire at those raspberry pi decoys, it “unmasked” the opposition force’s location in the woods, enabling soldiers from the 101st to target their weapons in that direction.

Soldiers shuffling through the trees and swamp lands also used the raspberry pis for offensive operations. After programming the circuit boards and pairing it with a standard power bank and a 3D-printed carrying case, they attached the case to the bottom of a UAS.

“Then they [flew] over positions in order to be able to identify the electromagnetic signature,” the two-star general said.

“Once you start getting a cluster of those [service set identifier] SSIDs, you would make a good assumption about whether or not you’ve been able to identify a command post or not, and then be able to generate a fire mission,” he added.

Other UAS techniques were also tested out, including a new “artificial intelligence” capability designed to identify enemy vehicles, generate a fire mission and text it back to soldiers who then decide how to proceed. If it’s a go, the UAS can continue observing the target and, if needed, make adjustments to the mission.

While the new weapons and tech were easier for the Army to show off, a centerpiece of this month’s training event revolved around testing out improvements to the network — aptly dubbed C2 Fix — to help shape improvements and tweaks. The service is hoping changes under this initiative will be enough to ensure that soldiers can communicate and fight on today’s battlefield, while it launches forward with a new network under the C2 Next prototyping umbrella.

In addition to ensuring soldiers can communicate, the service is hoping to provide maneuver commanders with what they need, in part, via a common operating picture. And a big part of that is finding ways to integrate new, smaller C-UASs into the C2 architecture, according to Alex Miller, a chief technology officer.

“We’ve been working across what does counter UAS mean as part of integrated air and missile defense?” Miller told reporters last week.

“We’ve had bad C2 for 30 years. What comes after that to make sure that we can integrate all of our sensors, all of our effectors, so we have that combined offense, defense for fires,” he added.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · August 27, 2024

2. Army launches brain health testing for new recruits as Pentagon eyes improved blast exposure care

In the 2007-2010 time frame I remember the USASOC psychologist (COL Robert Forstens) proposed this for all new SOF soldiers and he told me that the entire military should be testing new personnel to develop a baseline for understanding brain injury effects.

It is good to see this finally happening.

Army launches brain health testing for new recruits as Pentagon eyes improved blast exposure care

Stars and Stripes · by Corey Dickstein · August 27, 2024

Soldiers at Fort Moore, Ga., take a cognitive screening test as part of a new Army program aimed at improving brain health and recovery. The program will test all incoming recruits and officer trainees across the service for baseline brain health and assess them continually throughout their careers for signs of injury or cognitive decline. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)

FORT MOORE, Ga. — The testing is simple: It requires only a computer and a mouse with two buttons — labeled “1” and “2” — but Pentagon officials believe it will have a huge impact on the military’s ability to monitor the brain health of its troops.

Through a series of testing modules, soldiers are instructed to press button “1” as quickly as possible when a star or an “X” appears on their screen, press one of the buttons when a simple math equation is higher or lower than 5, and match symbols on dominoes displayed on the computer screen. The testing, which takes about 30 minutes, is meant to capture the soldiers’ cognitive performance at that moment in time, said Steven Porter, the chief of the neurocognitive branch for the Pentagon’s Surgeon General’s Office and Defense Health Agency.

“Collecting baselines is very important because everyone’s brain functions differently, so using normative data typically is not as helpful for assessing cognitive change without that baseline,” Porter said Monday at Fort Moore where officials gathered to roll out the new cognitive testing program for all recruits coming into basic training at the Georgia Army post. “Being able to get that baseline prior to any significant injury allows us to identify the small cognitive changes that may be occurring that maybe would not have been to the point of diagnosis or even symptomology, so we can identify those changes even before the soldier notices any change within their own cognitive abilities.”

Only milliseconds of change in a soldier’s reaction time to stars appearing on the computer screen during the test can show health care officials that the individual needs assessment for a cognitive change, Porter said. The testing can also help those medical officials to understand where an issue or injury might have occurred in a soldier’s brain, he said.

Fort Moore on Monday became the second Army basic training site to stand up its new baseline cognitive testing program for all incoming recruits, said Col. Jama VanHorne-Sealy, Army Medical Command’s occupational health director. The Army opened testing last month at Fort Sill, Okla. It plans to begin testing at its final two basic training locations, Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., and Fort Jackson, S.C., by the end of September, she said.

Army Col. Greg McLean, center, the commander of Fort Moore’s 196th Armor Brigade, cuts a ribbon to open a new cognitive monitoring program for incoming recruits at the Georgia Army post, as Col. Jama VanHorne-Sealy, left, the Army’s occupational health director, and Lt. Col. John Suprynowicz, the Fort Moore Soldier Recovery Unit battalion commander, look on. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)

Army ROTC juniors and seniors underwent the baseline brain health testing in June during annual summer training for ROTC cadets at Fort Knox in Kentucky, VanHorne-Sealy said. By the end of the year, the service aims to open testing for all officer trainees, including for cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., she said.

The new testing is a marked shift in how the service monitors its troops’ cognitive health, VanHorne-Sealy said.

“We are now looking across the brain health of the soldiers throughout their entire career,” she said. “We are baselining them as soon as they enter the service, and then they’re going to get periodic exams over their career based upon whatever occupation they have.”

Soldiers serving in direct combat arms fields such as the infantry, armor, artillery, combat engineering and special operations, will likely be tested every year. Others in jobs where they are rarely exposed to weapons or blasts will typically be tested every three years, VanHorne-Sealy said.

The effort extends beyond the Army, Porter said, as the Pentagon aims to soon test all its incoming troops across the military branches.

Soldiers at Fort Moore, Ga., take a cognitive screening test as part of a new Army program aimed at improving brain health and recovery. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)

New program, old test

While the program to provide baseline testing to all incoming troops is new, cognitive testing has been available in the Army since 2007, Porter said. For years, the service reserved those tests for soldiers preparing to deploy into combat and for those suspected of receiving a brain injury.

The change toward testing all incoming service members is a critical one, said Porter, who has spent more than 20 years studying brain injury as an active-duty Navy neuropsychologist and as a Defense Health Agency civilian. The new proactive approach is based on the latest scientific research on blast exposure.

“Injuries that had been sustained at wartime, the [improvised explosive device] blasts, all of these exposures have given us … data that we didn’t have previously, and now we’re able to … be proactive,” said Porter, who helped develop the testing modules. “We just didn’t have the science [before] that we now have today.”

The change will allow the military to catch cognitive issues in its troops quicker to give them a better chance at recovery, and it will also allow the Pentagon to study brain health trends it sees among its 1.3 million service members, he said.

The testing will also not disqualify anyone from serving in the military, VanHorne-Sealy said. Soldiers or recruits cannot fail it.

And it is not meant to assess troops’ intelligence nor will it be compared to the results of other individuals, VanHorne-Sealy said. Soldier’s results will be kept confidential, per medical law.

She likened the test to a hearing screening.

“How has your hearing changed over the last year? Then we need to refer you to somebody to see if there’s an underlying cause, to get an actual medical exam,” Van-Horne-Sealy said. “So, this is really that [cognitive] screening process to determine who we need to send for a better medical evaluation.”

The testing is only useful in comparing results to an individual’s prior results, officials said.

In many cases, a soldier’s cognitive function will return to the baseline with some rest away from blast exposures, Porter said.

“If we identify [an issue] before any symptoms are evident … we can intervene, pull them out of an area with continued blast exposure and let them recover,” he said. “They take a knee for a short period, get back to baseline, and we get them back in the fight.”

Day zero testing

At Fort Moore, new recruits began taking the test last week. From now on, incoming recruits will take the cognitive test within days of arriving at the Army’s home of infantry and armor training and before they ever set foot in the field or are exposed to a service weapon.

Col. Greg McLean, who commands Fort Moore’s 194th Armored Brigade, which will oversee the cognitive testing program, said it was important the baseline testing is done before recruits enter the field — around “Day zero” or when they arrive on post.

“That way it’s a true baseline, instead of having them come test at some point when they’ve already possibly done something in the Army, where they’ve dealt with some blast exposure,” he said.

The Army’s other basic training locations will also aim to test recruits almost as soon as they arrive on post.

The colonel said he was pleased to see the Army moving to take a proactive response to brain injuries. The 26-year veteran suffered a traumatic brain injury in an explosion in Iraq in 2008 and experienced the Army’s cognitive testing at that time.

“This test was very hard to complete at that time to be able to prove to the Army I could get back to training,” McLean said of his initial cognitive testing in Baghdad not long after his injury. “I think it would be easier today.”

While the cognitive testing in 2008 showed Army medical officials that McLean had improved from his injury, it could not show them if he suffered permanent damage or change.

“So, it’s great now to have the baseline,” he said. “It’s phenomenal that our character of medical care is continually updated [in the Army]. Now each and every citizen as they come in is going to have that baseline. That’s part of the handshake we have with America that we’re going to take care of … our soldiers.”

Stars and Stripes · by Corey Dickstein · August 27, 2024

3. Combat tours don’t cause permanent readjustment issues for vets: Study

Hmmm.... Swedish research. Does it transfer to the US military? I certainly hope so. What about a 20 year study in the US looking at US veterans? Have we studied this in the US military for the past 20 years?

Excerpts:

The report acknowledges unresolved mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder can produce “poor work-related outcomes” and that past U.S. studies have found significant long-term employment problems among American veterans who served in Vietnam.

But the study authors say a greater emphasis in Swedish military planning on the “physical and mental well-being of those who have served in international peace missions” after war may have produced better results among its country’s veterans.

Swedish personnel serving in international peacekeeping operations have not shown a higher risk of suicide compared to the general population, or shown a higher dependency on antidepressants than their civilian peers, researchers said.

Combat tours don’t cause permanent readjustment issues for vets: Study

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · August 27, 2024

Veterans’ ability to thrive in civilian life after war may have more to do with societal support than their own lingering combat trauma, according to a study from the Swedish Defence Research Agency.

In a 20-year study that tracked 2,275 Swedish service members who served as peacekeepers in Bosnia in the 1990s, study authors found no evidence of long-term barriers to veterans’ success in civilian jobs and no indication that time in a war zone permanently impairs those individuals’ ability to move on to future, non-combat jobs.

“Even though the veterans did indeed experience an increased risk of unemployment in the two years immediately following their return from service, there is no indication that in the long run their attachment to the labour market was affected negatively by their service,” the study authors wrote.

“If anything, the results suggest that the veterans, for longer follow-up times, are at lower risk of long-term unemployment.”

Young veterans more likely to get dangerous jobs than civilian peers

Young veterans are more likely to work in jobs with significant physical demands and health risks than civilian peers, new research found.

The report acknowledges unresolved mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder can produce “poor work-related outcomes” and that past U.S. studies have found significant long-term employment problems among American veterans who served in Vietnam.

But the study authors say a greater emphasis in Swedish military planning on the “physical and mental well-being of those who have served in international peace missions” after war may have produced better results among its country’s veterans.

Swedish personnel serving in international peacekeeping operations have not shown a higher risk of suicide compared to the general population, or shown a higher dependency on antidepressants than their civilian peers, researchers said.

Employment problems have been tougher to gauge, partly because of various job market variabilities. Researchers said when they followed younger troops for two decades after their deployments to Bosnia and accounted for swings in the Swedish unemployment rate, they found some readjustment concerns in only the first two years.

“From the third year after deployment, and up until the end of the follow-up period of 20 years, the veterans no longer demonstrate any increased risk of long-term unemployment,” they wrote.

“The temporary increase in unemployment during the first few years after returning home most likely represents a period of prolonged job search in the labour market rather than an inability to work.”

Whether the Swedish military can serve as a fair comparison for the U.S. military population remains unclear.

In the 1990s, Sweden had roughly 88,000 service members in the ranks. At the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military’s active-duty and reserve end strength was more than 2.2 million.

The full study is available through the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies and was republished in the Baltic Sentinel this week.

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

4. Building on Kursk: Can Ukraine and the US agree on a plan? by Sir Lawrence Freedman

An important question from Sir Lawrence.

Building on Kursk

Can Ukraine and the US agree on a plan?

https://samf.substack.com/p/building-on-kursk?utm

Lawrence Freedman

Aug 28, 2024

A damaged statue of Lenin in Sudza, Kursk, now controlled by Ukraine. (Photo by YAN DOBRONOSOV/AFP via Getty Images).

In my previous post I described the Ukrainian move into Kursk as intended to shift the narrative around the war. Prior to the invasion the view was that Ukraine was on the defensive, making Russian advances as painful as possible without actually stopping them, and so looking for other ways to hurt Russia. The core strategy was to hang on until Russia’s losses reached the point where its offensives petered out and its leadership started to look for a way out. The advantage of the Kursk operation was that it showed that Ukraine could take military initiative and as a result make serious gains while catching Moscow by surprise.

On 27 August, three weeks after the start of the incursion, President Zelensky and his Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi provided an update on its progress and what they hope to achieve. According to Syrskyi, Ukraine now controls 1,294 square kilometers and 100 settlements. He reported that 594 Russian soldiers have been captured. More importantly, in terms of the desire to encourage Russia to move troops out of Ukraine to deal with the Kursk situation, he spoke of the redirection of about 30,000 troops from other sectors to Kursk, adding that ‘this number is growing.’ The number required for a Russian counter-offensive in Kursk is assessed to be around 50,000. Yet, as was anticipated, Russia still persists with its dogged advance in the Pokrovsk sector. This is its top priority, to which it has assigned its most combat-ready units.

In his remarks Zelensky claimed that the Russian advance was slowing but did not hide the tough time facing those defending this crucial sector. He warned that the assault would be like last year’s on Bakhmut. If the Russians decide they really need it, they

‘will throw 50,000-60,000 people there. You will see it. You will understand these numbers very soon... There must be tricks. We are not bigger than Russia.’

He did not claim that the Russians could be stopped in their tracks, or that Pokrovsk could be defended indefinitely, although efforts are being made to stabilize the situation. He was however confident that Russian forces could be prevented from occupying all of Donetsk, which is their objective. (This also appears to be the assessment of the Kyiv-based Centre for Defence Strategies; nonetheless a number of Ukrainian analysts are very anxious about recent Russian gains). Zelensky also observed that Putin appeared to care more about capturing a Ukrainian city that he had likely never heard of rather than defending his own territories. Lastly, he emphasized the Kursk incursion’s value in making it harder for the Russians to launch any more invasions of their own into Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts. Ukraine was creating a buffer zone inside Russian territory. As if to reinforce this point Ukrainian forces have been pushing to get a foothold in Russia’s Belgorad oblast.

Zelensky also made a point of relating the incursion to Ukraine's second peace summit, planned for November. It is one of ‘the stages to end the war.’ Although this suggests creating a bargaining chip to be deployed in eventual talks with Vladimir Putin, that is not what he has in mind. Instead his peace plan, perhaps designed in the same spirit as Putin’s peace plan, is really about how to achieve a victory.

‘The Kursk operation is not related to any of the points of (Ukraine's) peace formula. Is the Kursk operation connected to the second peace summit? Yes, it is. Because the Kursk operation is one of the points of Ukraine's victory plan.’

This plan, to be presented to the Biden administration during September, involves four steps of which Kursk is just one . The others involve Ukraine's participation in the global security infrastructure (that is membership of NATO or some equivalent arrangement), diplomatic pressure on Russia to end the war, and an economic aspect.

Attacks on Infrastructure

Zelensky is surely right that Ukraine cannot solely rely on military moves to get Russian troops out of his country. But the economic aspect also seems ambitious. After all his new conference came just after a series of relentless attacks involving hundreds of drones and missiles on Ukrainian civil society, and in particular on its critical infrastructure.

On the morning of 26 August, in one of the largest attacks of the war, 15 Ukrainian regions were attacked by drones, cruise missiles and Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. Ukraine’s Air Force claimed to have shot down or electronically disabled 201 of the 236 missiles and drones. The next day came yet another attack, on a smaller scale but still substantial. This time Ukraine claims to have shot down 60 out of 81 drones and five out of ten missiles. There were significant civilian casualties on both days.

These attacks were expected. Air raids of this sort were regular during the spring and early summer. There was then a marked lull over the summer, which suggested stockpiling for a very large attack (see the figures compiled by John Ridge). There are three reasons for the attack now. The first is that this is the Kremlin’s way of celebrating Ukraine’s Independence Day (25 August). Second, that it is frustrated by Ukraine’s initiatives of recent weeks – both the move into Kursk and its strikes against a variety of high-value targets within Russia – and it has been looking for ways to hit back. Third, and more important, for this is more than just lashing out, it is part of a long campaign, as the Russian military confirmed, against ‘important energy infrastructure’.

Russia’s aim is to make life as miserable as possible for ordinary Ukrainians over the coming months and into winter, not just as punishment for their resistance and resilience but to make it difficult for them to stay. Russia wants hundreds of thousands to leave their homes, perhaps creating yet another refugee crisis in neighbouring European countries.

Before the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s domestic energy production was about 55 gigawatts of electricity. In the later months of 2022, the electrical distribution grid was badly damaged because of incessant Russian strikes but then during 2023 it was repaired. Nonetheless vital installations were still taken out of the system: the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power plant was taken offline and the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam was also damaged. Earlier this year strikes were directed against thermal and hydroelectric power plants which are hard and expensive to fix or replace. The Financial Times reported last June that energy production was now below 20GW, less than half of prewar levels. This led to rolling blackouts, and injunctions to individuals and organisations to save power by every means possible. The paper quoted one official saying ‘We should prepare for life in the cold and the dark’ with another adding, ‘This is our new normal.’

According to Time Magazine by early August, over 9 gigawatts of power generation had been taken out since March. The largest hydroelectric plant, the Dnipro station, has been rendered inoperable while every single thermal (coal and natural gas burning) plant has been hit. Of the original 13 no more than two were still operational.

The impact of the latest attacks are still being clarified. Blackouts were introduced as much as a precaution as a consequence. At the same forum where Zelensky and Syrskyi were speaking Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal reported that the energy infrastructure suffered less damage from the latest attacks than feared;

"Yesterday, Russia attacked our power distribution substations with missiles for the first time. The facilities were targeted by tens of cluster missiles, but we lost a relatively small amount of equipment during that attack. All due to the (heightened) protection of the facilities because of ‘the protection systems implemented on power distribution substations’

This still leaves Ukraine coping with a significant energy deficit. Some relief can be found by increasing imports of EU electricity from 1.7GW to 2.4GW. More gas-fired energy plants are being brought online. The aim is to set up a more decentralised energy system, increasing the use of solar panels and wind turbines. In addition, private generators are being used throughout the country. To give the system a chance to recover it is necessary to improve air defences and, where possible, strike the Russian bases from where their aircraft fly. This is where Kyiv needs more help from its western partners. The recent attacks won’t be the last.

The Need for Long-range Systems

In a statement on 26 August President Biden condemned that day’s attack and added that the coalition of Ukraine’s supporters:

‘is providing Ukraine with critically needed military equipment, including air defense systems and interceptors. As I announced at the NATO Summit in July, the United States and our allies have provided Ukraine with the equipment for five additional strategic air defense systems, and I have re-prioritized U.S. air defense exports so they are sent to Ukraine first. The United States also is surging energy equipment to Ukraine to repair its systems and strengthen the resilience of Ukraine’s energy grid.’

Unfortunately the promised strategic air defence systems are only starting to arrive. Hopefully the urgency of the current situation will speed things up. Another disclosure from Zelensky was that Ukrainian F-16s, the first of which arrived early in August, were employed defending against the attacks of 26 August and had shot down some missiles and drones. He added, ‘we don't have many of them, and we still need to train pilots.’ (Some ten have reportedly been received so far, with 79 in total expected from a number of European countries).

Absent from Biden’s statement, was any mention of what might be done to prevent Russian aircraft taking off to launch their missiles. His Administration’s refusal to allow the long-range systems it has provided to be used to strike targets well inside Russian territory has long been a source of immense frustration in Kyiv. The prohibition extends to non-US systems which have US components, such as the UK Storm Shadow (French Scalp) cruise missile. Neither London nor Paris objects to their use to target Russian air bases but they need consent from Washington.

There are three levels to this debate. The first is one about the availability of both systems and targets. Essentially are there enough of the relevant bases in range and is this the best use of a scarce resource? The second level is the ‘fear of escalation’, the assumption that there is a point beyond which Russia must not be pushed lest it moves in desperation to nuclear use of some kind. The third, is whether the US and other NATO countries fear jeopardising relations with Russia to the point that they are unable either to play a useful role in brokering an eventual peace settlement or recasting the European security system once this war is over.

This third level achieved some prominence recently when a story in Politico reported that some officials had ‘told the Ukrainians that the U.S. will eventually want to reset relations with Moscow and lifting the restrictions could upend those efforts.’ After this attracted many adverse comments, with regular references to ‘appeasement’, the Biden Administration said that this notion of a reset was ‘utterly unreflective of the White House's thinking.’ In practice, so long as President Putin is in the Kremlin it is hard to see how anything approaching normal diplomatic relations is possible with Russia. There may be communications to limit the repercussions of the war or even to make arrangements for winding it down, but the divorce has been too messy and acrimonious for there to be any reconciliation.

Putin is also in no mood to forgive and forget. He regularly blames NATO for his inability to bring the war to a successful conclusion and presents Ukraine as an instrument of Western foreign policy. On this basis he argues that peace depends on Russia-US talks in the first instance, to which the US cannot agree. Even a returning President Trump would not be able to go back to pre-invasion relations.

The second level, involving worries about escalation, has become a familiar part of the debate. The issue has not gone away, not least because the Russians keep on bringing it up, but so many of their ‘red lines’ have now been crossed that the issue is losing its force. (Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov chipped in by describing Ukraine's demand to be allowed to strike deep into Russia with Western weapons amounted to blackmail, adding that Russia is ‘adjusting’ its nuclear weapons doctrine, and Western nuclear powers should not be ‘playing with fire.’)

As was seen with the Kursk incursion, when something bad happens the instinct in Moscow is to play it down rather than up, because they do not wish to give the impression of events moving out of their control. A frustrated Zelensky has dismissed:

‘The whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled these days somewhere near Sudzha [in the Kursk sector].’

Ukraine is routinely attacking big targets well inside Russia with its own systems and the US has already agreed that its systems can be used to defend against Russian troop movements that directly threaten Ukrainian forces. It is not a very large step to say that it can also attack any Russian forces that are being used to attack Ukraine.

My view remains that the only real red line in all of this is NATO countries deciding to fight directly with Ukrainians against Russian forces. Even in those circumstances it is not clear how Moscow would respond, as nuclear use would still make little strategic sense. It is, however, understandable that this is not a proposition that NATO governments want to test. There are still ways that this line could be blurred. Zelensky has also been pressing for neighbouring NATO countries, such as Poland, to use their air defences against Russian aircraft, drones and missiles when they pass close to their airspace attacking targets in Ukraine.

The Administration’s stance is often characterised as being ready to prevent Ukrainian losing the war but not being prepared to let it win. And perhaps this is why Kyiv is bundling together its requests to Washington as a package designed to achieve victory and not just one-off measures to ease difficult situations. Relaxing the restrictions on long-range strikes would not be by itself a war-winning move, but it might help move the dial in Ukraine’s favour and at least providing some relief from the deadly attacks being experienced by Ukraine.

In his own address after the attacks on 26 August Zelensky concluded with a strong plea:

‘There should be no restrictions on the range of weapons for Ukraine, while terrorists have no such restrictions. Defenders of life should face no restrictions on weapons, while Russia uses all kinds of its own weapons, as well as “Shahed” drones and ballistic missiles from North Korea. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and other partners have the power to help us stop terror. We need decisions.’

John Kirby, Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the NSC , acknowledged in response that Zelenskyy had made these calls before both privately and publicly, and this was not surprising when his country was under attack. He added: ‘But as I've said many, many times, we'll keep the conversations with the Ukrainians going, but we're going to keep it private.’

The conversation are continuing as top Ukrainian officials are reported to be visiting Washington with a list of targets that could usefully be hit inside Russia. This is an attempt to move beyond the issue of principle to that of practicality. What difference would it make if the restrictions were relaxed further? This reflects a shift in the Administration’s argument. It is now less about escalation and more about its view that not only can Ukraine can win without mounting long-range attacks but that even if they could be mounted, they would not be as useful as Ukraine thinks they would be. Their supplies of ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) are quite modest, and the US stockpile is limited. Those that Ukraine possesses are already being used – effectively – for an offensive directed against targets in Crimea (about which the Administration has been relaxed because it does not consider Crimea part of Russia, although of course Russia does).

At the same time many of the Russian assets have been moved out of reach. This is not, however, an argument against denying Ukraine the capability. If Russian aircraft must be moved further away from Ukraine to be safe then that helps as it means that they would need to be in the air longer and give Ukrainian defences more time to prepare.

While this argument rumbles on, another $125 million military assistance package is being prepared by the US. This includes howitzer and artillery ammunition, ambulances and medical equipment, antitank missiles, drones and ammunition, and is largely geared to the fight in eastern Ukraine. The Administration still appears squeamish about anything that Ukraine is doing on Russian territory. Partly this is misgivings about the danger of Ukrainian forces getting overstretched. The Washington Post quoted an official as saying ‘I don’t foresee the United States helping or providing assistance in intel sharing that would enable the further taking of sovereign Russian territory.’ Yet the New York Times suggests that Western intelligence (possibly not including the US?) was provided to help the Ukrainians locate Russian troops. There are some indications that the success of the operation thus far has persuaded the administration to see how it can help the Ukrainians ‘dig in and defend themselves’ when working out how large a buffer zone they wish to protect.

Ukraine’s Response

Instead of waiting for the Americans to change their minds, Ukraine has been developing its own means of attacking a wide range of targets in Russia. Zelensky also revealed on Tuesday that Ukraine has developed its own ballistic missile which has now been successfully tested. Earlier in August he unveiled a long-range-missile-cum-drone, named the Palianytsia. To get a flavour of what Ukraine is trying to achieve with this weapons, which has already been used, watch this video.

On 22 August Marinovka military airfield in Russia’s Volgograd region, about 180 miles from the Ukrainian border, was hit with long-range drones. According to one Russian source, no operational aircraft were hit (they had flown away before the strike) but some non-operational aircraft, lacking spare parts, were damaged, along with shelters at the airfield. In one of these shelters ammunition was stored leading to significant damage.

Ukraine’s economic targets for their long-range strikes are different from Russia’s. For much of this year they have been hitting Russia’s oil industry. A drone strike on Proletarsk oil storage facility in the southern Rostov region of Russia on 18 August caused a giant blaze that Russian firefighters failed to put out, so that it spread, leading the authorities to declare a state of emergency. Another oil depot was attacked in the Kirov region by drones, some 1150 km away from Ukraine, demonstrating again the increasing range of Ukrainian drones and the vulnerability of oil facilities as targets.

The other objective is to isolate Crimea. On 22 August a fire was caused at the Black Sea port of Kavkaz, the main ferry terminal connecting Russia with Crimea, when a large cargo ferry carrying fuel was struck by a Neptune missile. The bridge linking Crimea to Russia over the Kerch Strait was partly damaged some time ago. This is causing real logistical problems for Russia in its efforts to keep Crimea supplied let alone be of value to its war effort.

The challenge for Ukraine if it wants to demonstrate that it has a strategy for victory is to pull these threads together and show how they add up to a coherent whole. The conversations between Ukrainian and American officials need to be candid, so that the former do not feel patronised and the latter do not feel taken for granted. Ukraine cannot win without the US and its many other partners. It is important to recognise the commitment that has already been shown in supporting Ukraine as it resists Russian aggression. It is also important to recognise that their interests will not always be in alignment. Washington will always put some limits on what it is prepared to do for Kyiv and Kyiv will bristle at times at Washington’s advice. But they do need to agree on a strategy that they can both explain and justify, and that has some chance of success.

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5. The Greats Agree: Ukraine's Kursk Offensive Is Strategic Malpractice

"Dear Prudence," "strategic prudence." I wonder if the Beatles lyrics hae any application here? Actually they might ("Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play?...Dear Prudence, won't you open up your eyes?...https://www.thebeatles.com/dear-prudence - I could not resist).

A contrarian view from Professor Holmes.

The Greats Agree: Ukraine's Kursk Offensive Is Strategic Malpractice

Strategic prudence—from nineteenth-century Europe and ancient China alike—urges Kiev to wind down the Kursk operation, and consolidate scarce manpower and resources to defend what matters most.

The National Interest · by James Holmes · August 26, 2024

Strategic grandmasters would upbraid Ukraine’s leadership for hurling an offensive into the Russian border district of Kursk. Sure, Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian soldier-scribe of everlasting renown, countenanced opening secondary theaters or operations under certain circumstances. But he did so grudgingly. Clausewitz cautioned commanders to divert forces only on a not-to-interfere basis with success in the primary theater, which after all represents the theater of greatest consequence as the leadership defines it.

This is sage counsel. If nothing else, strategy means setting and enforcing priorities. This takes self-discipline. It makes little strategic sense to hazard what matters most for the sake of something that matters less, no matter how beguiling. For Ukraine—a combatant that stands in mortal peril—the foremost priority must be to hold as much Ukrainian ground as possible while striving to regain lost ground. Kursk is great from a fist-pumping standpoint. Apart from that its benefits appear lackluster.

As he does for so many martial enterprises, Clausewitz enunciates a simple formula to help the leadership fathom whether to open a secondary theater or operation. Some years ago I took to calling it Clausewitz’s Three R’s, namely reward, risk, and resources. A new endeavor, that is, must not merely promise nice-to-have gains. It must be “exceptionally rewarding.” He presents no units of measurement for exceptional reward, but his message is stark: if it is not necessary to do this, it is necessary not to do it.

The notion of wresting territory from Russia exudes a certain allure on the logic that paybacks are hell, but do the prospective rewards qualify as exceptional? It’s hard to see how. If not, Ukraine’s leadership should cut the foray short.

But there’s more to the calculus than forecasting rewards. Clausewitz cautions the commander against running undue risk in the “principal theater” in order to pursue lesser aims elsewhere. And he defines risk in terms of the resources available in the principal theater. Only “decisive superiority” of resources in the main theater can justify siphoning resources into a secondary effort.

Only if a candidate theater or operation passes all three tests—Clausewitz’s Three R’s—should the venture proceed.

Does anyone think the Ukrainian armed forces command decisive military superiority over Russia in eastern Ukraine, the major fighting front? Unless they do, writes Clausewitz, Kiev is courting unacceptable risk in Kursk. In all likelihood he would fault Ukrainian military and political leaders for strategic indiscipline.

Now, it is conceivable that the classical Chinese general Sun Tzu, Clausewitz’s companion in the pantheon of arms, would not deplore the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk. Sun Tzu advises the general to take an opportunistic, highly supple approach to battlefield operations, employing “direct”—sometimes translated as “normal,” or “orthodox”—and “indirect”—sometimes translated as “extraordinary,” or “unorthodox”—lines of effort.

Direct operations generally refers to a frontal assault, while indirect operations strike the enemy’s flanks from some unforeseen axis. Sun Tzu enjoins the wily commander to be prepared to shift effort back and forth as the fortunes of battle dictate. He might make the indirect assault the main effort if the direct assault falters, and thus relegate the direct effort to secondary status. He might shift back, and back again, if circumstances warrant. Etc.

This is a fluid concept of generalship. For Master Sun there are infinite combinations and recombinations of direct and indirect effort.

On its face Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk might resemble a macro-scale indirect attack apt to warm Sun Tzu’s heart. It certainly took Moscow by surprise. But here’s the thing. Like Clausewitz two millennia later, the Chinese sage fretted constantly about risk and resources. If the general’s army boasts ten times as many soldiers as the enemy, he exhorts the general to order the foe surrounded. If the general enjoys five times the manpower, he should attack.

And so forth. As the force ratio dwindles, the less venturesome the commander can afford to be. Acting otherwise flirts with disaster. “If weaker numerically,” Sun Tzu goes on, “be capable of withdrawing.” And “if in all respects unequal, be capable of eluding him, for a small force is but booty for one more powerful.”

The Chinese strategist traffics more in maxims than in Clausewitz-esque analysis of alternative courses of action. He dispenses the wisdom of a master. But given his emphasis on numbers of soldiers, it’s tough to imagine his endorsing Ukraine’s incursion into Russia. Since 2022 the Ukrainian Army has outperformed expectations by a wide margin. That should not mask the fact that Ukraine is—and will remain—the lesser antagonist confronting a bulkier, better-resourced neighbor that sees vital interests at stake. It is weaker by most indices and must conduct itself accordingly.

Strategic prudence—from nineteenth-century Europe and ancient China alike—urges Kiev to wind down the Kursk operation, and consolidate scarce manpower and resources to defend what matters most.

Enough with the adventurism.

About the Author: Dr. James Holmes, U.S. Naval War College

Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.

Image Credit: Creative Commons and/or Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by James Holmes · August 26, 2024

6. Biden authorized troubled Gaza pier operation as officials warned of weather and security challenges, watchdog finds

A political requirement to "just do something?"

Biden authorized troubled Gaza pier operation as officials warned of weather and security challenges, watchdog finds | CNN Politics

CNN · by Oren Liebermann · August 28, 2024

A Maxar Technologies satellite image, taken on Wednesday, June 12, shows the floating pier and ships that are using it to offload aid.

Maxar Technologies

CNN —

President Joe Biden authorized the troubled Gaza pier operation as officials warned the humanitarian aid effort would face weather challenges in the Mediterranean Sea and security problems in an active war zone, according to a newly released government watchdog report.

Officials from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) also feared that focusing on the pier would distract from the larger effort to reopen land crossings into Gaza, seen as a far more efficient and well-established method of moving large quantities of humanitarian supplies.

Plagued by bad weather and recurring security problems, the $230 million pier operated for only 20 days over a two-month span, delivering a fraction of its intended aid, the USAID inspector general report found. Instead of delivering enough food for 500,000 Palestinians each month for three months, the pier only delivered enough aid for 450,000 for a single month.

During its operation, the pier delivered 19.4 million pounds of aid to Gaza, the deputy commander of US Central Command, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, told reporters after the pier shut down.

Palestinians walk past a jetty in Gaza City with a view of navy vessels off the coast as part of a humanitarian "maritime corridor" announced by US Central Command on May 17. The US military said aid deliveries began on May 17 via a temporary pier in Gaza aimed at ramping up emergency humanitarian assistance to the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

AFP/Getty Images

Biden, who announced the pier during his State of the Union address in March, acknowledged the pier had not lived up to expectations, saying he was “disappointed” during a press conference in July. “I was hopeful that would be more successful,” he said.

The pier, known as Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS), began operations on May 17. But it was operational for roughly a week before it broke apart in heavy seas, the first of several times weather forced the pier to stop operating. The Defense Department intended to use the pier for three months before the seas would make the operation unsustainable, but “rough seas and high winds began earlier than anticipated,” the report found, curtailing the period in which the pier could be effectively used.

JLOTS can only operate effectively in “short and moderate waves,” the report said, even though the Mediterranean Sea often has “significant wind and waves.” A DOD expert on JLOTS brought up these weather issues at the planning kick-off meeting, according to the report.

The Gaza war was the first time the Pentagon used the temporary pier to support a humanitarian effort in an active war zone with major security challenges, the report said.

Even when it was operating, crowded roads and land routes that constantly changed made it difficult to operate the pier effectively. The US military was in regular communication with the Israeli military, as well as the World Food Programme (WFP), which was in charge of distributing aid once it was delivered to the beach in Gaza.

According to the report, WFP and USAID staff cited “multiple instances” of the looting of aid convoys, attacks on WFP warehouses and drivers being detained or shot. In addition, planned distribution routes could quickly become evacuation zones “within a matter of hours” based on Israeli military operations, forcing officials to change transportation plans.

The Defense Department dedicated more than 1,000 US soldiers and sailors to the operation, as well as several ships.

During the pier mission, three US service members were also injured. While two experienced minor injuries and were returned to duty the same day, the third service member was in critical condition and was transferred back to the US in June to be treated at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

The pier became somewhat of a focal point of attacks on Biden, with Republican members of Congress criticizing the operation and its frequent pauses.

In June, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to senior Biden administration officials in which he said the temporary pier “has been riddled with setbacks, sidelined more often than operational, and can only be classified as a gross waste of taxpayer dollars.”

CNN · by Oren Liebermann · August 28, 2024

7. What Are We Deterring?

The author omitted the most important quote:

"Deterrence works. Until it doesn't."

– Sir Lawrence Freedman.

That said this should stimulate some useful discussion on deterrence. Talk amongst yourselves

As an aside I cannot tell you how many times I have heard just today that we have to deter north Korea provocations or we failed to deter the development of north Korean nuclear weapons (yet we have successful deterred another attack on the South for seven decades and we have so far deterred the we of north Korean nuclear weapons). Perhaps another quote should be, "He who tries to deter everything, deters nothing."

2 hours ago
7 min read

What Are We Deterring?

By Jeremiah Monk

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/what-are-we-deterring

Weapons fail to halt,

Deterrence dwells in the mind,

Ephemeral as mist.

A deterrence haiku.

INTRODUCTION

“Integrated Deterrence influences adversary decision calculus by affecting perception of costs, benefits, and consequences of restraint. The Joint Force’s contribution to Integrated Deterrence is combat-credible forces, backstopped by a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent. Through the NMS’ theory of success, the Joint Force contributes to Integrated Deterrence to reduce an adversary’s perceived benefit and increase the adversary's perceived cost of aggression, incentivizing restraint as a result.”

- The 2022 National Military Strategy[i]

The Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff often reiterate how the number one priority of the Defense Department is to prevent a war with China. These statements align with the National Security Strategy, which directs “the military will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the PRC as its pacing challenge.”[ii] The National Defense Strategy puts a finer point on this directive by establishing the Defense Department’s priorities, which can be summarized as: a) defend the homeland, b) deter attacks and aggression, and c) prepare to prevail in conflict.[iii]

Across all forms of communication, deterring America’s adversaries in order to avoid war is the uncontested stated priority of the Department.

So, we ask…what’s the plan?

DETER, OR PREVAIL

The US Department of Defense defines deterrence as “the prevention of action by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable counteraction and/or belief that the cost of action outweighs the perceived benefits.”[iv]

The issue is not the Department’s definition, but rather how it is interpreted. The problem is twofold:

- The Defense Department largely believes that by preparing to prevail, through force posture and by deploying newer and better weapons systems, it can simultaneously achieve both objectives b) deter and c) prevail.

- The Defense Department’s predisposition to “prevailing” in combat gives little consideration to deterring adversary actions that are not aggressive “attacks.”

Combined, these two problems result in the Department’s chronic mismanagement in their pursuit of deterrence - a predisposition to obtaining, maintaining, and presenting a “combat-credible force” (a Means) to serve as a “credible threat,” instead of prioritizing capabilities to “prevent [adversary] action” (an Ends).

DETERRING IS NOT THE SAME AS PREVAILING

"Integrated deterrence is not just about possessing advanced technology and superior firepower — that is just one part of the orchestra," said Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, Jr, just days ago at a forum on Integrated Deterrence.[v] GEN Brown’s predecessor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, noted much the same in his forward to the 2023 Joint Concept for Competing:

“Our adversaries have studied our military strengths and way of war. They have implemented approaches that pursue their strategic objectives while avoiding the deterrent tripwires upon which our national security posture is based. Simply put, U.S. adversaries intend to "win without fighting." In this context, U.S. challengers intend to pursue their objectives while avoiding armed conflict-rendering traditional Joint Force deterrence less effective. Facing this dilemma, more of the same is not enough.”[vi]

America’s approach to deterrence is to prepare to prevail in a fight. But our adversaries intend to achieve their objective without fighting. So…what exactly do we think our deterrent posture is deterring?

For an analogy, imagine our Joint Force is a highly-trained boxer, standing ready to take on any challenger in the ring. But our opponent is out back stealing our car. Sure, our boxer’s overwhelming strength may have deterred our opponent from a direct fight...but who prevailed?

GEN Milley and GEN Brown recognized this truth – effective deterrence does not come from a threat of military force alone, and is not confined to the ring of combat. The Department’s adoption of the new buzzwords “Integrated” and “Total” Deterrence pays homage to the “whole-of-government” and “interagency” aspects of deterrence, indicating a tacit acknowledgment that the Department realizes the military instrument of power on its own is insufficient to address modern challenges.

Yet the bureaucracy of the Department remains…undeterred. If the Pentagon’s true priority is to avoid war, its processes, plans, and assessments should be geared accordingly. But of course, it is not. The Department views deterrence as little more than having a “big stick” and the will to use it, so its efforts orient on presenting a “credible threat” by building a “combat-credible” force that is built primarily for war. War plans are built with an eye to the “most dangerous” scenario of high-end combat. Wargames evaluate the effectiveness of those plans. The results of these wargames are used to justify the allocation and acquisition of combat resources. The entire cycle is built to present combat credibility, based on the Department’s understanding that this credibility equates to deterrence.

By focusing on the task of prevailing in combat, the Department largely overlooks its primary charge to build plans and conduct operations intended to avoid war – a fundamentally different task. It also ignores adversary activities that are intended to remain below the threshold of what will trigger a military action, or circumvent those triggers entirely by operating outside the military domain. China seizes territory through predatory trade practices, leveraging legal systems, conducting influence campaigns, and dredging islands. Iran circumvents retaliatory triggers by operating through proxies and black markets. North Korea profits from cyber theft and the black-market arms trade. They all achieve their strategic objectives with little fear of a retaliatory strike from the large US fleets positioned near their shores.

Having combat-credible forces is a means to an end. It is not a strategy.

A DETERRENT STRATEGY OF LEVERAGE

The adversary’s “belief that the cost of action outweighs the perceived benefits” does not necessarily need to come from the threat of combat operations. In fact, that potential cost may be more effective if it does not. Sanctions, trade controls, diplomatic relations, market and resource access, travel restrictions, and international court rulings are all examples of costs that can be applied with great effect and do not require military force.

It is leverage, not force, that is key to an effective deterrent strategy. The Department should seek to use its military might in such a way as to generate leverage, not just threaten with force.

Leverage is the application of influence gained or created to achieve an effect or exploit an opportunity, and advantage is the superiority of position or condition.[vii] The military instrument can certainly be used to generate leverage, but doing so requires an understanding of an adversary’s holistic points of vulnerability, then investing in operations and activities that create potential dilemmas and signal the existence of a credible counter-action, not just a credible force.

Efforts to arm proxies such as Ukraine have proved to be a cost-effective way to pin down adversaries with strategic quagmires. Houthi strikes against shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb strait demonstrate the strategic potential of holding an adversary’s supply chain at risk, a capability that the US should mirror. Both of these strategies are potent deterrent options with effectiveness that can be measured not in combat credibility but in leverage.

If the Department were truly committed to the deter priority, then the Pentagon’s objective would be to develop strategies to secure points of leverage, instead of focusing on developing capabilities. Planning and programming functions would operate accordingly, with evaluative simulations designed to test approaches to generate leverage. These “un-wargames,” would identify areas where adversaries are undeterred, and lead to the exploration of fresh alternative deterrent measures. As the military instrument is but “one piece in the orchestra” as GEN Brown suggests, then these un-wargames would be “integrated” to fully incorporate the other instruments of national power and identify ways where the Joint Force can act in a supporting role.

Pentagon leaders should look for ways to use its exquisite, combat-credible capability to obtain and apply leverage, not just force, and seek to build military capabilities accordingly. Leverage, like risk, is relative and perishable as adversaries find workarounds. Therefore, the Joint Force’s leverage posture should be continually challenged and reevaluated to ensure leverage is there when needed. This cycle should lead to changes in both capabilities (Means) and approaches (Ways). Failure to reevaluate the ability of a capability or position to provide leverage can lead the nation to continue to invest in capabilities and activities that have outlived their shelf-life, in turn wasting precious resources and creating a false sense of security.

CONCLUSION

Leverage, not capability, is the true catalyst of deterrence. Combat-credible forces are essential to enabling a deterrence strategy, but they are a means as opposed to an end. Deterrence does not come from having a combat-credible force, it comes from having a force that can apply leverage in such a way as to change an adversary’s risk calculation.

The Department of Defense must stop conflating deterrence with the combat capability of its weapon systems, and instead look at deterrence as a separate objective that can be best pursued by applying strategies to secure leverage, not just threaten the use of force. The Department should implement functional planning and wargaming processes that are oriented on the first priority (deter) instead of the second (prevail), which would reveal these hard truths and empower the Pentagon to enact more effective deterrent approaches and better secure national interests in the face of adversary aggression.

Alas, the bureaucracy of the Defense Department appears to be comfortable to keep squaring off in the boxing ring with no opponent present to contest.

NOTES

[i] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “National Military Strategy.” US Department of Defense, Washington, DC, 2022, p.3.

[ii] The White House, “National Security Strategy.” Washington, DC, October 2022. p. 20.

[iii] US Department of Defense, “National Defense Strategy.” Washington, DC, 2022. p.7.

[iv] Joint Staff, “JP-3-0 Joint Operations.” Washington, DC, January 17, 2017, incorporating Change 1 October 22, 2018, page GL-08.

[v] Olay, Matthew, “Integrated Deterrence Is Key to Meeting Challenge of Future Conflicts, Brown Says.” US Department of Defense, Washington, DC, August 14, 2024. https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3874160/integrated-deterrence-is-key-to-meeting-challenge-of-future-conflicts-brown-says/ (accessed Aug 18, 2024)

[vi] Joint Staff. “Joint Concept for Competing.” Washington D.C., February 10, 2023, as published by Small Wars Journal on February 26, 2023, page i. https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/joint-concept-competing?utm_source=pocket_saves (accessed June 17, 2024)

[vii] Bazin, Aaron, ed. “On Competition: Adapting to the Contemporary Strategic Environment.” MacDill Air Force Base, Florida: JSOU Press, Report 21-5, 2021. p. xi.

8. Marine Corps infantry’s secret weapon: A $9.95 unofficial website

Another example of why I am bullish on our young people.

We have to be able to not only outfight our enemies but outthnk them too.

Marine Corps infantry’s secret weapon: A $9.95 unofficial website

marinecorpstimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · August 27, 2024

Last year, an idea began percolating among some Marine infantry officers: How could they draft principles and procedures for if the Marines found themselves in a conflict similar to the one now raging in Ukraine?

Using open-source analysis and commentary, a team of volunteers led by a retired lieutenant colonel got to work answering this question.

Two documents emerged out of this informal Marine effort.

One was a detailed 126-page handbook that described a series of scenarios and explained how existing Marine doctrine would apply to such a fight.

The handbook covered everything from how a company leader should write an order — one page, handwritten, no imagery — to drone use, and how each drone would support one unit, with leaders tasking drones in the company order.

Goodbye, tanks: How the Marine Corps will change, and what it will lose, by ditching its armor

Commandant Gen. David H. Berger has said that should armor be needed by Marines, he would look to the Army to provide that capability.

It also candidly acknowledged gaps in official Marine Corps guidance on how to hide from enemy drones, how to use anti-tank missiles alongside drones to hunt and destroy the enemy and how to move under artillery fire.

The second document was a brief summary of 10 “lessons for leaders” about fighting on a battlefield like Ukraine.

That five-pager specified what Marine ground forces would need to win in these conditions: drones in every unit and echelon, anti-drone electronic warfare jammers, and, counter to the Corps’ recent decisions on the future shape of the force, a reliance on tanks.

“The tank is not dead, as many have predicted,” the authors wrote, citing Ukraine’s employment of armored vehicles and its desire for more to stand off Russia’s mechanized units.

These documents were combined and published in June on 2ndBn5thMar.com, a website that takes its name from a Camp Pendleton, California, infantry unit, but is unaffiliated with the Corps.

It’s run by Brendan McBreen, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2011 and is now a faculty member at Marine Corps Intelligence Schools in Dam Neck, Va.

The site dates to 1998, when McBreen, then attached to 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, was tasked with distributing standard operating procedures being developed to fight and train. When a sergeant suggested posting the document to the “World Wide Web,” McBreen took it upon himself to create a place to host it.

Marines during a Realistic Urban Training exercise at Fort Hunter Liggett, California, on Aug. 24, 2023. (Sgt. Sydney Smith/Marine Corps)

“I didn’t do anything for a couple of years,” McBreen said. “And my wife said, ‘Hey, we’re still paying $9.95 a month to this web hosting company. And so I got on – you know, once every six months, I would look and see how it’s doing. And there were thousands of downloads.”

For those concerned about operational security, McBreen said all material discussed on his site is based on open-source information and doesn’t cover anything classified.

As McBreen’s career progressed, the site traveled with him. From time to time, fellow infantry Marine officers would reach out to share their own best practices for specific tasks, such as 81mm mortar employment.

While official Marine Corps doctrine provided general guidance, McBreen said he noticed a lack of unit-level practices and procedures, creating space for this crowd-sourced infantry network to fill in the gaps.

“Some of it was good,” McBreen said of the informal input he received. “Some of it was average, but all of it was shareable.”

The emergence of drones as a battlefield factor in recent years has created new demand for guidance on how to integrate the technology into the fight and defend against it. In 2020, Marine Capt. Walker Mills co-authored a paper on how units could camouflage themselves to evade aerial surveillance and published it on McBreen’s website.

Now a drone officer, Mills contributed to portions of the new Ukraine documents dealing with drone warfare that were published on 2ndBn5thMar.com.

“The doctrine always lags somewhat,” Mills told Marine Corps Times. “Our standard infantry company and platoon publications are several years old, maybe even a decade old. So, they don’t talk a ton about small tactical [drones].”

McBreen said he’s occasionally noticed spikes in the site’s popularity over the years, notably around 2005 when he published “Night Warrior,” a training guide for nighttime combat. Most of the time, he said, he can’t tell what’s driving a new surge in traffic.

“The tracking stuff would show jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, and then a big spike,” he said, “And you could also tell, although I never knew the origin, that some instructor said at some school, ‘Hey, students, you ought to look at this document.’”

Marines establish a firing position by checking coordinates and fields of fire using a compass during defensive tactics training in Brazil in 2023. (Gunnery Sgt. Daniel Wetzel/Marine Corps)

Maj. Zachary Schwartz, who recently served as the operations officer for 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines out of Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, California, and is now enrolled in Marine Corps Command and Staff college, said he’s used the site for guidance as an infantry leader at various levels.

While a 1st lieutenant serving as a team leader, Schwartz recalled benefitting from an article about condensing traditional Marine Corps five-paragraph orders into concise verbal instructions.

He’s also employed the practical guidance within the camouflage manual to teach signature management and deception: simple things like habitually using leaves and brush to hide the shape of a helmet. Schwartz was also a contributor to the recently published Ukraine document.

It’s hard to know the exact reach of McBreen’s website, which has typically been shared via word of mouth.

“I would say the infantry community embraces what Brendan McBreen has done,” Schwartz said. “The real pros in our community all know this website. They all know the resources on it, and they all pass it around.”

Though the documents contain candid analysis that sometimes challenges conventional Marine Corps perspectives — such as calling for tanks even as the Corps has divested itself of them to fight lighter — the site’s supporters feel that such informal discussions are what leaders want of their Marines.

“I feel like you hear a lot of leaders say, hey, professional discussion is part of being in the Marine Corps,” Mills said. “You know, leave things better than you found them.”

When McBreen published the Ukraine handbook in June, he got an immediate indicator that the document was popular when a notice from the website hosting service warned that downloads had exceeded the site’s capacity and 2ndBn5thMar.com was in danger of crashing.

“OK,” McBreen recalled saying. “I’ll give you four more dollars a month, or whatever you need.”

About Hope Hodge Seck

Hope Hodge Seck is an award-winning investigative and enterprise reporter covering the U.S. military and national defense. The former managing editor of Military.com, her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Politico Magazine, USA Today and Popular Mechanics.

9. Army Preps for "Transparent" Future Battlefield - Nowhere to Hide

The unblinking eye (remember that concept?) now applied against us, everywhere all at once. It gives new meaning to having to be able to hide in plain sight. How can we do that now?

Or this could be the 3-5 second rush applied on a grand scale: What I recall from my younger days: "I'm up, he sees me, i'm moving, he aims, I'm down." But I understand it is just "I'm up, he sees me, I'm down."

Video at the link: https://warriormaven.com/uncategorized/army-preps-for-transparent-future-battlefield-nowhere-to-hide?mc_cid=79c035bb9c&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Army Preps for "Transparent" Future Battlefield - Nowhere to Hide - Warrior Maven

If a target can be seen, it can be killed

warriormaven.com · by Kris Osborn · August 26, 2024

By Kris Osborn, President, Warrior

There will be an urgent and pressing need to “hide in plain sight” on a “transparent” future battlefield due to ubiquitous, multi-domain sensors, according to Army intel researchers, who clearly explain that … in a future combat environment … “if it can be seen … it can be killed.”

Deception, jamming, spoofing, camouflage and “hiding” heat, electromagnetic and light signatures will be the key to survival and prosperity in future war, explains an interesting new research study by the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command G2 called “The Operational Environment 2024-2034 Large-Scale Combat Operations.”

The essay, which involved research and analysis of current and expected future warfare dynamics, tactics and concepts of operation, sought to anticipate future warfare and best position the Army to fight and win in a hyperconnected, multi-domain, high-tech combat sphere.

“The modern battlefield is growing progressively more transparent because of the proliferation of advanced technologies—smart devices, sensors, emitters, etc.—as well as the emergence of hyper-connected global communications and social media,” the essay states.

Low and Medium-Earth Orbit satellites are emerging by the hundreds bringing additional surveillance, imagery, throughput and networking to future combat, drones are multiplying exponentially in swarms with the specific aim of blanketing areas with surveillance, overwhelming enemy air defenses and launching “suicide” strikes acting like munitions themselves. Long range sensors from surveillance planes and medium and high altitude drones are now equipped with much higher levels of resolution and image fidelity, able to zoom in closely and gather precise data from unprecedented distances. Thousands of unmanned ground, air and surface platforms, robots, sensors and vehicles are likely to span across a multi-domain warzone, leaving nowhere for forces to hide themselves from view. High-tech, advanced heat-sensors will detect thermal signatures through heavy vegetation and weather obscurants and secure networking of surveillance data and image collection will enable a high-speed transfer of data from inside buildings, behind ridges, accross mountains or positioned in many otherwise undetectable locations.

“Modern LSCO will be a competition between the hiders and the finders, with only fleeting exploitation opportunities for both. If a target can be seen, it can be killed. The ability of the Army to protect itself on this transparent battlefield will be paramount to its survival and success. The ability to hide in plain sight takes on even greater importance with the mass and precision of modern weapons systems,” the text of the report states.

A large concern with this kind of phenomenon is that advanced, AI-enabled computer algorithms are increasingly capable of processing and analyzing massive pools of incoming sensor data to identify moments and objects of great relevance. The process of gathering, analyzing, processing, exploiting and disseminating information, called PED, is becoming faster, more efficient, multi-domain and ubiquitious.

Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization and Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

warriormaven.com · by Kris Osborn · August 26, 2024

10. EAGLS: US Army gets new anti-drone systems featuring laser-guided 70mm rockets.

??? the US Army’s Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR)???

Established in 1966 as the successor to the Navy's Bureau of Naval Weapons, the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) is headquartered in Patuxent River, Md., with military and civilian personnel stationed at eight locations across the continental United States and one site overseas.

You know how to spell Joint? A-R-M-Y. I guess we are truly joint if NAVAIR belongs to the US Army. :-)

EAGLS: US Army gets new anti-drone systems featuring laser-guided 70mm rockets.

https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-army-counter-drone-laser?mc_cid=79c035bb9c&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Story by Kapil Kajal • 6h • 3 min read

EAGLS: US Army gets new anti-drone systems featuring laser-guided 70mm rockets

he US Army has received the six MSI Defense Solutions’ (MSI) Electronic Advanced Ground Launcher Systems (EAGLS) to improve its counter-drone capabilities.

In April, the US Army’s Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) announced the order for a firm-fixed-price contract with MSI with a not-to-exceed value of $24,186,464.

The contract demanded the delivery of six EAGLS to fight off drones in the Middle East.

The order was seen as an emergency response to provide much-needed counter-drone systems to protect US assets in the region.

Adaptable, cost-effective

As the global unmanned aerial system (UAS) threat expands in quantity and complexity, personnel and asset protection demand more agile, mobile, and effective solutions.

The EAGLS Counter-UAS system provides an adaptable, cost-effective, mobile, or stationary system that can be employed in various environments and on multiple platform types.

MSI’s EAGLS C-UAS system is a platform that can accommodate both mobile and stationary integrations to protect critical infrastructure such as power, water, and information systems/data centers.

It can also protect any target on the move, repositioning from one location to another, and enable shoot and scoot capability.

Related video: Indian Army To Strengthen Anti-Drone Arsenal Amid Growing Threats of Unmanned Aerial Systems | N18G (News18)

News18

Indian Army To Strengthen Anti-Drone Arsenal Amid Growing Threats of Unmanned Aerial Systems | N18G

Featuring a remote weapon station, MHR radar, electro-optical sensor, and a 70mm laser rocket launcher, UAS targets are quickly detected at a safe distance, recognized and identified, and prosecuted by the forces.

70mm rockets

Similar to L3Harris’ Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) system, EAGLS features laser-guided 70mm rockets to kill drones at a safe distance.

EAGLS is a complete system with three main components. These include a version of the Commonly Remotely Operated Weapon Station II (CROWS II) equipped with a four-round 70mm rocket launcher loaded with laser-guided Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (APKWS II) rockets, a sensor turret with electro-optical and infrared cameras, and a small radar array.

The weapon station uses laser-guided rockets such as the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II with a range of 10 kilometers (6 miles), identical to the RPS-40 radar’s detection range.

MSI’s website shows a version installed on a pickup truck-style variant of the 4×4 Humvee light utility vehicle.

The United States Navy recently released a document called Justification and Approval, which stated that an urgent contract action is required to address the emerging and persistent threats posed by UAS in the United States Central Command (USCENTCOM) Area of Responsibility (AOR).

According to the J&A document, “Immediate contract award is critical due to the urgent need for ongoing operations in the USCENTCOM AOR. “If the immediate procurement is not made, U.S. Forces will not receive the necessary critical C-UAS systems as required for capability in theater,” it adds.

The urgency has yet to be made public, but it is clear that US higher-ups are concerned about the lack of counter-drone systems to defend US assets in the Middle East.

This is likely a fear that has only increased given the Islamic Republic of Iran’s threats to attack US bases around the region following its assistance to Israel.

Whatever the case, purchasing the new EAGLSs highlights the need for increased counter-drone capabilities for US forces in the Middle East.

11. A dangerous new flashpoint is fast emerging in the South China Sea

Maps and photos at the link: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/27/asia/china-philippines-new-flashpoint-sabina-shoal-intl-hnk/index.html?utm_term=

A dangerous new flashpoint is fast emerging in the South China Sea

Analysis by Nectar Gan and Brad Lendon, CNN

7 minute read

Published 10:18 PM EDT, Tue August 27, 2024

Chinese Coast Guard ship collides with a Philippine Coast Guard vessel on August 25, 2024. Philippine Coast Guard

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world.

Hong Kong

CNN

—

A stretch of uninhabited, low-lying reefs in the South China Sea is fast becoming a dangerous new flashpoint between China and the Philippines, dealing a blow to recent efforts to de-escalate tensions in one of the world’s most vital waterways.

Over the past week, Chinese and Philippine vessels have engaged in multiple collisions and face-offs near Sabina Shoal, a disputed atoll lying just 86 miles from the Philippines’ west coast and 745 miles from China, which claims almost all of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory despite an international ruling to the contrary.

The violent confrontations came just weeks after Beijing and Manila struck a temporary deal to lower tensions that had been rising all summer at another nearby reef, where China’s increasingly aggressive tactics had raised alarm across the region as well as in Washington, a mutual defense ally of the Philippines.

Renewed tension in the South China Sea is expected to be on the agenda of meetings between US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during Sullivan’s visit to China this week.

Following a particularly violent encounter at the Second Thomas Shoal in June, which saw Chinese coast guard personnel brandishing axes at Filipino soldiers and slashing their rubber boats, Chinese and Philippine officials sat down for talks and agreed to de-escalate.

For a while, tensions appeared to be cooling, but the detente proved short lived.

On August 19, in the middle of the night, coast guard ships from China and the Philippines collided near Sabina Shoal. Manila said the Chinese ships rammed into its vessels, tearing a 3.6-foot hole in one and a 3-foot-wide gap in another. Beijing blamed the Philippines for the collisions.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, another clash took place, with the Philippines accusing China of ramming and firing water cannons at a vessel from its fisheries bureau in an encounter with eight Chinese ships, including a warship from the People’s Liberation Army Navy. China said the Philippine ship “refused to accept control” by a Chinese coast guard vessel and “deliberately collided” with it.

The Chinese and Philippines vessels get uncomfortably close on August 25, 2024. Philippine Coast Guard

The following day, in yet another tense encounter, the Philippines said China deployed “an excessive force” of 40 ships – including three PLA Navy warships – to block two Philippine Coast Guard vessels. Beijing said it took “control measures” against two Philippine ships that “intruded” into waters near Sabina Shoal.

Analysts say Sabina Shoal is fast becoming the latest confrontation zone in what is already a highly contested part of the world, where a mistake could quickly spiral into a conflict with hugely damaging consequences.

“All indications seem to point to the fact that this is an emerging third flashpoint” after the Second Thomas Shoal and another atoll to the north named the Scarborough Shoal, said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

“Manila is trying to avoid what they call a repeat of the Scarborough Shoal,” which China seized in 2012 after a long standoff with the Philippines and on which it has maintained a permanent presence since, Koh added.

China, on the other hand, is trying to see off another Second Thomas Shoal, where the Philippines ran aground a World War II-era ship in 1999 to stake its claim over the reef and has stationed a small group of marines since.

The violent clashes around Second Thomas Shoal earlier this summer occurred during Beijing’s attempts to block Manila’s missions to resupply its soldiers stationed on the rusting BRP Sierra Madre.

Resupply missions

A similar blockade is playing out at Sabina Shoal, which is about 40 miles closer to the Philippine coast than the Second Thomas Shoal. Both lie within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines.

Since April, the Philippines has deployed a coast guard vessel to Sabina Shoal to monitor what it said were signs of China’s illegal land reclamation activities, after Filipino scientists discovered piles of crushed corals on the sandbars amid an increased presence of Chinese ships in the area. China has denied the accusation.

Displacing 2,300 tons, the 318-foot-long BRP Teresa Magbanua anchored at Sabina Shoal is one of the two largest ships that the Philippine Coast Guard has and is its flagship. Acquired from Japan in 2022, it is also one of the newest ships in Manila’s fleet, carrying a crew of 67.

“This has really annoyed China and they want that (Philippine) vessel to go away,” said Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

“China refers to it … as a ‘quasi-grounding,’ so they’re basically treating it like it’s the Sierra Madre all over again even though it is not grounded, it’s anchored.”

And Beijing has been gradually upping the pressure on Manila.

In July, China anchored one of its “monster” coast guard ships, the 12,000-ton CCG-5901, near Sabina Shoal. The CCG-5901 is more than five times the size of the Philippines’ Teresa Magbanua and larger than any other regular coast guard ship in the world.

“Initially the Chinese were trying to warn Manila to roll back at Sabina Shoal. That’s why they send the monster ship just to create an impression,” Koh said.

“But the Filipinos were sitting still and not moving at all. So I guess the Chinese likely have reached a point where they concluded that they need to up the pressure on the Filipinos, which is why we saw what’s happening recently.”

Philippine Coast Guard cutter BRP Teresa Magbanua. Philippine Coast Guard/Facebook

In recent weeks, Chinese state media have accused the Philippines of trying to establish a long-term presence at Sabina Shoal to occupy the reef and indicated that China will not allow any resupply missions to proceed.

“China will never be deceived by the Philippines again,” Chinese state news agency Xinhua said in a commentary about the Sunday faceoff, citing Manila’s grounding of the Sierra Madre at the Second Thomas Shoal back in 1999.

On Monday, the Philippine Coast Guard said it had deployed two ships on a “humanitarian mission” to deliver vital food and supplies to its personnel stationed abroad the Teresa Magbanua, including “a special ice cream treat” in honor of the country’s National Heroes’ Day.

(Teresa Magbanua, one of the heroes commemorated on the day, was one of the few women to lead Filipino troops in battles against Spanish colonizers during the Philippine Revolution and against American forces in the Philippine-American war.)

But the mission failed due to the obstruction of 40 Chinese ships, according to the Philippine Coast Guard.

If China continues to block the Philippines from resupplying the Teresa Magbanua with food, water and fuel or rotating its crew, the Philippine ship will have to sail away, Powell said.

‘High-stakes game’

For now, neither Beijing nor Malina appear willing to back down.

“It’s a high-stakes game for Manila,” Koh said. “The domestic circumstances all point to the very fact that now Sabina Shoal is where you could not yield an inch to the Chinese… Marcos Jr is definitely right on the chopping board for that,” he added, referring to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Since coming to power in 2022, Marcos Jr has strengthened Manila’s alliance with the US and increasingly challenged China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea, which an international tribunal said had no legal basis in a landmark ruling in 2016.

His predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, a firebrand populist who launched a notoriously brutal anti-drug war, favored a much warmer relationship with Beijing and was much less willing to confront Beijing over the South China Sea.

Manila’s current “transparency initiative” to expose China’s growing assertiveness in the disputed waters has won it international support, especially from Western countries, but Beijing is not deterred by negative press, Powell said.

“China seems to be speeding up its agenda for taking control of West Philippine Sea features,” he said. “They have the capacity and they have the will, and they have not seen anything yet that says to them that the cost is going to be too high.”

Meanwhile, both Beijing and Manila are watching closely for how Washington will react.

American officials have repeatedly pledged to defend the Philippines from any armed attack in the disputed waters, stressing Washington’s “ironclad commitment” to a 1951 defense treaty between the two allies.

Samuel Paparo, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, said Tuesday that American ships could escort Philippine vessels on resupply missions in the South China Sea, describing what he called an “an entirely reasonable option” that required consultation between the treaty allies, according to Reuters.

But being dragged into another global conflict will not be in US interests, especially in the run-up to its presidential election, Koh said, adding that Washington is already occupied with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the raging war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

“The Chinese know that Manila has very limited options if they could not depend on US help,” Koh said. “China is deliberately escalating the situation, with a likely intention to test how far Washington would support Manila.”

12. The False Promise of Ukraine’s Deep Strikes Into Russia

But deep strikes were an integral part of AirLand battle. And I cannot tell you how many times I have heard the football analogy from airpower experts and deep strike enthusiasts: I would rather tackle the quarterback for a loss (deep strike) rather than have to make a goal line stand (the close fight with CAS).

Excerpts:

Of course, conducting more extensive deep strikes would help Ukraine. Damaging factories or infrastructure inside Russia might help boost Ukrainian morale, for example, as a small U.S. bombing raid against Tokyo in 1942 did for American morale in World War II. But now, like then, the capability will not transform the military situation on the ground.

With that in mind, Kyiv’s partners should now ask whether the modest military benefits are worth the escalatory risk. The answer will turn on assessments of the likelihood of expanding the conflict, and on the risk tolerance of Western governments and publics. The latter is ultimately a value judgment; military analysis alone cannot dictate where to draw the line. What it can do is forecast the battlefield consequences of policy decisions. If the West lifts its restraints on Ukrainian deep strike capability, the consequences are unlikely to include a decisive change in the trajectory of the war.

The False Promise of Ukraine’s Deep Strikes Into Russia

Hitting Faraway Targets Will Not Tip the Balance of the War

By Stephen Biddle

August 28, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle · August 28, 2024

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has provided Kyiv with extensive military aid. But that aid has long been subject to restrictions. Some have to do with the type of equipment provided, such as limits on transfers of long-range missiles or aircraft. Others constrain how U.S. weapons can be used. Washington has designed many of these restrictions to limit Ukraine’s ability to hit targets far behind the front, fearing that deep strikes would be unduly escalatory.

That position has been controversial. Both Ukrainian officials and outside critics argue that the Biden administration exaggerates the risk of Russian escalation, needlessly denying Kyiv critical military capabilities. Before making an assessment, it is important to consider just how militarily valuable deep strikes would be for Ukraine—how, if at all, the war’s prognosis would change if the United States were to lift its restrictions and Ukraine were to acquire the necessary capabilities. Only then would it be possible to judge whether the military benefits are worth the escalatory risk.

From a strictly military perspective, restrictions never help. Giving Ukraine the means and permission to launch attacks deep into Russian-held territory would surely improve Ukrainian combat power. But the difference is unlikely to be decisive. To achieve a game-changing effect, Ukraine would need to combine these strikes with tightly coordinated ground maneuver on a scale that its forces have been unable to master so far in this war. Otherwise, the benefits Ukraine could draw from additional deep strike capability would probably not be enough to turn the tide.

SHAPING THE BATTLEFIELD?

The conflict in Ukraine has been a war of attrition for more than a year now. Both sides have adopted the kind of deep, prepared defenses that historically have proven very difficult to break through. It is still possible to take ground, especially for the numerically superior Russians, but progress is slow and costly in both lives and materiel. Ukraine would need far more than modest improvements in capability to overcome Russian defenses and turn the present war of position into a war of maneuver, in which ground can be gained quickly, at tolerable cost, and on a large scale.

Ukraine’s recent advances in the Kursk region of Russia illustrate the difficulty of turning the tide of the war. Ukraine attacked an unusually ill-prepared section of the Russian front, which enabled Ukrainian forces to take ground quickly. But as Russian reserves have arrived, the Ukrainian advance has slowed, and it appears unlikely that Ukraine will make any major breakthrough. The modest seizure of Russian territory may strengthen Ukraine’s bargaining position in negotiations, ease Russian pressure on Ukrainian defenses in the Donbas, or weaken Russian President Vladimir Putin politically, but it is unlikely to change the military picture in a significant way.

There are several ways in which greater Ukrainian deep strike capability might, in principle, change the course of the war. Kyiv would be able to hit distant logistical and command targets, Russian air or naval bases, ground force assembly areas, arms factories or supporting infrastructure, the civilian energy industry, or centers of Russian political control, such as the Kremlin. Striking or threatening to strike such targets would reduce the efficiency of Russia’s offensives, weaken its defensive capability, make military action less sustainable in the long term, and increase the costs of the war for Putin and the Russian leadership class.

Ukraine would need far more than modest improvements in capability to overcome Russian defenses.

Yet there is reason to question how significant any of these effects may be. For starters, deep strike systems are expensive. Cheap drones cannot fly hundreds of miles to reach distant targets. This capability instead demands larger, more sophisticated, and more costly weapons. U.S. aid to Ukraine is limited by strict spending caps, making such systems impossible to provide without curtailing other kinds of provisions. A fleet of just 36 U.S. F-16 fighter jets, for example, would eat up $3 billion of the $60 billion allocated to Ukraine in the most recent aid bill.

If expensive systems produced disproportionate results, their cost might be worth it. But to hit distant targets requires precision guidance—a technology vulnerable to countermeasures. When one side has introduced new capabilities during this war, the other side has responded quickly by deploying technical countermeasures and operational adaptations. Even though expensive precision weapons such as the HIMARS missile or Excalibur guided artillery shell were highly effective when Ukrainian troops first began to use them, for example, they lost much of their efficacy within just a few weeks as Russian forces adapted.

Deep strikes would have a similarly short window in which they could make a real difference. Ukraine would need to deploy its new capabilities on a large scale and all at once, integrating them with ground maneuver to break through Russian lines. Per U.S. military doctrine, the deep strikes would “shape the battlefield” by temporarily cutting off support for key enemy fronts, creating an opportunity to strike those fronts with concentrated ground and air forces before the enemy could recover and respond.

Executing all this is far from easy. In its summer 2023 offensive, the Ukrainian military showed no ability to coordinate forces on anything like the scale needed for a decisive breakthrough. Longer-range weapons would make this coordination even more complicated. In 2023, Ukrainian leaders argued that large-scale synchronization was impossible while fighting an enemy with modern drones and artillery; many U.S. officers thought the problem was insufficient Ukrainian training. Either way, though, there is little reason to expect that a dynamic, large-scale integration of deep strikes and close combat would be more feasible for Ukraine now than a simpler version was a year ago. Without such an operation, however, a small number of expensive deep strike systems would consume a large share of the U.S. aid budget in exchange for a marginal increase in Ukraine’s ability to inflict casualties in positional warfare.

STRATEGIC BOMBING?

Ground-force synchronization is not the only way deep strikes could reshape the war. Rather than aiming at Russian military forces directly, Ukraine could use these capabilities to target war-supporting Russian industries, such as tank and ammunition manufacturing; oil refineries, power stations, and other parts of the country’s energy infrastructure; or centers of political control. The goal would be either to undermine Russia’s ability to sustain its war effort or to drain its will to do so.

Yet the historical record of such targeting is not encouraging. Allied forces launched massive bombing campaigns to destroy German and Japanese cities and industrial sites in World War II. U.S. forces repeatedly hit North Korean cities and infrastructure in the Korean War and North Vietnamese cities and infrastructure in the Vietnam War. The strikes never broke the targeted country’s resolve. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been decisive in pushing Japan to surrender in 1945, but no one is proposing a nuclear attack on Russian cities today.

More recent and smaller-scale precision bombing campaigns have fared little better. The United States and its allies conducted such operations in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Serbia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, and Libya in 2011. Iraq and Iran struck each other’s cities during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88. Russia has undertaken a strategic bombing campaign against Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure since the winter of 2022–23. In none of these cases have the results been promising. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy system, if anything, have hardened the Ukrainian will to fight. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, too, strategic bombing failed to induce concessions; it took synchronized combinations of air and ground combat to secure Western war aims. Iraq’s threats to attack Iranian cities with chemical weapons helped push Iran to accept a UN-brokered cease-fire in 1988, but chemical warfare against Russia is not on the table today. The evidence is mixed in the case of Serbia in 1999. The Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic conceded to most of NATO’s demands after a months-long NATO bombing campaign, but it is difficult to disentangle the effects of the bombing from the effects of years of sanctions, which had taken a heavier toll on the Serbian economy than the bombing had. Decades of history thus offer little basis for confidence that Ukraine could break Russia’s will to fight with a modest bombing campaign.

Some analysts consider the most beneficial outcome of strategic bombing to be its ability to divert an enemy’s military effort away from land warfare and into air defense, or its ability to destroy an enemy’s weapons production, thereby weakening its fielded forces. But to do either on a sufficiently large scale is a massive undertaking. During World War II, the Allied powers used more than 710,000 aircraft to drop over two million tons of bombs on Germany over three and a half years—and German weapon production still rose between January 1942 and July 1944. Only in the war’s final months, after the German air force had been largely destroyed, did this enormous campaign incapacitate German ground forces. Even with the benefit of modern technology, no plausible transfer of Western weapons today would enable Ukraine to carry out a campaign that is remotely comparable in scope. If it somehow did, Russia has access to foreign weapons and equipment—courtesy of countries such as North Korea and China—that would remain beyond the reach of Ukrainian strikes.

RISK ASSESSMENT

Of course, conducting more extensive deep strikes would help Ukraine. Damaging factories or infrastructure inside Russia might help boost Ukrainian morale, for example, as a small U.S. bombing raid against Tokyo in 1942 did for American morale in World War II. But now, like then, the capability will not transform the military situation on the ground.

With that in mind, Kyiv’s partners should now ask whether the modest military benefits are worth the escalatory risk. The answer will turn on assessments of the likelihood of expanding the conflict, and on the risk tolerance of Western governments and publics. The latter is ultimately a value judgment; military analysis alone cannot dictate where to draw the line. What it can do is forecast the battlefield consequences of policy decisions. If the West lifts its restraints on Ukrainian deep strike capability, the consequences are unlikely to include a decisive change in the trajectory of the war.

STEPHEN BIDDLE is Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle.

Foreign Affairs · by Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle · August 28, 2024

13. America Has More Latitude With Israel Than It Thinks

Excerpts:

As for steps a new administration could take, historically, U.S. presidents seeking to change Israeli behavior have pulled several levers. One is diplomatic pressure, which often entails allowing resolutions critical of Israel to pass at the United Nations or even voting in favor of them. In June, the United States made a move in this direction by sponsoring a UN resolution calling on both Israel and Hamas to end the war, although the language was somewhat restrained, and for now, the resolution has had little effect.

In the past, the United States has applied more serious forms of pressure in the economic and military spheres. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush held up $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel, forcing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to change Israel’s settlement policy and participate in a major peace conference in Madrid with the Palestinians. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama each paused high-level arms shipments to Israel over the Israeli military’s interventions in Lebanon and Gaza, respectively. When applied with firmness and patience, these forms of pressure have often succeeded in restraining Israeli governments and pushing them toward the bargaining table to end military campaigns.

Philip Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser, has made clear that a full arms embargo is off the table if Harris were to win the presidency. But his comments still leave open the possibility of substantial pressure, up to and including a halt on all offensive arms shipments to Israel until a cease-fire deal is reached. Pausing the shipment of some or all (nondefensive) weapons to Israel, refusing to guarantee Israeli loans unless the government ends the fighting, and possibly holding out the promise of economic inducements to incentivize a deal illustrate what a potential menu of pressure actions could include. Coupling such moves with renewed diplomatic efforts to push key regional powers to lean on Hamas would also likely be under consideration.

Ultimately, the war in Gaza must end. The conflict has already exacted a devastating human toll in both Israel and Gaza. The longer it goes on, the more it elevates the chances of a wider regional war and generates anti-Semitism and Islamophobia worldwide. And the longer the United States appears to support Israel or just stand on the sidelines, the more tarnished its image becomes across the Arab world and the global South. Ending this war is clearly in the United States’ national interest—and, as a range of Israelis from former security chiefs to peace activists have contended, it is in Israel’s national interest, as well. Applying pressure to the Israeli government is the primary tool the United States has to encourage the war’s end. Our analysis suggests that Washington can push right-of-center Israelis meaningfully toward the bargaining table without suffering significant damage to its reputation. If the next U.S. president wants the war to end, they must find the courage to push for it.

America Has More Latitude With Israel Than It Thinks

Why U.S. Pressure Can Persuade Netanyahu to Change Course in Gaza

By Daniel Silverman, Anna Pechenkina, Austin Knuppe, and Yehonatan Abramson

August 28, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel Silverman, Anna Pechenkina, Austin Knuppe, and Yehonatan Abramson · August 28, 2024

Over the course of Israel’s nearly yearlong war against Hamas in Gaza, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has been reluctant to apply serious pressure on Israel to curtail its most destructive operations and seek an end to the conflict. There are several reasons why Biden has held back. But one is skepticism that anything good can be accomplished by pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to change course. Some analysts and experts have argued that the United States does not have the influence to fundamentally change the Israeli government’s behavior and, indeed, that challenging Israel’s response to Hamas’s devastating attack on October 7, 2023, could backfire.

These perceptions seem to carry weight among top U.S. decision-makers. Earlier this summer, Amos Hochstein, a Biden administration official serving as a mediator between Israel and Hezbollah, warned Lebanese politicians that the United States lacked the power to force Israel’s hand. Ed Gabriel, president of the nonprofit American Task Force on Lebanon, summarized Hochstein’s message: “If you think we can dictate what [Israeli officials] do or not, you’re wrong. . . . You have to understand that America does not have the leverage to stop Israel.” Similarly, as Dennis Ross, a longtime U.S. diplomat and Middle East negotiator, said late last year, “history shows that if Israeli voters think the U.S. is making unreasonable demands, [they] will reject them, regardless of the costs.” This view is driven in part by Israeli officials’ claims. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, for instance, has repeatedly asserted that any U.S. pressure to end the war actually motivates Israelis to keep fighting.

But this assumption is just that—an assumption. To test it, in May, we conducted a unique survey of Israeli public opinion about the war to better understand how Israelis react to statements of unconditional support by the U.S. government compared with U.S. pressure to change strategy in Gaza. The results showed that the belief that the United States lacks leverage is wrong: the United States likely can pressure Israelis to move toward peaceful compromise and an end to the war in Gaza without generating significant backlash. If the Biden administration or, perhaps more likely, its successor were to apply real and sustained pressure on Israel—such as by conditioning the export of offensive weapons to the country in order to reach a deal—it would be likely to significantly undermine Israeli public support for the war and expedite its end.

A WINNABLE PUBLIC

Recent public opinion polls have consistently found that a majority of Israelis support a cease-fire deal to release all hostages in exchange for Israel ending the war and withdrawing fully from Gaza. As of August, 63 percent of Israelis expressed support for such a compromise, up from 56 percent in June. U.S. policy may have already influenced these numbers to some degree; Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns have clearly signaled rhetorical support for a deal and growing impatience at the Israeli government’s refusal to accept it.

To better understand how Israelis respond to the United States’ stances toward the country, from May 7 through May 12, we distributed an online survey of about two dozen questions to a sample of 1,238 Israeli adults that was broadly representative of the general Israeli population. Respondents were polled just days after the news broke that Washington had placed its first hold in years on a weapons shipment to Israel to try to forestall an Israeli invasion of Rafah. This strategy made the direction of U.S. policy toward the war in Gaza appear particularly uncertain at the time in which our survey was in the field.

Our survey included a carefully crafted message test to see how Israelis responded to the United States’ posture. We divided respondents into three groups. The first was a control group; respondents were not primed with any messaging before completing the survey. Before answering questions, the second group read a realistic but fictitious news story suggesting that the American people supported Israel in the conflict and the Biden administration would provide unconditional backing for Israel to achieve a complete victory over Hamas. The third group read a news story in which Americans were described as souring on the war and the Biden administration as having firmly stated that Israel should end it—and that U.S. support wasn’t unconditional if the country failed to do so. Both of the positions presented to the two test groups were fully plausible in early May when the Biden administration had just declared its first weapons hold and there were conflicting reports about whether it was indeed on the verge of a major policy shift or would continue to back the war with mild criticism. After this intervention, all three groups of respondents were asked the same questions regarding their attitudes toward the conflict in Gaza, the possibility of ending it, and other geopolitical issues.

The results were striking. We found that, on average, reading that the United States was prepared to exert real pressure on Israel to end the war did not significantly alter Israelis’ views of the war, the negotiations to end it, or the United States and its geopolitical rivals. Notably, in the group that heard that the United States was pressuring Israel to change course, there was no meaningful drop in the percentage of respondents who subsequently said they held a favorable view of the United States—or rise in the percentage holding a favorable view of Russia or China— compared with the group that was not primed with messaging. These findings undermine worries that U.S. pressure would diminish Israelis’ support for a cease-fire or significantly harm their views of America. In short, Smotrich is wrong: there is no evidence that pressure would backfire.

It is worth noting that in the group of respondents that heard that the United States was providing unconditional support to Israel, the percentage who expressed a favorable view of the United States was eight points higher than it was in the control group. Survey respondents did prefer that the United States offer unconditional support to Israel. But the United States did not appear to lose face with them if they heard it had applied the pressure.

TURNING UP THE HEAT

We looked more deeply at the effect of hearing about U.S. pressure on Israel by disaggregating respondents into supporters and nonsupporters of Netanyahu—a key political cleavage in Israel. We asked respondents if they planned to vote for Netanyahu or one of several other leading Israeli politicians in the next election. We found that Netanyahu voters’ support for reaching a deal with Hamas rose dramatically—from 25 percent to 40 percent—when they read the story about U.S. pressure being applied, showing that key segments of the Israeli public are in fact quite sensitive to hearing that the United States is pressuring Israel to end the war—and that they respond as intended to this pressure, despite some of their leaders’ claims to the contrary.

These findings are particularly notable given the views expressed by Netanyahu voters and non-Netanyahu voters in the control group. Among respondents who did not read anything about U.S. strategy prior to completing the survey, support for reaching a deal to end the war and return the Israeli hostages held in Gaza—as opposed to continuing it to try and eliminate Hamas—was 25 percent among Netanyahu voters and 73 percent among other Israelis. In other words, Netanyahu voters are the primary source of support for a maximalist Israeli outcome in the war. Eroding their desire to seek a total victory, and pushing them toward compromise, would seriously jeopardize the viability of continuing the conflict in Israeli politics.

For as much as Netanyahu himself is dug in on the war, to which his political future is linked, he has also shown that he is sensitive to U.S. government pressure on the rare occasions when it has been applied. For instance, after a pointed call from Biden in April in which he reportedly told Netanyahu to make serious changes to Israel’s conduct in the war, Israel significantly increased the number of trucks transporting humanitarian aid into Gaza. These events coincided with some of the lowest points in Netanyahu’s polling numbers to date, as well as increased speculation that Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, the more moderate members of his war cabinet, would resign. Proponents of pressure might act when they see a similar confluence of mounting public opposition, growing threats of elite defection, and shifts in policy.

It is perhaps for this reason that Netanyahu himself—along with the Israeli ministers to his right and the Israeli government’s most ardent and reflexive defenders in the United States—have issued such dire warnings about what will happen if the United States pressures Israel to end the war. They recognize the power of U.S. policy to shape the landscape of Israeli politics. If, for example, in addition to large-scale regular mass protests, more reservists were to refuse to report for service in protest of Netanyahu’s unprecedented jeopardizing of Israeli security and American support, as they did during last year’s protests against his government’s judicial reforms, the country could be plunged into further turmoil.

What about the consequences of hearing that the United States would offer unconditional support to Israel? Here we found an intriguing, albeit weaker, parallel to the impact of telling respondents that the United States was applying pressure on Israel to end the war. Reading the news story about unconditional U.S. support for Israeli victory made support for a cease-fire among non-Netanyahu voters decrease by six percentage points compared with the control group, a smaller difference than the one associated with the story about U.S. pressure on Netanyahu voters, and not quite statistically significant. It suggests, however, that when Israelis think that the United States has their back no matter what, they feel that they have free rein to pursue more maximalist goals. Combined with the results from the conditional-support story groups, it demonstrates that Israelis’ views on the war are malleable and, by extension, that the United States’ posture can push Israeli public opinion toward terminating the war.

Ultimately, our survey strongly suggests that the United States does in fact have substantial leverage over how Israelis think about the costs and benefits of continuing the conflict. Hearing about U.S. pressure to end the war can move Israelis to turn against the continuation of military operations and toward compromise without incurring significant costs to Israelis’ overall opinion of the United States. What’s more, our findings likely understate the power of real U.S. pressure, since subjects were reading a single, fictitious news story. Although it is possible that countermessaging by the Israeli government could eat into the effects we uncovered, our results are still quite bullish on the United States’ ability to influence Israeli views about the conflict.

WHO’S THE SUPERPOWER HERE?

Of course, the worry that U.S. pressure might fail—or backfire—has not been the only impediment to Washington seeking to exert more influence over Netanyahu’s government and its behavior. There are at least two other major reasons why Biden has refrained from applying serious pressure on the Israeli government about its conduct of the war. Biden has a long-standing personal sympathy for Israel, which makes him hesitant to criticize the country’s conduct, and his behavior has also no doubt been influenced by domestic political considerations in a presidential election year.

Soon, however, neither of these factors will be nearly as relevant. Biden is nearing the end of his presidency, after which his personal worldview will no longer be a key driver of and constraint on U.S. foreign policy. And the excruciatingly strong political pressures associated with the country’s high-stakes presidential contest will pass, too, in a few short months. The next presidential administration will be much freer to adjust its policy on the war in new directions.

While reaffirming her basic commitment to Israel’s security, Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential candidate, has signaled greater empathy for Palestinian suffering and sharper rhetoric toward and treatment of Netanyahu in recent months. Harris’s main foreign policy advisers on the Middle East are progressives who have likely encouraged this posture. Some supporters of a cease-fire are thus hopeful that a Harris administration might be willing to marry her rhetoric with concrete actions to push the Israelis, along with Hamas, more forcefully toward a deal. The Democratic consensus on Israel has moved to Biden’s left, and the next Democratic president, along with a new crop of Democratic leaders, may seek to apply more pressure to Israel. Worries that such pressure will have a negative impact will likely linger. Our survey, however, shows that there is greater room for such a shift in policy than many strategists fear.

Could the results of our survey also inform the policies of a second Trump administration? Given Donald Trump’s embrace of Israel’s right wing in his first term, stated opposition to withholding arms to Israel to end the war, and comments that Israel should “finish the job,” it is more difficult to imagine that a Trump administration would be willing to pressure Israel to end the war. Yet tensions between Trump and Netanyahu dating to the end of Trump’s first term, as well as Trump’s other close relationships in the region, such as his ties to the Saudis, leave open the possibility that regardless of the November election’s result, U.S. pressure on Israel to end the war could rise in the next administration.

Applying pressure to the Israeli government is the primary tool the United States has to encourage the war’s end.

As for steps a new administration could take, historically, U.S. presidents seeking to change Israeli behavior have pulled several levers. One is diplomatic pressure, which often entails allowing resolutions critical of Israel to pass at the United Nations or even voting in favor of them. In June, the United States made a move in this direction by sponsoring a UN resolution calling on both Israel and Hamas to end the war, although the language was somewhat restrained, and for now, the resolution has had little effect.

In the past, the United States has applied more serious forms of pressure in the economic and military spheres. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush held up $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel, forcing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to change Israel’s settlement policy and participate in a major peace conference in Madrid with the Palestinians. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama each paused high-level arms shipments to Israel over the Israeli military’s interventions in Lebanon and Gaza, respectively. When applied with firmness and patience, these forms of pressure have often succeeded in restraining Israeli governments and pushing them toward the bargaining table to end military campaigns.

Philip Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser, has made clear that a full arms embargo is off the table if Harris were to win the presidency. But his comments still leave open the possibility of substantial pressure, up to and including a halt on all offensive arms shipments to Israel until a cease-fire deal is reached. Pausing the shipment of some or all (nondefensive) weapons to Israel, refusing to guarantee Israeli loans unless the government ends the fighting, and possibly holding out the promise of economic inducements to incentivize a deal illustrate what a potential menu of pressure actions could include. Coupling such moves with renewed diplomatic efforts to push key regional powers to lean on Hamas would also likely be under consideration.

Ultimately, the war in Gaza must end. The conflict has already exacted a devastating human toll in both Israel and Gaza. The longer it goes on, the more it elevates the chances of a wider regional war and generates anti-Semitism and Islamophobia worldwide. And the longer the United States appears to support Israel or just stand on the sidelines, the more tarnished its image becomes across the Arab world and the global South. Ending this war is clearly in the United States’ national interest—and, as a range of Israelis from former security chiefs to peace activists have contended, it is in Israel’s national interest, as well. Applying pressure to the Israeli government is the primary tool the United States has to encourage the war’s end. Our analysis suggests that Washington can push right-of-center Israelis meaningfully toward the bargaining table without suffering significant damage to its reputation. If the next U.S. president wants the war to end, they must find the courage to push for it.

DANIEL SILVERMAN is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
ANNA PECHENKINA is Associate Professor of Political Science at Utah State University.
AUSTIN KNUPPE is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Utah State University.
YEHONATAN ABRAMSON is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Foreign Affairs · by Daniel Silverman, Anna Pechenkina, Austin Knuppe, and Yehonatan Abramson · August 28, 2024

14. The Cacti and the Grass: The Collapse of Afghanistan's Security Forces

Conclusion:

Unlike how it was portrayed in the media, the collapse of the ANDSF did not occur in a few weeks; instead, its demise was years and decades in the making. The analogy of the cacti and the grass allows us to understand why. The seeds of the ANDSF collapse were sewn when the United States and its allies decided to make a Western-style security force in an environment for which it was fundamentally unsuited – grass in a desert. This resulted in the rapid dissolution of the ANDSF once Western support was withdrawn.

The United States’ experience in Afghanistan highlights the importance of understanding socio-political realities when advising foreign security elements. Instead of imposing Western military culture and traditions, the United States must tailor its security assistance efforts to the unique needs of the host country’s culture from the onset; otherwise, we risk repeating history’s mistakes. Despite the frustrations I experienced first-hand in Afghanistan, I still believe that other warrior cultures can, in fact, “learn from us, but they can never become us.”

The Cacti and the Grass: The Collapse of Afghanistan's Security Forces - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Antonio Salinas · August 27, 2024

Introduction

For those of us who fought, bled, and lost friends in Afghanistan, it is hard to fathom the approaching third anniversary of the American withdrawal on August 30, 2021 and the subsequent collapse of the Afghanistan National Defense Security Forces (ANDSF) soon thereafter. Years later, we are still asking ourselves, “Why did the ANDSF dissolve so quickly?” For current and future practitioners of irregular warfare, understanding the answer to this question could mean the difference between repeating history’s mistakes or not.

In the beginning, many had hoped the establishment of an effective ANDSF would help fulfill the fundamental objective of the United States’ efforts by preventing any further attacks by terrorists taking advantage of safe havens in Afghanistan. Over the next 20 years, and with this objective in mind, the United States proceeded by pouring resources into the ANDSF. By 2021, the United States had spent nearly 90 billion dollars in security sector assistance to the development and sustainment of the ANDSF. This staggering figure was further subsidized by American, Coalition, and Afghan blood. Despite the massive amount of resources dedicated to its establishment, the ANDSF did not withstand its first true test: the 2021 withdrawal. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the collapse of the ANDSF can be attributed to numerous strategic failures. However, the following analysis will explain the failure of the ANDSF from a holistic standpoint by offering an analogy entitled “The Cacti and the Grass,” which compares the creation of the ANDSF to planting grass in a desert. This analogy, informed by my experience training and fighting alongside the ANDSF on the ground, seeks to illustrate the key challenges in creating an effective and sustainable security force in Afghanistan.

The Cacti and the Grass: The Collapse of Afghanistan's Security Forces – Insider: Short of War

Similar to the way an Arizona country club stubbornly attempts to build a golf course in a desert, the United States attempted to build the ANDSF in ways incompatible and unsustainable with the socio-political climate of Afghanistan. Like grass in a desert, the ANDSF thrived only under external support. The grass appeared green while the United States pumped money, airstrikes, and advisors into the ANDSF. However, when that support vanished, the grass withered, exposing the flawed strategy that ignored Afghanistan’s unique socio-political landscape. Cacti, on the other hand, are native to the desert. In this analogy, the cacti represent pre-intervention Afghani security structures such as the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. The Taliban and the Northern Alliance represent different varieties of cacti …but are both cacti nonetheless. In the wake of the destruction of the ANDSF, the cacti, no longer facing resistance from an externally supported and non-native invasive species, once again reclaimed the terrain—the Taliban returned. The following analysis will further break down this analogy, illustrating why the collapse of the ANDSF was a calamity that did not occur over a few weeks, but rather was years in the making.

Origin of an Analogy: A War Story in the Pech River Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, Fall 2009

The Cacti and the Grass analogy occurred to me during my first combat deployment as an infantry officer in the Pech River Valley, where I spent months painstakingly training the Afghan National Police (ANP) – a sub-organization of the ANDSF. Like many Americans at the time, I thought they were progressing nicely. That was until one night when my platoon discovered one of the ANP-controlled checkpoints smoldering in ruins without a trace of any type of resistance.

At sunrise, I spoke with the local ANP district commander. Nobody had answers until the squad of ANP manning the fallen checkpoint walked into the district center. They offered up a story of an intense battle that ended with the Taliban overrunning them, taking them prisoner, blowing up the checkpoint, and then releasing them at sunrise. It was apparent they were lying. At that moment, I suspected they were either Taliban supporters or that they had been asleep for the whole ordeal. However, as I have reflected over the years, I now realize that the ANP were aware of the reality that the enemy forces controlled the area and simply did what they had to do to survive. I was disheartened as my hard work was turned into rubble. I could not understand why the ANP didn’t defend their checkpoint. That was the first time I felt as though we were planting grass in the desert–cultivating something that looked good in the short term, but that had little hope of enduring.

Examining the Decision to Plant Grass

A newcomer to a desert may be shocked by the cacti’s seemingly harsh appearance. They might see the native desert species’ spines as brutal, unaware that the spines themselves are the result of years of evolution to meet the harsh demands of its unique climate. They may wish to terraform the desert in the likeness of their home biome by replacing the cacti with something more familiar, like grass. Perhaps this was how United States strategic planners viewed the existing security environment in Afghanistan in 2001. Indeed, one of the biggest criticisms of the United States strategy focuses on the decision to design the ANDSF as a “mirror image” of American forces. Instead of harnessing existing local security structures, the United States planted Western-style security forces in the form of the ANDSF, completely ignoring factors such as the tribal nature of Afghan society, the mountainous terrain, or the socio-political context. Even though the ANDSF was composed of Afghanistan citizens, the structure, organization, and fighting tactics the United States planted were distinctly Western.

integrated, partnered, and parallel patrols.” Later, in response to a need to show progress in a way that American policy-makers could measure, the United States introduced Western organizational structures by creating battalions, divisions, and police departments aligned with American cultural and nationalistic values, completely ignoring the proud warrior tradition that existed in the mountainous country long before Western forces arrived. Facing these challenges on the ground, many of those directly involved in the training of the ANDSF experienced significant frustrations, often stemming from the disconnect between Western strategies and the existing Afghan socio-political realities and military traditions.

Understanding Afghanistan’s Culture

The patchwork of Afghanistan’s different ethnic groups and local loyalties prevented the cohesive national identity and civic responsibility necessary to mold the foundation for a national force with a shared identity. Afghan society is not a homogeneous nation-state but rather is made up of diverse ethnic groups and regional loyalties, which present challenging conditions for creating a Western-style security force. Western-style security forces require the unification and organization at the scale of large amounts of people under a central identity, i.e. nationalism. However, the socio-political landscape of Afghanistan is not conducive to producing the level of nationalism necessary to sustain a Western-styled security force. Despite the immense cultural challenges in building the ANDSF, many Afghan soldiers fought valiantly to defend their country from the Taliban, and approximately 66,000 Afghan security forces members paid the ultimate price.

Understanding the socio-political realities of Afghanistan was one of the most significant challenges the United States faced in installing and training an effective security force, but it was not the first time the United States military faced this challenge. In fact, United States counterinsurgency doctrine, in place at the time the build-up of the ANDSF began, cautioned against it. Army Field Manual z3-24, “Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies,” recognizes the importance of “gaining an understanding of their (our) counterparts’ culture before advising activities can commence,” and yet, the United States continued to raise and train an Afghanistan security force that fundamentally misunderstood the socio-political realities of Afghanistan. In the end, we learned the hard way of the follies of trying to cultivate another nation’s security apparatus in our likeness when the environment is fundamentally unsuited for Western structures. Almost a decade preceding the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the then-Command Sergeant Major of the Afghan National Army foreshadowed the late ANDSF’s fate when he stated “We can learn from you, but we will never be you,” …but we didn’t listen.

The Withdrawal

On April 14, 2021, the United States declared its intention to withdraw from Afghanistan, and this statement further applied pressure to the already low morale throughout much of the ANDSF. As the American withdrawal approached, the ANDSF, consisting of approximately 300,000 members, appeared to be more than enough to defeat the approximately 75,000-strong Taliban. However, once the American contractors left and logistical support dried up, the grass was deprived of nutrients. Lacking the direct United States military support it had become dependent upon, the ANDSF quickly withered. Early in May 2021, the Taliban overran six ANDSF bases in Baghlan province and dozens of other outposts and bases soon followed. Not all ANDSF surrendered without a fight, particularly in the Northern provinces. However, without support or reinforcements, they, too, eventually surrendered. As the United States withdrawal neared, more and more ANDSF units succumbed. By August 15, six out of seven of Afghanistan’s ANDSF corps had either dissolved or surrendered. It became clear that the ANDSF, without the support of the United States, had no legs to stand on, disintegrating like sandcastles against the coming tide of the Taliban.

Regrowth of the Cacti: The Resurgence of the Taliban

While the Taliban were certainly devastated in the years following 9/11, they were never completely eradicated; the cacti were damaged, but their roots remained. After 2003, as the United States shifted its focus to Iraq, the Taliban regrouped and strengthened themselves deep in the mountains of Afghanistan and western Pakistan. As the United States ended its role in leading combat operations in 2015, the Taliban continued to gain territory. By 2017, the Taliban controlled 184 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts. Emboldened by the United States—Taliban Agreement in February 2020, the Taliban continued to gain ground.

As the United States prepared its final withdrawal into the summer of 2021, the Taliban seized the opportunity presented by the power vacuum the withdrawal created. The United States began removing forces from Afghanistan on May 1, 2021, and the Taliban started their summer offensive soon thereafter. From August 6 through August 16 of that year, the Taliban successfully captured 33 of 34 Afghan provinces. On August 17, then-President Ghani fled to Uzbekistan, and the Taliban entered the presidential palace. The Taliban’s resurgence was not merely a military takeover. Instead, it was both a cultural and ideological coup d’état reaffirming their deep-seated presence and wide acceptance throughout Afghan society.

Lessons for the Future

In the ashes of the ANDSF, we must seek some wisdom to apply to future endeavors. First, imposing American models without considering socio-political realities is a recipe for disaster. We must follow counterinsurgency doctrine and take the time to understand how different cultures view their own security structures. Secondly, we should seek efforts to promote and foster civic identity. Consider this: compared to the 90 billion dollars the United States spent on creating the ANDSF, it only spent 1.3 billion on education. The additional emphasis on education and literacy could have helped produce a society more conducive to supporting national institutions. Thirdly, we need to periodically provide real tests on the security forces that we train, allowing them to operate independently to evaluate if they can fight, sustain themselves, and survive without our support.

The United States must learn from the bloody lessons of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The repeated collapse of security structures we installed is now a recurring trend that can and should be intensely studied. Unfortunately, this reoccurrence appears not to be an anomaly within the history of United States security assistance undertakings, but rather a feature of it.

Conclusion

Unlike how it was portrayed in the media, the collapse of the ANDSF did not occur in a few weeks; instead, its demise was years and decades in the making. The analogy of the cacti and the grass allows us to understand why. The seeds of the ANDSF collapse were sewn when the United States and its allies decided to make a Western-style security force in an environment for which it was fundamentally unsuited – grass in a desert. This resulted in the rapid dissolution of the ANDSF once Western support was withdrawn.

The United States’ experience in Afghanistan highlights the importance of understanding socio-political realities when advising foreign security elements. Instead of imposing Western military culture and traditions, the United States must tailor its security assistance efforts to the unique needs of the host country’s culture from the onset; otherwise, we risk repeating history’s mistakes. Despite the frustrations I experienced first-hand in Afghanistan, I still believe that other warrior cultures can, in fact, “learn from us, but they can never become us.”

Antonio Salinas is an active duty Army lieutenant colonel and PhD student in the Department of History at Georgetown University, where he focuses on the history of climate and conflict. Following his coursework, he will teach at the National Intelligence University. Salinas has twenty-five years of military service in the Marine Corps and the United States Army, where he led soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of Siren’s Song: The Allure of War and Boot Camp: The Making of a United States Marine.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

Main Image: Kabyk, Afghanistan — Afghan National Army soldiers take part in a combined graduation ceremony at the Kabul Military Training Center July 29, 2010 (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

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15. We Are All Agents: The Future of Human-AI Collaboration

But are we friendly or enemy agents? (note attempt at humor)

Excerpts:

Just as humans are not great at self-assessment, we’re also not great at accepting criticism, even when it’s necessary. Criticism is hard to ignore when it comes from your boss, but if it comes from a computer, well, we can always unplug a computer. Managing that relationship between an evaluator and evaluatee is the subject of many a human resources training module—but there is not yet such a manual for situations where the computer is the one doing the evaluation.

Military AI agents have the potential to be useful in a number of ways, including identifying potential errors in human judgment. Humans, for example, are not great at evaluating their own plans, or even other plans made by humans. We lack objectivity. It’s not that a computer is even better, necessarily, but it doesn’t bring the same context to the problem as a human does. It’s not a perspective, because that would be anthropomorphizing the computer, but it does have a stance based on its programming and training. In a team dynamic, just as each team member has his or her own area of expertise, and the interaction between diverse team members may result in a stronger outcome, the use of AI agents, or a team of AI agents, has already demonstrated its benefits.

The development of AI agent teams represents a significant leap forward in artificial intelligence, mirroring the power of human collaboration while leveraging the unique strengths of AI systems. By bringing together specialized AI agents to work in concert, we are opening up new possibilities for solving complex problems, driving innovation, and enhancing decision-making across countless fields.

As this technology continues to evolve, it will be crucial to address the challenges of interoperability, both between AI agents, as well as between AI and human agents. The future of AI lies not just in the development of more powerful individual systems, but in the creation of collaborative AI ecosystems that can tackle the most pressing challenges of military operations—even if we don’t ask Socrates to weigh in on the plan.

We Are All Agents: The Future of Human-AI Collaboration - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Thom Hawkins · August 28, 2024

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If you could invite anyone to a dinner party, alive or dead, who would it be? Ghandi? Albert Einstein? Dorothy Parker? Just imagine the conversation! Walter Landor did, in the 1820s, in a series of published “Imaginary Conversations.” In these dialogues, Socrates talks with Cicero, Shakespeare with Ben Jonson, and Michelangelo with Raphael. Landor (as did others who worked in this form) put in the effort to represent the figures appropriate to their respective personalities and philosophical stances, like a fantasy league for intellectuals.

Today, we can prompt a large language model (LLM) and, assuming that the corpus it was trained on includes work by and about the selected individuals, it can create a passable dialogue in seconds. (Thanks anyway for your labors, Walter—you could have saved yourself the effort if you simply waited two hundred years.) The result won’t necessarily generate new insights—yet—but the models are improving daily.

It’s also possible to create a specific AI agent, based on an LLM foundation, fine-tuned with an additional corpus to react and respond to queries as a particular person (e.g., a philosopher) might. Separating the dialoguing philosophers into individual agents makes the resulting discussion more authentic because the agents are independent and reacting genuinely—that is, the dialogue is not constructed from a single source, but each response from an agent is a reaction to the other agent’s input. The difference is like the one between scripted acting and improv. The actors in a play are saying the right thing because someone else has set them up for those lines. In improv, actors are responding in the moment—the lines are not planned in advance by anyone.

The appeal of inviting great minds. whether living or dead, over to dinner is not limited to the passive observation of their conversations, but extends to the prospect of being an active interlocutor with the world’s shiniest people. AI agents can provide that stimulation—you can ask Socrates how he feels about Keeping Up with the Kardashians, if you so desire. If you’re not just in it for the likes and LOLs, however, AI agents have some serious applications.

In a military context, for example, you might have an AI agent that identifies a target through drone footage, another built to track the target as it moves, another yet to predict where the target will be at a given time, etc. It may sound like individual pieces of software, but the agents can also communicate for seamless operations, directed by a common goal, bolstered by their relative strengths while mitigating collective weakness.

In his 1949 book, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, George Kingsley Zipf introduces the notions of a “speaker’s economy” and a “listener’s economy.” Speakers wants to preserve their resources—words—by communicating their ideas in as few words as possible. (It’s certain that you know people for whom you suspect this not to be the case.) By this measure, speakers are more likely to use broad or vague terms to maintain a mass appeal. Part of the reason politicians are prone to use words like “freedom,” according to George Orwell in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” is to weaponize the ambiguity of the term—everyone supports “freedom,” even if each person who hears the word fits it into the context of his or her own situation. In contrast, the listener, who has the job of understanding the message, wants more words—not necessarily as in the quantity of words being spoken at them, but rather the number of words that are available in a language, with the aim of reducing ambiguity. It is, according to Zipf, these two economies engaged in constant battle that determines the size of a language.

In 2014, Ian Goodfellow devised a technique known as the generative adversarial network, or “GAN” in response to the problem of how to create realistic synthetic data. The idea was to pit two neural networks against each other: a “generator” that would attempt to create the data—an image of a cat, for example—and a “discriminator” that would distinguish between the generated image and a photo of an actual cat. The generator network is penalized each time the discriminator correctly identifies the made-up picture as synthetic. This process continues through hundreds or thousands or more cycles until the discriminator can no longer find the difference. This process, while generally quicker than those Zipf identified in books like Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort and The Psycho-Biology of Language, works along similar principles—an evolution toward an optimization point.

If we pit two or more goal-directed AI agents against one another over any task—for example, battle planning—the result would also trend toward a game-theoretic optimization (or at least realize the futility of a no-win scenario). Battles would increase to machine speed, stand-off distance would necessarily increase as a trade-off with time, and the next thing you know we’re all paperclips.

Humans—irrational and irascible—are, as this article goes to print, still involved in warfare. We are agents, too. After all, the neural networks that are the foundation of modern AI are (at least conceptually) based on the human brain. It’s very likely that we’ll see not just homogeneous AI teams, but also heterogeneous teams of humans and AI. Computers have always played a supportive role in human endeavors. We make it do our homework. Now, though, we’re contending with an intelligence that, in many situations, surpasses our own. A survey of AI experts shows a faster path to high-level machine intelligence than to full automation of labor, implying that we’ll be working alongside AI well before it becomes our overlord. We’re in an age of near-peer AI. That’s a different relationship with AI than we have experience previously, a new power dynamic where we might not always be the ones giving orders.

Just as humans are not great at self-assessment, we’re also not great at accepting criticism, even when it’s necessary. Criticism is hard to ignore when it comes from your boss, but if it comes from a computer, well, we can always unplug a computer. Managing that relationship between an evaluator and evaluatee is the subject of many a human resources training module—but there is not yet such a manual for situations where the computer is the one doing the evaluation.

Military AI agents have the potential to be useful in a number of ways, including identifying potential errors in human judgment. Humans, for example, are not great at evaluating their own plans, or even other plans made by humans. We lack objectivity. It’s not that a computer is even better, necessarily, but it doesn’t bring the same context to the problem as a human does. It’s not a perspective, because that would be anthropomorphizing the computer, but it does have a stance based on its programming and training. In a team dynamic, just as each team member has his or her own area of expertise, and the interaction between diverse team members may result in a stronger outcome, the use of AI agents, or a team of AI agents, has already demonstrated its benefits.

The development of AI agent teams represents a significant leap forward in artificial intelligence, mirroring the power of human collaboration while leveraging the unique strengths of AI systems. By bringing together specialized AI agents to work in concert, we are opening up new possibilities for solving complex problems, driving innovation, and enhancing decision-making across countless fields.

As this technology continues to evolve, it will be crucial to address the challenges of interoperability, both between AI agents, as well as between AI and human agents. The future of AI lies not just in the development of more powerful individual systems, but in the creation of collaborative AI ecosystems that can tackle the most pressing challenges of military operations—even if we don’t ask Socrates to weigh in on the plan.

Thom Hawkins is a project officer for artificial intelligence and data strategy with US Army Project Manager Mission Command. He specializes in AI-enabling infrastructure and adoption of AI-driven decision aids.

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

Image credit: Senior Airman Kadielle Shaw, US Air Force

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Thom Hawkins · August 28, 2024

16. How America Lost its Global Connectivity Lead and Why the Future Depends on Getting it Back

We have lost our mojo.

Conclusion:

This is America’s moment and the greatest and most enduring use of the Pentagon’s pivotal project to enhance further (or bring back) U.S. global reach. This vision – termed Joint All Domain Command and Control — cannot come soon enough, but the ambition of the effort belies the country’s current situation. Bold leaps in adoption are the only way America is going to win against a near peer, and the Pentagon should feel empowered to lean heavily into experimentation. Failure is not silly- competing the way the Department of Defense has and optimizing for stagnation is. The optimization path leads to cost-cutting, which leads to commoditization where countries who do not value human life or profits in exchange for their goals will always win. The Department of Defense has more than enough money to do this, it just needs to agree it’s a priority- and I think they will soon. The criticality of this extends to everything. Whether you have an AI-enhanced whatever does not matter when the enemy can read your emails or, better yet, block them from being sent. America can do better, and as the parents of this industry and its rightful stewards, she should. Winning the next war depends on it.

How America Lost its Global Connectivity Lead and Why the Future Depends on Getting it Back - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Alexander Harstrick · August 28, 2024

It could be a boat anchor that kicks off the invasion of Taiwan, not a bullet. The thousands of miles of sub-sea cables are what make everything function — not just in Taiwan — and it’s clear to any invading force that owning this is key to winning any proposed invasion. That prospect has never been easier. Having something banal like a “fisherman” turn off the connection for a second is all it takes to launch an attack. That’s because the global telecommunications network is increasingly owned and maintained by entities that can be manipulated against the United States. And America and its allies have dropped their deserved lead as innovators in this industry. For the United States, regaining a technological and strategic lead in telecommunications is an urgent necessity for national security. That’s what I will try to convince you of here: The United States used to dominate in this sector. It does not anymore. It is critical that American industry focuses on the next deep horizon, specifically in optimization, private networks, and free space optics, with a lot of help from the U.S. Department of Defense. It’s also a great opportunity for investment. Both public and private sector players can work now to meet this challenge and should, before it’s too late to re-establish dominance.

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When Things Go Wrong Internationally, America Has Had No Answers

America’s lack of sophistication here is already being revealed by its two biggest global competitors, China and Russia. In February of 2023, Chinese maritime vessels disabled internet access to Taiwan’s Matsu Island, effectively cutting off the internet to the archipelago’s 13,000 residents. The activity was allegedly caused by Chinese fishing and shipping vessels within six days of each other. As a part of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s first move was to shut off the country’s internet service. Six months after the incident in Matsu Island, a Ukrainian counterattack against Russian submarines was thwarted when their single point of communication was suddenly cut off in the middle of the mission. Without any redundancy, the fighting forces on the ground were forced to retreat and the mission was scrapped. The message was clear: If this war is to be fought, it must be fought on a single telecommunications provider’s terms. These activities have been referred to as “invisible blockades.” The United States and its allies would be foolish to treat these incidents as anything less than a tactical rehearsal for a larger war.

It’s amazing America ended up here. American innovation made the industry. But as it has become more commoditized, the United States has fallen way behind in the race to the bottom and is increasingly dependent on a variety of unaligned actors to make sure things work as they should. That’s why the free world needs the U.S. Department of Defense to do what it does best for industry: de-risk the short-term barriers to entry for the next great technologies to emerge and ensure they run uninterrupted and uncorrupted globally. My bias here is clear: I am a venture capitalist, running a firm — J2 Ventures — focused on, among many things, global telecommunications, so I want to invest in these technologies too. But for a space that is so large and so important, it is much harder than it used to be to find innovators among the United States and her allies doing good work here. Moreover, I often find myself in very small company when the deals finally materialize. For the future of the free world, which has to be able to communicate unencumbered, I’d like this to stop.

America and its Allies Made this Industry What It Is

American naval dominance after World War II paved the way for the telecommunications industry the world has now. Thanks to the miracle of almost 500 undersea fiber optic cables that span nearly 750,000 miles, paired with a domestic broadband cable network that can go across the United States over 22 times in its current form, you are reading this online now. You even likely carry a supercomputer in your pocket connected to 142,100 cell towers and 452,200 small cell nodes, as of 2022, in the U.S. alone. The statistics in developing countries are harder to count but easier to appreciate as you need only look up to see the thousands of wires connecting everything.

That’s because knowledge is power and knowledge is transmitted, so it serves to reason the U.S. military would be interested in its transmission after taking the stage as the dominant power after World War II. The father of this industry is well known, Alexander Graham Bell, who would create the first telephone, the first big telephone company (AT&T), and then make the first transcontinental phone call from New York to San Francisco. But this industry would not hyperscale until it collided with venture capital and entwined with the U.S. military in the 1950s in the form of Bell lab’s influenced Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was funded by significant government research and development dollars and made commercially relevant by a B-70 Bomber guidance deal supercharged by the need for Minuteman Nuclear Ballistic Missile guidance chips. Now you can scroll on Instagram from your couch. The importance of this technology is existential, and it is why everyone in the world cares about the potential future of Taiwan today.

A Losing Race to the Bottom

The problem is that over time good enough became good enough, and it was then about how to scale the most cheaply with all other metrics being measured linearly not exponentially. Shareholders like cheap because in a world measured in quarterly time increments that means more profits. Where America sees profits, its despotic rivals, who measure influence in lifetimes, see opportunities. America is great at a lot of things. Patience and being the lowest-cost provider are rarely those things.

It’s hard to overstate how bad this problem is for the future of telecom in its current state. Most of the global traffic for the internet happens through seabed cables, most of which are the size of a garden hose and can be as fragile as one, which is a dually bad problem. Breaks are serviced by obscure maintenance companies of which Chinese companies are, by far, one of the most active.

So, America has given both the technology and the maintenance over to those without motivation or responsibility to uphold the U.S. conception of global security. Why else would the dynamic cabling off the coast of Taiwan suspiciously seem to be some of the most prone to breaking? According to a report from ABC, the cabling that connects Taiwan to the rest of the world has seen 27 breaks over the last five years – a number categorized by the same report as “a lot” (I concur). It should not come as a surprise that direct cable servicing rival, HMN Tech, formerly known as “Huawei Marine Networks”, based in Tianjin, China, is the fastest-growing company in the cable fixing space.

America’s cures are proving to be as bad as the disease. The United States (including the public and private sectors) is seeking to build thicker cables, have them built by our corporations (sometimes specifically for their use), and route these cables by different countries that are not as geopolitically targeted. Moreover, common opinion views satellites as a panacea without appreciating that the satellites themselves are just the conduit to what the United States should be focusing on. My view is that low earth orbit-based beaming technology will liberate us, but at best it degrades precipitously with each incremental user (there is a reason satellites never replaced cable internet and for a long time will not), and at worst, the state’s “diplomatic relations’’ reliance on just a few companies put them in a very bad position militaristically, see: Ukraine Counteroffensive.

Don’t worry, it gets worse. With an increasing percentage of telecommunications giants being Chinese or beholden to Chinese regulations, a growing share of the global information and computer technology market is going to the preferred providers of equipment of these companies, of which, the Chinese have by far had the best growth in developing economies. You do not have to look far to see this. The Atlantic Council’s African Center elucidated this in 2021 (and since then, I bet it’s gotten worse) that 50 percent of the continent’s 3G networks and 70 percent of its 4G networks are built by Huawei alone (yes, the same company that also services the cables). As recently as 2019, you could get Huawei pucks (little Wi-Fi hotspots to connect your phone and call home, check email, etc.) on American military bases in Afghanistan (I was offered a hand-me-down in-country in 2017). It would be another two years before the U.S. government realized what was happening and banned a company that was obviously bad for the country. If you think connecting to cell towers is the way to a spy-free and efficient future, think again, as the list of Chinese dependencies in this industry would go beyond the word limit of this article.

In Search of Solutions

America lost the old tech to its rivals, and it’s not getting it back. The innovation community alongside the incredible power of the Defense Department’s research and development needs to double down on the next generation of this industry and do so with purpose-built mission aligned partners. America will only return to a good place if it makes the old ways look like the Pony Express (which I’m sure at one point was dominantly best-in-class). Here are a few good ways to get started:

Do Better with the Pipes that Already Exist

The first is to make more effective use of the existing pipes. All of these cellular towers, wires, and infrastructure are actually still good for a lot of things even though the hardware itself is never going to be cost-competitive with China. But America has not done enough to build and optimize them when they’re needed, nor protect them while they’re transmitting. That’s because rather than embrace continually evolving and emerging digital modulation techniques and wireless standards, older systems are kept decades longer than necessary. This is low-hanging fruit that is moving forward slowly but not fast enough.

Make More Private Networks

Taking this a step further, many are even setting up completely digital networks and private 5G for the larger enterprises that are much more secure, and faster than their traditional carrier or Wi-Fi alternatives. In 2025, the Defense Department has allocated over $200 million (the cost of two F-35s) to efforts in this domain, including $80 million for the person who figures out “Dual Use 5G use cases” to help the efforts cross over into the civilian world. Open Radio Access Networks have become an increasingly important part of Defense Department life, with installations adopting private 5G to power everything from computers to warehouses on base, and we still have no preferred carrier. The spending so far has been small, but these innovations will proliferate in a big way to the private sector as the right solutions are allowed to mature- and I’d be surprised if the private sector did not see the Department of Defense take its rightful place as the industry’s rocket fuel in the future. This applies to any large campus that needs to be secure such as a hospital system.

Lasers, Baby

But the space where the military is really going to change the world and should focus its efforts is in the transmission technology itself, namely coherent light. People smarter than me call this “the phenomenon of all photons in a beam acting together in perfect lockstep,” but if you have ever been 10 years old and seen a laser pointer, you get the visual. Unlike cables, it does not degrade, cannot be cut, and is not limited by the physical volume of the cable (light can become bigger, plastic tubes cannot). In fact, you can dynamically mount the lasers and transmit the internet anywhere and anytime — not just from space, but ground to ground and ground to air. Unlike non-coherent light, it retains its strength over long distances and usage. The best part is the U.S. government is already the world leader in this research, and it can continue to lead. The foundations of the technology functionally came from Albert Einstein working with the U.S. government in New York during World War II, some of its first iterations came from the University of Michigan in 1963, and some of the best scientists and technologies in the world are currently in the Defense Department-funded Lawrence Livermore Labs in California. America can transform a 750,000-mile vulnerability into a laser wall that cannot be intercepted.

Conclusion

This is America’s moment and the greatest and most enduring use of the Pentagon’s pivotal project to enhance further (or bring back) U.S. global reach. This vision – termed Joint All Domain Command and Control — cannot come soon enough, but the ambition of the effort belies the country’s current situation. Bold leaps in adoption are the only way America is going to win against a near peer, and the Pentagon should feel empowered to lean heavily into experimentation. Failure is not silly- competing the way the Department of Defense has and optimizing for stagnation is. The optimization path leads to cost-cutting, which leads to commoditization where countries who do not value human life or profits in exchange for their goals will always win. The Department of Defense has more than enough money to do this, it just needs to agree it’s a priority- and I think they will soon. The criticality of this extends to everything. Whether you have an AI-enhanced whatever does not matter when the enemy can read your emails or, better yet, block them from being sent. America can do better, and as the parents of this industry and its rightful stewards, she should. Winning the next war depends on it.

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Alexander Harstrick is a managing partner and co-founder of J2 Ventures, a fund that specializes in early-stage companies that are looking to partner with the U.S. government. J2 is one of the most active investors in the dual-use space, focusing on companies leading AI, machine learning, biomedical engineering, cybersecurity, and infrastructure innovation.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Alexander Harstrick · August 28, 2024

17. Chinese government hackers penetrate U.S. internet providers to spy

Unrestricted Warfare.

Chinese government hackers penetrate U.S. internet providers to spy

Beijing’s hacking effort has “dramatically stepped up from where it used to be,” says former top U.S cybersecurity official.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/27/chinese-government-hackers-penetrate-us-internet-providers-spy/?utm

4 min

2015

(Washington Post illustration; Shutterstock)

By Joseph Menn

August 27, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. EDT

Chinese government-backed hackers have penetrated deep into U.S. internet service providers in recent months to spy on their users, according to people familiar with the ongoing American response and private security researchers.

The unusually aggressive and sophisticated attacks include access to at least two major U.S. providers with millions of customers as well as to several smaller providers, people familiar with the separate campaigns said.

“It is business as usual now for China, but that is dramatically stepped up from where it used to be. It is an order of magnitude worse,” said Brandon Wales, who until earlier this month was executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA.

The hacks raise concern because their targets are believed to include government and military personnel working undercover and groups of strategic interest to China.

“This is privileged, high-level connectivity to interesting customers,” said Mike Horka, a former FBI agent and current researcher at Lumen Technologies, which described one of the campaigns but didn’t identify the ISPs it targeted. It was notable, he added, that the groups considered the effort important enough to exploit previously undiscovered software flaws that could have been preserved for later use.

Though there is no evidence that the new inroads are aimed at anything other than gathering intelligence, some of the techniques and resources employed are associated with those used in the past year by a China-backed group known as Volt Typhoon, two of the people said. U.S. intelligence officials said that group sought access to equipment at Pacific ports and other infrastructure to enable China to sow panic and disrupt America’s ability to move troops, weaponry and supplies to Taiwan if armed conflict breaks out.

The White House referred questions to CISA, inside the Department of Homeland Security, which agreed that the flaw found by Lumen was being exploited. It declined to answer questions about other techniques, the end victims, the breadth of the campaigns or who is behind them.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington rejected the accusations.

“‘Volt Typhoon’ is actually a ransomware cybercriminal group who calls itself the ‘Dark Power’ and is not sponsored by any state or region,” said embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu.

“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.,” he added.

Lumen researchers said they had identified three U.S. internet service providers that had been hacked this summer, one of them large, along with another U.S. company and one in India.

In a blog made public Tuesday, Lumen said the hackers used a previously unknown vulnerability, known as a zero-day flaw, in a program made by Versa Networks for managing wide-area networks. Versa acknowledged the critical vulnerability late last week, warning only its direct customers.

On Monday, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company published a blog post about the problem, saying that it had issued a patch and that “impacted customers failed to implement system hardening and firewall guidelines.”

Lumen wrote that it located malware inside ISP routers serving certain groups or individual customers that could intercept passwords from those customers. Lumen said it believed the malicious software was being used by Volt Typhoon.

In a separate report earlier this month, security company Volexity said it had found another high-end technique in play at a different, unnamed ISP. In that case, it said a Chinese state hacking group distinct from Volt Typhoon was able to get far enough inside the service provider to alter the Domain Name System (DNS) web addresses that users were trying to reach and divert them elsewhere, allowing the hackers to insert back doors for spying.

While the concept of such an approach “is not that hard, to put in play successfully, that’s more top-tier,” said Volexity Chief Executive Steven Adair.

DNS manipulation is something of a specialty among Chinese government hacking groups. A mysterious campaign identified earlier this year by security experts at Infoblox and attributed to China involved using the so-called Great Firewall of China, which normally misdirects people on the mainland trying to reach restricted services or content.

Though they avoided discussing threats to ISPs specifically, some of the top U.S. cybersecurity officials at the recent Black Hat and Def Con hacking conferences said Volt Typhoon remained as active and successful as it was when its operations were first identified last year.

The group’s emphasis on obtaining access for potential physical destruction “is nowhere near where the nations of the world behave,” said retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, who stepped down in February from his posts running U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.

2015

Comments

By Joseph Menn

Joseph Menn joined The Post in 2022 after two decades covering technology for Reuters, the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times. His books include "Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World" (2019) and "Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet" (2010).

18. Opinion How Rep. Mike Gallagher, a rising GOP star, was driven out of politics

We still could use him and others like him in political leadership.

I had no idea about the incident with his family last December. What a terrible incident for them. Why did it happen? Who did that?

But he will still do good things for our nation.

Excerpt:

Gallagher left the House in April. He took a job last week as head of the defense business at Palantir, a leading software company. He sees his work at Palantir as an extension of what he was doing on Capitol Hill, working with people from different political perspectives for a strong defense.

Opinion How Rep. Mike Gallagher, a rising GOP star, was driven out of politics

Could the forces that pushed him out soon be eclipsed?

Former congressman Mike Gallagher at the Hudson Institute in D.C. on July 24. (Greg Kahn for The Washington Post)

7 min

1099

By David Ignatius

August 27, 2024 at 4:42 p.m. EDT

Why did Rep. Mike Gallagher, a rising Republican star from Wisconsin with friends on both sides of the aisle, decide to leave Congress this past spring? His story turns out to be a case study in what’s broken in national politics — and maybe how to fix it.

The story turns on a gruesome moment the night of Dec. 30, 2023, in Gallagher’s hometown of Green Bay. The local sheriff had received an anonymous call claiming that Gallagher had been shot in the face and that his wife and two young daughters, 3 and 1, had been taken hostage.

A SWAT team arrived at the house to find Gallagher and his family safe. His anguished wife, Anne, somehow had the presence of mind to ask the SWAT team to take their shoes off before they searched the home. But for the young couple, trying to build a family in the town where they were born and raised, the cruel hoax was a deeply upsetting event.

For Gallagher, it proved to be a breaking point. As a former Marine who had served two combat tours in Iraq, he knew war. And in Congress, he’d gotten used to death threats and actual attacks on his colleagues. But this involved his wife and children. “I signed up for this, but my family didn’t,” he told me in one of a series of interviews. “That was a moment when we felt we needed to make a change and take a step back from politics.”

Gallagher didn’t stick around long. Two months later, he refused to join House Republicans in impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, arguing that taking such extreme action “in the absence of criminality lowered the bar.” That brought even more threats and hate mail. A week later, he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection, even though he probably could have won any primary challenge.

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Gallagher left the House in April. He took a job last week as head of the defense business at Palantir, a leading software company. He sees his work at Palantir as an extension of what he was doing on Capitol Hill, working with people from different political perspectives for a strong defense.

Follow David Ignatius

The arc of Gallagher’s career illustrates several things that matter in this election year. First, despite all the bickering, bipartisanship is still possible. Gallagher led a select panel on China that developed nearly 150 bipartisan recommendations for legislation helping the United States to compete more effectively with Beijing. Responsible Republicans like Gallagher are an endangered species, but they still exist. Politics isn’t yet a zero-sum game.

Former congressman Mike Gallagher at the Hudson Institute in Washington on July 24. (Greg Kahn for The Washington Post)

But Gallagher’s departure tells us something else. Congress in the age of Trump is becoming a toxic echo chamber. Members and their families are targets of extremist rage. When a talented, sensible politician like Gallagher decides to quit to protect his family, you know that something is badly wrong.

Make no mistake: Gallagher is very conservative. He’s a devout pro-life Catholic who prays the rosary nearly every day. He’s a hawk on such traditional Republican issues as the deficit and national security. But he fears that conservative values aren’t the defining point for Republicans any longer. “How conservative you are can’t be measured by loyalty to the party or the president,” he told me.

I first got to know Gallagher in 2020 when he was heading a bipartisan House-Senate panel examining cybersecurity. With co-chair Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent, he had forged a pragmatic consensus on some complex issues about cyberdefense. When the committee issued its report in March 2020, the two co-chairs asked me to moderate its launch at the Capitol. More than 75 percent of the panel’s recommendations have become law, according to a member of King’s staff.

What interested me about Gallagher was his focus on public service and making government work. He had joined the Marines after studying Arabic at Princeton, and he served two tours as an intelligence officer in Iraq’s Anbar province. After Iraq, he took a doctorate from Georgetown, writing his dissertation on how presidents change their “grand strategy” during crisis.

Not the typical congressional résumé, in other words. But Gallagher had the political bug, and he began making his way in the mainstream of what was then the traditional GOP. He took a job with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under then-chair, Bob Corker of Tennessee and then went home to help manage the brief 2016 presidential campaign of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. When Walker withdrew, Gallagher ran successfully for an open seat in his hometown congressional district and began his first term in 2017.

From the start, Gallagher could see that something was broken in Congress. It was so snarled in internal wrangling that it couldn’t do its constitutional job of overseeing the executive branch. In late 2018, he wrote an article for the Atlantic magazine titled “How to Salvage Congress.” The subtitle bluntly summarized his experience: “When I was elected to the House of Representatives two years ago, I found the problems weren’t as bad as I expected — they were worse.”

Then-Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) walks toward the House chamber on Feb. 6 after he voted against a bill to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post)

Gallagher proposed a three-part remedy to make congressional committees stronger: Committee members, rather than the leadership, should choose the chairmen; the number of committees should be reduced so there weren’t overlapping jurisdictions over executive agencies; and the all-powerful appropriations committees should be abolished, so that the authorizing committees had oversight not just of policies, but the money to fund them.

Good ideas, in my view. Not surprisingly, in the temple of the status quo, they went nowhere. But Gallagher showed he was serious about reclaiming congressional authority. In February 2019, he was one of only 13 House Republicans who opposed Trump’s demand for executive authority to close the border, arguing that this was a congressional prerogative. And though he was an Iraq veteran, he voted in 2021 to repeal the war-enabling Authorization for Use of Military Force, contending that it had usurped congressional powers.

Gallagher’s problems with MAGA Republicans began when he opposed Trump’s border demands. He told me that back home, he began getting warnings: “We will pursue you!” “You betrayed us!” A right-wing organization called Turning Point began to dominate county Republican committees in his home state. When I asked if I could travel with him to his district to report his experience as an independent-minded Republican, he balked. I sensed he feared that publicity would only make his problems worse.

The Jan. 6 insurrection marked a sharper break. Gallagher had earlier refused to sign a Republican friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court supporting Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen. When the mob stormed the Capitol, Gallagher tweeted: “We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now.”

Gallagher found a welcome bipartisan platform in 2023 with his select committee on China, where he worked closely with Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.), the ranking Democrat, and other Democrats. And he tried to avoid the fratricidal warfare among House Republicans after they took control last year and began purging speakers. But after the traumatic experience for his family last December, he decided to quit.

Then-Rep. Mike Gallagher (Wis.), center, chairs a Feb. 28, 2023, hearing of a House select committee on China. He worked closely with Democrats on the panel, including Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.) (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

“We’ve turned Congress into a ‘green room’ for Fox News and MSNBC, instead of being the key institution of government,” he told me. “Being a bomb-thrower on TV or crapping on my colleagues has never interested me.”

Thinking about Gallagher reminds me that politics is a character test — not just of the candidates but of the system itself. If good people leave Congress or don’t run for office at all, we’ll get legislators who are coarser and more extreme — creatures of this broken process.

But something about this campaign season tells me that extremism might be peaking. Vice President Kamala Harris, however imperfect, is tapping a national desire for change and renewal. The party of crazy — the vicious people who conjured the macabre scene with Gallagher and his wife — might be in retreat. Gallagher, a reasonable Republican, might not be on the ballot in November. But I’d be surprised if he wasn’t at some point in the future.

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Did Ukraine just call Putin’s nuclear bluff?

By invading Russia, Ukraine was also sending a message to America.

https://www.vox.com/politics/369035/kursk-nuclear-escalation-zelenskyy-putin

by Joshua Keating

Updated Aug 29, 2024, 12:34 AM GMT+9Vox · by Joshua Keating · August 27, 2024

Three weeks ago, Ukraine’s military launched a stunning operation to take the war in Ukraine back onto the territory of the country that launched it. Three weeks later, the Ukrainians still occupy hundreds of miles of territory in Russia’s western Kursk region.

The incursion had a number of goals: to force Russia to divert its forces from Ukraine to defend its own towns and cities; to seize territory that might later be used for bargaining leverage in peace negotiations; and to send a political message to the Russian people and their leaders that they are not safe from the consequences of the war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin nearly two-and-a-half years ago.

But there was also a less obvious objective: Leaders in Kyiv likely hoped to send a message to their friends in the United States and Europe that their approach to the war has been overly cautious — that fears about “escalation,” “red lines,” and Russian nuclear use — a threat that Putin himself has voiced repeatedly — have been overblown.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged this explicitly in a speech on August 19, saying, “We are now witnessing a significant ideological shift, namely, the whole naive, illusory concept of so-called ‘red lines’ refs somewhere near Sudzha” — a town near the border now under the control of Ukrainian forces.

He also confirmed that Ukraine had not informed its Western partners about the operation ahead of time, anticipating that they would be told “it was impossible and that it would cross the strictest of all the red lines that Russia has.” According to press reports, the Ukrainians predicted — correctly, as it turned out — that the West would not object too strongly once presented with a fait accompli.

“They were trying to push a boundary with their Western partners and what we’ve seen is that these partners have quietly accepted the new boundary,” said Liana Fix, fellow for Europe and the Council on Foreign Relations. In particular, they’re hoping the US will lift restrictions on using American-provided long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia, a step Washington has so far avoided.

In apparent retaliation for the Kursk invasion, Moscow on Monday launched the largest missile and drone barrage on Ukraine since the start of the war. But that still fell far short of the nuclear escalation that Putin has often threatened.

In his speech, Zelenskyy was arguing, in effect, that he had called Putin’s bluff and that it’s time for Ukraine’s allies to become much more aggressive in giving Ukraine the kind of support it needs to win the war.

Are Russia’s threats still working?

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s Western backers, including the United States, have had two priorities: preventing Russian victory and avoiding “escalation” — meaning avoiding direct combat between Russia and NATO militaries or, in a worst-case scenario, use of nuclear weapons. At times, the second priority has taken precedence over the first.

The Russian government has certainly done everything in its power to add nuclear uncertainty to Western leaders’ calculations. From the very first day of the invasion, Putin has made repeated references to his country’s nuclear arsenal — the largest in the world — and warned countries that get in Russia’s way of “consequences that you have never faced in your history.”

Over the course of the war, Putin and other Russian officials have made repeated references to “red lines” that should not be crossed if Western governments don’t want to face a catastrophic response. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been particularly active in threatening foreign powers with “nuclear apocalypse” via his social media accounts.

It’s not all rhetoric: The Russian government has taken steps such as moving some of its nuclear weapons to Belarus and conducting realistic drills for using tactical nuclear weapons — seemingly in an effort to remind Ukraine’s allies of Russia’s capabilities.

“Beyond North Korea, the Russians have been the country that has used nuclear threats most vigorously,” said Nicole Grajewski, a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The threats work — but only to a certain extent and only for a time. Escalation fears were the reason Western countries ruled out taking actions like imposing a no-fly zone in Ukraine or sending NATO troops into the country.

Escalation fears have also made them reluctant to provide certain weapons systems to Ukraine, though system-by-system, that reluctance has faded over time. There was a time when even shoulder-mounted stinger missiles were viewed as too provocative. Now, the Ukrainians are using US-provided long-range missiles and recently received their first batch of F-16 fighter jets.

That these capabilities have often been provided only after months of contentious political debate has been an endless source of frustration to Ukrainians.

“I’ve been hearing about nuclear escalation since the first day,” Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament who chairs a committee monitoring arms supplies, told Vox last June. “First it was, it was ‘if Ukraine gets MIGs from Poland, he’s going to use nukes.’ Then it was the HIMARS, then Patriots, then tanks.”

She added: “It’s like we’re running behind the train. Every time we ask for something, we get it months or a year later when it won’t make as much of a difference as it would have before.”

The fact that none of the steps Western countries have taken so far have resulted in Russia using a nuclear weapon or directly attacking a NATO country is taken by many Ukrainians and their international supporters as evidence that these threats were never real to begin with.

Are there any more “red lines”?

If anything could be considered crossing a “red line,” one would think it would be the first military invasion of Russian territory since World War II.

Russia’s official nuclear doctrine permits the use of nuclear weapons under circumstances in which the “very existence of the state is in jeopardy.” Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, which has seized hundreds of square miles of territory, might not be a direct threat to the regime in Moscow, but it certainly threatens that regime’s ability to defend its own territory and sovereignty — the basic function of any state.

Moreover, the Ukrainians appear to be using US-provided weapons inside Russian territory, in apparent violation of US policy. (The Biden administration agreed in May to allow the Ukrainians to use American weapons for limited strikes into Russia, but only to defend against attacks on Ukraine.)

And yet, there’s been markedly little saber-rattling from Putin and the Kremlin since the Kursk operation began. The president has downplayed what he calls a “large-scale provocation” and has taken a few seemingly unrelated trips in what appears to be an effort to project normalcy.

The picture in the Russian media has been a bit more mixed: Vladimir Solovyov, host of the flagship pro-Kremlin talk show Sunday Evening, used one monologue to both call on Russians to “calm down a bit” about the incursion and to call for nuclear strikes on European capitals.

Regardless of what Solovyov says, it does not appear that Russia is planning to respond to the events in Kursk by using nuclear weapons, attacking NATO countries, or taking steps beyond — as we saw with Monday’s massive barrage — destroying more of Ukraine with conventional weapons.

This doesn’t, however, mean that Ukraine’s backers are ready to take the gloves off.

During a press call on Friday, Vox asked US National Security Spokesperson John Kirby whether Zelenskyy was right that it was time to move beyond fears of escalation.

“We’ve been watching escalation risks since the beginning of this conflict, and that ain’t gonna change,” Kirby responded. “We’re always going to be concerned about the potential for the aggression in Ukraine to lead to escalation on the European continent.” He added that “it’s too soon to know whether what’s going on in Kursk…[what] potential impact that that could have in terms of escalation. But it is something that we remain concerned about.”

The thinking in the administration appears to be that, as Pentagon Deputy Spokesperson Sabrina Singh recently put it, “just because Russia hasn’t responded to something doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t in the future.” And given that it’s nuclear weapons we’re talking about, that’s a risk that has to be taken seriously.

“Even if it’s only a 10 percent chance or 5 percent chance that they actually mean it, or they’re actually planning to act on it, that’s concerning enough,” said Carnegie’s Grajewski.

Does Putin have a breaking point?

Pavel Podvig, senior researcher on Russia’s nuclear arsenal at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, argues that “this whole kind of a business of red lines is actually quite misleading and not helpful.”

In his view, there are few useful military applications for nuclear weapons inside Ukraine and given the catastrophic risks involved, Putin would be unlikely to consider any sort of nuclear use unless the very existence of the Russian state were threatened. “Even the loss of a region like Kursk technically would not qualify,” Podvig said.

Putin has certainly implied, however, that his threshold for escalation was much lower. Just last May, for instance, he warned Western countries against allowing their weapons to be used to strike Russian territory, saying they should “bear in mind our parity in the field of strategic weapons.” (“Strategic” is a euphemism for nuclear in this case.) These threats are getting harder to take seriously.

Kyiv’s current campaign is to get the US to lift its restrictions on using US-supplied long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia, which would allow them to press the offensive in Kursk further and hit more Russian military targets than they are currently able to with domestically produced weapons.

“Ukraine is separated from halting the advance of the Russian army on the front by only one decision we await from our partners: the decision on long-range capabilities,” Zelenskyy said in his speech. In a post on Twitter following Monday’s strikes, Ukraine’s defense minister said the attack showed why “Ukraine needs long-range capabilities and the lifting of restrictions on strikes on the enemy’s military facilities.”

If this debate follows the trajectory of those that preceded it, Washington will eventually come around to giving the Ukrainians what they’re asking for. But while the risky incursion into Kursk may have given Ukraine some more ammunition in these debates going forward, Western leaders are not about to simply abandon their caution and give Ukraine everything it wants.

As the Council on Foreign Relations’s Fix put it, Western “red lines” on aid to Ukraine have clearly shifted. The problem is “we don’t know how the red lines are shifting in Putin’s mind.”

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Vox · by Joshua Keating · August 27, 2024

20. US military planning shifts from terrorism to fighting China, Russia

First, terrorism is never going away. We have to maintain a counter terrorism force.

Second, we need to have the proper balance between irregular warfare (IW) and large scale combat operations (LSOO) because all forces cannot do all things.

Third, irregular warfare (or whatever we want to call it) will still play a large role in LSCO - in the enemy's rear area, in the periphery and before and after conflict and in areas the enemy holds dear (e.g., population) that may not even be in the theater of operations.

Fourth, IW (as the military contribution to political warfare) plays an outsize role in strategic competition within the gray zone between peace and war and while LSCO forces can and must make significant contributions where appropriate they cannot be the main effort force in IW.

Finally, we need to discard the myth that if you can do LSCO effectively then you can do the lesser included case of IW. We need to provide trained and ready forces for IW just as we provide them for LSCO. But they cannot be the same. We must learn to use the right forces for the right missions because one size does not fit all.

Lastly when I think about integrated deterrence I think of three parts (non-dcontrinal) : nuclear deterrence, conventional deterrence, and unconventional deterrence (credit to Bob Jones for UD). This last is where IW plays the main effort role in which populations of authoritarian regimes (Dark Quad of the revisionat and rogue powers)) can be held at risk to create dilemmas for those leaders while at e same time populations of friends partners have the their resistance enhanced to resist the subversive activities of authoritarian regimes.

US military planning shifts from terrorism to fighting China, Russia - Asia Times

Integrated deterrence strategy recognizes risk of war with great power rivals and is spending big to avoid it

asiatimes.com · by Eric Rosenbach · August 27, 2024

President Joe Biden’s recent approval of a major shift in US nuclear weapons strategy highlights the attention the country’s national security officials are paying to Chinese ambitions for influence in the world.

As changes emerge in the types of threats facing the US, the American military adjusts its strategic focus, budgets and planning. For instance, after 9/11, the US military refocused away from its Cold War emphasis on preparing for combat against a powerful nation – the Soviet Union – and toward fighting small terrorist and insurgent groups instead.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon’s efforts have shifted back to preparing for what officials call “great power competition” among the United States, Russia and China.

The most important strategic shift that’s evident in planning for great power competition is a focus on deterrence. In classic military strategy, deterrence focuses on making an adversary believe it can never achieve its goals by military force because the response would be overwhelming and decisive.

The National Defense Strategy released in October 2022 – the document that articulates the nation’s goals, objectives and resource allocation for the next two years – explicitly recognizes the potential risk of tensions and open conflict with Russia or China, and it calls for “integrated deterrence” to prevent it. That means combined efforts from the military, intelligence and diplomatic agencies across the US government.

The National Military Strategy – the military’s section of the overarching National Defense Strategy – lays out how the US armed forces will contribute to that effort. As a former assistant secretary of defense and Pentagon chief of staff, I see that the military is focusing on three main goals to achieve integrated deterrence and prevent a conflict with Russia or China.

New operational plans

For the military, integrated deterrence means the armed forces will depend both on where forces are situated and what they can do once they’re in action to influence adversaries’ decisions about when, where, how – and whether – to use military force against the US or its interests.

In the shift away from counterterrorism toward preparation for a great power conflict, the Defense Department has developed new ways to deal with the fact that Russia and China, unlike small terrorist groups, can fight in the air, on land and at sea anywhere around the world – and online and in space, too.

First among those methods is what the Pentagon calls “dynamic force employment,” in which US military forces are deployed rapidly around the world, without predictable rotation schedules. This approach can reassure allies facing threats from Russia or China.

For example, the US has, at times, deployed as many as 10,000 troops to Poland. The troops are not permanently stationed there, but a continuous presence of US forces keeps Russia guessing about the size and capabilities of the force and demonstrates a commitment to support nervous NATO allies in Eastern Europe.

Second is a shift of personnel and capabilities to what is called “multi-domain operations,” in which units with different missions across air, land, sea, space and cyberspace plan and train together. That way, they can be prepared to work closely together in actual conflicts.

This level of collaboration allows the nation to respond to threats in a variety of ways. For instance, challenges to American naval power on the high seas do not have to be met directly with corresponding naval action, but instead could be answered with cyberattacks or from space.

This approach might make the Chinese People’s Liberation Army think twice about launching military operations against Taiwan. Not only would the Chinese potentially face a fierce direct conflict, but US cyber and space operations could also disrupt or destroy Chinese military communications, hindering their attack.

Investments in modernization

Recent research has shown that China’s investments in its military personnel and capabilities – particularly in air, naval and nuclear forces – have grown exponentially over the past two decades, to a level estimated at near parity with the United States.

This has prompted the US to modernize its own military’s corresponding capabilities. For the 2024 budget, the Department of Defense allocated a whopping US$234.9 billion for programs to support integrated deterrence, which likely represents a 10% increase over previous spending plans.

Some of this money will go to developing and acquiring F-35 fighter jets and building Columbia-class, nuclear-powered submarines. When the US and its allies in the Pacific region, such as Japan, South Korea and Australia, deploy these planes and submarines, they will remind potential adversaries of American military power – which is itself a deterrent against foreign aggression.

Over the past 10 years, China’s rapid expansion of its nuclear weapon supply has alarmed senior policymakers in the US. Although then-President Barack Obama pushed countries to envision a world free of nuclear weapons, he approved the most expensive and significant upgrade ever to the US nuclear arsenal.

In 2022, the Biden administration renewed a financial commitment to “field a modern, resilient nuclear triad” consisting of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles and long-range nuclear bombers.

Advancing technology

In 2019, the Space Force was established as a separate branch of the armed forces and tasked with defending American space-based assets and upholding international law.

Because of the importance of satellite communications to military operations and civilian life – including internet connectivity – the Space Force works closely with Cyber Command, the military organization charged with defending the nation against cyberattacks, to prevent malicious hackers from disrupting systems vital to the world, such as the Global Positioning System, widely known as GPS.

Recent intelligence indicates that China plans to conduct destructive cyberattacks against US domestic critical infrastructure, including the electric grid, during any conflict. To counter those plans, Cyber Command continues to enhance its abilities to defend US systems and companies against cyberattacks, as well as to conduct attacks against systems in other countries.

The Pentagon is also seeking to counterbalance China’s rapidly expanding military forces by using artificial intelligence software in a program called the Replicator Initiative. The effort seeks to build thousands of low-cost, AI-directed autonomous aircraft and boats that can be used in combat to “counter the [Chinese military]’s mass with mass of our own,” in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks.

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Integration with allies and partners

The US military has also sought to strengthen alliances with other countries, especially over the past four years of the Biden administration.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine led NATO to expand its membership as well as the numbers and capabilities of troops available to the organization. The US has reinforced its commitment to NATO, increasing troop deployments in Eastern Europe and support for European defense initiatives by committing nearly $3 billion in funding for additional fighter aircraft, air-defense batteries and munitions.

In Asia, around the Indian Ocean and across the Pacific Ocean, a vast region that the government often calls “the Indo-Pacific,” the US has strengthened alliances with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines by conducting numerous military exercises and increasing military assistance. Efforts like the annual Marine Aviation Support exercise are aimed at countering Chinese military and political influence.

The US has also sought to strengthen its alliances with the UK and Australia, with a commitment to sell up to five conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian Navy by 2030.

Collectively, the US has combined all of these efforts into a coordinated approach seeking to avoid open conflict with China and Russia. But the work is not yet done: The global political and military landscape is ever-changing, and new security challenges are always emerging.

Eric Rosenbach is a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Grace Jones, a master’s student in public policy and research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, contributed research to this article.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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asiatimes.com · by Eric Rosenbach · August 27, 2024

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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