Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”

– Helen Keller

"To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in life"

– Van Gogh

"Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the ways of different arts one by one."

–Miyamoto Musashi

Apologies for the consulate news and commentaries. As most know Korean Airlines rarely has WiFi.

1. This exercise is shaping the long-term future of Army brigades

2. Army puts its 'transforming in contact' concept to biggest test yet

3. Green Berets use disruptive cyber technology during Swift Response 2024

4. U.S.-Made F-16 Crashed in Ukraine, Killing Pilot

5. C.I.A. Warning Helped Thwart ISIS Attack at Taylor Swift Concert in Vienna

6. In new guidance, top Marine says 'righteous' Force Design will guide the money

7. Army Just Signed $1B Deal For Massive Order Of Switchblade Kamikaze Drones

8. Every War Must End (Ukraine Edition) by Chase Metcalf, John Nagl

9. In Brief: Why the Gaza Peace Talks Have So Far Failed

10. What is an Italian Carrier Strike Group Doing in the Indo-Pacific?

11. Rewind and Reconnoiter: A Europeanized NATO? The Alliance Contemplates the Trump Era and Beyond with Sten Rynning

12. Haiti’s Window of Opportunity

13. Army’s upcoming Project Convergence billed as early test for ‘C2 Next’ plans

14. The Peril of Ignoring the Legitimacy of Violent Non-State Actors

15. The Limits of Diplomacy With China

16. Neither Narrow nor Nice: Economic Warfare, Disinformation, and Civil Society

17. How Irregular Warfare Can Find—and Exploit—the Vulnerabilities in China's Defense Industrial Base

18. Distressing Global Report on Civil Freedoms

19. The Fall and Fall of Mahmoud Abbas

20. Challenges of the Gaza humanitarian aid pier offer lessons for the US Army

21. When the US left Kabul, these Americans tried to help Afghans left behind. It still haunts them

22. US carrier drought in Western Pacific is telling but no security threat, expert says

23. Don’t Downplay Risks of AI for Democracy

24. NSA's China specialist: US at a loss to deter Chinese hackers

25. ‘Range of options’ ready for South China Sea aggression: US admiral

26. Army’s blunt trauma tests on pigs, cadavers may aid body armor designs

1. This exercise is shaping the long-term future of Army brigades

Transforming in contact.

Louisiana maneuvers? (if you know you know).

But this is a big deal. The future of the Army is unfolding at this and related and upcoming events. We really need to pay attention as history is likely being made (though it will be decades before we will be able to assess it).

Excerpts:

By this time next year, other brigades within these brigades’ divisions could see formations transform, with new tech at their fingertips for a “fight tonight” scenario, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said.

The Army’s efforts to transform the entire combat force over the next five years are expected to yield tangible results in the next year among those three brigades, added Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

Note the emphasis on projecting power.

Excerpt:

Sylvia said the division command elements of the Fort Campbell brigade performed mobile strike missions requiring 76 aircraft to haul more than 2,000 soldiers and 252 pieces of equipment across more than 500 miles on two avenues of approach. That maneuver necessitated at least two refueling points before troops hit the ground at 14 different landing zones.

Note the concluding description of "How Army unit composition has evolved." This is an interesting comparison.

This exercise is shaping the long-term future of Army brigades

armytimes.com · by Todd South · August 28, 2024

FORT JOHNSON, Louisiana — A series of experiments with available technology and new unit configurations being tested in Louisiana will shape the future of brigade combat teams and how they deploy to tomorrow’s fights.

In early August, the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, conducted a 500-mile air assault from their home station to the Joint Readiness Training Center. On Aug. 22, the brigade launched a large-scale combat maneuver using novel approaches, homegrown technology and smaller headquarters.

The brigade is one of three currently experimenting with various tech, from electromagnetic spectrum tools and hide, decoy or detect signatures to counter-drone capabilities and nimble, small-footprint command posts running operations — which once took 60 troops — with only eight soldiers.

The two additional brigades, the Hawaii-stationed 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division and the Fort Drum, New York-based 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division are in earlier stages of developing such tech, with combat training center rotations planned for later this year and early 2025.

By this time next year, other brigades within these brigades’ divisions could see formations transform, with new tech at their fingertips for a “fight tonight” scenario, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said.

The Army’s efforts to transform the entire combat force over the next five years are expected to yield tangible results in the next year among those three brigades, added Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

Is this unit the future of Army combat formations?

A Hawaii-based light brigade combat team's recent overseas rotation featured a bevy of cutting-edge capabilities, leaders say.

It’s all part of a larger initiative, announced in 2023, called “Transformation in Contact.” The effort puts soldiers at the center of solving tactical problems at the brigade level and below.

Many assets formerly part of the brigade-centric fight are now going to be the division level, which Army leaders say will lighten the operational burden on brigades, freeing them to do what brigades are supposed to do: destroy things.

The 101st is working with the Mobile Brigade Combat Team concept, which centers mobility around the infantry squad vehicle, said Capt. Charles O’Hagan, company commander for the brigades recon company.

That simple adjustment allowed a newly formed brigade reconnaissance company to go into the wood line Aug. 14 and work through Aug. 23 without the need for resupply, O’Hagan said. A dismounted company would require resupply in half that time.

In recent years, the Army has sought to shrink command posts for brigades and divisions, getting away from bulky, multivehicle convoys with massive radar dishes, antenna farms and tents that took hours to set up.

Army leaders point to Ukraine as a real-world example. Russian forces got bogged down early in the war and saw hundreds of operational commanders killed as Ukrainian troops employed simple signals intelligence detection and strike methods with drones and other cheap devices.

But even getting to the fight requires reconfiguring the way brigades have approached maneuver for more than 20 years.

A Global War on Terror-era brigade would hold about 4,300 soldiers. That number now sits at 3,000.

Sylvia said the division command elements of the Fort Campbell brigade performed mobile strike missions requiring 76 aircraft to haul more than 2,000 soldiers and 252 pieces of equipment across more than 500 miles on two avenues of approach. That maneuver necessitated at least two refueling points before troops hit the ground at 14 different landing zones.

Another 700 soldiers were needed to manage the forward area refueling points along the route from Fort Campbell to Fort Johnson, he said.

The 500-mile mark is key, Sylvia added. If the Army can strike from that distance, they can strike nearly any important feature of Russia, China, Iran or North Korea from regional installations.

The division practiced this sort of long-range assault in January using legacy gear and approaches, the two-star said.

“What we found was a huge disconnect between the brigade and its ability to communicate, and between the division and the brigades to be able to control those formations,” Sylvia said.

Soldiers from the 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division exit a CH-47 Chinook into the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana. (Staff Sgt. Joshua Joyner/U.S. Army)

In their follow-up exercise, the brigade was able to use commercial tech, two avenues of approach and refueling points to better manage movement, Sylvia said.

“Our forward area refueling points are the lifeblood of this division,” Sylvia said.

Combat aviation brigade must be available to each brigade commander but coordinated by the division to be effective in moving all elements.

Moving assets to the division has streamlined the brigade, reducing time for many functions and allowing more creative tactics in combat training.

Soldiers now operate from four Humvees, one infantry squad vehicle and a 200-square-foot command post with smaller, distant antenna cluster. This replaces the previous 600-square-foot command post with an antenna farm and eight-plus vehicles and trailers.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vidal Perez, who works communication for 2nd Brigade’s command post, said setup and teardown used to take 30 to 45 minutes, which often meant colocating antennas with the command post — a setup that emitted a large signal for anyone looking to strike the brigade’s headquarters.

Now, with everything running on a cloud network and using commercial satellite technology, setup and teardown take just 10 to 20 minutes, Perez said.

Perez’s team have even set up “decoy” command posts by using commercially purchased circuit cards and power supplies, labeling them as 2nd Brigade Command Post and other names and dumping them in clusters in the woods for the opposition to detect and strike.

And when they strike, they reveal their positions for a counterattack.

In October, the 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division is slated for its own test with a rotation through the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii.

That validation event will provide lessons for the future brigades. The 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division is set for a combat training center rotation in 2025.

As the three brigades share lessons from their experiments, Army senior leaders will evaluate their adjustments over the coming year. Successful outcomes are expected to spread across other brigades within their respective divisions, George said.

How Army unit composition has evolved

Looking at the differences between the Army’s pre-2004 division-centric setup, its post-GWOT brigade-centric construction and its 2030 construct, unit composition looks like the following:

Pre-2004 division-centric

Three infantry brigades
Two combat aviation brigades
Sustainment brigade
Artillery brigade
Support command
Signal battalion
Air defense artillery battalion
Military intelligence battalion
Engineer battalion

GWOT brigade-centric

Four infantry brigades
Two combat aviation brigades
Division sustainment brigade
Division artillery brigade
Special troops battalion

New division 2030 working construct

Three mobile brigade combat teams
One combat aviation brigade
Division sustainment brigade
Division artillery brigade
Signal battalion
Military intelligence battalion
Engineer battalion
Mobile protected firepower battalion
Counter drone battery

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correctly identify the brigade from 10th Mountain Division that is participating in the Army’s Transforming in Contact experiments.

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

2. Army puts its 'transforming in contact' concept to biggest test yet

Transforming in contact from the bottom up. When this is successful it should have "buy in" from the troops because they are the ones who are going to have to make it work.

Hopefully we will hear the voices of soldiers and how they assess this.

Excerpts:

This type of bottom-up innovation is exactly what Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George is trying to foster with the so-called transforming-in-contact concept, where the service plans to use deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield.

According to George, there are three areas where the Army needs to be faster and more adaptable when it comes to delivering equipment to forces, due to how challenging the threat environment is and the cat-and-mouse aspect of countering opponents’ moves: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

The concept has roots in the Middle East where troops weren’t getting the latest and greatest equipment, due to pre-determined unit fielding decisions. The thinking was, if a unit is deploying to a high-risk theater, they should be getting new equipment. Moreover, lessons from the war in Ukraine have demonstrated that the constant action-counteraction between both sides means forces must be more adaptable in contact with the enemy to innovate, especially given the rate of development of commercial technology.

Army puts its 'transforming in contact' concept to biggest test yet

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · August 29, 2024

FORT JOHNSON, La. — It seemed like a long shot: soldiers using small drones with MacGyvered tech that cost less than $100 to serve as decoys to divert the attention of a highly capable enemy.

During a recent area defense operation, an Army unit had two possible paths it needed to take. With the opposition force closely following, the unit deployed around 50 decoys — commercial raspberry pi’s available for hobbyists on Amazon with SSID cards. The technology allowed the unit to load electronic signatures for anything from the brigade’s command post to a commander’s cell phone and mount it on small drones with a power supply, in an attempt to draw away the adversary.

As a result, the enemy spent about 50 percent of its artillery targeting what it thought was the Army unit, but in fact, was just dirt, making the foe not only easier to find for the Army forces given it exposed its position with its artillery, but it expended valuable munitions for naught.

While the Army has an annual procurement budget that exceeds $20 billion, it was this type of jerry-rigged tech that created a tactical advantage on the battlefield, much to the surprise of senior commanders.

“The thing that surprised me was actually the effectiveness of the decoys that were put out … I underestimated, personally, the effectiveness that we would see out there. It really did create some real dilemmas for [the enemy] during this fight,” Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airbourne Division, told reporters during a trip to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana. “A tactical advantage there, because he has to unmask his guns in order to be able to execute that fire mission.”

What made this such an impressive feat was that it was done successfully at a combat training center rotation — the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train — against 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment, know as “Geronimo” and serving as a highly capable opponent for units rotating into these centers, rather than just a home-station training event.

This type of bottom-up innovation is exactly what Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George is trying to foster with the so-called transforming-in-contact concept, where the service plans to use deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield.

According to George, there are three areas where the Army needs to be faster and more adaptable when it comes to delivering equipment to forces, due to how challenging the threat environment is and the cat-and-mouse aspect of countering opponents’ moves: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and electronic warfare.

The concept has roots in the Middle East where troops weren’t getting the latest and greatest equipment, due to pre-determined unit fielding decisions. The thinking was, if a unit is deploying to a high-risk theater, they should be getting new equipment. Moreover, lessons from the war in Ukraine have demonstrated that the constant action-counteraction between both sides means forces must be more adaptable in contact with the enemy to innovate, especially given the rate of development of commercial technology.

The transforming-in-contact units include: 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division — the first mobile brigade combat team — 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division and 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division.

The concept was put to one of its biggest tests this month where 2nd Brigade, 101st conducted a rotation at JRTC. George called this transforming-in-contact 1.0, with 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division having a planned rotation in October in Hawaii and 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division having a planned rotation in January in Europe.

The goal is to continue to foster innovation from soldiers while testing equipment in different environments to ensure they work. George noted that technology the Army sent to the Middle East didn’t perform as well in the Philippines due to the high humidity in that region.

Private Davis from 2-502 Infantry Regiment, 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) poses for a picture against the night sky after air assaulting into the Joint Regional Training Center (JRTC) at Ft. Johnson, LA as part of a large scale, long range air assault (L2A2) that the 101st launched from Ft. Campbell, KY to JRTC on the night of August 16, 2024. (Photo by Staff Sgt. Joshua Joyner)

Senior Army leadership is flipping the script and allowing bottom-up innovation to help drive change and traditional processes such as capability requirements and acquisition of new systems that to date have mostly been top-down.

Former officials explained that there was constant innovation during the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan because the terrain or the tactics the enemy was using would adapt rapidly. The Army is now allowing division commanders to let their units tailor themselves how they need to in order to prosecute the fight, either by creating new organizations, purchasing low-cost equipment to employ in new and creative ways or using different tactics.

Officials explained that in the past, units would generate a requirement based on a gap, send that to the enterprise, which would work that in a lab and undergo a rigorous design-and-testing process before getting it back to the unit. Now, the Army is trying to take capabilities before full maturity, let soldiers use them and provide more accurate feedback regarding how it could be used or identify additional, better-informed gaps that need to be addressed.

“I’ve called it in the past a quiet revolution that we don’t have to field the same capabilities to every unit and that we can upgrade in different portfolios over time. Transformation-in-contact is designed to help us serve as a pathfinder to get there. It is giving us an opportunity to take a handful of operational units and experiment really with how they will use the new tech, whether it’s tactical UAVs, ground robots, other EW systems in an operational environment and what works, what doesn’t work,” Gabe Camarillo, undersecretary of the Army, told reporters in early August. That will help inform development of tactics, techniques, procedures, concepts of operation, requirements, solicitations and acquisition strategies, he added.

Camarillo noted that intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance is a good example of that because it traditionally required a lot of specialized training, but operations in Ukraine have demonstrated the ease of ubiquitous ISR with low-cost and low-training systems like small drones.

As technology evolves to become more intuitive and easy to use, the Army is finding that it doesn’t need to give soldiers new gear months in advance to test and train on it. Instead, they can give it to troops weeks ahead and let them innovate with it.

For example, new electronic warfare systems — namely the Terrestrial Layer System Manpack, the first official program in decades for a dismounted electronic attack capability that soldiers can use to conduct jamming on-the-move as well as direction and signal finding with limited signals intelligence capabilities — was given to soldiers about two weeks before JRTC, whereas in the past, those systems would require specialized training and take soldiers away from their units.

The same goes for newer network and communications equipment where more intuitive systems means the program office can give kit to units on a tighter timeline, whereas historically, they would have to provide a longer lead time so the units could train on it and get used to it before using it in an exercise.

The Army is also gaining valuable lessons from Geronimo, the opposing force at JRTC, as well as other similar units at other combat training centers. That organization is constantly sharing information back and forth to help the Army evolve, with one prominent example being the raspberry pi’s mounted to drones to serve as decoys and surveil electronic signatures in the battlespace.

“We get to do this every month. We get to do a rotation against the best free-thinking enemy in the world every month, the United States Army, against our own RTU teammates,” Lt. Col. Mason Thornal, commander of 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment, said. “We get to implement capabilities and we get to develop tactics, techniques and procedures for new capabilities that are coming out in the Army. And we’re trying to share these things that we’re learning with our rotational unit teammates as we go along.”

He noted that his unit has had to make adjustments on the battlefield relative to 2nd Brigade, 101st and the new equipment they have as part of the transforming-in-contact concept.

For example, he said the unit now has a lot more sensing capability, meaning his opposing force had to serialize their movements on the battlefield so that it would be harder to identify its main efforts. This has made them slower and as a result, they missed some opportunities to isolate and destroy a battalion that they identified.

500-mile air assault

As part of its rotation at JRTC, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne conducted a roughly 500-mile air assault from its home at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Louisiana to start the exercise.

During that effort, it had upgraded communications equipment — part of the Army’s integrated tactical network, a combination of program-of-record systems and commercial off-the-shelf tools.

That included putting HMS manpack radios — the same that are used by dismounted soldiers — into helicopters, providing MUOS beyond-line-of-sight satellite communications. Previously, those aircraft only had chat functions and could only send position location information.

Those capabilities provided continuous and more robust communications tools to the unit for the entire 500-mile entry into JRTC.

The Army’s network team has been on a multiyear journey to modernize tactical communications and make units lighter, faster, smaller and able to pass and share more information. Those efforts were ahead of their time in many instances as they employed the rapid feedback loop that transforming-in-contact is striving for, with one official saying they are “very comfortable” with this tight linkage and feedback mechanism.

Throughout this years-long process, modernized equipment has significantly shrunk the size of command posts. A key lesson from Ukraine is the need to have smaller, more mobile command posts to avoid being targeted.

2nd Brigade’s command post was significantly smaller than those of the past with just a couple of trucks — instead of large, sprawling, and often relatively static outposts. The Army shrunk the number of people from about 30 in previous rotations — and in some cases 60 to 70 — to around eight people.

It also had a much smaller electromagnetic signature, near zero, thanks to the “antenna farm” that produced all the communications for the brigade command post and was dispersed physically from the main command post, whereas before it was co-located.

While the farm did have a signature, communications capabilities such as directional radios and proliferated low-Earth orbit satellites made it difficult for the adversary to discover it in the spectrum, unlike other capabilities such as WiFi or high-frequency systems.

The foe was not able to distinguish if this was a brigade command post or a lower echelon given the small footprint and lower electromagnetic signature. Now, the enemy has to be more discretionary in terms of deciding what to hit because they don’t want to waste artillery or give away their position on a smaller echelon. They’re looking for bigger payoffs like a brigade or division command post.

Soldiers from the 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Air Assault out of a CH-47 Chinook into the Joint Regional Training Center (JRTC) at Ft. Johnson, LA as part of a large scale, long range air assault (L2A2) that the 101st launched from Ft. Campbell, KY to JRTC on the night of August 15, 2024. (Photo by Staff Sgt. Joshua Joyner)

“The bottom line is, you put that antenna farm … well away from the actual command post and so then you are, if you’re disciplined with WiFi pucks and phones and watches and all that kind of stuff, then truly, that place where the — where all the humans are sitting is nearly undetectable when you have the snipers up above,” Sylvia said.

In fact, feedback that made its way to Army Cyber Command head Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett was that the brigade’s signature was the best seen in 38 rotations, she said at the TechNet Augusta conference in Georgia Aug. 22.

One of the key examples for commanders enabling subordinate soldiers to tailor to how they need to is the multifunctional reconnaissance company, or MFRC. It’s a prototype formation that grew out of both cooperation with Geronimo — which has a similar unit — as well as lessons from the Ranger Regiment. With the Army’s changes in force structure released in February, certain capabilities are being moved up to division. This unit is meant to retain some of those capabilities resident within the brigade.

It has “the task of being painfully light and disproportionately lethal in order to sense, kill and protect on behalf of the brigade. How we’re getting after those three lines effort: traditional reconnaissance, emerging technology, and then some homegrown EW capabilities,” Capt. Charles O’Hagan, the company’s commander, said.

Officials said the unit is a bit of back-to-the-future regarding how the Army used to do long-range reconnaissance, operating stealthily on the battlefield and acting as scouts to find enemy positions.

“The fact that the opposition force knew that they were out there and couldn’t find them, created some dilemmas for him in terms of his ability to be as aggressive as he would have liked. He had to be a little more timid, a little bit more deliberate and introduce his forces,” Sylvia said.

Making lasting change

Transforming-in-contact, while it has demonstrated many successes to date, still faces challenges given the Army is large and change takes time.

Top officials have explained the need for flexible funding authorities in order to purchase these lower-cost, smaller and more attritable systems.

“What I mean by agile funding is that we don’t have to buy one system. I talked about program of record. What we don’t want is to buy something and then say we’re going to have it for the next 20 years, because when I asked that question this morning they said, ‘Yeah, we got a new UAS this year because it’s better, more modular, longer endurance,’” George told reporters.

He noted that officials don’t want to always worry about quantities and they desire the ability to buy something new when it’s available.

George also addressed issues of scaling this across the entire force. Scaling these technologies and concepts will be much harder, to include how to do home-station training, because some capabilities will be challenged at home station to fully train with.

“We have to figure out how we’re going to train all of these systems at home station. We’re going to have to figure out how we can put UAS up and do all the things that we need to do to adapt,” he said.

George dismissed major concerns related to integration of these technologies, saying soldiers are innovators and will be able to figure out that part.

“This isn’t about just the tech. This is about the formations. This is about the people,” he told reporters. “Do we have the right people at the right locations, with the right skills?”

The Army wants to ensure the right expertise is resident in each unit and formation to enable the types of coding, quick fixes and technical innovation to instill the lessons being drawn out by these experimental units in the future.

Other key questions the Army is trying to answer related to scaling is what is the official number of low-cost technology — from small drones to even raspberry pi’s — that a unit requires and is authorized, something referred to in military parlance as Modified Table of Organization and Equipment, or MTOE.

“We need to have the flexibility of units [where] you have a certain number of UAS. That’s why we’re talking about low cost to be able to train. That’s why we’re talking about modular. It gets added and making those adjustments,” George said.

The ultimate goal is to become more modular in which sensors and systems can be taken off a piece of hardware and placed on another if there’s an advancement or a new platform is a better host for technology, with George offering the analogy to rails on an M4 rifle.

“We’ll have to be nimble. I think we can use tech to actually do that. I always think about Walmart that can inventory a huge, large, passively, that system that we can do that … You can train with a lot of this stuff and then have some of the higher-end stuff that you saw with what’s available,” he said.

Officials also need to ensure the lessons are captured for doctrine and training given this will have wide-sweeping implications for how capabilities are employed and how units operate on the battlefield.

“We had our G3 down here, G8 and everybody else is that we understand process-wise, in the building, what the frictions are at every level and everybody’s doing their piece to understand,” George said. “How is this going to impact this level of formation in the field — not what’s best for the program or all those other things or what’s easiest or what is going to make the biggest difference at this level. That’s our culture that we have to change here to match this culture down there.”

Written by Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare and cyberspace.

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · August 29, 2024

3. Green Berets use disruptive cyber technology during Swift Response 2024

Numerous photos at the link.

It is great to see your long time friend and mentor, the late Warlord Emeritus Col (RET) John Colins given credit for the SOF Truths. Just one minor correction. They were first published in a Congressional research Service report in 1987.

Green Berets use disruptive cyber technology during Swift Response 2024

By Sgt. 1st Class Tim BeeryAugust 27, 2024

https://www.army.mil/article-amp/279281/green_berets_use_disruptive_cyber_technology_during_swift_response_2024

In 1991, U.S. Army Col. (ret) John Collins authored the special operations forces (SOF) truths. These five stanzas outline what it means to be a SOF soldier, and how the force must operate to be successful. Chief among those is truth number 1: “People are more important than hardware”. SOF capabilities have evolved considerably since 1991, however, and while people remain the most important asset, hardware has led the evolutionary change.

Advancements in technology have increased the capabilities of the people in the SOF community. Not only are they masters of air, land, and sea, but now there is a fourth domain. Cyberspace has become a key part of the battlefield, and quickly has become just as critical as the physical realm in battlefield superiority. It’s for this reason that Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) teams trained with disruptive cyber technology during Exercise Swift Response 2024 near Skillingaryd, Sweden this month.

“What this allows us to do is target an objective, use the signaling equipment to gain access to any WiFi networks originating at the target, and then monitor activity from that location for a period of time,” explained an identity protected ODA team member.

“It’s a very useful tool for us, because it gives us another set of eyes and helps to paint a clearer picture of our objective.” he said.

During the exercise, the aforementioned ODA team identified a target building and used a remote access device (RAD) to identify the networks coming from the facility. They were able to crack the WiFi password, enumerate the network, and run exploits on the target computer inside the building. This enabled the team to manipulate security cameras, door locks, and other security systems in the building.

While one team was in charge of manipulating the building through cyber disruption, a second ODA team conducted an infiltration operation on the facility. They conducted a military free fall (MFF) jump and marched seven miles to access the building, which they were able to enter easily due to the cyber disruption. From there they placed signal jamming equipment to clear any trace of the attack and exited the premises.

Training on a set of tools gives the team the ability to master them, living up to the second SOF truth, which is that quality is more important than quantity.

“In a real-world situation, this would allow us to gain information in a way that we haven’t always had,” explained the commander of the INFIL ODA team. “If we have a specific target or objective we need to reach, we now have the capability to glean critical information in a way that is undetectable if we do our jobs right.” he said.

The third SOF truth is that special operations cannot be mass produced. The ability to hack into a building through cyber technology is not exclusive to the special operations community, but the ability to do so, while also incorporating an MFF jump, and 7 mile foot march undetected is a SOF skill that when combined with the cyber capability gives special operations a unique set of skills that is exclusive said the ODA cyber team member.

“We are able to see what’s happening, and we know what the INFIL team is doing,” he said. “We have eyes on the whole scenario.”

The fourth SOF truth states that special operations forces cannot be produced after an emergency. They must be established, ready, and fully competent. This is why training in exercises like Swift Response is so important. It allows team members to sharpen their skills in an unfamiliar environment and put their knowledge to the test.

Advancements in hardware are due to the fifth SOF truth, which is that SOF requires non-SOF support. Cyber disruption is not brand new technology, but a tool that continues to develop. Staying current with the technology is a critical task, said the ODA cyber team member.

“This capability is something that we need to train on, and keep current with,” he said. “Because it’s evolving so rapidly, the devices we use today could be obsolete next year. It’s been five years since I first went to school for this - it’s changed so much in that time, I feel like it’s a whole new world.” he said.

While advancements are inevitable, the five SOF truths remain. New capabilities fall in line with established practices, and the entire machine keeps moving forward. Working during exercises like Swift Response 24 with Allies and partners such as Sweden enables special operations to remain uniquely postured to counter malign influence, build interoperability, rapidly respond to emerging threats and if necessary, defeat aggression.

4. U.S.-Made F-16 Crashed in Ukraine, Killing Pilot

U.S.-Made F-16 Crashed in Ukraine, Killing Pilot

Kyiv recently received six of the planes to boost its fight against Russia, symbolizing U.S. support

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukrainian-f-16-is-destroyed-in-crash-4f6d66f6?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Lara Seligman

Updated Aug. 29, 2024 3:00 pm ET

F-16 warplanes belonging to the Ukrainian Air Force flying earlier this month. Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

A Ukrainian pilot was killed when his F-16 jet fighter crashed as he was helping to repel a massive Russian missile attack, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

The crash occurred Monday, just weeks after the first American-made aircraft arrived in Ukraine. Officials identified the pilot as Oleksiy Mes, one of Kyiv’s first pilots to be trained on the F-16.

Initial reports indicate the jet wasn’t shot down by enemy fire, U.S. officials said.

The Pentagon referred questions to the Ukrainian Air Force for comment. The Ukrainian Air Force acknowledged the crash and pilot’s death in a statement Thursday.

F-16

Armament for Ukrainian F-16s: Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range, Small Diameter Bomb, AGM-88G Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile, Advanced medium-range air-to-air missile, AIM-9X short-range air-to-air missiles.

Speed: 1,500 mph (Mach 2 plus)

49.3 feet

Sources: Lockheed Martin (F-16); staff reports (F-16 armament)

Ukraine used the jets for the first time in combat to shoot down Russian missiles during the strikes this week, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Ukrainian Air Force said Mes was killed in combat while helping respond to the missile barrage Monday. The General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said contact had been lost with the jet while it was approaching its next target.

A person close to the Ukrainian military said the cause of the crash was unknown and an investigation was under way. The person described Mes as a hero who successfully shot down multiple Russian missiles on Monday before the crash.

Mes, whose call sign was “Moonfish,” was one of the better known Ukrainian pilots, appearing frequently in the media and visiting Washington to lobby the U.S. to send Ukraine the jet fighters.

Mes met personally with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including in 2022 with then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.). In a Thursday post on X, Kinzinger said Mes and Andriy Pilshchykov, another prominent Ukrainian pilot, “fought like hell for Ukraine, and the F-16.” When Kinzinger met with the two in 2022, “I had a sick feeling they wouldn’t make it through the war,” he wrote.

Mes often appeared with Pilshchykov, whose call sign was “Juice,” who died in a training accident in 2023. Two other pilots were killed in that incident, a midair collision.

The news that one of Ukraine’s few F-16s has been destroyed, and one of its most well-known pilots killed, is a major blow to Kyiv, which had pleaded for the jets for months before President Biden gave the green light for European countries to transfer the aircraft last year.

Kyiv hopes the advanced Western aircraft will give its forces an edge on the battlefield, particularly to shoot down incoming Russian missiles and help protect troops on the front lines. But the F-16s, many of which are secondhand and have decades of flying time already, are vulnerable to Russian air defense missiles and present a high-value target for Moscow’s forces.

What New F-16s Mean for Ukraine’s Soviet-Style Air Force

C.I.A. Warning Helped Thwart ISIS Attack at Taylor Swift Concert in Vienna

The agency provided information about several suspects that led to arrests, the deputy director said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/us/politics/cia-isis-warning-taylor-swift-concert.html?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru

Taylor Swift had been planning to hold three concerts in Vienna beginning Aug. 8, and 200,000 people had been expected to attend.Credit...Max Slovencik/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Julian E. Barnes

Reporting from Washington

Aug. 28, 2024

The C.I.A. provided intelligence to Austrian authorities that allowed them to disrupt a plot that could have killed thousands of people at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna this month, the agency’s deputy director said on Wednesday.

David S. Cohen, the deputy director of the C.I.A., said the agency had provided information about four people connected to the Islamic State who were planning an attack. Some of the individuals arrested were found with bomb-making material and had access to the concert venue, where several shows were scheduled to take place in the days after the arrests.

“They were plotting to kill a huge number, tens of thousands of people at this concert, I am sure many Americans,” Mr. Cohen said at the annual Intelligence Summit just outside Washington, D.C. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”

On Aug. 7, Austrian authorities arrested two people accused of plotting a terror attack; others were arrested in subsequent days. Austrian officials said one of the men, a 19-year-old Austrian, had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and had focused on Ms. Swift’s tour as a target.

Mr. Cohen expressed no doubt that attacking the Eras Tour concert and killing a large number of concertgoers was the goal of the plot.

Taylor Swift’s Concerts Canceled After Planned Attacks

Return to the Stage: Taylor Swift resumed her Eras Tour with a performance at Wembley Stadium in London, where fans said they trusted British security officials to keep them safe.
Three Vienna Concerts Canceled: The shows were called off after Austrian officials arrested two men and accused them of plotting a terrorist attack, and said that one had been focused on her upcoming stadium concerts.
The Suspects: The two teenagers accused of planning to attack the Swift concerts in Vienna had hoped to kill as many people as possible, the Austrian authorities said. A third teenager connected to the main suspect was also arrested, though authorities believe he was not part of the plan.

He did not say how the C.I.A. had learned about the planned attack. But intelligence agencies have previously alerted other countries about terrorist plots. Earlier this year, U.S. officials warned authorities in Iran and in Russia that the Islamic State’s Afghanistan-based affiliate, known as ISIS-Khorasan, intended to strike events — a memorial service in Iran and a concert in Moscow — though neither country was able to stop those attacks.

Ms. Swift had been planning to hold three concerts in Vienna beginning Aug. 8, and 200,000 people had been expected to attend. Last week, in a social media post, she thanked the authorities, saying that because of them, “we were grieving concerts and not lives.”

Mr. Cohen said counterterrorism warnings do not always get a lot of attention. But the action to stop the attack in Austria, which potentially saved hundreds of lives, he said, was different.

“I can tell you within my agency and others, there were people who thought that was a really good day for Langley,” he said, referring to the C.I.A. headquarters. “And not just for the Swifties in the workforce.”

Speaking at the same conference in 2021, Mr. Cohen said the challenge after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan would be to know whether the Islamic State or Al Qaeda would “have the capability to go to strike the homeland” before they could be detected.

He promised then that the C.I.A. would find ways to rebuild its intelligence on Afghanistan, suggesting that the efforts could include “over the horizon” collection by long-range drone and talking to informants in the country.

On Wednesday, Mr. Cohen acknowledged recent successes in thwarting Islamic State Khorasan but said it was harder to do now that the United States did not have a military presence in Afghanistan.

“We figure out how to execute our mission even when it is difficult,” he said.

Mr. Cohen said the C.I.A.’s ability to collect intelligence on threats from Afghanistan was not as strong as it was five years ago, but he said the agency and its partners were still able to “defend the homeland and unravel terrorist plotting.”

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. More about Julian E. Barnes

See more on: Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), National Intelligence Estimates, Taylor Swift

6. In new guidance, top Marine says 'righteous' Force Design will guide the money

Excerpts:

“Accepting near-term risk for long-term gain has, and always will be, the essence of Force Design,” Smith continues later in the document when discussing the need to balance funding between future modernization and current operational requirements.

The Commandant’s Planning Guidance is a broad, forward-looking document, designed to give the service chief a chance to address the entire Marine Corps and lay out their vision and priorities.

Historically, the document is published soon after the new commandant assumes his position, but Smith’s CPG was delayed, first, by a political impasse on Capitol Hill — he was not permitted to publish a CPG while serving as the acting commandant, despite his nomination to the job — and then by a medical emergency that sidelined him from work for several months.

His affirmation of Force Design is not surprising. As the assistant commandant to the previous Marine Corps chief, Gen. David Berger, Smith played an integral role in devising and implementing the plan’s earliest steps and has been a fierce public advocate for Berger’s ideas — despite the public criticism from retired officers as well as the fact his ascension to commandant gave him free reign to take the service in another direction, if desired.

In new guidance, top Marine says 'righteous' Force Design will guide the money - Breaking Defense

“Accepting near-term risk for long-term gain has, and always will be, the essence of Force Design,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith wrote in his Commandant's Planning Guidance.

breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · August 28, 2024

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Eric M. Smith gives a speech at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va. on Feb. 23, 2023. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Alfonso Livrieri)

WASHINGTON — In his newly released Commandant’s Planning Guidance, Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith re-affirmed his service’s commitment to the future-looking Force Design effort, including a pledge to “make all necessary investments” towards maintaining the service’s amphibious ships and their associated forces amidst “finite” resourcing.

“I remain confident that we are on the right track as a service. Force Design remains a righteous journey, and we are in perhaps the most difficult phase — implementation,” Smith wrote in the document published today.

“Accepting near-term risk for long-term gain has, and always will be, the essence of Force Design,” Smith continues later in the document when discussing the need to balance funding between future modernization and current operational requirements.

The Commandant’s Planning Guidance is a broad, forward-looking document, designed to give the service chief a chance to address the entire Marine Corps and lay out their vision and priorities.

Historically, the document is published soon after the new commandant assumes his position, but Smith’s CPG was delayed, first, by a political impasse on Capitol Hill — he was not permitted to publish a CPG while serving as the acting commandant, despite his nomination to the job — and then by a medical emergency that sidelined him from work for several months.

His affirmation of Force Design is not surprising. As the assistant commandant to the previous Marine Corps chief, Gen. David Berger, Smith played an integral role in devising and implementing the plan’s earliest steps and has been a fierce public advocate for Berger’s ideas — despite the public criticism from retired officers as well as the fact his ascension to commandant gave him free reign to take the service in another direction, if desired.

Berger first publicly unveiled his ideas for Force Design 2030 in his own CPG published in 2019. The Marine Corps has since abbreviated “Force Design 2030” to just “Force Design” in recognition of the fact the changes and adaptations for future conflict will not necessarily conclude at the end of this decade.

“We have a finite budget and each of the services must make hard decisions to prioritize resources to prepare for the future fight,” Smith’s guidance states. “The Marine Corps has many competing requirements, all of which are important. We must sequence our investments over time, applying capital when and where it makes the most difference. Simultaneously, we must sustain the hard work that led to a clean audit for the service.”

One of the costliest budget items for the Marine Corps are its amphibious ships and the forces deployed on them, also called the Amphibious Ready Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit. In his new guidance, Smith characterizes the ARG/MEU as the “premiere force offering of our Corps” and said he’ll spare no expense to “keep it that way.”

A major goal is to maintain a “3.0 requirement” for the combatant commanders, which means “heel-to-toe” deployments of one MEU from the East Coast, West Coast and forward-deployed naval forces in Japan. (“Heel-to-toe” in this case means that as one ARG/MEU departs a region to head home, another is simultaneously beginning its own deployment, ensuring a constant presence.) The goal is in line with the service’s historical policies, but it has remained a challenge in recent years to realize it in practice.

Smith also alludes to the fact that, in order to meet that goal, the bottom line may require more money from lawmakers. In addition to highlighting the importance of amphibious ships, Smith also calls out capabilities focused on contested logistics and littoral mobility; joint and coalition command and control as well as long-range precision fires.

While not called out in the guidance, Smith’s document indicates that there is no interest in reversing the Marines’ movement away from tanks or other changes Berger made. The decision to divest tanks, advocated heavily by Berger, has been one of the most controversial aspects of the Force Design debate.

“To meet the material and personnel readiness goals associated with a 3.0 MEU requirement, the United States Navy will likely require increased resources across multiple Future Years Defense Programs (FYDP),” Smith wrote.

breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · August 28, 2024

7. Army Just Signed $1B Deal For Massive Order Of Switchblade Kamikaze Drones

Compare these to north Korea developing its so-called "suicide drones."

Army Just Signed $1B Deal For Massive Order Of Switchblade Kamikaze Drones

The Army is moving to drastically expand its stocks of one-way attack munitions so infantry can hunt and kill tanks and other targets from the air on a grander scale.

Joseph Trevithick

Posted on Aug 28, 2024 4:04 PM EDT

8 minute read

twz.com · by Joseph Trevithick

The U.S. Army has awarded a massive contract valued at close to $1 billion to AeroVironment for the delivery of Switchblade-series loitering munitions, also known as kamikaze drones, over the next five years. This is part of a larger effort that the service has said is intended to help make its infantry units just as lethal as formations with tanks and other heavy armored vehicles amid a pivot to preparing for potential high-end fights, especially one against China in the Pacific.

The Pentagon first announced the Army’s $990,000,000 hybrid cost-plus-fixed-fee and firm-fixed-price contract to AeroVironment in its daily contracting notice yesterday, but provided only limited information. A company spokesperson has now told The War Zone that this new deal covers deliveries of both Switchblade 300s and 600s, but did not say how many of either type the Army is now set to receive. AeroVironment also said in a press release today that the contract is in response to what the Army currently calls its Lethal Unmanned Systems (LUS) Directed Requirement (DR), which was formalized in 2022.

A rendering of a trio of Switchblade 600s. AeroVironment

“AV is proud to have been selected to provide Switchblade for this critical and urgent Army requirement,” Brett Hush, AeroVironment’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Loitering Munition Systems, said in a statement today. “This latest contract underscores the unmatched maturity and effectiveness of our system, as well as AV’s strategic positioning to rapidly produce and deliver these cutting-edge solutions to operators in the field.”

“Starting with the LUS Directed Requirement, we are well positioned to meet the Army’s emerging needs, leveraging our robust production capability and supply chain capacity to ensure rapid fielding and enhanced combat overmatch for our soldiers,” Hush added.

AeroVironment has already been supplying Switchblade 600s to the Army under a contract it received in December 2023 as part of the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (LASSO) program, which is also tied to the LUS DR. The Army has also been getting additional help in buying Switchblade 600s through the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative. The U.S. military has been acquiring Switchblade 300s for years now, especially for use by special operations forces, as well.

A member of the US Marine Corps fires an early version of the Switchblade 300. USMC

The Switchblade 300 and the larger 600 model are both tube-launched loitering munitions that can be employed individually by dismounted personnel. A multi-round launcher that can be mounted on vehicles or other platforms is also available for the Switchblade 300, as seen in the video below.

U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) is advancing lethality and the combat capabilities of unmanned surface vehicles during Exercise Digital Talon in international waters @US5thFleet, Oct. 23. During the exercise, NAVCENT’s Task Force 59, the Navy’s first Unmanned and… pic.twitter.com/N9jkv4vpeM

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) November 2, 2023

Both Switchblade types have highly automated target engagement capabilities, as well as man-in-the-loop control functionality. The latter allows the operator to see the view through the drone’s onboard electro-optical and infrared cameras throughout its flight and provides the option for fine manual core course corrections right up until the moment of impact. This also gives the human at the controls the ability to retask the drone or abort its attack entirely. The cameras give the Switchblades a limited secondary surveillance and reconnaissance capability, as well. You can read more about these capabilities in this previous War Zone feature.

Current Block 20 versions of the Switchblade 300 can stay airborne for at least 20 minutes and, with the help of a range-extending antenna system, can reach targets up to (30 kilometers) away. A single one of these drones packed in an individual launch tube weighs just eight pounds and can be stuffed in a backpack.

The larger Switchblade 600 offers increased flying time and range with an endurance of at least 40 minutes and the ability to reach out to nearly 25 nautical miles (40 kilometers), or even further by handing off control to operators closer to the desired operating area. It also has the same warhead used in the shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile, giving it hard-hitting anti-armor capabilities that the Switchblade 300 lacks.

As already noted, the Army and others within the U.S. military have already been buying Switchblades. For the Army, specifically, its huge new order for these kamikaze drones reflects a major push to field them in far greater numbers, especially within infantry units. Loitering munitions offer dismounted infantry formations, even at the lowest levels, valuable new ways to engage various kinds of targets well beyond the reach of traditional man-portable missiles, rockets, and similar weapons, and from the safety of cover.

On top of that, Switchblades will give those same units a new tool to actively hunt for, as well as engage, tanks and other targets miles away from the air. This is something in years past that would have required calling in close air support-capable aircraft.

“Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (IBCTs) lack adequate proportional organic capabilities at echelon to apply immediate, point, long range, and direct fire effects to destroy tanks, light armored vehicles, hardened targets, defilade, and personnel targets, while producing minimal collateral damage in complex terrain in all environmental conditions,” the Army said about the driving factors behind the LASSO program within the larger LUS DR effort in its 2025 Fiscal Year budget proposal released back in March. “The goal of the LASSO program is to make Infantry Brigades as lethal as Armored Brigades.”

“The capability enables precision engagement against near peer tanks, armored vehicles, dismounted formations, and reinforced/protected positions, provided the Soldier stand-off from enemy fires, significantly reducing risk to the Soldier,” the section on LASSO in the proposed Fiscal Year 2025 budget documents added. “Unlike existing direct and indirect fire weapon systems, LASSO’s discreet payload and unique capability delivers Soldiers the ability to abort against targets in a dynamic situation (e.g., use of human shields) or prosecute targets that would have been deemed non-viable in past due to the higher collateral damage associated with alternative munitions.”

Despite the large scale of AeroVironment’s new contract, the Army has already said that it expects Switchblades to be just one element of a larger LUS family of systems.

“We’re gonna have multiple variants and we’re gonna have competition. So, to meet the urgent need, we’ve gone sole source to a limited number of SB 600 [Switchblade 600], which is a very good system. But there’s a lot of companies in this space with a lot of good tech,” Doug Bush, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, said in an interview with DefenseScoop in December 2023. “So, we want to have really continuous competition because different companies have things that fit different parts of the mission space better.”

The U.S. Marine Corps is now investing heavily in new loitering munitions, as is America’s special operations community (which is where capabilities like Switchblade really started gaining traction first in the U.S. military), for many of the same general reasons as the Army. Kamikaze drones that can be air-launched and/or fired from ships and submarines, and employed against targets on land and at sea, also look set to become increasingly ubiquitous across the U.S. military.

This all reflects a broader surge in interest in loitering munitions around the world that is being driven in large part by observations from the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military’s arsenal includes Switchblade 300s and 600s. An expansive array of other kinds of kamikaze drones, including weaponized commercial types, are also in daily use on both sides of the conflict, which is having a transformative impact on the face of war globally.

#Ukraine: Ukrainian SSO (SOF) published rare footage of a kamikaze drone in action, which we identied as a US-supplied Switchblade 300 – hitting a Russian T-72B3 tank with its crew on top.

The tank is unlikely to receive any serious damage, which cannot be said about the crew. pic.twitter.com/sRm5GQNRyL

— Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) May 24, 2022

#Ukraine: The first external view of a Ukrainian Switchblade 600 loitering munition, donated by the US- Russian soldiers filming the wreckage after detonation.

Compared to SB300, the SB600 can carry a more powerful payload (incl. anti-armor) and can hit targets over 40km away. pic.twitter.com/HkLcjQ6TKb

— Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 20, 2023

Kamikaze drones, a category of weapons that has already been evolving for decades, are also a major feature in current crises across the Middle East and in and around the Red Sea.

For the U.S. military, loitering munitions could be especially critical in helping to provide the volumes of fire against targets right at the tactical edge and deeper behind the front lines that potential high-end conflicts will demand. In particular, there is ever-growing evidence that swarms of networked uncrewed systems in the air and down below could be a deciding factor in any future crisis across the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. military is now actively pursuing a strategy to help defend that island against an invasion from the mainland that involves turning the airspace and waters around it into a “hellscape” full of uncrewed platforms.

Deals like the one AeroVironment just got from the Army could be vehicles to help get kamikaze drones to allies and partners like Taiwan and Ukraine, too. The LASSO contract the company previously received already has a foreign military sales (FMS) component. The U.S. government also notably approved the potential sale of 720 Switchbalde 300s, as well as up to 291 ALTIUS 600M-V loitering munitions from up-and-coming defense contractor Anduril, to Taiwan in June, as you can read more about here.

So, while the Army awarding a nearly $1 billion contract to AeroVironment for Switchblade 300s and 600s is a huge development in of itself, it is also a sign of even bigger things to come for the entire U.S. military.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

Joseph Trevithick

Deputy Editor

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

twz.com · by Joseph Trevithick

8. Every War Must End (Ukraine Edition) by Chase Metcalf, John Nagl

Excerpts:

An Imperfect Peace and a Chance to Prepare

The Kursk offensive is the latest development in a largely stalemated war. Ukraine’s operational success will likely force Russia to reallocate resources to its border defenses at the expense of its efforts in Ukraine proper. Given Russia’s lack of proficiency in maneuver warfare to date, this will likely involve manpower-intensive fixed defenses. Ukraine may even contest the strategic initiative Russia has controlled through grinding attritional operations since late 2023. However, because the action does not meaningfully shift the war’s trajectory, the greatest value Ukraine obtains, if it is able to continue to hold Russian territory, is in the notable strengthening of Kyiv’s bargaining position—which brings the discussion back to political negotiations. While the probability of a settlement remains remote—war is, after all, highly unpredictable—it is useful to consider how this war might end, given the costs and risks involved.

If the war in Ukraine were to conclude in the manner described above, the result would be less than satisfying for all involved. Yet, fighting often concludes in unsatisfying wars—like the Korean War, for example, where the combatants fought to a standstill within the context of a broader global competition and potential conflict. A negotiated settlement may be both imperfect and the least bad alternative.

The West now faces the likelihood of a sustained political and irregular warfare campaign by the Axis of Upheaval to undermine US dominance of the international system. Bringing the Ukraine War to an unsatisfying end while increasing NATO unity and deterrence of further Russian aggression may prove to be not only more feasible than concluding the war on the battlefield, but also a better alternative than a grinding war that continues to cost lives and resources with no end in sight. And it may provide the West with the opportunity it needs to rapidly prepare for the possibility of global conflict.

Every War Must End (Ukraine Edition) - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Chase Metcalf, John Nagl · August 29, 2024

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

The Russo-Ukraine war rages on, thirty months after Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine. The largest land war in Europe since World War II continues to consume personnel and materiel at a disturbing rate. While the costs of this war continue to mount, neither side is eager to compromise, and both seek to exhaust the other’s political will and capacity to continue.

Even the recent Kursk offensive by Ukraine, while demonstrating an ability to “win” and thus sustaining Western support, does not fundamentally change the strategic correlation of forces or the trajectory of the conflict: Russian President Vladimir Putin appears convinced he can outlast the West. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy likely believes his ability to compromise is limited, given Russian brutality and the enormous sacrifices Ukraine has made to date. Further, Ukrainians fear that any pause in the fighting will only allow Russia time to rebuild its military and renew the war in the future.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is a blatant war of aggression and violation of international norms that is reshaping the geopolitical landscape. This war is leading to increased collaboration between an Axis of Upheaval consisting of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, who seek to create an alternative to the existing international order. The recent Commission on the National Defense Strategy has characterized the world we face as “the most challenging and most dangerous international security environment since World War II,” and Phillip Zelikow, respected historian and diplomat, argues we face a period of enormous risk, putting the chance of broader global war at 20–30 percent. The threats are real, and the war in Ukraine continues to consume much-needed resources while creating a risk of escalation.

While neither side is eager to compromise, there are signs that this war cannot continue forever. Russia and Ukraine both suffer from manpower and materiel shortages that will only continue to grow as the war drags on. Ukraine has long been dependent on outside support, but Russia increasingly is, as well. Finally, both sides have, at various points, indicated a willingness to negotiate, though they remain far apart on the conditions for those talks. Given all this, it is time to consider what a negotiated settlement might look like. How might this war end?

Why Now

Despite there being little appetite to compromise for either Russia or Ukraine, there are reasons why they may choose to do so. Russia surprised many with its ability to endure economic sanctions, but it cannot sustain the conflict indefinitely. Materiel and manpower costs continue to increase. Russia is reported to have suffered as many as 728,000 casualties through June 2024 and is consuming its stock of Soviet-era weapon systems at a rapid clip. Though experts debate how long Russia can sustain the war, its ability to do so at the current intensity is in large part dependent on Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean support.

While Russia continues to find sufficient manpower to continue the war, expanding mobilization efforts is politically and economically risky. In July, Putin announced a doubling of upfront payments for volunteers to fight in Ukraine, making the minimum pay of a Russian soldier in Ukraine triple the average wage in Russia. This comes as Russia’s military spending is already consuming roughly a third of the country’s budget, inflation is running at 9 percent annually, and the Russian central bank’s chairwoman is warning that “labor force and production-capacity reserves have been almost exhausted.”

Ukraine also faces manpower shortages and uncertainty over continued Western support. Under sustained pressure from Russian forces, Ukraine passed a mobilization law in April lowering the conscription age from twenty-seven to twenty-five. Passage of this law followed prolonged political tensions and the firing of General Valerii Zaluzhny, who had called for mobilizing five hundred thousand troops to sustain the war. Western support also appears unpredictable given the six-month delay in passing the last Ukraine aid bill in the United States and the reality that Germany’s proposed budget for 2025 would cut Ukraine aid in half.

Ukrainians have demonstrated an extraordinary will to resist Russian aggression throughout the war. Polls have repeatedly shown that large percentages of Ukrainians remain confident in eventual victory and reluctant to consider ceding territory to Russia. However, a July poll showed that nearly a third of Ukrainians—more than triple as many as a year before—are now willing to cede some territory to Russia to end the war. While a majority remain committed to liberating all Ukrainian territory, political maneuver space may be opening for Zelenskyy.

The administration of US President Joe Biden has repeatedly emphasized that its goal of a sovereign, independent, and secure Ukraine is central to broader European security. However, a recent Pew poll showed that only 34 percent of Americans believe Russia’s invasion poses a “major threat” to US interests, down from 50 percent in 2022, and only 48 percent feel the United States has a responsibility to help Ukraine defend itself. More importantly, Pew polling shows the percentage of Americans who believe the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine has grown from 7 percent in March 2022 to 29 percent in July 2024. This type of polling highlights that public support for American aid to Ukraine has declined over time, and future support is far from certain.

There is also a growing desire to focus on China as America’s pacing threat. The 2022 National Security Strategy highlights China as the top security priority for the United States. While American spending on Ukraine is a small percentage of the defense budget, and that spending is enabling the Ukrainians to attrit the Russian military, some call for ending the war to free up resources to focus on China.

The Art of the Possible

Given Russia’s blatantly illegal aggression, it is entirely legitimate for Ukraine to remain committed to a victory that restores its pre-2014 borders and avoids Russian escalation. For Ukraine’s international supporters, insisting on such a victory as the only acceptable outcome is a morally justifiable and principled position. And to be sure, that outcome would be ideal. But given the current dynamics of the conflict, it is also unlikely. Therefore, it is worth considering how this war might end in a way that supports Ukraine and broader US security interests.

Wars rarely end in the total defeat of an adversary. Instead, wars typically end in some form of compromise. In Ukraine, this will undoubtedly be the case as Kyiv lacks the capacity to march on Moscow and, as long as Western aid continues, Russia lacks the capacity to defeat Ukraine militarily. The details of any settlement must be negotiated between combatants—something that appears remote today. Thus, what follows is not the solution to the problem of ending the war, but rather an attempt to spur thought.

As unpalatable as it is given the costs of war for Russia to date, Putin will require something to end the war. Despite being an autocrat, Putin must maintain elite and even some level of public support. If, in return for a Russian withdrawal of all forces from eastern Ukrainian territory, Ukraine were to recognize Russian sovereignty over the Donbas territory it has occupied since 2014 and give up its immediate ambition of joining NATO, Putin could claim victory even as Ukraine put its NATO ambitions on pause until Putin’s successor takes charge, whenever that may be. Putin could argue that he had fought NATO-backed forces to a standstill in Ukraine (and thereby checked NATO’s eastward expansion), safeguarded Russian nationals in Ukraine, and forced international acceptance of the Donbas as Russian. He could further argue that by forcing Ukraine to rule out joining NATO, he had mitigated the security threat he used at times as justification for invading Ukraine.

Perhaps Putin’s most challenging issue would be justifying the return of annexed territories to Ukraine. Some form of sanctions relief, internationally observed referendum, and Ukrainian assurances regarding Russian speakers or portions of the Minsk agreements could serve as a foundation. Ultimately, Putin might justify it as necessary to allow Russia to rebuild its military forces while implicitly leaving open the possibility of readdressing the situation.

Zelenskyy will be rightfully reluctant to compromise, but given the uncertainty about long-term Western support, he may ultimately decide doing so is necessary. In return for renouncing claims on the Donbas, Ukraine would regain Crimea and the annexed territories—areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts—that it likely cannot regain through force of arms while also gaining some form of security guarantees and significant economic support to rebuild its country.

While the 2024 Washington Summit reaffirmed Ukraine’s future in NATO, it also noted that an invitation will only be extended once the allies agree and conditions are met. Given the uncertainty of when that might happen, Ukraine may be better off with an alternative security guarantee. For example, a Polish tank division stationed in eastern Ukraine, along with bilateral or multilateral agreements with NATO eastern flank nations that complement the US-Ukraine bilateral security agreement signed in June, would provide increased protection against renewed Russian aggression. Further, the United States could agree to permanently station an American tank division in Poland. This would both offset the stationing of a Polish tank division in Ukraine and strengthen NATO’s deterrent against Russian aggression. It would also provide other NATO nations with time to rebuild their force capacities in the face of increased recognition of the chronic nature of the Russian threat.

Ukraine would also require substantive commitments from the West to help it rebuild its economy and infrastructure. Though the West provides significant humanitarian and financial aid today, much more will be needed. In February, the World Bank estimated that recovery and reconstruction will require around $486 billion over ten years, and those costs will only continue to climb as Russia deliberately targets Ukrainian infrastructure.

What Happens Then

To reiterate, this is not an ideal solution. Ukraine was the victim of an unprovoked invasion and had a war forced on it that has cost the nation dearly. However, a negotiated settlement—along these or other lines—mitigates against the risk of eroding Western will and uncertainty over future Western support. Meanwhile, it would provide Ukraine with the time and space to rebuild its infrastructure and economy, thus encouraging its large diaspora to return to Ukraine. Perhaps, in time, it would allow Ukraine to build a functioning and prosperous democracy that serves as a contrast to the Russian system.

For the West, a settlement reduces the near-term strain on resources and allows some refocus on China. It provides time to build up both forces and a defense industrial base to prepare for future large-scale wars. Perhaps most importantly, it allows the United States to act on the recommendations of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy.

For Russia, this would most likely simply be an opportunity to pause the bleeding and rebuild its military forces. Putin’s worldview is such that he will likely just see this as a phase in a larger confrontation with the West consistent with Russia’s 2021 Russian National Security Strategy and 2023 Foreign Policy Concept. Given this, he, or his successor, would almost certainly choose to sustain a political or irregular warfare campaign against the West while seeking to work with the Axis of Upheaval to erode US influence globally.

Counterarguments

Of course, no examination of a potential negotiated settlement is complete without due consideration of counterarguments. And given this is a war that has been fought at such cost in blood and treasure, there are bound to be counterarguments because of the sheer challenge of intellectually and emotionally accepting an imperfect outcome. Some will argue that compromise represents a moral failure and further erosion of international norms. There is a substantial element of truth to that claim. However, given the political divisions in the West and uncertainty around sustained support, there would also be a potential moral failure if Western aid were to end, potentially enabling Russia to defeat Ukraine’s conventional resistance. Such a scenario would likely result in a prolonged guerrilla war and the brutalization of Ukraine. Similarly, some would argue that absent the West providing Ukraine with the resources needed to win decisively, with the inherent risk of escalation that comes with that, this war will only drag on at an enormous cost in lives.

Others will argue that compromise rewards aggression and would embolden Russia, China, and the rest of the Axis of Upheaval. Again, there is some truth to this. However, the costs to Russia have been high, forcing others to think twice, and the West could use any pause in the fighting to build up its forces and realign resources for the broader global competition. By doing so, the West could deter similar aggression and thus avoid the risks and costs of direct large-scale war.

An Imperfect Peace and a Chance to Prepare

The Kursk offensive is the latest development in a largely stalemated war. Ukraine’s operational success will likely force Russia to reallocate resources to its border defenses at the expense of its efforts in Ukraine proper. Given Russia’s lack of proficiency in maneuver warfare to date, this will likely involve manpower-intensive fixed defenses. Ukraine may even contest the strategic initiative Russia has controlled through grinding attritional operations since late 2023. However, because the action does not meaningfully shift the war’s trajectory, the greatest value Ukraine obtains, if it is able to continue to hold Russian territory, is in the notable strengthening of Kyiv’s bargaining position—which brings the discussion back to political negotiations. While the probability of a settlement remains remote—war is, after all, highly unpredictable—it is useful to consider how this war might end, given the costs and risks involved.

If the war in Ukraine were to conclude in the manner described above, the result would be less than satisfying for all involved. Yet, fighting often concludes in unsatisfying wars—like the Korean War, for example, where the combatants fought to a standstill within the context of a broader global competition and potential conflict. A negotiated settlement may be both imperfect and the least bad alternative.

The West now faces the likelihood of a sustained political and irregular warfare campaign by the Axis of Upheaval to undermine US dominance of the international system. Bringing the Ukraine War to an unsatisfying end while increasing NATO unity and deterrence of further Russian aggression may prove to be not only more feasible than concluding the war on the battlefield, but also a better alternative than a grinding war that continues to cost lives and resources with no end in sight. And it may provide the West with the opportunity it needs to rapidly prepare for the possibility of global conflict.

Colonel Chase Metcalf is a faculty instructor in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the Army War College. John Nagl is a retired Army officer and professor of warfighting studies at the Army War College. They work together on the Army War College Ukraine War Integrated Research Project.

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

Image credit: Mil.gov.ua

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Chase Metcalf, John Nagl · August 29, 2024

9. In Brief: Why the Gaza Peace Talks Have So Far Failed

In Brief: Why the Gaza Peace Talks Have So Far Failed - War on the Rocks

https://warontherocks.com/2024/08/in-brief-why-the-gaza-peace-talks-have-so-far-failed/

Oren Barak, Zaha Hassan, Yousef Munayyer, and Yael Mizrahi-Arnaud

August 28, 2024

Members

A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it.

***

After nearly 11 months of war in Gaza, negotiations towards a ceasefire deal have so far failed. Despite optimism expressed by U.S. officials, negotiators have been unable to forge an Israeli-Hamas agreement in mediation talks that began in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month, and fighting continues in Gaza. Plus, this weekend, the conflict once again threatened to spill over into a wider regional war, with Israel trading intense strikes with Hizballah in Lebanon and carrying out an airstrike in the West Bank. We asked four experts why the talks, so far, have failed and what, if anything, could bring about peace.

What is an Italian Carrier Strike Group Doing in the Indo-Pacific? - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Alessio Patalano · August 29, 2024

This week the Italian carrier strike group centered on the aircraft carrier ITS Cavour and the frigate ITS Alpino is pulling into Tokyo Bay. The carrier strike group is taking to Japan a 13-strong air wing of AV-8B Harrier II jets and cutting-edge F-35B aircraft fresh from some 180 flying hours and 110 missions at the Pitch Black exercise, including air-to-ground attack and suppression of enemy air defense actions. On its way to the archipelago, the group conducted also its first multi-large deck event in the region with the U.S. Navy’s Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group.

These are not the marks of a simple European diplomatic exercise in port calls and basic maneuvers away from familiar shores. The Italian navy is heading to Japan to present their professional credentials to their military counterparts as a way to underwrite the country’s ambition to develop a robust relationship. To that end, the navy’s training sailing ship ITS Amerigo Vespucci will join the Cavour, adding history and heritage to experience and cutting-edge technology. That is a naval statement with no equal in other European visits in recent times.

Such a remarkable engagement raises two rather fundamental questions. Why is an Italian aircraft carrier deployed to the Indo-Pacific in the first place? And, more importantly, why does it matter? The answers strike at the heart of a wider controversy. Experts have recently called for European actors to stay “out of Asia” as they strive to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia. Post-Cold War constraints from years of disinvestments in European naval capabilities make such calls a seemingly sensible choice. Others argue conversely that NATO, the European Union, and notably powers like the United Kingdom and France should continue to lead Europe’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific, especially from a maritime perspective.

In explaining Italy’s behavior, however, these assessments present three limitations. They first of all discount country-specific national interests beyond their relevance to the management of Sino-American tensions or, failing that, major conflict. Second, whilst Italy remains a G7 country and a major economic and political power, its role in the region is hardly ever fully considered, let alone understood. Third, European military engagement with the Indo-Pacific is articulated exclusively as a cost imposed on meager set of resources that bend the region’s military power balance out of shape.

This paper tackles these limitations to make a different case. Italy deployed the Cavour carrier strike group to the Indo-Pacific for three main reasons that, when understood in context, help in casting the wider European military engagement in the region in a different light. First, the Italian carrier strike group plays to the strengths of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s foreign policy “new look,” signaling the strategic importance of expanding trade connections with actors across the Gulf and Indo-Pacific regions. Second, the deployment reinforces Italian efforts in wider strategic engagements with key partners — notably Japan — by showcasing Italy’s understanding of, and commitment to, the fragility of the global order at sea, the key pillar connecting Europe to East Asia. Finally, and unfolding from the previous point, the Cavour’s deployment is carefully designed to strengthen the development of an operational capability that has the potential to be central to one of Europe’s core power projection programs, the European Carrier Group Interoperability Initiative.

Become a Member

Italy’s “Enlarged Mediterranean” in a Contested Age

Before Meloni came to power in 2023, the Indo-Pacific stood beyond the commitments of a longstanding regionally focused naval and military posture. Today, however, her government’s “pivot” to the region is both a reflection of, and a driver for, the reconceptualization and expansion of Italy’s geopolitical concept of an “enlarged Mediterranean” that informs the country’s foreign and security policy.

In particular, this notion should not be understood purely as a widening of Italy’s geographic area of interest from the natural boundaries of the Mediterranean Sea to the shores of the Gulf and western Indian Ocean regions. Rather, it is the result of the Italian government’s understanding of the geo-economic opportunities unfolding from stronger interactions with Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Indeed, within this enlarged Mediterranean vision, Italy is seeking to link maritime connectivity to economic development, and science and technology to the need to acquire advanced capabilities for a strategic edge capable of meeting the demands of unprecedented international competition and dangerous contestation.

For this reason, Meloni’s first actions focused on reinvigorating the country’s role as Europe’s economic bridge with Africa. Her strategy was articulated in her signature economic initiative, the “Mattei Plan for Africa.” This project, combined with the launch of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, created the ideal conditions for a structured approach to Italy’s influence in sustainable infrastructure and energy development initiatives across the three regions from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to those of the Indian Ocean.

Against this background, it is worth recalling that efforts to reduce Europe’s energy dependency on Russia in the wake of the war in Ukraine, and the government’s decision to disengage from China’s Belt and Road Initiative — a choice consistent with Meloni’s earlier skepticism of the program — further contributed to a foreign policy outlook focusing on engagements to the country’s south and east. Of no less relevance, the longstanding challenge of migration across the Mediterranean itself had led Meloni to create an expectation during the electoral campaign that a conservative government in Italy would take firm action to tackle it.

Consistently, the Mattei Plan focused on Italy’s engagement with Africa, an area of the world in which the new conservative government sought to promote economic development as a way to help address, in part, the crucial issue of illegal migration. In June 2024, just a year after its official launch, the Mattei Plan received additional political validation through the support of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. This initiative was designed to support flagship projects to deliver “transformative economic corridors,” linking the Mattei Plan and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor seamlessly.

By a similar token, Meloni’s visits to India and the United Arab Emirates in 2023 aimed at reinforcing this new strategic approach to foreign policy, with a clear emphasis on the future of the energy and security sectors. In particular, in India, Meloni announced that Italy would join Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, taking a leadership role on the science and technology pillar in a fashion consistent with her wider initiatives.

For the Meloni government, nonetheless, the promotion of new links in the Gulf and Indian Ocean stood next to an appreciation of the more fractured nature of world order. With war raging in Europe and maritime-centric crises growing from the Red Sea to the Taiwan Strait, the Italian government viewed links with actors within the Indo-Pacific as a distinct defense-industrial opportunity. It is in this context that Italy joined the Global Combat Air Programme collaboration with Japan and the United Kingdom. The idea to develop jointly a key capability in a major domain of future warfare espoused Italy’s desire to retain a military-technological edge.

Clear signs of Italy’s economic commitment to the program emerged in the aftermath of the announcement in December 2022. Recent Italian sources reported that the country’s bilateral trade with Japan had witnessed a 10 percent increase in 2023 compared to the previous year, reaching a total of some €15 billion. Stronger political links in terms of technological and scientific collaboration, together with the more favorable conditions created by the European trade framework between the European Union and Japan — enacted in 2019 — are likely to have contributed to this expansion of trade ties.

The strategic character of the relationship, which could draw on both countries’ participation in a reinvigorated G7 framework, was further restated during Meloni’s visit to Japan earlier this year. The two governments unveiled a series of new initiatives in the area of defense and security cooperation, including training, reciprocal visits, and activities within the framework of the G7 — the latter especially since Italy holds this year’s presidency. As plans for the Cavour carrier strike group visit to Japan firmed up, Italy used the deployment to militarily underwrite political actions, setting the stage for a security relationship aiming to settle on a qualitative character not too dissimilar to those enjoyed by the United Kingdom and France.

Maritime Statecraft the Italian Way

Against this renewed set of ambitious goals, the Italian navy stands as a key enabler to deploy the country’s capacity for statecraft beyond Mediterranean shores. Indeed, the Italian navy is a major tool for maritime statecraft, drawing in no small measure on a vibrant maritime commercial sector. Leading Italian commercial shipping company MSC is consistently at the top of the industry. Shipbuilder Fincantieri leads the field with a global footprint, with contracts from the United States to the Gulf and Southeast Asia, investments in ship repair facilities in Mexico, and plans to acquire shares of the TKMS group in Germany.

Maritime statecraft rests — as U.S. Secretary of the Navy Carlos del Toro has argued — on the strengths and synergic leveraging of commercial and military levers of power. In the Italian case, the navy’s professional capacity and operational confidence underwrite the country’s wider ability to achieve two crucial goals: to enhance national and partners’ capabilities, and to ensure maritime access to international sea lanes.

On the former, commercial and military synergies take the shape of Italian navy’s operational activities supporting wider capacity-building efforts through foreign sales. For example, last year, the deployment to the Indo-Pacific of the navy’s newest offshore patrol vessel, ITS Morosini, set the first step of this year’s carrier strike group campaign through an extensive operational schedule and multiple strategic port calls. Some of the planned activities, such as the ship’s five-day engagement in Indonesia, offered a clear opportunity to showcase the technological innovations of this warship to the Indonesian navy.

It is worth recalling that the warship featured a “light” configuration — one of three different options — that nonetheless leveraged technology to strengthen the link between the ship’s modularity and its operational flexibility, with some of the core innovative solutions including the futuristic naval cockpit and a digital battle damage assessment system.

In regard to access to sea lanes, the decisive Italian commitment to addressing disruptions to shipping in the Red Sea, both nationally and multilaterally, is a case in point. By January, Italian media reported that disruptions were costing the country €95 million per day. This is probably why Italy joined the U.S.-led joint statement condemning Houthi activities at the beginning of the year, and it was among the first countries to deploy anti-air defense capable assets to conduct close escorts to shipping well before the establishment of the E.U. operation ASPIDES (Figure 1). Indeed, by April 2024, Italy had a key leadership role in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden areas of operations. Cdre. Stefano Costantino had tactical command of ASPIDES, whilst Cdre. Francesco Saladino was in command of the EUNAVFOR Atalanta, and Capt. Roberto Messina led the Combined Task Force 153 responsible for Operation Prosperity Guardian.

Italian Warships deployed during this period: ITS De la Penne; ITS Fasan; ITS Martinengo; ITS Duilio.

Italian Shipping Companies: MSC, Ignazio Messina & C., Grimaldi Group, D’Amico Shipping, and SNAM.

Source: Italian Navy

Figure 1: The Italian Navy contribution to the Red Sea (Dec ’23 – May ’24)

Further, within ASPIDES, by the end of May, the Italian warships ITS Duilio and ITS Fasan had carried out 54 escort missions, the highest number of any contributing nation, with France — the second highest — conducting some 27 missions (Figure 1). Of no less relevance, Italian commercial vessels figured prominently in the escort activities with 91 ships sailing under close protection during the period from February to May 2024, compared to 23 French and 19 Greek vessels, suggesting a clear connection between the Italian shipping industry and the navy that is entrusted to ensure the safe conduct of its activities.

Such undertakings speak to two wider decade-long developments. First, thanks to policy support drawing upon the visibility the navy gained during its operational response to the migration crisis in the mid-2010s, Italy fields today one of the most balanced and modern fleets in Europe. Its surface fleet is the region’s second largest, together with the United Kingdom’s, and just behind France (Figure 2). Policy support for today’s fleet is in no small measure the result of Admi. Giuseppe De Giorgi’s declared ambitions to secure in 2014 a dedicated naval program. This was a vital step to guarantee a pipeline approach to shipbuilding worth €5.4 billion of investment over two decades.

Crucially, this program challenged assumptions about the country’s European-focused strategic outlook, inherent to the Law No. 244 approved just two years prior. In doing so, the navy’s argument anticipated an understanding of the need to engage in a wider area — beyond the Mediterranean into the Gulf and Indian Ocean region — that came to be espoused in the 2015 Defense White Paper.

* Data from 2023; ** Royal Fleet Auxiliary

Source: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2024 (London: Routledge, 2024), 54-157.

Figure 2: Pennant List of Main European Fleets

A decade on from its original approval, de Giorgi’s steely aspirations have become the enabling conditions to the present government’s ambitions. The seven ships of the Thaon de Revel class — the second and third of these having been crucial to the Indo-Pacific engagements over the past two years — represent, together with the LHD Trieste, the physical manifestation of a wider operational reach and illustrate the point about the impact of maritime statecraft.

The second long-term development concerns the Italian navy’s choice a decade ago to renew its commitment to national security by investing into a more active role in environmental management and governance. This, in turn, enabled its leadership to make a case to retain a primary function in marine protection, including a dedicated patrol force of six vessels, and to lead through undersea research and marine science in the emerging space of seabed and critical infrastructure security.

By the end of 2023, Italy could count on a normative framework, the “Sea Plan” (Piano del Mare), that encapsulated all aspects of governance responsibilities for different departments of government, civil society, and the private sector to ensure a sustainable, safe, and secure use of the sea. Within this context, the navy led an effort to organize a “national undersea community” (Polo Nazionale Subacqueo) including public, scientific, and private actors to ensure adequate understanding of, and action over, the protection of critical undersea and seabed infrastructure. This plan was also closely aligned with the previous government’s strategy for the defense and security of the Mediterranean region adopted in 2022.

With expectations of the seabed continuing to grow as a crucial area of future economic development and conflict, the Italian navy’s investments in this area, not least through an undersea information monitoring center at its fleet headquarters, has renewed its efforts in placing naval activities within a wider understanding of the modern roles of maritime forces in statecraft — as the navy’s recent commitment within NATO on this subject would attest.

An Operational Deployment for an Operational Capability

Still, the quality of maritime statecraft relies on naval proficiency. From an operational perspective, the Cavour’s deployment is a reminder of the fundamental notion that geography is an opportunity, not a cost. For an organization of the structure and experience of the Italian navy, the counterintuitive notion that the ocean is one single large playground means that the boundaries for the conduct of peacetime operations are dictated predominantly by the capacity for logistical support and the scope of a political mandate, not by geography.

Indeed, the navy’s concept of operations is based on the principle of expeditionary sea-based activities. Within this construct, the carrier strike group generates sustainable air sorties in national and coalition operations to project national power and status away from Italian shores through command headquarter functions, maritime situational awareness, and joint intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. Equally significant, the Cavour is equipped with hospital facilities up to NATO Role 2 enhanced level to support humanitarian and disaster relief missions, as it did in operation “White Crane” in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

MA: Mare Aperto; DYMR: Dynamic Mariner; POL: POLARIS

Source: Italian Navy

Figure 3: Mare Aperto exercise series, 2023-2024

With the introduction of fifth-generation aircraft capability with the F-35B, the Italian navy has upgraded its carrier strike component and this year’s deployment thus became a unique opportunity to work toward an Initial Operating Capability status that would meet national and international commitments. Starting in May, the Cavour took active part in the largest naval exercise in the Mediterranean Sea since the end of the Cold War — witnessing the convergence of the Italian Mare Aperto exercise with the French POLARIS exercise, involving some 50 naval assets and 10,000 personnel (Figure 3). The Cavour operated both as at-sea direction of exercise and as the main strike group platform together with the French Charles de Gaulle carrier group. The four-week-long activities tested the Cavour’s carrier air wing, command, and expeditionary functions, especially as it faced the experienced French carrier group.

Notably, the deployment to the Indo-Pacific took stock of prior Mare Aperto exercises, including the October 2023 edition that was conducted together with the NATO exercise Dynamic Mariner — a major test in interoperability bringing together 14 allied nations and 6,000 personnel (Figure 3). Equally important had been the Neptune Strike exercise in 2022, which added the important element of transfer of command authority to STRIKEFORNATO. On its way to the Indo-Pacific, the carrier strike group reaped the fruits of prior activities and put them to test against ongoing operations, supporting the Noble Shield, ASPIDES, and Atalanta operations and enjoying phases of interoperability and interchangeability with Spanish and French escorts.

Against this background, interactions with Australia and Japan added two significant aspects to the carrier strike group’s operational journey. First, they are facilitating a more granular understanding of the region’s environment and second, they are directly contributing to achieve the Initial Operating Capability status that will be essential in a continuous development of the European Carrier Group Interoperability Initiative. For the navy, Pitch Black represented one such critical step, and the Cavour brought to Australia for the first time ever a sea-based combat aircraft component to the exercise. In Japan, interactions with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force will represent the culminating point of a deeply operationally focused engagement with Asia that pays dividends directly to a crucial capability in Europe.

Conclusions: Italy as a Major European Actor Working with Asia

The Cavour carrier strike group’s arrival in Tokyo should not be seen as yet another European “showing the flag” journey in distant waters. It comes hot on the heels of a substantive training and engagement schedule in which engagement with Asian partners advances Italy’s pursuit of a fifth-generation carrier strike capability and signals the country’s concerns over the fragility of the international maritime order. It is a flag-bearer for an economic connectivity strategy and a security strategy for the Mediterranean in which the geographical boundaries of this theatre extend eastwards beyond the western Indian Ocean. These are important political steps indicating a commitment to maintaining a technological edge in defense and to working with others to do so — regardless of geographical boundaries, because their uses apply across different interlinked theatres.

This is why Italy’s activism east of Suez should matter to allies and partners from Washington to London, from Canberra to Tokyo. Meloni’s Italy shares with each of them a worldview that places prosperity and governance at the heart of the country’s foreign policy seeking to link Europe, Africa, and Asia. Since 2022, Italy espoused also a national strategic concept that is aligned with the principles of the various free and open Indo-Pacific initiatives and brings strong equities in Africa, the Gulf, and the Indian Ocean with crucial maritime statecraft initiatives, notably around the future of seabed governance and security. This concept places international cooperation, notably through the Global Combat Air Programme — but potentially also through the F-35B — at the center of industrial collaborations, foreign sales opportunities, and operational advantage. As evidence of security links among Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran increase, Italy’s increased understanding of, and familiarity with, the Indo-Pacific and its key actors through this wider canvass of initiatives stands as a force multiplier in the ability to meet challenges from authoritarian regimes.

Italy’s case, therefore, strongly suggests that Europe should not stay out of Asia. Rather, it should strive to anchor national interests to ways to work with Asia to ensure that the two regions remain stable. Looking ahead, though, Italy’s main challenge is one of long-term sustainability of numerous military commitments. The Cavour’s deployment is showing a modern, proficiently run, and technologically advanced fleet that is part of a wider European construct. This year’s in-depth interactions with Australia and Japan, and the confirmed U.K. carrier strike group deployment next year, offer circumstances for ways to extend Italy’s Indo-Pacific endeavors in the near term.

Beyond that, much will depend on other factors, not least developments within NATO in relation to the war in Ukraine. What is certain is that the strategic and economic factors that have propelled recent initiatives — not least the carrier strike group deployment — are unlikely to vanish anytime soon, and these serve as the main guarantee for Italy’s enlarged Mediterranean horizon to remain as such and for its allies and partners to make the most of it.

Become a Member

Alessio Patalano is professor of war and strategy in East Asia and codirector of the Centre for Grand Strategy at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. In May 2024, he participated in the Mare Aperto/POLARIS exercise on the aircraft carrier Cavour.

Image: Government of Japan via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Alessio Patalano · August 29, 2024

11. Rewind and Reconnoiter: A Europeanized NATO? The Alliance Contemplates the Trump Era and Beyond with Sten Rynning

Excerpts:

And finally, with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would change about your argument or piece?

I have been impressed by the leadership offered by Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland. Ukraine is obviously proving enormously courageous and resilient in the face of Russia’s onslaught. Poland and the Baltic states invest greatly, politically and militarily, in NATO’s adaptation. And had it not been for Finland, the Scandinavian enlargement would not have happened. My piece did not foresee this impressive burst of willpower and leadership.

The piece invokes the specter of Locarno, and I continue to believe this is to the point. NATO with either less or no United States would confront this specter of flank diplomacy and balance of power adjustment. The historical reading is that Western European limitations would cause Central and Eastern Europe to suffer. However, we should pay closer attention to the determination of Central and Eastern European countries to take fate into their hands.

Locarno is thus an apt reminder that balance of power politics is returning to Europe. The question is whether NATO can remain in the game to contain it, or whether, if NATO fails, all hell might break loose.

Rewind and Reconnoiter: A Europeanized NATO? The Alliance Contemplates the Trump Era and Beyond with Sten Rynning

https://warontherocks.com/2024/08/rewind-and-reconnoiter-a-europeanized-nato-the-alliance-contemplates-the-trump-era-and-beyond-with-sten-rynning/

Sten Rynning

August 29, 2024

In 2018, Sten Rynning wrote “A Europeanized NATO? The Alliance Contemplates the Trump Era and Beyond” where he argued that NATO goals and U.S. geopolitical policies and priorities diverged under the Trump administration. In the wake of NATO’s recent 75th anniversary summit, we invited Sten back to reflect on the relationship between the United States and NATO.

Haiti’s Window of Opportunity

What It Will Take to Stop Gang Violence and Promote Stability

By Renata Segura and Diego Da Rin

August 29, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Renata Segura and Diego Da Rin · August 29, 2024

In late July, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield visited Haiti and sounded an upbeat note. “I do have a sense of hope,” she said at a press conference, citing the “many people here on the ground” who were “working every day to create a better future for the Haitian people.” She was referring, in part, to the roughly 400 Kenyan police officers who have arrived in Port-au-Prince as part of an international peacekeeping force that is eventually projected to number 2,500. The hope is that this UN Security Council–approved mission—formally referred to as the Multinational Security Support mission (MSS)—will allow Haiti to assert control over the country’s gangs, which have established de facto control over much of the capital’s neighborhoods and plunged the country into a dramatic humanitarian crisis. “[T]his mission has opened a door to progress,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

Haiti could certainly use more progress. Since even before President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, the country has been suffering from intense violence. In the past three years, around 12,000 people have been killed, and some 600,000 have been displaced across the country. Gangs have established control or influence over around 80 percent of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and have been spreading their presence to other regions.

Thomas-Greenfield is right that, even amid all the chaos, there are reasons to be hopeful. The international police reinforcements have started to deploy. There is also change within Haiti’s government. After almost three years of deep political instability under the leadership of acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry—seen by many Haitians as the prolongation of a corrupt system—Haiti now has a cross-party transitional presidential council, a new prime minister, and a full cabinet. These steps toward more inclusive political leadership, combined with the first deployments of the MSS, have created a path toward stability.

But the country still faces enormous challenges. Persistent gang violence, an understaffed and underequipped international mission, domestic political infighting, and corruption could destroy this path toward a better future. To prevent a setback and allow for some semblance of normality to return to Haiti, transitional officials must create a more permanent and stable governing arrangement. They need to quickly address corruption accusations. Haiti’s foreign allies, meanwhile, must step up their financial contributions to the MSS to give it a real chance against the gangs. The Haitian government could also consider creating ways for minors currently involved with organized crime to exit. And eventually, the country could consider negotiations that would help facilitate the gangs’ permanent demobilization.

A FRAGILE STANDOFF

February 2024 marked a turning point for Haiti. Henry, who had proved unable to mitigate growing gang violence, left the country on official business. Sensing an opening, the gangs shifted their strategy: rather than continuing to battle each other for territorial control, they started coordinating attacks against the state in what became known as the Viv Ansanm coalition. As part of this unprecedented offensive, gangs assaulted and burned dozens of police stations, the capital’s main seaports, and its airport, which closed for nearly three months. They also attacked Haiti’s two largest prisons, allowing nearly half the country’s prison population to escape.

With Port-au-Prince under siege, leaders from Caribbean countries—together with Canada, France, the United States, and others—convened an emergency meeting in Jamaica. The group aimed to establish a consensus government in Haiti that would include all major political and social groups, leaving no powerful outsiders that might sabotage the process. The result was a transitional presidential council. Its representatives were chosen by six prominent political groups and participants from Haiti’s private sector and civil society organizations. The council, in turn, selected a new prime minister after Henry resigned under international pressure. Its choice—Garry Conille—is a technocrat with a long history of public service in Haiti and with the UN. He was also the candidate favored by Washington.

Since Conille took office and the first deployments of international police officers landed in Haiti, the gangs operating in the capital have mostly retreated to their strongholds, where they have built barricades and trenches. This has allowed economic activity to gradually return to parts of Port-au-Prince that had been disrupted by the gangs’ concerted offensive. Improvised markets have taken over busy streets, and buses have established new routes (the violence having forced them out of their old ones).

Haitians fear that the world has once again made promises it will not fulfill.

But the fighting has hardly ended. In Port-au-Prince, the MSS has limited its activities to patrolling certain sectors of the capital. The gangs have thus decided to consolidate their control of the metropolitan area. Gangs operating in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince recently launched attacks in the towns of Gressier and Ganthier—previously largely free of violence—and have tried to establish their dominance over the towns of Cabaret and Arcahaie. Criminal outfits also attacked a convoy transporting Conille in July after he visited a hospital that state forces had recaptured from these groups.

Haitians are growing impatient, and they hope that the MSS can steadily deal more damage to these groups, in part by penetrating gang strongholds. But less than 20 percent of the Kenyan-led mission’s personnel is currently on the ground, giving it limited power to disrupt the organizations. Sources close to the gangs told the International Crisis Group that so long as the mission’s footprint does not increase dramatically, the gangs assume that MSS forces will be limited to protecting infrastructure, and they are thus not too worried about the mission weakening their hold over the capital.

In this environment, Haitians fear that the world has once again made promises it will not fulfill. Brian Nichols, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, has said that existing international funds can cover the costs of 600 or so officers, including those currently on the ground, plus the 200 police officers from neighboring Caribbean countries who have received training but are still waiting to be deployed. With a lack of ready money stalling new arrivals, countries will have to invest much more than the around $380 million they already have to reach the 2,500-troop target.

BEYOND SECURITY

Without better security, Haiti will struggle to see improvements in public well-being. Yet a strategy solely centered on security will not be enough. Efforts by the police and the MSS will only bear fruit only if they are supported by a functional and effective government. And although the new transitional government has provided a certain level of stability, there are signs that the country’s politics are starting to break down again.

Three months after his appointment, tensions between Conille, the members of the council, and the parties that elected them have been growing. At the core is a competition for power: although the president is constitutionally the head of state, in the current arrangement Conille effectively has executive powers, and the council alleges that he has overstepped his authority. (They are unhappy, for example, that he has represented the government in foreign official visits.) People close to the transition government have told the Crisis Group that members of the council have privately threatened the prime minister with conducting an evaluation of his performance, one that could lead to his dismissal.

Conflicts have also surfaced between the groups that were selected to form the presidential council and those they appointed to the body. Two major groups, including the Montana Accord, a broad coalition of political and civil society groups that had put forward early on a governance plan for Haiti, have distanced themselves from their representatives on the council after claiming that they have been kept out of important decision-making. These tensions could erode the political unity that the transitional government was meant to foster. The tensions could, relatedly, give rise to a political opposition that might capitalize on any chance to undermine and discredit the government.

A strategy solely centered on security will not be enough to improve public well-being.

And then there is corruption. The head of the National Credit Bank has accused three members of the presidential council of demanding hefty bribes or lose his position. These allegations evoke previous scandals, including ones that enveloped the late President Moïse and his predecessor, Michel Martelly. The charges have enraged Haitians and threatened the stability achieved in the last few months. Part of the new government’s transition plan is to establish a specialized financial prosecuting authority to investigate corruption, which has depleted public finances in the past. Support for the authority from the UN and other multilateral bodies will be important to making sure that this initiative is effective.

But fully dealing with Haiti’s governance problems will eventually require moving beyond the transitional system of government. The UN-approved mandate calls for the MSS to help the Haitian police “build security conditions conducive to holding free and fair elections.” The agreement signed by the transitional government states that elections must take place in time for a new government to take office in February 2026. Yet without a stronger presence from the mission and decisive action against the gangs, it is unlikely that the country will be prepared to vote by then. And rushed elections could do more harm than good.

The risks will be particularly high if gangs continue to control much of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, where approximately a quarter of the country’s total population lives. In this case, political parties might—as they have in the past—try to forge alliances with gangs to get more votes. Even more perturbing is the possibility that the gangs, which have grown more independent from their past elite sponsors, could put forward their own candidates. “The armed groups will play the game,” one humanitarian worker, who knows gang leaders, told us. “They are pulling back into their fiefdoms and hope to engage in negotiations with political groups in preparation for the elections.” There is no way to completely avoid gang involvement in Haiti’s next contest, but minimizing their influence will be essential to curbing the long-standing use of violence between the country’s political factions.

EXIT RAMPS

Soon after the transitional government was established, Jimmy Chérizier, the de facto spokesperson of the Viv Ansanm coalition, proposed that the government and the gangs sit down to talk. “We need dialogue today, Mr. Prime Minister. Prove to the world that you can make history as someone who . . . pacifies the country,” Chérizier (who is better known as “Barbecue”) said in an online video. Conille responded by saying that the bandits must “lay down their guns and recognize the authority of the state before any other arrangements.”

Conille’s declaration stood in stark contrast with previous bellicose statements about the need to subdue the bandits by force. As a result, many Haitians believed that the prime minister’s statement opened the door to negotiations. At this stage, the vast majority of Haitians oppose any kind of talks with the gangs, especially if it includes the prospect of some sort of amnesty. Opponents argue that negotiations would effectively forgive the gangs for the harm they caused and would not respond to the needs of the victims of criminal violence. These opponents also believe that the gangs have not given any reason to believe that they would stand by their word.

But there are strong reasons to doubt that the gangs can be dissolved by force alone. Most gangs are entrenched in densely populated areas where houses are separated by hundreds of narrow alleys, making it nearly impossible for the police to fight gang members without harming civilians. The gangs still have strong links to political and business elites who could throw them lifelines at crucial moments. Gang co-optation at all levels of the Haitian National Police will make it difficult to avoid leaks about planned operations. And neither the police nor the international security mission is currently equipped to take territory away from gang control and replace it with a permanent state presence in these areas. The last UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti failed to defeat the gangs for similar reasons; instead, it merely prompted gangs to lay low until UN forces withdrew, at which point they returned stronger than before. Haitians should therefore start exploring when and under what conditions they could contemplate talking with the criminal groups, with the goal of permanently dismantling them.

One place to start could be with children. Between 30 and 50 percent of the gangs’ rank and file (around 5,000 members and collaborators) are minors, according to UNICEF. Most of them joined out of desperation. In a country where hundreds of thousands of children have no money or incentive to go to school, and where legal livelihoods are scarce, joining criminal groups can be the only way to secure regular weekly payments. Creating off-ramps for minors could help convince Haitians that discreet negotiations are a necessary step toward achieving peace, and not a political quid pro quo that disregards the public interest. For this, the Haitian government should reactivate the currently dormant National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration.

That would be a first step; Haiti will need many more to return to normalcy. But with the creation of a transitional government and the arrival of the first mission deployments, there is finally a small window for opportunity for Haiti to curb violence and start rebuilding its state. The path is not straightforward, and progress will hinge on a virtuous interplay between the MSS’s campaign against gangs and the transitional government’s restoration of public confidence. But Haiti now has a shot at a better future.

RENATA SEGURA is Program Director for Latin America and Caribbean at the International Crisis Group.
DIEGO DA RIN is Analyst for Haiti at the International Crisis Group.

Foreign Affairs · by Renata Segura and Diego Da Rin · August 29, 2024

13. Army’s upcoming Project Convergence billed as early test for ‘C2 Next’ plans

I wonder if anyone has ever just gone to Apple or Google or Microsoft and said design a communications network that is simple, secure, intuitive and user friendly. Use concepts from social media and design a C2 system that can push and pull information in an effective way using techniques that all people are familiar with and bring with them when they enter the military. This may work in about 10 years or so when all the military dinosaurs have reached retirement and all the senior leaders then in charge will have grown up with iphones and social media.

I only ask this half sarcastically.

Army’s upcoming Project Convergence billed as early test for ‘C2 Next’ plans - Breaking Defense

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · August 29, 2024

US Army soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division work inside a command post on Aug 22 during a rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center. (Breaking Defense/ Ashley Roque)

FORT JOHNSON, La. — The US Army is gearing up its fifth Project Convergence iteration where soldiers will test out the service’s future command and control (C2) architecture to see if it’s on the right track, according to a senior leader helming the initiative.

Today the service faces a complicated time overcoming network challenges and is embarking on a multi-pronged plan aimed at eventually providing soldiers with a unified, “flattened” architecture that they can seamlessly communicate through. To get there, it is currently upgrading the current network under its C2 Fix initiative. But at the same time, it is eyeing a more ambitious plan referred to as either C2 Next or Next Generation C2 (NGC2).

Still in the early days of development, this new prototyping umbrella is slated to include: a single array; a line-of-sight and beyond line-of-sight terminal; modular RF communications software; and “edge computing capabilities.”

Col Michael Kaloostian, the Army Futures Command’s (AFC’s) networks and security director for NCC2, plans to have soldiers test out the proof of principle at the Project Convergence capstone five event early next year.

“We are in the S&T [science and technology] phase, and we’re still doing [research and development] on this project,” he told Breaking Defense during an Aug. 22 interview. Even still, AFC head Gen. James Rainey has tasked the team with testing out the new construct at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. during Project Convergence maneuver events.

“He wants to use it completely,” Kaloostian explained.

He said later that C2 Next is “completely different” and a “100 percent clean sheet approach” compared to the current network and C2 Fix. If the test goes well, senior leaders will likely hand the prototyping project over to the AFC’s Network Cross-Functional Team to continue testing it out.

That team is “already getting the requirements developers together. They’re already looking at the budget that it will require, and working [on] the acquisition approach,” Kaloostian said.

Part of that tentative plan ahead revolves around delivering a “minimal viable product” to units later in 2025 for continued testing before the service begins fielding it to soldiers, possibly in 2026.

“We’re going to learn [with] each step. … It’s always gonna be iterative, because technology is always going to improve,” Kaloostian said.

And although the Army has an idea of the key C2 Next components, it is looking for avenues to inject competition into the new network’s development. More information should be available to interested vendors in mid-September when the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T) hosts a virtual, industry day.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · August 29, 2024

14. The Peril of Ignoring the Legitimacy of Violent Non-State Actors

Conclusion:

Understanding the key role that sympathy and tolerance play in enabling violent non-state actors to be effective must be central to the strategies of both national and international actors. In an era of escalating great power competition, irregular warfare, and proxy conflicts, this strategic omission is dangerously counterproductive.

A continuous stream of failures in dealing with violent non-state actors in US partner countries reinforces the idea among autocratic elites that the only real answer is force and repression. This view draws them closer to actors like Russia and China while fueling cynicism among marginalized populations in these countries who increasingly believe that the democratic world has never been serious about political inclusion.

The Peril of Ignoring the Legitimacy of Violent Non-State Actors - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Santiago Stocker, Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham · August 29, 2024

Looking around the world today, there is a glaring gap in both national and international approaches to non-state actor violence. There is little engagement with the idea that susceptible populations will come to support, sympathize with, or tolerate insurgency in the absence of credible authorities. Too often, the United States and like-minded democratic countries fixate on the tactics of violent actors and the uncompromising positions of extreme personalities while ignoring what gives violent actors legitimacy among local populations. This approach often makes foreign assistance ineffectual and sometimes counterproductive, creating suitable conditions for authoritarian systems supported by US competitors, such as Russia and China.

The Peril of Ignoring the Legitimacy of Violent Non-State Actors – Insider: Short of War

To effectively compete for influence in areas experiencing non-state actor violence and to mitigate its destabilizing effects, the United States must emphasize an approach that addresses the grievances of the populations that enable such actors to be effective.

Appeal of the Alternative Authority

Violent non-state actors cannot be effective solely based on the direct support of hardliners. Rather, these groups must build legitimacy among the populations they control. While some groups rely primarily on coercion of local populations to establish such legitimacy, this is by no means the norm. Coercion-centric approaches are most commonly used by state-sponsored militias. In other instances, violent actors work intentionally to build active support, sympathy, or tolerance among the populations they control.

Whether a civilian population sympathizes with or tolerates a violent actor depends on how civilians view competing authority options. Civilians make this judgment based on their own interests and their opinions may change over time and as alternative authorities emerge.

For example, ISIS in Iraq and Syria enjoyed substantial support from Sunni Arabs during their expansion in 2014-2015. In this period, many Sunni Arabs viewed ISIS as a better alternative to the brutal Alawite and Shia-dominated regimes in Damascus and Baghdad, respectively. ISIS’s expansion was initially supported (or at least tolerated) by hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs. While many disagreed with ISIS’s extreme interpretation of Islam, they saw the opportunity to restore the personal dignity, social standing, security, and economic opportunity that had been stripped away under the Syrian and Iraqi regimes.

However, in just two short years ISIS lost 70 percent of its territory in Iraq, 50 percent of its territory in Syria, and control of over 5 million people in the region. Much credit should be given to the US-led global coalition, yet it is also clear that local support for ISIS also fell severely during this time as the sheer depravity of their tactics became clear.

While it is difficult to tie ISIS’s territorial losses directly to declining Sunni support, available evidence suggests that support among Sunnis fell dramatically during ISIS occupation and correlates to ISIS territorial losses. Not only did sentiments among Iraqi Sunnis change quickly under occupation, but reports of Sunni tribal fighters joining the Iraqi government to fight ISIS emerged within months of ISIS’s occupation of significant Iraqi territory.

Without the tolerance, sympathy, and support of Sunni Arabs, ISIS became a group of fighters on the run from a global coalition with few places to hide. A Sunni tribal leader in Iraq summed it up when speaking to the Washington Post in 2016: “If there was no support here, they wouldn’t have survived one hour. The Sunnis were very happy in the beginning. They did not know who they were, and they welcomed them as saviors,” he said. “Now we consider them a disaster.”

Today, key issues driving the appeal of alternative authorities persist across the world. In 2023, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded 17 countries that experienced 500 or more fatalities from conflict between rebel and government forces. Eight of the 17 countries are rated as “closed autocracies” while another six are rated as “electoral autocracies” by the Varieties of Democracy dataset (V-DEM), which is a dataset measuring democratization. 14 of 17 countries are also rated four or five out of five on the Political Terror Scale (PTS), which measures the degree to which a state imposes terror on its population. State repression is one of the strongest empirical drivers of violent extremism.

Beyond direct abuse, most of these states fail to provide for basic needs of citizens in an equitable manner. In 15 of 17, exclusion of services by social group is rated as “extreme” or “unequal” by V-DEM, meaning that a significant proportion of one or more social groups are denied access to services based on their identity. In a majority of these cases, conditions are rife for an alternative governance model that violent non-state actors could provide.

A Failing Approach

While the literature on insurgency and terrorism identifies the drivers of violence and the importance of legitimacy among local populations, the importance of these factors is often ignored by domestic and international actors. The immediate desire to reestablish security in areas contested by violent non-state actors usually takes precedence over solutions that address the conditions that incentivize civilians to see violent actors as legitimate.

For example, since 2019, Salafi jihadist violence has engulfed Mali and Burkina Faso and spread into neighboring states like Togo and Benin. The most formidable and active group, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), draws support from a complex set of grievances and interests that regional states and the international community have failed to address. JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate, has made inroads among Fulani communities and other rural populations since 2017. Fulanis, about a third of whom are nomadic, often experience political marginalization.

At the local level, the disappearance of grazing routes has fueled grievances among pastoralist Fulani communities and has led to intercommunal violence. Repression and even large-scale killings by security forces and local ethnic militias have further alienated Fulanis. According to the PTS, Mali is evaluated at the highest level, which indicates that “Terror has expanded to the whole population,” while Burkina Faso is evaluated at the second highest level, which indicates “Murders, disappearances, and torture are a common part of life.”

At the national level, opportunities to legitimately adjudicate grievances have disappeared, with Mali and Burkina Faso now rated as “closed autocracies” according to V-DEM. Surrounding countries like Togo and Benin, where JNIM is now active, have also experienced pronounced democratic deterioration.

At the international level, countries such as Russia have aggravated the conflict by providing mercenary forces that engage in extrajudicial killings, while China and Turkey have supplied millions of dollars worth of weaponry. The United States has refrained from selling weapons to these regimes following recent coups, but it is insufficiently focused on the needs of the region’s communities most vulnerable to violent extremist recruitment. For example, the newly released 10 Year Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability in Coastal West Africa makes no references to the unique vulnerability of Fulani communities in the Sahel and neighboring coastal West African states.

In southeast Nigeria, the insurgency by ethnic Igbo separatists—the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) movement—has been growing. At the local level, security force abuses continue to fuel perceptions of deliberate ethnic marginalization. ACLED data shows more than 30 incidents of violence by security forces against civilians resulting in more than 70 fatalities in 2023 in the southeast. Nigeria is rated a four on the Political Terror Scale due to widespread abuses by government forces. According to Afrobarometer’s latest survey in 2022, more than 72 percent of Igbos in Nigeria say the government sometimes or always treats their ethnic group unfairly.

Continued democratic backsliding compounds perceptions that opportunities for legitimate political adjudication are shrinking. The 2023 Nigerian elections were marred by violent voter suppression against Igbos in Lagos State as well as substantial logistical delays that disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Igbos from voting in the South East region. A subsequent off-cycle election in the southeast state of Imo in November 2023 experienced such high levels of irregularities that independent Parallel Vote Tabulations were unable to confirm the results and forensic analysis of the election results pointed to outcome-changing levels of fraud.

At the international level, the IPOB movement has received little attention. Even an attack on a US convoy by likely separatists in May 2023 generated little interest in addressing the root causes of the violence. The US continues to downplay Nigeria’s democratic deterioration and provide weapons to Nigeria’s government with limited conditions. While the US has been a strong proponent of democratic growth in Nigeria on paper, it often fails to acknowledge the local and national conditions that fuel groups like IPOB.

Implications for Irregular Warfare

An approach that ignores the issues that give non-state violent actors legitimacy among local populations puts the democratic international community at a disadvantage. Russia, China, and other foreign actors find it relatively easy to push a model of repressive authoritarianism as a solution to violent non-state actors (a dynamic currently on full display in the African Sahel) while the US and its allies waffle between providing security assistance or emphasizing process legitimacy, such as long shot elections, while generally ignoring local issues.

Ultimately, such an approach tends to be frustrating for the United States and its allies, as well as ineffectual, leading to disengagement. Worse, the result may appear in hindsight to support malign foreign narratives that the West is disinterested when it comes to solving conflicts and that the real solution was always repressive authoritarianism. This is a dangerous cycle that expands the constellation of autocratic forces arrayed against the democratic world and fuels the rise of violent non-state actors, many of whom see the United States and its allies as legitimate targets for violence.

Ten years ago, the number of countries with conflicts between the government and non-state actors was 38, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The average liberal democracy score in these countries, according to V-DEM, was .25 (on a 0-1 scale, with 1 being the most democratic). By 2023, the average liberal democracy score in those same 38 countries had fallen to .17. At the same time, the influence of China increased in 77 percent of these countries, according to the Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) Index. Russia, even under the strain of the war in Ukraine and international sanctions, increased its influence in 36 percent of these countries.

While the causal directionality between conflict, authoritarianism, and foreign malign influence is murky, what is clear is that all three factors are interwoven and mutually exacerbating. In 2023, the number of conflicts between governments and non-state actors reached a record high of 57, while the average global democracy score reached a 10-year low.

So, what sort of support should the United States and other democracies give partners struggling with these challenges? First, security assistance should be conditioned on limited and legitimate use of military force against violent non-state actors that does not result in disproportionate use against civilian populations. Reasonable thresholds can be set by the State Department and Defense Department who can make assessments on a regular basis as to whether such thresholds have been objectively violated.

This could be similar to the process of Leahy Vetting which sets standards for allowable behavior of US-funded foreign security units. Unlike Leahy Vetting, which restricts aid to specific units based on credible allegations of human rights abuses, this policy would be broader in scope, and connect the net effect of a government’s security forces’ actions on civilian populations with the general provision of security assistance.

Second, the United States should support partners to ensure there are legitimate political avenues for all civilians to address their grievances, including open political spaces and free and fair elections. This is a challenging recommendation because it requires not just a high standard of electoral conduct, but also a suitably enabling environment, including freedom of the press, fair political competition, and rule of law. These efforts should be specially targeted at marginalized ethnic, religious, and regional communities.

Currently, democracy and governance assistance from the US is much smaller than humanitarian or military assistance and is often scattered across a wide range of activities, from supporting election bodies to increasing the capacity of civil society organizations. It is rare to see democracy and governance foreign assistance targeted specifically toward the political inclusion of marginalized communities who frequently form the basis of support for violent non-state actors. This is short-sighted, given how critical the inclusion of such communities can be to the long-term stability of a country.

The United States should also conduct routine assessments of a country’s progress on metrics related to political and civic activities. Backsliding in these areas should be noted and countered as quickly as possible, using available leverage.

Conclusion

Understanding the key role that sympathy and tolerance play in enabling violent non-state actors to be effective must be central to the strategies of both national and international actors. In an era of escalating great power competition, irregular warfare, and proxy conflicts, this strategic omission is dangerously counterproductive.

A continuous stream of failures in dealing with violent non-state actors in US partner countries reinforces the idea among autocratic elites that the only real answer is force and repression. This view draws them closer to actors like Russia and China while fueling cynicism among marginalized populations in these countries who increasingly believe that the democratic world has never been serious about political inclusion.

Santiago Stocker is a Program Director at the International Republican Institute (IRI) and previously served as a Director in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. The thoughts expressed in this piece are his own.

Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and is a 2024 Non-Resident Fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a joint production of Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point. The thoughts expressed in this piece are her own.

The views expressed are those of the authors 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: Iraqi Army and Hashed al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces of Iraq) fighting against the Islamic State in Saladin Governorate. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons).

If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

15. The Limits of Diplomacy With China

Excerpts:

Instead, at least in public statements, they have lashed out at Washington’s measures. According to an official Chinese-government readout, Foreign Minister Wang Yi firmly advised Sullivan that “the United States should not shirk its responsibilities to China, let alone abuse illegal unilateral sanctions.”

Sullivan put a somewhat more positive spin on the tensions. “I think there is will on both sides to put a floor under the relationship, so we don’t end up in downward spirals,” he told me. The degree of diplomatic engagement was reflected in the fact that Sullivan not only held extensive talks with Wang, but also met Xi himself, and landed a rare meeting with General Zhang Youxia, the vice chair of the powerful Central Military Commission. But the visit was not likely to produce any breakthrough. “I don’t think there’s been an underlying shift in the dynamic of the relationship,” Sullivan told me.

“I think [China’s leaders] would like stabilization while also pursuing their larger national ambition,” he said. “And we would like to pursue stabilization while also pursuing our national interests and continuing to take competitive actions, which we will.”

That means Xi will likely continue to prioritize his relationships with Russia, Iran, and other countries that he believes can aid his quest for a new world order more shaped by Chinese interests. Yet his willingness to tolerate the chaos these partners foment will be a test of his vision for that reformed order and his ability to lead it. In the end, Xi has to decide what kind of power he wants China to be: the force for stability he talks about, or the source of instability it’s becoming.

The Limits of Diplomacy With China

Despite Jake Sullivan’s visit to Beijing this week, American interests remain in severe tension with China’s vision.

By Michael Schuman

The Atlantic · by Michael Schuman · August 29, 2024

As China’s leader, Xi Jinping, intensifies his campaign to reshape the U.S.-led global order, the big question hanging over international affairs is: How will he choose to do it? Xi purports to be a man of peace, offering the world fresh ideas on diplomacy and security that could resolve global conflicts. Yet his actions—above all, his moves to deepen a partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin—suggest that he presents a new threat to global stability, and instead of bringing security, he is facilitating forces that create turmoil.

This was a key issue that U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan faced during his visit to Beijing this week. On the table was China’s support for Putin’s devastating war in Ukraine and American efforts to stop it. Part of Sullivan’s mission was to persuade China’s leaders to cooperate more with the United States.

“I’ve sought to impress upon my Chinese interlocutors that they need to recognize the American history with European security,” Sullivan told me. “There is no more profound issue for us in our foreign policy.”

Whether Sullivan made any progress remains to be seen. For now, China’s leadership may be inclined to wait for the outcome of November’s U.S. presidential election to see if it can get a better deal from someone other than President Joe Biden. Beijing may judge that its prospects of achieving that are distinctly better if the winner is Donald Trump, whose pronouncements are more sympathetic to Putin than to NATO.

Michael Schuman: Trump signals weakness to Xi Jinping

China’s challenge to U.S. global leadership won’t go away, regardless of who wins the White House. Unmoved by the rising death toll in Ukraine, Xi has strengthened China’s diplomatic, trade, and business ties with Russia. Similarly, in the Middle East, Xi has maintained close links with Iran, despite the violence caused by the Yemen-based Houthis and other Tehran-backed groups.

“We’ve seen Xi Jinping indulging in the temptation to promote chaos,” Matthew Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser and now the chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me. “He is trying to advance power and influence through riskier means, mainly proxy warfare in Europe and the Middle East. We’ve got our work cut out to make him think thrice before pushing that line of strategy harder.”

Whether Beijing fully intends to promote instability through these relationships is a matter of debate. China has so far scrupulously avoided providing direct military aid to Russia, in contrast to Washington’s supply of arms to Ukraine. Xi has many reasons to develop a close relationship with its Russian neighbor—such as securing energy resources and a market for China’s industrial exports—that have little to do with the war. Despite Xi’s lofty language about peace and justice, his foreign policy typically revolves around more pragmatic political and economic interests.

Yet Xi has also shown little willingness to rein in his partners. Hopes in Western capitals that Xi would use his influence with Putin to help end the Ukraine war were dashed long ago. Beijing reportedly leaned on Iran to intercede with its Houthis allies and end their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. That failed to happen, which suggests either that Xi’s effort was half-hearted or that Beijing has limited sway in Tehran.

In addition, China’s leaders must be aware that their continued commerce with Russia and Iran, which both face Western sanctions, buoys the two countries’ economies and consequently their ability to sponsor conflict. In Russia’s case, Beijing’s complicity in Putin’s Ukraine war is more brazen, and Western leaders have accused China of enabling Moscow’s war effort with crucial supplies.

Sullivan explained to his Chinese counterparts “how vital an interest European security and the trans-Atlantic relationship is to the United States,” he told me. “The contributions of Chinese firms to the Russian war machine don’t just impact the war in Ukraine, though that’s of enormous concern to us; they also enhance Russia’s conventional military threat to Europe.”

Washington has already tried to stop that support. Earlier this month, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on more than 400 companies and individuals it believes to be aiding Russia’s war effort, including Chinese firms. What Beijing would need to do is intervene with China’s own companies to curb the flow of vital components to Russia. This, after all, is something Chinese officials can clearly do—they have few scruples about cracking down on companies when it suits them.

Michael Schuman: China may be the Ukraine war’s big winner

Instead, at least in public statements, they have lashed out at Washington’s measures. According to an official Chinese-government readout, Foreign Minister Wang Yi firmly advised Sullivan that “the United States should not shirk its responsibilities to China, let alone abuse illegal unilateral sanctions.”

Sullivan put a somewhat more positive spin on the tensions. “I think there is will on both sides to put a floor under the relationship, so we don’t end up in downward spirals,” he told me. The degree of diplomatic engagement was reflected in the fact that Sullivan not only held extensive talks with Wang, but also met Xi himself, and landed a rare meeting with General Zhang Youxia, the vice chair of the powerful Central Military Commission. But the visit was not likely to produce any breakthrough. “I don’t think there’s been an underlying shift in the dynamic of the relationship,” Sullivan told me.

“I think [China’s leaders] would like stabilization while also pursuing their larger national ambition,” he said. “And we would like to pursue stabilization while also pursuing our national interests and continuing to take competitive actions, which we will.”

That means Xi will likely continue to prioritize his relationships with Russia, Iran, and other countries that he believes can aid his quest for a new world order more shaped by Chinese interests. Yet his willingness to tolerate the chaos these partners foment will be a test of his vision for that reformed order and his ability to lead it. In the end, Xi has to decide what kind of power he wants China to be: the force for stability he talks about, or the source of instability it’s becoming.

The Atlantic · by Michael Schuman · August 29, 2024

16. Neither Narrow nor Nice: Economic Warfare, Disinformation, and Civil Society

After reading the headline I did not think it would go to this conclusion (based on the headline).

Conclusion:

Income inequality is a national security risk that can be effectively activated by mis/disinformation campaigns targeting left-behind communities. Current economic sanctions and warfare tactics focus too much on politically acceptable approaches at the expense of efficacy. Governments must be aware that the lack of impact from current economic policies may lead adversaries to pursue more damaging approaches. This paper illustrates one such risk to spur debate on defensive strategies.

Neither Narrow nor Nice: Economic Warfare, Disinformation, and Civil Society

irregularwarfarecenter.org

August 26, 2024

James Sullivan

“Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man”

A country’s economy is core to its national security, driving significant discourse regarding economic warfare. Current strategies, however, are driven more by political expediency than tactical efficacy. These strategies are based on the hope that “narrow” approaches targeting specific industry sectors or “nice” approaches avoiding harm to large population segments will drive impact. Hope, however, is not a strategy.

Narrow and nice economic warfare strategies are rarely effective. The “small yard, high fence” approach targeting specific industry segments fails in an increasingly interconnected global supply chain with rapidly changing industry linkages. Sanctions targeting elites have not splintered them from leadership; indeed, recent examples have shown the ability to further cement elite loyalty through windfall profits.

Effective economic warfare strategies target the foundation of a nation’s power: its economy and people. This paper suggests that such a strategy can leverage or create broad economic dislocations within a society and then allow those dislocations to be weaponized through disinformation campaigns that aim to manipulate the political beliefs of broader civil society. The integration of economic warfare and disinformation builds on Nye and Wilson’s idea that any separation of hard and soft power creates “an imperfect, dichotomous debate” given that state power increasingly combines hard power and a “nation’s capacity to create and manipulate knowledge and information.”

This integration is self-reinforcing: economic hardship creates receptive audiences for disinformation campaigns, and such campaigns make it harder to: a) maintain social cohesion to address underlying economic issues; b) inoculate against negative effects of disinformation campaigns; and c) legitimize government decisions.

A better understanding of the limited efficacy of “narrow” and “nice” approaches should inform both offensive and defensive policies. Further study of the enabling nature of economic dislocation for disinformation should enable governments to build more robust defences.

Politics over Purpose

Record levels of all voters believe that American troop presence overseas should be decreased. Recent polls show 71 percent of Americans against sending troops to Ukraine but supportive of economic sanctions as a substitute. The development of smart sanctions targeting narrow industry segments or elites has created a tactical toolkit addressing political issues surrounding the use of force against this increasingly isolationist backdrop. However, the strategic impact of this toolkit is decidedly mixed, with some arguing its efficacy is structurally limited. Sanctions are leveraged to create the appearance of action (fulfilling a political objective) at the expense of real progress on underlying strategic issues.

Narrow: The Limitations of Industry Segment Targeting

An analysis of recent U.S. actions in the semiconductor space illustrates the issues facing narrow industry-centric approaches. This is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis, but to provide an illustration of the broader issues at play with narrowly defined sanctions.

Semiconductor policies have been core to cross-Taiwan strait relations, with the United States looking to weaponize its control of global semiconductor technology. These efforts have focused on: 1) Defensive economic tactics, including subsidies to encourage domestic industry development; and 2) Offensive economic tactics, including export bans to hinder adversary industry development. Both approaches face challenges.

1) Defensive Economic Tactics: A new era of industrial policy

The U.S. government is a major procurer across industries and funds one-third of all domestic industrial research and development. The historic lack of political support for comprehensive U.S. industrial policy means that the impact of this procurement and investment was largely random given the lack of planning and coordination. This is suboptimal compared to more comprehensive approaches such as China’s Made in China 2025 program. The recent U.S. pivot to overhaul significant industrial policies arises from the view that more organization will better address efforts by foreign governments to undermine the American lead in key dual-use technologies.

Critiques of this re-centralized industrial policy argue that overall return on government-directed investment is sub-par and that industry subsidies and on-shoring initiatives can damage partner nation relationships and trigger declines in global trade. These are important points which deserve earnest debate.

The larger issue is that most important industry segments today rest on complex global networks of relationships, within which lies their real power. There is no longer a national auto industry, but a global ecosystem comprising lithium and nickel mines, chemical processors, battery technology, power management software, and companies that assemble something that looks like a car (at least from the outside). Similarly, the integrated circuit industry is now a complex global web of companies involved in design, lithography, testing, and assembly of semiconductors so small they beggar the imagination.

This global networked ecosystem prevents the success of any narrow nationalized approach, as all aspects of the ecosystem cannot be addressed. Close partnerships with companies across countries are necessary for commercial viability. Subsidies designed to advance one aspect of the ecosystem cannot exist in isolation. TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor company, announced construction of a new plant in Arizona after US CHIPS Act subsidies. However, these subsidies don’t address other barriers such as access to qualified engineers and crucial import inputs. These issues led TSMC to slow down U.S. activities while intensifying investment elsewhere.

2) Offensive Economic Tactics: Export bans on…knowledge?

U.S. strategy to curtail adversarial development of dual-use technologies includes export controls on high-end lithography machines and semiconductor chips. Such controls may have been more effective during the Cold War’s bifurcated global economy. Today’s web of global trade ties means these controls are more likely to negatively impact ally relationships and U.S. market share than their intended targets. This trade interconnectedness also allows countries to find workarounds, as shown when Huawei and SMIC surprised the world with a new mobile phone using Chinese-made advanced semiconductors.

Nice: The Limitations of Targeting Elites

Research on sanctions targeting regime-linked elites shows that their holdings linked to global capital flows are most exposed and easily targeted. This has driven Vladimir Putin and Russian elites to reduce their financial market linkages. Additionally, regimes can use sanctions to redirect significant windfall profits to targeted elites through exit taxes, forced sales, and asset seizures. These tactics have been used in Russia to ensure strong elite ties to Putin’s regime, overseeing “one of the biggest transfers of wealth within Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.” Elites in such a society can be seen as passengers in a vessel with only one lifeboat (their existing benefactor regime), rather than as potential coup-plotters.

Economic Warfare and Civil Society

Other academic research questions the viability of sanctions overall, focusing on their lack of impact and growing defenses deployed by targeted groups. The examples above further question the efficacy of even narrowly-targeted economic warfare tactics.

This paper suggests that narrow tactics fulfil the West’s increasingly isolationist political impulse. They are politically expedient, but generally fail to fulfil desired policy goals. An alternative approach recognizes the enabling impact of economic dislocation for disinformation campaigns, potentially contributing to significant civil society degradation. This option deserves further study to develop proper defences.

Economic impacts Driven Through Behavioral Theories

The proposed approach identifies or creates a macroeconomic change within a target country that creates disadvantaged groups, recognizing that income and opportunity inequality create significant political pressure. Efforts are made to exacerbate the problem and mitigate solutions, stressing these groups. These stresses will: 1) challenge group identities in line with Ontological Security Theory per Mitzen and Kinvall; 2) change in-group and out-group dynamics according to Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory and Brewer’s Optimal Distinctiveness Theory; and 3) shape group reactions to external stimuli based on shifting identities and perceived membership. These changing group dynamics can be influenced through disinformation tactics addressing identity security, potentially unravelling societal bonds by polarizing domestic narrative debates. An ensuing civil society breakdown can weaken the target country on the world stage.

Case Study: The United States

The rapid reduction in U.S. manufacturing jobs during 2000-2020 illustrates the potential impact of a broader, longer-duration economic warfare strategy. The contention here is not that any nation’s actions directly created this macroeconomic dynamic, but how an adversary can opportunistically leverage existing economic dislocation.

Step One: Identification of disadvantaged groups created via economic dislocation

Manufacturing jobs represented 38 percent of the U.S. workforce post-WWII, 32 percent in 1955, but only 8 percent by 2019. The decline’s drivers are debated, but the impacts on communities and individuals are clear.

Workers with more than ten years of manufacturing experience who lost jobs generally moved to service sector positions, with 80 percent experiencing wage declines of 45 percent or more. These wage losses were significantly larger in the U.S. than other developed economies. For every 100 durable manufacturing jobs lost, 744 indirect jobs were impacted, explaining the community-wide impact in certain geographies.

China’s entry into the global economy drove a portion of this impact from 1992 through 2010. While trade with China and emerging economies wasn’t net negative for U.S. job creation overall, with export-oriented and high value-added service jobs partially offsetting manufacturing job losses, this doesn’t help the workers and communities “left behind” and at risk of targeted attempts to break down U.S. civil society.

Step Two: Leverage disinformation to enhance identity insecurity and social divisions

Several state actors have the will and capability to pursue disinformation efforts. We focus on three of the most capable, without suggesting that this sample is exhaustive:

Russia has an over one hundred year history of active measures or information warfare, not targeting a positive analytic truth supported by facts and data, but one relative to specific communities, shared values, and histories. This truth is “preached from a pulpit, not tested in a lab” and is by definition inherently political in nature. Recently, Russia has embarked on sophisticated social media disinformation campaigns to exacerbate political tensions and exploit the link between rising inequality and declining civil participation. This strategy targeted existing tensions on socially divisive issues into the 2016 election cycle and beyond. While the efficacy of these campaigns is debated, they’re expected to continue into the 2024 election cycle.

China has a rich history in information warfare tactics dating to the Qing Dynasty. China’s tactics have been less focused on fostering civil-societal breakdown and more on pushing pro-China views or “flooding the field” to obscure critiques. However, there are signs of a shift towards inciting divisions, including commentary around QAnon conspiracies and the anniversary of George Floyd’s death.

The United States has focused on information superiority since the American Revolution, advancing significantly during the Cold War with the Active Measures Working Group designed to give the United States an upper hand in an “arms race of fictions.”. Recent literature discusses the evolution of U.S. defensive disinformation strategies and argues for more offensive tactics. Further development of offensive and defensive capabilities would be required if the strategies described here are pursued.

Lighting the fuse: why disinformation matters

The growth of these disinformation campaigns, targeting potential fault lines in civil society, is critical as they light the dormant fuse of economic distress. Defensive strategies must be developed to mitigate this impact.

Traditional “discontent” theories by Garr and Midlarsky argue that economic dislocation and income inequality are root causes of political violence. These include economic discontent theory and political opportunity theory. More recent work, like Schock’s Conjunctural Model, suggests it’s the interplay between these forces that matters, arguing that inequality mixed with an unresponsive political system ignites the flame. Interventions creating or expanding the perception of unresponsiveness can accelerate civil breakdown. Income inequality is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for civil societal ruptures. Sophisticated disinformation campaigns leveraging social media and AI render these inequalities visible, driving outrage, ruptures, and political violence.

India: Potential Risks and Vulnerabilities

While China has seen compressing income inequality since 2010 and introduced Common Prosperity policies to mitigate economic dislocations, India has emerged from the COVID-19 slowdown with a “K-shaped” recovery, where gains in middle and upper-income segments aren’t matched by gains in lower-income rural areas.

Step One: Identification of potential disadvantaged groups

Macroeconomic statistics point to a growing disadvantaged group in India, largely in the rural agricultural population. Car sales (wealthier segment) grew 32 percent relative to 2019, while motorcycle sales (lower-end segment) shrank 7 percent. The share of affordable new housing construction fell from 44 percent to 18 percent, while super-luxury construction grew from 23 percent to 54 percent. White-collar wages grew 16 percent since 2022, while agricultural wages remained stagnant. These trends likely exacerbate fissures between formal economy players and informal economy workers. India’s February 2024 federal budget opted for fiscal consolidation over investments in rural economies or manufacturing stimulus, limiting short-term progress on inequality.

Significant government intervention is likely necessary to address these structural inequalities, focusing on skills training for transition to more productive manufacturing jobs and investment in infrastructure to entice foreign direct investment.

Step Two: Leverage disinformation to enhance identity insecurity and social divisions

India has a long history of political violence triggered by caste differences, religious disputes, and nationalism. It’s experiencing a significant increase in dis- and misinformation campaigns, targeting one of the world’s largest social media user bases. Evidence links these campaigns to mob violence, anti-Muslim riots, and majoritarian radicalization.

Various players are active in the Indian misinformation space, including domestic political parties and foreign countries. Indian Intelligence officials blame China for launching “massive information warfare” activities. The structural basis of the disadvantaged economic class, combined with the world’s largest social media user base and history of political violence, creates a rich target environment for adversaries looking to trigger civil society breakdowns.

Conclusion

Income inequality is a national security risk that can be effectively activated by mis/disinformation campaigns targeting left-behind communities. Current economic sanctions and warfare tactics focus too much on politically acceptable approaches at the expense of efficacy. Governments must be aware that the lack of impact from current economic policies may lead adversaries to pursue more damaging approaches. This paper illustrates one such risk to spur debate on defensive strategies.

About the Author

James Sullivan serves as an External Associate on the Economic Conflict and Competition Research Group at the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, where he is also is a PhD candidate. Previous fellowships have included roles as an Adjunct Fellow at Pacific Forum and a Visiting Scholar at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies. He also serves on advisory boards for the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University and Duke Corporate Education. James holds a Master’s degree in International Relations (Dean’s List Academic Achievement Award) from Harvard University’s Extension School, an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science (Summa Cum Laude) from Marist College. He also serves as Deputy Director of the International Affairs Directorate for the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary and holds multiple marine safety qualifications.

irregularwarfarecenter.org

17. How Irregular Warfare Can Find—and Exploit—the Vulnerabilities in China's Defense Industrial Base

Conclusion:

By employing a combination of tools—export controls, supply chain disruptions, cyber operations, diplomatic and economic pressure, and information warfare—the United States can significantly hinder China’s ability to sustain or grow its defense industrial base. Additionally, strengthening regional alliances, promoting joint defense programs, and accelerating US innovation will help maintain a strategic and technological advantage over China. Perhaps the biggest challenge for the United States right now is the ability to orchestrate all of these offensive and defense irregular warfare measures, across government and society, in unison. With the necessary legal authorities in place, these actions, carefully managed to avoid unintended consequences and escalation, would ensure that the United States and its allies remain well positioned to deter China’s dangerous and illegal behavior as well as increase stability in the global security environment.

How Irregular Warfare Can Find—and Exploit—the Vulnerabilities in China's Defense Industrial Base - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Lumpy Lumbaca · August 30, 2024

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

As the United States and China are locked in strategic competition with one another, China’s increasingly dangerous and illegal activities in the gray zone form one of the most potent legs of its approach to that competition. The United States, however, is not without means of leveraging its own effective but legal activities. It can meaningfully affect the strategic balance between the two countries by more aggressively targeting China’s vulnerabilities—efforts that can be specifically aimed at deterring destabilizing behavior. China’s defense industrial base, the policies and essential infrastructure supporting its military industrial complex, is one such area where US activities can have such an effect. Disrupting this base could significantly erode China’s military capacity, giving the United States and its allies a strategic advantage in the global balance of power. The capabilities and methods employed to achieve this effect are already in the US military’s irregular warfare toolbox, and an irregular warfare campaign, if carefully calculated to be both effective and non-escalatory, could have outsized impact on the strategic competition between the United States and China.

China’s rise as a global military power has been underpinned by a rapidly developed defense industrial base, a formidable engine for producing conventional military capacity, space technology, advanced weaponry, and the influence that derives from these advancements. This transformation is the result of substantial investments, technological progress, and a focused strategy on enhancing military capabilities across various sectors, including aerospace, shipbuilding, electronics, and weapons manufacturing. Of course, a full understanding of China’s industrial policy remains elusive, and intelligence capabilities and strategic attention should be deliberately aimed at closing this gap. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to conclude that the defense industrial base is not only vital for China’s military but also plays a crucial role in its overall economic power, generating jobs and driving technological innovation. Despite these advancements, China’s defense industrial base remains vulnerable to various forms of disruption, making it a strategic target for the United States.

One of the most effective tools the United States can deploy to weaken China’s defense industrial base is the imposition of stringent export controls and targeted sanctions. China’s rapid military modernization relies heavily on foreign technology, especially in areas like semiconductors, high-performance computing, and advanced materials. By restricting China’s access to these dual-use technologies—those with both civilian and military applications—the United States can create significant bottlenecks in China’s defense production process. This would require a higher degree of decoupling of US-China technology ecosystems than the process that is currently underway. The result would force China to either rely on inferior domestic alternatives or invest heavily in developing its own capabilities, both of which would likely slow down its military advancements. Sanctions targeting Chinese defense companies and individuals involved in the defense industrial base could further isolate China’s defense sector from the global financial system, compounding the difficulties in sustaining its military production.

In addition to technological controls, the United States can also exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in China’s complex global supply chains. China’s defense industrial base depends on a steady flow of raw materials and components, many of which are sourced from abroad. The United States, in collaboration with its allies, could disrupt these supply chains by restricting the export of critical materials such as rare earth elements, high-end microchips, and precision machinery. Such disruptions could delay production, increase costs, and create significant inefficiencies within China’s defense manufacturing sector. Furthermore, encouraging global companies to diversify their supply chains away from China would not only reduce China’s leverage over global markets but also diminish the economic resources available to fund its defense sector.

The cyber domain presents another opportunity for undermining China’s defense industrial base. Cyber capabilities can be used against vulnerabilities in the digital infrastructure that supports China’s defense industry, including networks that manage research, production, and logistics. By disrupting these systems—which could range from strategically useful in competition to imperative in crisis or conflict—the United States could cause significant delays and errors in the production of military equipment. Moreover, protecting sensitive intellectual property from Chinese cyber espionage would deny China access to advanced technologies that could enhance its military capabilities. As US intelligence and cyber leaders have argued, offensive cyber operations are a critical component to the United States’ ability to compete with China in cyberspace. Such operations—as well as cyber and espionage—could, for instance, be used to sabotage China’s research and development efforts, further hindering its ability to innovate and deploy new technologies.

Another strategic measure involves targeting the human capital that drives China’s defense innovation. Despite its large population, China faces challenges in attracting and retaining top talent within its defense industry. The United States could exploit this by offering incentives for Chinese scientists, engineers, and other professionals to emigrate, effectively creating a brain drain that weakens China’s defense sector. Encouraging defections or supporting counterintelligence operations could further erode the talent pool available to China’s defense intelligence base, complicating its efforts to maintain a competitive edge in military technology. There are risks in this component of the irregular warfare strategy, of course—not least the prospect of inviting individuals who may be engaged in espionage for China into the United States. Careful implementation of all activities in an irregular warfare campaign is critical, but especially so in this line of effort.

Information warfare is an additional tool that the United States could deploy to undermine China’s defense industrial base. By spreading information that highlights inefficiencies and corruption within the Chinese defense industry, the United States could sow mistrust and reduce morale among Chinese defense workers. Exposing these vulnerabilities could also pressure Chinese leaders to implement reforms that might slow down production and innovation, thereby hampering the overall effectiveness of China’s defense industrial base.

As for the United States itself, strengthening regional military alliances and partnerships and increasing arms sales to countries in the Indo-Pacific region could further strain China’s defense resources. By enhancing military cooperation with nations like Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India, the United States has already begun to create a regional counterbalance that complicates China’s security calculations. More aggressive, bilateral and multilateral defense development programs with allies could accelerate technological advancements, making it harder for China to keep pace. These initiatives would enable the United States and its allies to develop more advanced or cost-effective weapons systems, slowing the erosion of the technological gap that the United States has long enjoyed over China, and potentially even widening it—not only for the United States but for its regional allies and partners, as well.

Finally, the United States must continue to invest in its own defense capabilities to maintain a technological edge over China. China has routinely demonstrated its ability to target the US defense industrial base through direct and indirect instances of espionage, intellectual property theft, elite capture, undermining academic institutions, targeting critical infrastructure on American soil, and other nefarious methods of destabilization. In June 2024, the head of US Cyber Command, Air Force General Timothy D. Haugh, said China is “engaging thousands of intelligence, military, and commercial personnel” to steal US intellectual property and disrupt defense firms’ business processes. Increased American investment in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, hypersonic platforms, and quantum computing will ensure that the United States remains protected while also positioned at the forefront of military innovation. As the United States advances in these areas, China would be forced to allocate more resources to catch up, potentially straining its defense industrial base and diverting funds from other critical areas.

By employing a combination of tools—export controls, supply chain disruptions, cyber operations, diplomatic and economic pressure, and information warfare—the United States can significantly hinder China’s ability to sustain or grow its defense industrial base. Additionally, strengthening regional alliances, promoting joint defense programs, and accelerating US innovation will help maintain a strategic and technological advantage over China. Perhaps the biggest challenge for the United States right now is the ability to orchestrate all of these offensive and defense irregular warfare measures, across government and society, in unison. With the necessary legal authorities in place, these actions, carefully managed to avoid unintended consequences and escalation, would ensure that the United States and its allies remain well positioned to deter China’s dangerous and illegal behavior as well as increase stability in the global security environment.

Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD, is a retired US Army Green Beret and current Department of Defense professor of irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and special operations at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. He can be found on X/Twitter @LumpyAsia.

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.

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Lumpy Lumbaca · August 30, 2024

18. Distressing Global Report on Civil Freedoms

This is a troubling development but one that should be studied by all practivities of unconventional, irregular, and political warfare (obviously as well as diplomats and the IC and anyone concerned with the rules based international order).

Excerpts:

Nonetheless, Civicus has lumped Bangladesh together with Afghanistan, China, Hong Kong, Laos, Myanmar, North Korea, and Vietnam. Seven others – Brunei, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand – remain in that category, with the latest addition Sri Lanka. Five are in the obstructed category: Bhutan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives and Nepal. “In Thailand scores of democracy activists and critics of the regime have been prosecuted for royal defamation, including human rights lawyer Anon Nampa, who was sentenced to four years in jail, while others have been denied bail,” the report notes. “In Indonesia, authorities have used the Law on Electronic Information and Transactions to criminalize human rights defenders (HRDs), including Haris Azhar and Fatia Maulidiyanti for a video discussing military involvement in the mining industry in Papua. Treason charges have been used to prosecute peaceful pro-independence activists in the Papuan region.”

Civic space in Japan, Mongolia, and South Korea, where Trade unionists have faced vilification, harassment, and attacks, is rated narrowed with Timor-Leste improving its rating to join this category, while Taiwan, ironically a renegade province of deeply repressed China, remains the only country rated open by the organization. Hong Kong, another China territory, is not so lucky. Publisher and democracy icon Jimmy Lai has been jailed and yesterday he was joined by two editors of the now-defunct Stand News – Chung Pui-Kuen, 54, the former editor-in-chief, and Patrick Lam, 36, the former acting editor-in-chief – and the paper’s parent company, Best Pencil (Hong Kong) Limited, of “conspiring to publish seditious materials.” Chung and Lam face up to two years in prison.

Distressing Global Report on Civil Freedoms

More governments turning away from civic space

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/distressing-global-report-civil-freedoms?utm_campaign=email-post&r=7i07&utm

Our Correspondent

Aug 30, 2024

∙ Paid

Civil freedoms are under increasing attack in many countries across the world, with Asian ones no exception according to a newly-released report by the South Africa-based global alliance of civil society organizations and activists CIVICUS, released today. The annual report, People Power Under Attack, rates the state of civic space conditions based on data collected throughout the year from country-focused civil society organizations, regionally-based research teams, international human rights indices, and the Civicus Monitor's in-house experts. The report can be found here.

“Almost a third of the world’s population now lives in countries with closed civic space,” the report notes. “This is the highest percentage since 2018, when Civicus began systematically tracking civic space conditions around the world. This startling decline – from 26 percent living in closed countries in 2018 to 30.6 percent today – points to a major civic space crisis that requires immediate, global efforts to reverse. This year we also recorded the lowest percentage of humanity living in open countries, where civic space is both free and protected. Today, just two percent of the world’s population enjoys the freedom to associate, demonstrate and express dissent without significant constraints, down from almost four percent just five years ago.”

Bangladesh, which went through a burst of violence that took the lives of hundreds before mobs ousted the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and forced her to flee to India, is newly listed among eight Asian countries listed as “closed,” although that listing may be unfair. The country is currently operating under a caretaker government headed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhamad Yunus, who formulated the concept of microlending and is a deeply admired civil libertarian who was persecuted by Sheikh Hasina. It is far too early to know which way the country will go at this point.

Nonetheless, Civicus has lumped Bangladesh together with Afghanistan, China, Hong Kong, Laos, Myanmar, North Korea, and Vietnam. Seven others – Brunei, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand – remain in that category, with the latest addition Sri Lanka. Five are in the obstructed category: Bhutan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives and Nepal. “In Thailand scores of democracy activists and critics of the regime have been prosecuted for royal defamation, including human rights lawyer Anon Nampa, who was sentenced to four years in jail, while others have been denied bail,” the report notes. “In Indonesia, authorities have used the Law on Electronic Information and Transactions to criminalize human rights defenders (HRDs), including Haris Azhar and Fatia Maulidiyanti for a video discussing military involvement in the mining industry in Papua. Treason charges have been used to prosecute peaceful pro-independence activists in the Papuan region.”

Civic space in Japan, Mongolia, and South Korea, where Trade unionists have faced vilification, harassment, and attacks, is rated narrowed with Timor-Leste improving its rating to join this category, while Taiwan, ironically a renegade province of deeply repressed China, remains the only country rated open by the organization. Hong Kong, another China territory, is not so lucky. Publisher and democracy icon Jimmy Lai has been jailed and yesterday he was joined by two editors of the now-defunct Stand News – Chung Pui-Kuen, 54, the former editor-in-chief, and Patrick Lam, 36, the former acting editor-in-chief – and the paper’s parent company, Best Pencil (Hong Kong) Limited, of “conspiring to publish seditious materials.” Chung and Lam face up to two years in prison.

Since 2020, according to Human Rights Watch, the Chinese and Hong Kong governments “have dismantled Hong Kong’s once-thriving independent media, which for decades had often been highly critical of the Chinese Communist Party. The Hong Kong government turned Radio Television Hong Kong, a public broadcaster that previously had editorial independence, into a government propaganda outlet. Hong Kong police raided and shuttered Apple Daily, arresting its owner, top executives, and staff, and froze the company’s assets. At least seven other news outlets shut down in fear of the crackdown. The Hong Kong government has repeatedly harassed the Hong Kong Journalist Association, including prosecuting its former head for “obstruction” while reporting and making an apparently politically motivated claim for HK$400,000 (US$51,000) in back taxes. Major international news organizations including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have moved their Asian operations elsewhere. In July 2023, Hong Kong authorities announced that eight exiled democracy activists would be pursued for life for alleged national security offenses and issued bounties for their arrest. Police officers from the national security department also harassed and interrogated their family members in Hong Kong.

Although there was speculation that Singapore might lighten up with the departure from the office of Lee Hsien Loong and ostensibly the Lee dynasty, that is not the case. On May 15, “Lawrence Wong was sworn in as Singapore’s first new prime minister in 20 years and only its fourth leader since independence. While some were hoping that the new prime minister would be willing to undertake reforms and protect civic freedoms, since Wong came to power, the state policy of silencing dissent and restricting civic space has persisted. In recent months, peaceful protesters have been investigated and charged for their activism in Palestine or around the Maintenance of Racial Harmony Bill. The POFMA law has continued to be used to target politicians and activists, creating a chilling effect on freedom of expression. In another attack on press freedom, the independent news portal Gutzy Asia has been designated as a Declared Online Location. The draconian Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA) continues to be used while a proposed Racial Harmony Bill has raised freedom of expression concerns.” Asia Sentinel is permanently barred from online publication to Singapore readers. Human rights lawyer M Ravi has also faced legal persecution for his work

In Sri Lanka over the past year, “authorities have harassed HRDs, protest leaders and social media activists by hauling them up for interrogation or prosecution while others have faced surveillance, intimidation and threats. Journalists have been targeted with judicial harassment and restrictions for undertaking their work and assaulted during protests. There were reports of excessive force, including the use of teargas, by the police in response to several protests, particularly by students, as well as intimidation of people from the Tamil minority seeking justice for past crimes in the Northern and Eastern provinces and restrictions on their protests. The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Act No. 56 of 2007 is used to stifle expression while the Prevention of Terrorism Act is used to target and harass activists, journalists, protest leaders, and minorities. A revised version of the anti-terror law still put rights at risk while an Online Safety Bill could be used to further restrict online expression.”

There has been some progress in Asia and the Pacific, as the upgrading of Timor-Leste from obstructed to narrowed shows. Fundamental freedoms have generally been respected by the Timorese authorities and the government has created an enabling environment for HRDs. Journalists are mostly free to report the news although a few have faced police harassment. The country is ranked in 10th place in the World Press Freedom Index published in May 2023 by global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Freedom of peaceful assembly is respected in practice, although the law places some unjustified restrictions on protests.

In Afghanistan, the report continues, the homes of women HRDs, particularly those involved in protests, have been frequently raided by the Taliban. Often, women HRDs have been interrogated to pressure them to give up information or sign documents vowing they will not talk to the media or take part in any further protest activities before being released. In India, activists have faced intimidation from the National Investigating Agency and are often accused of being security threats while others have faced abductions and attacks. Media outlets such as the BBC and NewsClick have faced raids for their critical reporting while activists and journalists in Indian-administered Kashmir have increasingly been targeted.

In Malaysia, protesters are often hauled up for questioning and an HRD found an improvised explosive device under her car. In Cambodia, CSOs have faced ongoing threats of being shut down, and there were physical attacks on the political opposition and critics. In the Philippines, red-tagging – labeling people as communists – has continued against HRDs, particularly Indigenous rights activists, along with designating them as terrorists, putting them at great risk of facing attacks. There have also been reports of state surveillance of progressive groups including Anakbayan and Gabriela and cases of abductions of development workers, labor rights activists, and Indigenous and environmental activists.

In the Pacific, journalists have faced intimidation for carrying out their work. In Papua New Guinea, at least two journalists from The National and Post Courier were harassed and threatened by supporters of a former parliamentarian while covering a court case he was involved in. In May 2023, a journalist from the Samoa Observer was summoned by a minister who was unhappy with her coverage of him and threatened with detention when she refused to reveal her sources.

19. The Fall and Fall of Mahmoud Abbas

Excerpts:

Abbas’s central dilemma has always been how to balance the need for a peace deal with Israel with the imperative for national unity. What Abbas, and Israeli and U.S. leaders, have failed to understand, however, is that without national reconciliation there is virtually no hope for a durable peace with Israel. By sacrificing Palestinian political cohesiveness and his own domestic legitimacy on the altar of a U.S.-led peace process, Abbas has done immeasurable damage to the Palestinian struggle. Israel reinforced the Palestinian rift through its divide-and-rule strategy, which has proved to be equally shortsighted and detrimental, as the October 7 attack has demonstrated.

But Abbas will not be around forever, and it is crucial that the Palestinians look forward to a successor who can finally overcome the tensions that have paralyzed Abbas’s leadership from the outset. Abbas’s successor will have to resolve this dilemma by unifying the fractured Palestinian polity, including incorporating Hamas into formal political structures, such as the PLO. This will be very hard for Israeli and U.S. officials to swallow, but the group is not going to go away, and allowing it to continue acting as a free agent would be even worse. With or without the support of the United States, the next Palestinian leader must articulate a clear vision for national unity and liberation—one that is no longer beholden to a dysfunctional and obsolete peace process.

The Fall and Fall of Mahmoud Abbas

How the Palestinian Leader Prioritized a Peace Deal Over Domestic Political Unity—and Got Neither

By Khaled Elgindy

August 30, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Khaled Elgindy · August 30, 2024

For nearly two decades, Palestinian leadership has been fractured. Along with a basic division between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, numerous other groups have competed for influence. In late July, leaders of all 14 Palestinian political factions, including Fatah and Hamas, met in Beijing to issue a call for national unity. The agreement they signed, known as the Beijing Declaration, promised to create a consensus government presiding over both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, to reform and expand the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and to hold national elections.

Such proposals are not new and largely reiterate the principles set out in previous reconciliation accords. But they have taken on much greater urgency in light of Israel’s unprecedented war on Gaza. As of mid-August, the Israeli assault launched in response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel had killed more than 40,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—forcibly displaced two million people, and reduced most of the territory to rubble. It has become the deadliest moment in Palestinian history and the most destructive episode in the century-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Amid this crisis, the Beijing Declaration provides a roadmap to a different Palestinian future, one with credible leadership and functioning political institutions that will be essential for the day after the war.

Yet despite the gravity of the situation, Mahmoud Abbas, the longtime president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Fatah in the West Bank, has—through a spokesman—disparaged the Beijing Declaration as unhelpful and insignificant. (Abbas sent a Fatah representative to the talks in his place.) It is puzzling that a political leader, especially one as deeply unpopular as Abbas, in a moment of national trauma and existential despair, should show such open contempt for a display of national unity. Perhaps he sensed that Hamas’s back was against the wall and thus felt no sense of urgency to share power with the group. Or maybe he did not want to defy U.S. and Israeli officials, who, in the wake of October 7, are dead set against any political accommodation with Hamas. Either way, Abbas’s arrogant dismissal of the plan highlighted two hallmarks of his nearly 20 years in power—a profound disconnect with his people and an unwillingness to promote a coherent strategy for Palestinian liberation. If the Palestinians’ painful history has taught them anything, it is that bad things happen to them when they don’t have credible leaders. Such is the case with Abbas today.

Once seen as a promising peacemaker and political reformer, Abbas has steadily devolved into an erratic and small-minded authoritarian with a virtually unbroken record of failure. Although some of these setbacks were the result of forces beyond his control, particularly during the first few years of his rule, most have been self-inflicted. A short list of these own goals would include letting a debilitating internal political schism fester, creating an environment of growing corruption and authoritarianism, and, what is most crucial, failing to put forth a coherent strategy for national liberation. Nowhere have Abbas’s shortcomings been more evident—and consequential—than in Gaza, home to roughly 40 percent of all Palestinians under Israeli occupation and from which his own Palestinian Authority was expelled by Hamas in 2007. Abbas has consistently avoided dealing with Gaza’s problems, allowing the territory to paralyze internal Palestinian politics and repeatedly foil peace negotiations.

Now, amid a terrible and unending war, Abbas has an opportunity to mitigate some of the damage done to Palestinians and to his own legacy by pursuing Palestinian unity. And yet even at this most decisive moment in Palestinian history, Abbas remains a helpless bystander, with little say in either war or peace. Of course, he was not solely to blame for the neglect of the Palestinian question, which led to the October 7 attack—Hamas, Israel, the United States and even the peace process itself all undoubtedly played a role. But Abbas’s deficient leadership contributed to the conditions that precipitated the war, and his lacking vision for the future is helping to sustain it now.

SETBACK AFTER SETBACK

The problems with Abbas’s leadership of the PA have a long history. His tenure got off to an auspicious start in January 2005, following the death of Yasir Arafat, the PLO chairman and founding president of the PA who had towered over Palestinian politics for decades. But Abbas was quickly confronted by one setback after another. Two key developments in particular—the failure of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in late 2005 and the collapse of the national unity government and ensuing civil war in Gaza in 2007—effectively doomed his leadership. Abbas had come to office focused on the twin goals of unifying the fractious Palestinian factions under his rule and securing a peace deal that would end decades of Israeli occupation and lead to an independent Palestinian state. Unlike Arafat, who often sought to leverage political violence, Abbas was firmly committed to diplomacy. Indeed, the soft-spoken, grandfatherly Abbas, who will turn 89 in November, was everything his larger-than-life predecessor was not. Abbas was decidedly uncharismatic and notoriously averse to crowds. His disposition was more that of a school headmaster than the leader of a liberation movement.

Within a month of taking office, Abbas was able to unite the various Palestinian factions to back a cease-fire agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, quietly ending more than four years of bloodshed during the second intifada. Abbas hoped to use the calm to lay the groundwork for diplomacy, but Sharon had no interest in a peace process. Instead, he put forward a radical plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip, a move that was aimed not at advancing a two-state solution but rather, as Sharon’s chief of staff Dov Weissglas described it, at putting Palestinian statehood in “formaldehyde.” Israel effectively closed Gaza’s borders, sending its economy into a tailspin. The failure of Israel’s unilateral disengagement, though not Abbas’s fault, set off a chain of events from which he would never recover.

To begin with, Hamas’s surprise electoral victory in national elections in January 2006 effectively ended four decades of Fatah dominance over Palestinian politics. This was a major blow not only to Abbas but also to the U.S.-led peace process. Although Abbas hoped to encourage Hamas’s political moderation, the United States and Israel adopted a zero-sum approach to the group, which they designated as a terrorist organization: they categorically refused any dealings with Hamas until it laid down its arms and recognized Israel. As Israel withheld tax revenues that made up the bulk of the PA’s budget, the United States imposed an international boycott of the new Hamas-led government, devastating the Palestinian economy and briefly pushing the PA to the brink of collapse.

Abbas has steadily devolved into an erratic and small-minded authoritarian.

Hoping to diffuse the crisis, Abbas struck a unity deal with Hamas in February 2007, known as the Mecca accord, in which Hamas agreed to relinquish control over most PA ministries to Fatah. Although the deal was backed by Saudi Arabia and Washington’s other Arab allies, the United States and Israel continued to reject any arrangement that allowed Hamas to remain in government. Instead, the Bush administration pressed Abbas to dissolve the government and call for new elections, an extraordinary and unconstitutional move. Abbas was faced with an impossible choice—either overturn the results of a democratic election and trigger a civil war or risk indefinite international isolation and the eventual collapse of the PA. As U.S. and Israeli pressure mounted, fighting broke out between Hamas and the PA in June 2007, ending with Hamas’s forcible takeover of Gaza and the expulsion of the PA from the territory. A humiliated Abbas dissolved the putative unity government and accused Hamas of staging a coup in Gaza. Israel rewarded Abbas by lifting its siege of the West Bank and punished Gaza with a full blockade.

The collapse of the Mecca accord and the ensuing civil war of 2007 solidified the emerging divisions in Palestinian politics and ensured continued instability in Gaza. It is unclear whether the United States and Israel were prepared to bring down the PA and the entire edifice of the Oslo accords in order to keep Hamas out of Palestinian politics. But by prioritizing the demands of a U.S.-led peace process over national unity, Abbas guaranteed that he would have neither.

The split with Hamas left Abbas’s leadership permanently hobbled—too weak to be a credible peace partner and too dependent on the United States and Israel to pursue meaningful national unity. This became evident almost immediately, with the relaunch of peace negotiations in Annapolis in late 2007. The talks lasted a year, until war broke out between Israel and Hamas in December 2008. At the time, this was the deadliest conflict that had ever taken place in Gaza and the first of several bloody wars in the years that followed. The Israeli offensive, which left some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead, seriously eroded Abbas’s support. Many Palestinians now regarded him not only as powerless to stop the assault but also, given his feud with Hamas, as complicit in it.

Months later, Abbas was forced to relive the nightmare following the release of the Goldstone report, a UN-commissioned investigation into the Gaza war of 2008–9, which accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes. When the Goldstone report came up for a vote in the UN in late 2009, Abbas came under intense U.S. and Israeli pressure to ask his allies to delay the vote, which he did, setting off a firestorm. For many Palestinians, Abbas’s willingness to abandon the Gazans who were killed in the war as well as relinquish a crucial piece of leverage against their Israeli occupiers was tantamount to treason. Despite Abbas’s attempts at damage control, including a halfhearted offer to resign, the Goldstone debacle marked a new low point in his presidency. Now politically paralyzed, Abbas spent the next year avoiding U.S. entreaties to resume direct negotiations with Israel, agreeing only to participate in indirect “proximity talks,” in which U.S. officials communicated separately with Palestinian and Israeli negotiators. Even after Washington managed to convince Abbas to relaunch direct negotiations in September 2010, they collapsed within only a few weeks.

DEATH BY TRIANGULATION

The Arab Spring uprisings, which began in late 2010 and continued to spread across the Middle East through much of 2011, caused more headaches for Abbas. In early 2011, a popular revolt led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s longtime strongman and Abbas’s most important ally in the Arab world. After Mubarak’s ouster, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—an ally to Hamas—briefly gained power, emboldening Abbas’s rivals. Moreover, Abbas’s legitimacy weakened as the PA continued to be divided, corrupt, and repressive. The protests spread to the West Bank and Gaza. With demonstrators calling for an end to divisions between Fatah and Hamas, Abbas was forced to back away from the U.S.-led peace process and to pursue national unity. In May 2011, he signed a reconciliation deal with Hamas, which called for the formation of a national consensus government made up of technocrats unaffiliated with any faction, as well as new presidential and legislative elections. At the same time, he pursued UN membership.

Although hugely popular at home, both measures elicited a punitive response from the United States and Israel. As a result, Abbas was forced to tread lightly, dragging his feet on the implementation of the reconciliation pact with Hamas while slowly teasing out his UN bid. He got a much-needed domestic boost when, in November 2012, the UN General Assembly finally voted to recognize Palestine as a nonmember state. The new status allowed Palestinians to join other international bodies, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Despite fleeting moments of defiance, however, Abbas was too reliant on the United States to pull away completely. His adherence to the U.S.-led peace process became a domestic liability because most Palestinians saw it as highly lopsided and ineffective. Abbas tried to balance these conflicting interests by pursuing three pathways simultaneously: internal reconciliation, the internationalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the UN and other multilateral forums, and U.S.-sponsored negotiations with Israel. But instead of weaving all three tracks into a single, coherent plan for national liberation, Abbas vacillated among each of these priorities while fully committing to none. When one track was used up or became too costly, Abbas simply pivoted to the next. Thus when negotiations under U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (rather predictably) collapsed in March 2014 after just nine months, Abbas switched tacks by entering 15 international agreements and organizations and signing yet another reconciliation agreement with Hamas.

The split with Hamas left Abbas’s leadership permanently hobbled.

But Abbas remained powerless to influence events in Gaza. The outbreak of yet another devastating war in the territory in 2014, which left some 2,200 Palestinians and 70 Israelis dead, once again undercut Abbas’s domestic standing. Many Palestinians were outraged at the PA, perceiving that it had sided with Israel and the United States against Hamas. To quell the anger, Abbas joined the International Criminal Court in early 2015—a step that many Israelis regarded as a nuclear option and that Abbas had, until then, studiously avoided. The decision triggered fresh sanctions against the PA by Israel and the United States. Abbas was now trapped in a downward cycle largely of his own making: the weaker he became, the more he felt compelled to distance himself from Israel and the peace process, but the more he defied U.S. and Israeli officials, the more sanctions he faced and the weaker he became.

By 2015, the walls had begun to close in on Abbas. Abbas won a momentary spike in popularity by joining the ICC. But the step also signaled that he had taken the internationalization track as far as it could go. Meanwhile, the reelection of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who headed an even more right-wing coalition than before, ended any chance of resuming peace negotiations. The diplomatic stasis and the urgent need to reconstruct Gaza presented an opportune moment to finally put the Palestinians’ own house in order, but Abbas once again stalled. Both the United States and Israel softened their stance toward Palestinian reconciliation, hinting that they could work with (or at least live with) the consensus government. But the consensus government, which was still not operating in Gaza, was dissolved by Abbas barely a year after its formation, delaying reconstruction efforts in the war-shattered enclave. Although Hamas had, by agreeing to power sharing, indicated a willingness to give up its governance role in the territory, Abbas was reluctant to inherit Gaza’s myriad social, economic, and security problems, for which he had few solutions. Moreover, he was even less keen on sharing power with Hamas in an expanded and reformed PLO. During this time, Abbas’s popularity slumped to an all-time low, with nearly two-thirds of Palestinians saying they preferred him to resign—a proportion that would only climb over the years. Public speculation over who might succeed the aging leader became a national preoccupation.

ABBAS, THE TYRANT

As his strategy of bouncing between tracks began to wear thin, and with his domestic legitimacy hemorrhaging, Abbas grew more autocratic and paranoid. He began lashing out at would-be rivals and challengers, both real and imagined. His list of internal enemies grew and included the former Gazan security chief Muhammad Dahlan, former premier Salam Fayyad, and senior PLO figure Yasir Abed Rabbo. Abbas had effectively ruled by decree since 2007, without parliamentary or institutional oversight of any kind. To mask the arbitrariness of his rule, he created a new Supreme Constitutional Court in 2016, which he stacked with loyalists to rubber stamp his decisions. Two years later, Abbas resurrected the Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s long-dormant parliament-in-exile, for the first time in 22 years, in order to elect a new executive committee; it dutifully reappointed him as its chair and conveniently renewed his mandate as PA president, dispensing with the need for elections. Though such measures were condemned by civil society and opposition groups, Abbas persisted. By the close of 2018, Abbas used his newfound powers to formally dissolve the PA’s (largely idle) legislative council.

Having tethered himself so completely to the sinking ship of a U.S.-led peace process, Abbas left himself exposed to the pendulum swings of both U.S. and Israeli politics over the next several years. Abbas initially tried to ingratiate himself to U.S. President Donald Trump but was forced to change course in late 2017 when Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, overturning 70 years of U.S. policy. Abbas then took the uncomfortable—and for the PA, unprecedented—step of declaring that the United States could no longer be part of the peace process.

But Trump was only getting started. Over the next few years, his administration threw all it could at Abbas, severing all aid to Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories, reversing U.S. policies on settlements by declaring them legal, doing away with the land-for-peace formula, and even dispensing with the idea that Palestinians lived under Israeli occupation. (Trump called the territories “disputed” or simply “Judea and Samaria.”) Ironically, Trump’s anti-Palestinian onslaught inadvertently helped Abbas’s flagging leadership. In response to Trump’s so-called deal of the century, a purported peace settlement that granted Israel nearly all of its key demands, and growing talk among Israelis of formal annexation in the West Bank, Abbas carried through on his long-standing threat to cut security ties with Israel, giving the beleaguered leader a fleeting popularity bump. Moreover, the Abraham Accords—the normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signed in September 2020—forced Palestinians to come together to defend their liberation struggle, which had effectively been sidelined. The accords marked a departure in foreign policy for many Arab countries, which previously held that they would only forge formal diplomatic ties with Israel in exchange for concessions to the Palestinians. Within days of the Abraham Accords being inked, Fatah and Hamas signed their most far-reaching reconciliation deal to date, which for the first time ever included a schedule for presidential and legislative elections.

Abbas left himself exposed to the pendulum swings of both U.S. and Israeli politics.

If there was ever a chance for Abbas to rewrite his legacy, the national elections slated for the spring and summer of 2021 should have been it. Even though Fatah and Hamas tried to pre-cook the outcome, there was genuine popular enthusiasm at the prospect of reviving Palestinian politics after years of stagnation, with 36 electoral lists and more than 1,300 candidates set to participate in the first national elections in 15 years. In January 2021, however, President Joe Biden had taken office, and once again, Abbas subordinated the needs of his people in an effort to curry favor with the new administration in Washington.

First, Abbas swiftly resumed security coordination with Israel and made other gestures to get back in Washington’s good graces. The sentiment was not mutual. Biden restored aid to the Palestinians but was not prepared to invest major political capital in either the Palestinians or a two-state solution. Nevertheless, with the thaw in relations with the United States, Abbas again felt comfortable freezing domestic politics. As the Palestinian elections drew near, Abbas grew nervous about the prospects of his Fatah party, which remained deeply divided. With just over three weeks before the vote, Abbas canceled the elections, triggering widespread outrage among Palestinians. The decision was met with silence from Washington.

Abbas’s decision to scrap the elections proved to be among the most consequential moves of his political career. Holding the vote would have ended the debilitating schism with Hamas by folding the group into formal politics and might have even prevented the October 7 attack, since Hamas would have largely lost its ability to act as a free agent. Instead, by canceling the vote, Abbas sealed his disastrous legacy and accelerated his political demise. A few weeks after he abandoned the elections, PA security forces murdered Nizar Banat, a popular activist and critic of Abbas, sparking weeks of protests and underscoring the moral rot of Abbas’s administration.

As Israel’s current war in Gaza has unfolded, Abbas has remained impotent and irrelevant, and even his fiefdom in the West Bank has begun to crumble. With a cash-strapped PA struggling to pay salaries, Israel’s violent crackdown on armed insurgents across the northern West Bank has upended life for ordinary Palestinians and forced PA security forces out of parts of the northern West Bank.

THANK YOU, NEXT

Of course, any Palestinian leader faces significant constraints on power. Because of the Palestinians’ statelessness and the PA’s subordination to Israel, no Palestinian leader can influence outcomes in the same ways that an Israeli or U.S. counterpart can. Despite the limitations Abbas has faced, there have been times when he showed he was capable of significant accomplishments, often at great risk. He managed to resist U.S. and Israeli sanctions to obtain nonmember UN status for Palestine in 2012 and to join the ICC in 2015. In fact, it was Abbas’s campaign to build international support for the Palestinians through multilateral bodies that paved the way for the International Court of Justice’s investigation of Israel for the crime of genocide this year and for the ICC prosecutor to request arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders. But Abbas has only been willing to challenge the United States and Israel when it served him personally, such as by improving his domestic standing. He has not been willing to take the same risks in the service of his people, for instance by ending the rift with Hamas, which would have required some form of power sharing.

Abbas’s central dilemma has always been how to balance the need for a peace deal with Israel with the imperative for national unity. What Abbas, and Israeli and U.S. leaders, have failed to understand, however, is that without national reconciliation there is virtually no hope for a durable peace with Israel. By sacrificing Palestinian political cohesiveness and his own domestic legitimacy on the altar of a U.S.-led peace process, Abbas has done immeasurable damage to the Palestinian struggle. Israel reinforced the Palestinian rift through its divide-and-rule strategy, which has proved to be equally shortsighted and detrimental, as the October 7 attack has demonstrated.

But Abbas will not be around forever, and it is crucial that the Palestinians look forward to a successor who can finally overcome the tensions that have paralyzed Abbas’s leadership from the outset. Abbas’s successor will have to resolve this dilemma by unifying the fractured Palestinian polity, including incorporating Hamas into formal political structures, such as the PLO. This will be very hard for Israeli and U.S. officials to swallow, but the group is not going to go away, and allowing it to continue acting as a free agent would be even worse. With or without the support of the United States, the next Palestinian leader must articulate a clear vision for national unity and liberation—one that is no longer beholden to a dysfunctional and obsolete peace process.

KHALED ELGINDY is Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute. He is the author of Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump.

Foreign Affairs · by Khaled Elgindy · August 30, 2024

20. Challenges of the Gaza humanitarian aid pier offer lessons for the US Army

Another example of the broad range of capabilities the Army must train, resource, and sustain. Do units like these even make it above the line in constrained budgets when most of us do not have any idea that these capabilities exist or are required?

Excepts:

Designed as a temporary solution to get badly needed food and supplies to desperate Palestinians, the so-called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, faced a series of setbacks over the spring and summer. It managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid ashore for people in Gaza facing famine during the Israel-Hamas war.

Service members struggled with what Col. Sam Miller, who was commander during the project, called the biggest “organizational leadership challenge” he had ever experienced.

Speaking to The Associated Press after much of the unit returned home, Miller said the Army learned a number of lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Joe Biden’s announced in his State of the Union speech in March that the pier would be built and lasted through July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared that the mission was over and the pier was being permanently dismantled.

The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it learned from the experience. One of the takeaways, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train under more challenging conditions to be better prepared for bad weather and other security issues it faced. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments of the pier project have not been publicly released.

Challenges of the Gaza humanitarian aid pier offer lessons for the US Army

AP · August 30, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was their most challenging mission.

U.S. Army soldiers in the 7th Transportation Brigade had previously set up a pier during training and in exercises overseas but never had dealt with the wild combination of turbulent weather, security threats and sweeping personnel restrictions that surrounded the Gaza humanitarian aid project.

Designed as a temporary solution to get badly needed food and supplies to desperate Palestinians, the so-called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, faced a series of setbacks over the spring and summer. It managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid ashore for people in Gaza facing famine during the Israel-Hamas war.

Service members struggled with what Col. Sam Miller, who was commander during the project, called the biggest “organizational leadership challenge” he had ever experienced.

Speaking to The Associated Press after much of the unit returned home, Miller said the Army learned a number of lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Joe Biden’s announced in his State of the Union speech in March that the pier would be built and lasted through July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared that the mission was over and the pier was being permanently dismantled.

The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it learned from the experience. One of the takeaways, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train under more challenging conditions to be better prepared for bad weather and other security issues it faced. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments of the pier project have not been publicly released.

In a report released this week, the inspector general for the U.S. Agency for International Development said Biden ordered the pier’s construction even as USAID staffers expressed concerns that it would be difficult and undercut a push to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to get food into Gaza.

The Defense Department said the pier “achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza to help address the acute humanitarian crisis.” The U.S. military knew from the outset “there would be challenges as part of this in this complex emergency,” the statement added.

The Biden administration had set a goal of the U.S. sea route and pier providing food to feed 1.5 million people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down, the USAID inspector general’s report said.

The Defense Department’s watchdog also is doing an evaluation of the project.

Beefing up training

Army soldiers often must conduct their exercises under difficult conditions designed to replicate war. Learning from the Gaza project — which was the first time the Army set up a pier in actual combat conditions — leaders say they need to find ways to make the training even more challenging.

One of the biggest difficulties of the Gaza pier mission was that no U.S. troops could step ashore — a requirement set by Biden. Instead, U.S service members were scattered across a floating city of more than 20 ships and platforms miles offshore that had to have food, water, beds, medical care and communications.

Every day, said Miller, there were as many as 1,000 trips that troops and other personnel made from ship to boat to pier to port and back.

“We were moving personnel around the sea and up to the Trident pier on a constant basis,” Miller said. “And every day, there was probably about a thousand movements taking place, which is quite challenging, especially when you have sea conditions that you have to manage.”

Military leaders, he said, had to plan three or four days ahead to ensure they had everything they needed because the trip from the pier to their “safe haven” at Israel’s port of Ashdod was about 30 nautical miles.

The trip over and back could take up to 12 hours, in part because the Army had to sail about 5 miles out to sea between Ashdod and the pier to stay a safe distance from shore as they passed Gaza City, Miller said.

Normally, Miller said, when the Army establishes a pier, the unit sets up a command onshore, making it much easier to store and access supplies and equipment or gather troops to lay out orders for the day.

Communication difficulties

While his command headquarters was on the U.S. military ship Roy P. Benavidez, Miller said he was constantly moving with his key aides to the various ships and the pier.

“I slept and ate on every platform out there,” he said.

The U.S. Army official concurred that a lot of unexpected logistical issues came up that a pier operation may not usually include.

Because the ships had to use the Ashdod port and a number of civilian workers under terms of the mission, contracts had to be negotiated and written. Agreements had to be worked out so vessels could dock, and workers needed to be hired for tasks that troops couldn’t do, including moving aid onto the shore.

Communications were a struggle.

“Some of our systems on the watercraft can be somewhat slower with bandwidth, and you’re not able to get up to the classified level,” Miller said.

He said he used a huge spreadsheet to keep track of all the ships and floating platforms, hundreds of personnel and the movement of millions of tons of aid from Cyprus to the Gaza shore.

When bad weather broke the pier apart, they had to set up ways to get the pieces moved to Ashdod and repaired. Over time, he said, they were able to hire more tugs to help move sections of the pier more quickly.

Some of the pier’s biggest problems — including the initial reluctance of aid agencies to distribute supplies throughout Gaza and later safety concerns from the violence — may not apply in other operations where troops may be quickly setting up a pier to get military forces ashore for an assault or disaster response.

“There’s tons of training value and experience that every one of the soldiers, sailors and others got out of this,” Miller said. “There’s going to be other places in the world that may have similar things, but they won’t be as tough as the things that we just went through.”

When the time comes, he said, “we’re going to be much better at doing this type of thing.”

One bit of information could have given the military a better heads-up about the heavy seas that would routinely hammer the pier. Turns out, said the Army official, there was a Gaza surf club, and its headquarters was near where they built the pier.

That “may be an indicator that the waves there were big,” the official said.

___

AP writers Tara Copp and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed.

AP · August 30, 2024

21. When the US left Kabul, these Americans tried to help Afghans left behind. It still haunts them

Photos, graphics, and video at the link: https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-withdrawal-anniversary-afghans-kabul-f6a42bfa49507f9ba7fb977a7ebb2feb?utm

Excerpts:

To understand what has taken place since the last U.S. flight left Afghanistan, former military members will point you to the Special Forces operational approach titled, “by, with and through.”

The term effectively means that nothing the United States does on the ground in a partner state is done without allies. In the case of Afghanistan, that’s the Afghans who — at great risk to themselves — turned against the Taliban to work with the Americans.

So when Kabul fell, the obligation to their Afghan allies left behind was equal to the responsibility to their own fellow service members. Just as they would never leave another service member behind, so too with the Afghans they worked with.To understand what has taken place since the last U.S. flight left Afghanistan, former military members will point you to the Special Forces operational approach titled, “by, with and through.”

The term effectively means that nothing the United States does on the ground in a partner state is done without allies. In the case of Afghanistan, that’s the Afghans who — at great risk to themselves — turned against the Taliban to work with the Americans.

So when Kabul fell, the obligation to their Afghan allies left behind was equal to the responsibility to their own fellow service members. Just as they would never leave another service member behind, so too with the Afghans they worked with.

When the US left Kabul, these Americans tried to help Afghans left behind. It still haunts them

AP · by REBECCA SANTANA · August 30, 2024

The United States’ longest war is over. But not for everyone.

Outside of San Francisco, surgeon Doug Chin has helped provide medical assistance to people in Afghanistan via video calls. He has helped Afghan families with their day-to-day living expenses. Yet he remains haunted by the people he could not save.

In Long Beach, California, Special Forces veteran Thomas Kasza has put aside medical school to help Afghans who used to search for land mines escape to America. That can mean testifying to Congress, writing newsletters and asking for donations.

In rural Virginia, Army veteran Mariah Smith housed an Afghan family of four that she’d never met who had fled Kabul and needed a place to stay as they navigated their new life in America.

Smith, Kasza and Chin have counterparts scattered across the country — likeminded people they may never have heard of.

Across the U.S. hundreds of Americans are independently trying to help Afghans in the years after the United States pulled out in 2021. They have helped many Afghans, but the efforts have taken a toll on their lives as well. (AP Video by Nathan Ellgren)

The war in Afghanistan officially ended in August 2021 when the last U.S. plane departed the country’s capital city. What remains is a dedicated array of Americans — often working in isolation, or in small grassroots networks — who became committed to helping the Afghan allies the United States left behind. For them, the war didn’t end that day.

In the three years since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, hundreds of people around the country — current and former military members, diplomats, intelligence officers, civilians from all walks of life — have struggled in obscurity to help the Afghans left behind.

U.S military aircraft takes off at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon, File)

They have assisted Afghans struggling through State Department bureaucracy fill out form after form. They have sent food and rent money to families. They have fielded WhatsApp or Signal messages at all hours from Afghans pleading for help. They have welcomed those who have made it out of Afghanistan into their homes as they build new lives.

For Americans involved in this ad hoc effort, the war has reverberated through their lives, weighed on their relationships, caused veterans to question their military service and in many cases left a scar as ragged as any caused by bullet or bomb.

Most are tired. Many are angry. They grapple with what it means for their nation that they, ordinary Americans moved by compassion and gratitude and by shame at what they consider their government’s abandonment of countless Afghan allies, were the ones left to get those Afghans to safety.

And they struggle with how much more they have left to give.

Taliban fighters patrol Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 19, 2021, the day the Taliban celebrated Afghanistan’s Independence Day by declaring they beat the United States. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)

How we got here

The American mission in Afghanistan started with the goal of eradicating al-Qaida and avenging the group’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the mission morphed and grew over two decades. Every president inherited an evolving version of a war that no commander-in-chief wanted to lose — but that none could figure out how to win.

By the time President Joe Biden decided to pull the U.S. military from Afghanistan by Aug. 31, 2021, the American mission there was riddled with failures. But by early August the Taliban had toppled key cities and was closing in on the capital. With the Afghan army largely collapsed, the Taliban rolled into Kabul and assumed control on Aug. 15. The Biden administration scrambled to evacuate staff, American citizens and at-risk Afghans.

One Biden administration official recently described the chaos of those three weeks to The Associated Press, saying that it felt like nobody in the U.S. government was able to steer the ship. With the Taliban in control of the capital, tens of thousands of Afghans crowded the airport trying to get on one of the planes out.

That is when this informal network was born.

Past and current members of the U.S. military, the State Department and U.S. intelligence services were all being besieged with messages begging for help from Afghans they’d worked with. Americans horrified by what they were seeing and reading on the news reached out as well, determined to help.

Veterans who’d served multiple tours in Afghanistan and civilians who’d never set foot there all spent sleepless weeks working their telephones, fighting to get out every Afghan they could and to help those still trapped.

Dr. Doug Chin, who has helped provide medical assistance to people in Afghanistan via video calls, and helped Afghan families with their day-to-day living expenses, stands for a portrait at his practice in Oakland, Calif., July 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

‘Only thing I can think of’

One of those civilians was Doug Chin. A plastic surgeon in Oakland California, he was already familiar with Afghanistan, although he’d never been there. A few years before the Taliban takeover, he’d become involved with the then Herat-based Afghan Girls Robotics Team. So impressed was he with their mission that he’d joined their board and sometimes traveled to their international events.

Then, in August 2021, the Taliban entered Herat. Eventually came the scenes out of Kabul airport: mothers hoisting children over barbed wire, men falling to their deaths as they clung to the bottom of departing planes. Chin, working contacts, worked to help the team, their extended families, staff and others get on flight manifests, navigate checkpoints and eventually escape Kabul.

The work was so intense that he shut down his business for three months to focus on helping Afghans. For a time, he was supporting dozens of people in Afghanistan.

Now, three years later, the work is shifting. It’s a matter of trying to get visas for Afghans so they can escape — an educational visa to study in Europe, for example.

He advocates for human rights activists in Afghanistan and also helps provide medical services remotely to people in there. Once or twice a week he gets requests via the secure messaging app Signal to help someone in Afghanistan. Chin will either give advice directly or help them get in touch with doctors in Afghanistan that can help.

Some memories still move him to tears. In one case, in August 2021, a busload of people he’d helped evacuate was heading to the Kabul airport. One woman wasn’t on the passenger manifest. U.S. officials coordinating the evacuations told him that the Taliban controlling access to the airport might turn the entire bus around because of this one passenger. Chin had to order her off the bus. She later escaped Afghanistan, but it remains painful for him.

“The only thing I can think of,” he says, “is the people that I haven’t helped.”

An imperfect pathway

In those initial months, there was a frantic intensity to the efforts to get Afghans into the Kabul airport and onto the American military planes. Volunteers pushed U.S. contacts in Kabul to let Afghans into the airport, coordinated to get them onto the flight lists, lobbied any member of Congress or government official they could find and helped Afghans in Kabul find safe places to go. Even leaders of the U.S. administration and military resorted to the volunteer groups and journalists to get out individual Afghan friends or ex-colleagues.

By the time the last plane lifted off on Aug. 30, 2021, about 76,000 Afghans had been flown out of the country and eventually to the U.S. Another 84,000 have come since the fall of Kabul – each a victory for the Americans helping them over the Taliban and over a tortuous U.S. immigration process.

But more are still waiting. There are about 135,000 applicants to the special immigrant visa program and another 28,000 waiting on other refugee programs for Afghans connected to the U.S. mission. Those numbers don’t include family members, meaning potentially hundreds of thousands more Afghans are waiting in limbo and in danger in Afghanistan.

In 2009, Congress passed legislation creating a special immigrant visa program to help Afghans and Iraqis who assisted the U.S. government emigrate to the United States. The idea was that they’d risked their lives to help America’s war effort, and in return they deserved a new life and protection in America.

But ever since its inception, the SIV program has been dogged by complaints that it has moved too slowly, burdening applicants with too much paperwork and ultimately putting America’s wartime allies in danger as they waited for decisions.

Under the Biden administration, the State Department has taken steps to streamline the process and has boosted the number of special immigrant visas issued each month to Afghans. The department says that in fiscal year 2023, it issued more SIVs for Afghans in a single year than ever before — more than 18,000 — and is on track to surpass that figure this year. State has also used what it’s learned to streamline processing of SIV applicants to increase the number of refugees it is admitting to the United States from around the world.

The Biden administration official said most people remember only the chaos of those last two weeks of August and have no idea about the work that has been done in the three years since. But for those still waiting to come, they do so under constant threat and stress.

No One Left Behind, an organization helping Afghans who used to work for the U.S. government get out of Afghanistan, has documented 242 case of reprisal killings with at least 101 who had applied or were clearly SIV-eligible.

An opportunity to pay back

Faraidoon “Fred” Abdullah is one of the volunteers often referred to as caseworkers. He has helped hundreds of Afghans fill out immigration and visa forms or hunt down letters of recommendation from former employers.

“They’re eligible. They have the documentation, but (the) Department of State is too slow,” Abdullah says.

Faraidoon “Fred” Abdullah, who has been able to relocate a few family members out of Afghanistan, stands for a portrait in New York, July 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith)

His journey to this work started a little differently. The 37-year-old Afghanistan native began to work with the U.S. military as a translator during the war. He left his home country in 2016 through the same program he’s trying to help people through now. A year later, he enlisted in the U.S. Army.

“I lost many American friends while they served my country, while they were helping Afghan people,” Abdullah says. “So it was always like a dream for me to wear the uniform officially as a part of the United States military to pay them back with my service, with my time.”

He describes the work he has done over the last several years — as one of the few people who speaks the language and understands Afghan culture — as similar to that of a social worker. The calls come at random and varying hours of the night and day, he says.

“It’s like PTSD, and they might just snap at you like for no reason,” Abdullah says about the people he’s tried to help. “And not everybody has the patience and tolerance and the ability to deal with that.”

He was on active duty when the United States decided to withdraw. He had left his mom, siblings and other relatives in Afghanistan, thinking that the democracy that had been slowly built over the years would endure. It didn’t.

Over the last few years, Abdullah has been able to relocate a few family members out of Afghanistan. But more than a dozen still remain stuck in a process run by the departments of State and Defense. Now he worries that attention has faded from Afghanistan as other conflicts take precedence. The same urgency to donate, volunteer or sustain Afghans as their status remains in limbo is no longer there.

“Afghanistan is, right now, not an important issue — not a hot potato anymore,” Abdullah says. “That focus has shifted to Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Haiti. And then we are kind of like, you know, nowhere.”

‘By, with and through’

To understand what has taken place since the last U.S. flight left Afghanistan, former military members will point you to the Special Forces operational approach titled, “by, with and through.”

The term effectively means that nothing the United States does on the ground in a partner state is done without allies. In the case of Afghanistan, that’s the Afghans who — at great risk to themselves — turned against the Taliban to work with the Americans.

So when Kabul fell, the obligation to their Afghan allies left behind was equal to the responsibility to their own fellow service members. Just as they would never leave another service member behind, so too with the Afghans they worked with.

Thomas Kasza, a former Green Beret with over 13 years of service in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the executive director and founder of the 1208 Foundation, stands for a portrait with some of his military memorabilia in Long Beach, Calif., on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

It is a commitment Thomas Kasza knows all too well.

He spent 13 years active duty in the U.S. military, 10 as part of U.S. Army Special Forces, with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he prepared to leave active duty in August 2021, Kasza was planning to go to medical school. Then came the evacuation.

Like many U.S. military veterans, Kasza started helping Afghans he knew who were still in Afghanistan. At first, he was determined to limit his involvement.

Today, the notion of medical school has been abandoned. He’s the executive director of an organization called the 1208 Foundation. The group helps Afghans who worked with the Special Forces to detect explosives to come to America. Kasza and another Special Forces member and six Afghans do the work.

The foundation does things like pay for housing for the Afghans when they travel to another country for their visa interviews or paying for the required medical exams. They also help Afghans still in Afghanistan where they’re hunted by the Taliban. In 2023 they helped 25 Afghan families get out of Afghanistan. Each is a hard-fought victory and a new life. But they still have about another 170 cases in their roster, representing more than 900 people when family members are included.

To focus on the mission — getting those Afghan team members to safety — he limits the conversations he has with them. “You have to maintain a separation for your own sanity,” he says.

As the third anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan arrives, Kasza is preparing to step back from the executive director role at the organization he helped found although he’ll still be involved in the organization. Everything that’s happened over the last three years still weighs on him.

“I can’t do what our government did and look the other way,” he says.

Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a former Army Green Beret from Tampa, Fla., speaks during a workshop about how to organize and tell the stories of veterans for their family members, at the Cyrus Hotel in downtown Topeka, Kan., June 8, 2024. (AP Photo/John Hanna)

Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret who spent several deployments training Afghan special forces, describes the work of the past few years as “being on the world’s longest 911 call” and unable to hang up. “It is like one of the most taboo things in the world to leave a partner on the battlefield in any way,” he says.

Scott adds that many veterans, like himself, are only alive now “because on at least two occasions Afghan partners prevented” them from getting killed.

“And now those very people are asking me to help their father or their mother who were on the run,” he says. “How do you hang up the phone on something like that?”

The notion of ‘moral injury’

Some of the volunteers spoke of tapping their own retirement accounts, or their children’s college funds, to keep stranded Afghan allies housed and fed, sometimes for years. Marriages reached breaking points over the time that volunteers were putting into the effort. Spouses and children warned their loved ones that they had to cut back.

One veteran who worked at the heart of the logistics network by which volunteers got grocery and rent money to Afghan allies talked of the loneliness of the work, where once he’d had fellow troops with him in tough times. As the effort went on, he upped his antidepressants. Then did it again. And again.

“Moral injury” is a relatively new term that is often referred to in the discussion about how many volunteers, especially military veterans, feel about the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan and the treatment of allies. It refers to the damage done to one’s conscience by the things they’ve had to do or witnessed or failed to prevent — things that violate their own values. In this case, they feel betrayed by their country because they feel it has failed to protect Afghan allies.

Kate Kovarovic co-hosts a podcast called “Shoulder to Shoulder: Untold Stories From A Forgotten War”, an outlet for people affected by the global war on terror to tell their stories, at her home in Olney, Md., May 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Nathan Ellgren)

It is a concept that Kate Kovarovic feels passionate about.

She is not a veteran, nor does she come from a military family. But she became involved in the effort after a friend reached out to her in 2021 to ask for her social media expertise. From there Kate got more and more involved until she became the director of resilience programming for #AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations dedicated to helping Afghans trying to leave Afghanistan. She held that position for over a year. She describes it as the hardest job of her life.

During the evacuation and its aftermath, volunteers were focused on helping Afghans flee or find safe houses. But a few months later volunteers started realizing that they needed support as well, she says.

The ease of communication meant volunteers were always getting bombarded with pleas for help.

Kovarovic says they tried a little bit of everything to help the volunteers. She held a series of fireside chats where she’d talk to mental health professionals. They created a resource page on #AfghanEvac’s website with mental health resources. And she helped create a Resilience Duty Officer support program where volunteers needing someone to talk to could call or text a 24-hour hotline. She describes that program as “catastrophically successful.”

The volunteers weren’t just calling to vent a little. Kovarovic says the calls were graphic. Desperate.

“I personally fielded over 50 suicide calls from people,” she recalls. “You were hearing a lot of the trauma.”

A Plea for help

Messages from people still in Afghanistan pleading with American volunteers for help and from American volunteers describing the toll this effort has taken on them.

She lost weight, wasn’t sleeping and developed an eye twitch that made it difficult to see. Loved ones asked her to stop. In 2023, she took a break. Home from a two-week vacation, she landed at the airport and her eye twitch immediately returned. She sat down and texted colleagues that it was time for her to stop.

“I wept. I have never felt such a heavy sense of guilt. I felt like I hadn’t done enough and that I had failed people by abandoning them,” she says.

She now hosts a podcast called “Shoulder to Shoulder: Untold Stories From a Forgotten War” with a retired Air Force veteran that she met during the evacuation. They talk to guests like a Gold Star mother and an Afghan interpreter who lost his legs in a bomb blast.

She wants people outside the community to know that the work of helping Afghans during the withdrawal and all that has happened since has been its own front line in the war on terror.

“What I hope that people will understand one day is that these are lifelong conditions,” she says. “So even people who leave the volunteer work, even if you never speak to another Afghan again, this is going to sit with you for the rest of your life.”

What comes next?

Everyone in the movement, spread out across time zones, has varying views of where this effort goes from here. Many want Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would provide a permanent emigration pathway for Afghans. Others would like support for volunteers’ mental health concerns. Many just want accountability.

None of the four presidents who oversaw the war in Afghanistan has taken public responsibility for the chaos and destruction that followed America’s withdrawal. Biden, in charge when U.S. troops left, has come under the most criticism.

The Biden administration official, who spoke to AP on the condition of anonymity, said that the unwillingness by the U.S. government to admit its mistakes in regards to Afghanistan is perpetuating the moral injury felt by those who stepped up.

In the meantime, the work goes on — getting Afghans to safety and helping them once they’re here.

Mariah Smith, an Air Force veteran and board member of No One Left Behind, stands for a portrait at her farm in Stevens City, Va., Aug. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

In 2022, at Dulles International Airport, Army veteran Mariah Smith got to experience that moment. Smith spent three tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. With retirement from the military nearing in 2020, she joined the board of No One Left Behind. Then came the U.S. withdrawal.

One of the Afghans the group was helping was a woman named Latifa who had worked for the U.S. government. With the Taliban encircling and constant concerns over bombings, Latifa and her family didn’t want to risk taking the young children to the airport.

She was eventually able to get a visa to what is likely one of the least used Afghan immigration routes: Iceland. From there, No One Left Behind helped her process her special immigrant visa. That’s how Smith and the woman started talking.

They discussed where the woman and her family were going to live. Mariah lives in Stephens City on a farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley countryside. She also owns a home in town that she usually rents out but was empty at the time. She offered it to Latifa and her family.

Mariah was amazed at the response by the town of roughly 2,000 people where the Afghan family lived. Latifa, her husband and two kids came with the luggage they could carry, but Mariah said the mayor, police chief, town clerk, town manager and others all pitched in with furniture, toys and household items: “People really, really tried hard. And that was wonderful to see too.” The Afghan family stayed for over a year before moving to Dallas.

Why did she make that offer of a place to stay? Smith says it was a way to help a woman, her family, her children who’d had everything taken from them in their home country — helping them find a safe place, showing them that it was possible to start over here. Filling a gap. Helping.

“It felt like being a part of, I guess, the fabric of America.”

___

Associated Press journalist Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.

AP · by REBECCA SANTANA · August 30, 2024

22. US carrier drought in Western Pacific is telling but no security threat, expert says

I remember when I was in Korea in the 1990s we were always concerned whether there was a carrier battle group on a 5 day tether to Korea. It does not seem like we even have that capability any longer. Or at least we have larger gaps in our capabilities.

US carrier drought in Western Pacific is telling but no security threat, expert says

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · August 30, 2024

Petty Officer 3rd Class Israel Montano, front, and Airman Erick Telloayaca run on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington while underway in the Pacific Ocean, Aug. 25, 2024. (August Clawson/U.S. Navy)

The absence of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indo-Pacific poses no immediate risk to regional security but exposes the U.S. Navy’s inability to project a complete global presence, a defense expert told Stars and Stripes.

With the USS Ronald Reagan back in Washington state and its replacement, the USS George Washington, yet to deploy from San Diego, the 7th Fleet is temporarily without a carrier homeported at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan.

“The lack of deployed carriers in the Pacific is not a security threat today,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said by email Thursday. “However, it does mean that the U.S. has fewer tools available if a crisis or conflict occurs.”

The Pentagon on Aug. 2 ordered the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, making its way across the Pacific, to relieve the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Persian Gulf. Three weeks later, the Pentagon decided to keep both carriers and their strike groups in that area as conflict intensified between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hamas.

Meanwhile, the Ronald Reagan, operating from Japan for nearly a decade, returned to the United States for scheduled maintenance on Aug. 13.

Its replacement, the George Washington, began operations in the Eastern Pacific on Aug. 25, but was back in port at Naval Air Station North Island on Wednesday, according to information posted on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.

The U.S. 3rd Fleet did not respond to emails requesting comment on Wednesday and Friday.

An MH-60S Seahawk Helicopter takes off from the aircraft carrier USS George Washington while underway in the Pacific Ocean, Aug. 25, 2024. (August Clawson/U.S. Navy)

U.S. aircraft carriers have been a regular presence in the region since the USS Midway first deployed to Japan in 1973, but the current situation highlights the difficulty in projecting naval power on a global scale.

“Some strategists would have the United States withdraw from Europe and the Middle East to focus on the Pacific,” Cancian said. “That might be attractive in theory, but recent events in Ukraine and the Middle East show that it is just not possible.”

The Navy is too small to cover the Pacific, the Middle East and Europe simultaneously, Cancian added.

“It needs to be bigger,” he wrote.

The Navy is plagued with recruiting and manpower shortages, maintenance backlogs, delays in shipbuilding and a shrinking fleet, but hopes to grow its fleet from 296 to 381 ships over the next 30 years, according to an Aug. 8 report from the Congressional Research Service.

The Navy has declined to comment on when the George Washington would arrive at Yokosuka, but until then the Indo-Pacific isn’t completely exposed.

USS America, homeported at Sasebo Naval Base, and USS Boxer and their amphibious ready groups, as well as numerous guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, are in the area.

Those ships, along with allied military forces, demonstrate “our collective resolve to ensure security and stability in the region,” Pacific Fleet spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Christina Hough said by email Friday.

An amphibious ready group is typically composed of an amphibious assault ship, amphibious transport dock and a dock landing ship and carry more than 4,000 sailors and Marines and numerous aircraft, tanks and other vehicles.

The “large, powerful ships” show that the U.S. has not abandoned the region, and their capabilities are great for humanitarian assistance and the protection of U.S. facilities in the region, Cancian said.

However, they lack the “full range of combat power” of a carrier strike group, he wrote.

“In these situations, other forces are often tasked to cover portions of a [carrier strike group’s] missions,” Cancian added. “For example, the Air Force aircraft on Okinawa are likely tasked with providing some air defense and air striking power in the western Pacific.”

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · August 30, 2024

23. Don’t Downplay Risks of AI for Democracy

A very thought provoking conclusion:

When social media first surfaced, users and even those who weren’t on the platforms were swept up in a roiling tide that washed away crucial underpinnings of democracy, including local news and trusted institutions. Before diving in deeper on AI, it’s important for everyone to think through what it will take to keep democracy above water.

Don’t Downplay Risks of AI for Democracy

justsecurity.org · by Suzanne Nossel · August 28, 2024

August 28, 2024

Midway through a year in which more than 2 billion voters in at least 64 counties are going to the polls, pioneers of artificial intelligence are breathing a sigh of relief and arguing that the worst fears over the potentially corrosive influence of AI on democracies seem to have been overblown. While platforms have removed scores of AI-distorted videos of politicians lying or making fools of themselves, the impact on voters and tallies has seemed minimal.

But in the midst of the first-ever round of AI-influenced elections globally, it’s important to guard against a false sense of security. The last two decades have witnessed drastic and irreversible political changes wrought by the internet and social media, most of which were unforeseen and took years or decades to fully manifest. As the world assesses AI’s effects on democracy, we need to settle in for the long haul, looking well beyond the most obvious and tangible near-term threats to elections.

Going into this avalanche of elections, tech platforms, politicians, and regulators had dire forecasts about how AI would enable foreign interference and supply garden-variety fraudsters with deepfakes, the highly realistic videos that are doctored or depict events that never took place. In February, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and others pledged “reasonable precautions” to label manipulated content and share information about it.

Just two months later, Meta President Nick Clegg was already drawing conclusions. He remarked after balloting in Taiwan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that “it is striking how little these tools have been used on a systematic basis to really try to subvert and disrupt the elections.” In June, Microsoft President Brad Smith similarly declared that while it was too soon to “declare victory,” Russian interference was more focused on the Olympics than the elections. Last month, tech journalist Louis Anslow opined about AI that “the death of democracy and truth is starting to seem greatly exaggerated,” calling it an “awkward anti-climax.”

Some of these tidy conclusions ring familiar. In 2004, the year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, Pew Research concluded in a study that fears that the internet “might hurt healthy democratic deliberation are not borne out by online behavior.” Users were “not insulating themselves in information echo chambers” and the internet was judged to offer “heartening” potential for “stemming” polarization. In 2012, there were cheery reports that Facebook’s “I voted” button had driven a meaningful uptick in voter participation.

Experience with Rosy Assessments

Of course, those early measures of the impact of the internet and social media on democracy proved laughably rosy. We now know that digital transformation began reshaping democracy in ways that were hard to discern until they became all but irreversible. By vacuuming up print advertising, the internet wrought what has been described as a global “extinction event” for local news. Its decline, in turn, prompted a crisis of civic faith in communities around the world where citizens are often in the dark about the workings of local government and lack access to media outlets that can to hold public officials to account or get problems solved.

Not coincidentally, politics in the United States has grown steadily more fragmented, while political violence is spiking in the United States, France, Nigeria, India, and elsewhere and distrust in government institutions and the media is soaring. The world also is undergoing what analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have dubbed a “democratic recession,” with fewer countries worldwide classified as liberal democracies, and more meeting the criteria of authoritarianism.

While social media is hardly the sole source of pressure on democracies, it has accelerated so-called “truth decay,” diminished emphasis on and faith in fact-based information. These ramifications of social media for democracy took tech CEOs, the media, and political analysts by surprise. In 2017, Zuckerberg essentially confessed to having left Facebook largely defenseless to Russian meddling. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal sent global shockwaves by exposing how malign data-sweeping could enable potent and highly targeted political manipulation. Just this week, Zuckerberg voiced regret for having suppressed stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop on the eve of the 2020 election, implicitly recognizing that the decision to spike what turned out to be truthful reports fed perceptions of the platforms’ bias against Republicans. (Disclosure: I’m a member of Meta’s independent Oversight Board that serves as a check on content moderation on its platforms.)

The public as well as experts are all still struggling to understand the political universe that social media has wrought, with online influencers getting coveted speaking slots at political party conventions and viral memes defining political campaigns. As the globe reckons with how AI will shape democracy, it’s crucial to avoid premature self-congratulation and complacency. That deepfakes haven’t yet deep-sixed an election should not be grounds for tech executives to rest easy. Instead, they should double down on imagining, tracking, and analyzing AI’s ramifications for democracy.

Risks of Distrust

One obvious point is that AI, like social media, risks accelerating the erosion of trust in institutions, authorities and the media. The alienation generated by mass texts and robocalls will compound, as more and more of what passes for communication is rendered entirely by machine. The distrust may spin into a vicious cycle whereby automated “grassroots” messages flood politicians’ offices, obscuring where actual constituents stand and further alienating political representatives from those they serve.

AI-based content systems will flex the power of algorithms to predict what we want to see, hear and believe, satisfying just those appetites. Such tunneling of information can feed suspicion of those with different backgrounds and identities, deplete empathy, and inflate grievance. Researchers say AI also risks reinforcing structural biases — if a bot is trained to target the most engaged voters with election information, for example, it may leave immigrant populations or linguistic minority groups permanently out of the loop.

The proliferation of AI-based content is likely to further erode the weight of credible, fact-based journalism, leading to more newsroom cutbacks. Why will media companies invest in creating a 3,000-word, deeply reported news article if they can reach audiences at a tiny fraction of the cost using AI-generated derivatives of information put out by others.

Yet none of this means that AI spells doom for democracy. One of the biggest propellants of the global democratic recession has been a crisis of delivery: namely the failure of democratically elected governments to deliver economic growth, reduced poverty, better education, and other marks of a thriving society. These shortcomings, whether or not amplified by myths spread on social media, drive frustration with democracy and the embrace of purported autocratic saviors. As AI revolutionizes agriculture, manufacturing, supply chains, education, health care, emergency response, and more, governments can leverage these capabilities to improve delivery and reinforce the benefits of democratic governance.

Key Steps

No one knows for sure what AI holds in store for democracy. But we know enough to take key steps now to ensure it does not ride roughshod over norms and values.

First, regulators should force AI companies to provide transparency, allowing researchers to dig into how evolving capabilities are being used and their effects. Second, governments and companies need to install speed bumps so AI doesn’t proliferate so fast and far that no regulation or rules can catch up. Regulators in Europe have taken the lead in classifying categories of AI and slowing implementation of the most dangerous. Such preventive efforts should be applied to address not just environmental, health, and security concerns but also repercussions for democracy.

Whereas the United States is for now relying on an executive order relying mostly on voluntary compliance by companies, the European Union — through an AI Act that went into force earlier this month — recognizes that AI behemoths chasing mammoth profits will not be slowed by soft commitments. It has issued binding regulations backed up by intrusive oversight and enforcement measures, providing a potential blueprint for other jurisdictions. By setting standards for such a large market, the EU’s approach will reverberate globally, as companies configure their operations to comply and find it easier to implement consistent policies even in places where regulation is far behind.

A similar effect may gradually take hold across the United States, as individual states, including Colorado and California, take their own initiative to regulate AI. As regulatory oversight bodies and enforcement agencies get up to speed in implementing both the U.S. measures and the EU AI Act, they should be vigilant for evolving threats to democracy, including those that may be less obvious or direct.

A third key step involves revenue models. It took years for the public and policymakers to grasp how misleading, incendiary, and vitriolic content sent online engagement and revenues skyrocketing. AI business models are only now being invented and refined; if they depend upon eyeballs or ad dollars, history may repeat itself. Revenue structures that favor democracy-eroding content need to be identified and disabled before they become entrenched.

When social media first surfaced, users and even those who weren’t on the platforms were swept up in a roiling tide that washed away crucial underpinnings of democracy, including local news and trusted institutions. Before diving in deeper on AI, it’s important for everyone to think through what it will take to keep democracy above water.

IMAGE: Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights President and CEO Maya Wiley (L) and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attend the “AI Insight Forum” on Capitol Hill on September 13, 2023 in Washington, DC. Lawmakers are seeking input from business leaders in the artificial intelligence sector and some of their most ardent opponents, in preparation for writing legislation governing the rapidly evolving technology. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

justsecurity.org · by Suzanne Nossel · August 28, 2024

24. NSA's China specialist: US at a loss to deter Chinese hackers

Probably also Russian or north Korean or Iranian or other malign actors as well. Or maybe (hopefully) that is what the NSA wants them to think as they lure them into trapsin cyberspace.

NSA's China specialist: US at a loss to deter Chinese hackers - Breaking Defense

"They’re not going to be motivated to stop," David Frederick, assistant deputy director for China at NSA, said of the Volt Typhoon hacking group.

breakingdefense.com · by Carley Welch · August 29, 2024

Keyboard with China flag key (Getty images)

WASHINGTON — Officials from the National Security Agency and the State Department said they’re still struggling to come up with a way to deter a powerful hacking group allegedly backed by the Chinese government and accused of slipping into US critical infrastructure networks.

When asked how the US plans to deter the group dubbed Volt Typhoon from future attacks, David Frederick, assistant deputy director for China at NSA replied, “I don’t have a good answer to that.”

“They are trying to position themselves to have an asymmetric advantage in a crisis or conflict. If you look at the cost-benefit from their point of view and just the breadth of targets in the United States and our allies in terms of global networks, they’re not going to be motivated to stop,” Frederick said at an Intelligence and National Security Summit this week. “So that’s a hard problem — how do we get them, sort of thing.”

“It’s a tough subject,” he later added.

When Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cyberspace security at the State Department’s bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, was asked the same question, she responded similarly.

“I don’t know the answer to that question either, but there are many key parts we’re trying to get at,” she said Wednesday.

Franz said the State Department has “increased the drum beat” of deterrence tactics, like public attribution — part of a government-wide name-and-shame strategy.

“You know, once there has been adequate technical attribution and adequate confidence that we can make a public attribution, we do so in order to call out those state actors and hold them accountable,” she later added. But it’s not slowing the group down much, Franz acknowledged.

Senior US officials have attempted to directly tell China to knock it off, as US ambassador at large for cyberspace Nathaniel Fick related to reporters in May. But, he said, Beijing maintains the accusations are unfounded and said it’s all a “ploy” by the US government “to get more budget dollars.”

Volt Typhoon, which the US government says is “sponsored” by the Chinese government, has been accused of invading thousands of devices worldwide since it was discovered in 2021, Recorded reported. But the group gained more attention in May 2023 when it was more publicly outed by Microsoft security analysts.

On the same day Microsoft announced the existence of Volt Typhoon, the NSA and other national and allied agencies issued a warning about China state-sponsored cyber actors using built-in network devices to target US critical infrastructure, including in Guam.

At the beginning of this year, the FBI and other federal agencies announced that Volt Typhoon compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure providers in the US and warned that the organization was working to infiltrate other infrastructure providers to wreak havoc if there was US military escalation in the Indo-Pacific region.

Frederick said that unlike cyber espionage campaigns, stealing information is not Volt Typhoon’s goal.

“I think looking at kind of strategic context on why China’s conducting these operations is really important. Xi Jinping really sees the US as a block to his goals for national rejuvenation and growth,” Frederick said. “They have been determined to build a military capability that will enable China to deter the United States from getting involved in conflict in the Pacific, especially with Taiwan.”

He said China is “very focused on building a whole suite of capabilities to deter and defeat the United States, and so Volt Typhoon, these operations that target infrastructure, there really is no kind of reasonable explanation besides pre-positioning. […] It’s really part of a broader military strategy.”

As recent as the beginning of this week, Volt Typhoon was accused by cybersecurity researchers of exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the network management platform Versa Director in an attempt to try to infiltrate tech companies and internet providers, including some in the US. Volt Typhoon reportedly found a flaw in the Versa Director, which it used to capture credentials and perform harmful code on the compromised servers without detection. Versa has since announced that it had fixed the security flaw in its system.

breakingdefense.com · by Carley Welch · August 29, 2024

25. ‘Range of options’ ready for South China Sea aggression: US admiral

Did CINCPAC's strong words have any impact on the NSAs visit to China this week?

‘Range of options’ ready for South China Sea aggression: US admiral

militarytimes.com · by Jim Gomez and Joeal Calupitan, The Associated Press · August 29, 2024

BAGUIO, Philippines — American forces are ready with a “range of options” to deal with increasing acts of aggression in the disputed South China Sea if ordered to carry them out jointly and after consultations with treaty ally the Philippines, a U.S. admiral said Thursday.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. Samuel Paparo, who heads the biggest number of combat forces outside the U.S. mainland, refused to provide details of the contingency options.

Paparo's comments came when asked at a news conference what the longtime treaty allies could do to deal with China’s so-called gray-zone tactics in the disputed waters.

US military open to escorting Philippine ships in South China Sea

Adm. Samuel Paparo says the U.S. military is open to the possibility, depending on consultations under the allies’ 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.

The “gray-zone tactics” refer to types of assault, like water cannon fire and the blocking and ramming of rival ships in the disputed waters, that are under the threshold of an actual armed attack and wouldn’t allow the Philippines to invoke its 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with the U.S. The treaty obligates either country to help the other in case of an armed external attack.

“We certainly have prepared a range of options and USINDOPACOM stands ready, if so called, after consultations in accordance with the treaty to execute those shoulder to shoulder with our ally,” Paparo said.

Detailing those U.S. military options would allow “the potential adversary” to “build a countermeasure to those,” he said.

Paparo held a joint news conference with Armed Forces of the Philippines chief Gen. Romero Brawner Jr., after both led an annual meeting in the northern Philippine mountain city of Baguio to discuss security challenges and military plans. They include the Balikatan — Tagalog for “shoulder to shoulder” — the treaty allies’ largest combat exercises, which in April involved more than 16,000 American and Philippine forces and were partly staged in the South China Sea.

In response to a question, Paparo repeated the U.S. military is open, after treaty consultations with the Philippines, to escorting Philippine ships in the South China Sea amid a spike in hostilities between Beijing and Manila in the disputed waters. Such a prospect would risk putting U.S. Navy ships in direct collisions with those of China.

Washington and Beijing have been on a collision course over China’s increasingly assertive actions to defend its territorial claims in the South China Sea, and Beijing’s stated goal of annexing Taiwan, by force if necessary.

Brawner said the Philippines could still fend for itself in the disputed waters, where hostilities with the Chinese coast guard, navy and suspected militia ships have alarmingly spiked since last year.

“If we exhaust all the options and nothing works, then that’s the time we can ask for help,” Brawner told reporters.

When Philippine forces in the disputed waters “are at the verge of dying,” because food supplies were being blocked by Chinese forces, “then that’s the time that we are going to seek the help of the United States,” Brawner said, but added that “we still have a lot of options.”

During combat exercises by U.S. and Philippine forces in April, the U.S. military transported a midrange missile system to the northern Philippines, angering China, which warned that the missile system can trigger a regional arms race and endanger regional stability. Beijing demanded the U.S. missile system, which can threaten mainland China, be pulled out of the Philippines.

Paparo and Brawner refused to say on Thursday if and when the missile system would be flown out of the Philippines. Brawner thanked the U.S. military for transporting the high-tech weaponry to the country, saying Philippine forces were being exposed to advance defense equipment that the Philippine military plan to acquire in the future.

"Just like what we did with the Stingers and with the Javelins, we start training already even if we don’t have them yet in our inventory,” Brawner said.

China has angered the Philippines by repeatedly harassing its navy and coast guard ships with powerful water cannons, a military-grade laser, blocking movements and other dangerous maneuvers in the high seas near two disputed South China Sea shoals. They have led to minor collisions that have injured several Philippine navy personnel and damaged supply boats.

China has accused the Philippines of setting off the hostilities in the disputed waters by encroaching in what it says are its offshore territories, demarcated by 10 dashes on a map. It says the Chinese coast guard and navy have been forced to take action to expel Philippine coast guard and other vessels from those areas.

The Philippines has repeatedly cited a 2016 international arbitration ruling based on the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea that invalidated China’s claim over virtually the entire South China Sea on historical grounds.

Aaron Favila contributed to this report.

26. Army’s blunt trauma tests on pigs, cadavers may aid body armor designs

Wow. Check out the graphic at the link:https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2024/08/29/armys-blunt-trauma-tests-on-pigs-cadavers-may-aid-body-armor-designs/?utm

Perhaps this will give the animal rights activists something to feast on rather than the live tissue training they have long attacked.

Army’s blunt trauma tests on pigs, cadavers may aid body armor designs

militarytimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · August 29, 2024

When a soldier takes an enemy round to his or her body armor and lives to fight another day, it’s a good-news story for the engineers who develop that protection.

But as the Army develops lighter armor plates that offer greater levels of comfort and maneuver, there’s a secondary concern: blunt trauma damage from the armor’s response to a bullet that leaves soldiers with broken ribs or internal injuries.

Known as Behind Armor Blunt Trauma, or BABT, this aftereffect became a specific research focus for the Army in 2021 and has spawned inventions and protocols that may inform trauma study and protective designs beyond the military, including vehicle crash tests, athletic protective gear and more.

That’s according to Joe McEntire, a senior scientist and research medical engineer with the Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory.

McEntire, who has worked at the lab for more than three decades, said the science of BABT has to do with energy transfer. While the Army’s current modular scalable vest, with its hard ballistic plates, is substantially lighter than its predecessors, the services are always seeking out ways to cut weight.

And with lighter materials, McEntire said, there is greater risk that armor will deform inward when it absorbs a blow, potentially leading to serious thoracic cavity damage.

While this effect has been generally understood for some time, engineers have long relied on 50-year-old experiments involving goats shot with nonlethal rounds while wearing body armor, and tests with clay blocks positioned behind protective plates, he said.

The result, an industry standard that allowed 44 millimeters’ worth of armor deformation, was based on a limited test sample and hardly precise, McEntire said.

“Clay is supposed to be a plastic material where it reforms and doesn’t rebound,” he said. “Well, unfortunately, it actually does have a source of energy and [does rebound]. So, when you measure the depth of penetration or deformation, there’s some error associated with it.”

To gather more reliable data, the Army has signed $8 million in contracts with the Medical College of Wisconsin, which in turn subcontracted with the University of Virginia and Wayne State College in Nebraska.

Their objective is to develop better and more reliable “injury criteria,” as they’re technically called, to govern the safe design of the next generation of body armor.

In August, the academic journal Military Medicine published the latest research in the BABT initiative: an experiment involving seven anesthetized pigs subjected to blows at different speeds and force levels from a custom-designed device — like a free-flying half-softball made from hard polymer with a built-in accelerometer — called an “indenter.”

Illustrated design of the "indenter" and impact area. (Army via Military Medicine)

Three of the animals sustained nonfatal liver lacerations, allowing researchers to better understand how live tissue responded to blunt blows to the liver under a variety of conditions. All the pigs survived the experiment, but were eventually euthanized so their organs could be studied.

Grisly though some of the experiments might be, they get closer to simulating the real effects of body armor blows on live personnel. By comparing the experiments with the indenter on unarmored pigs and parallel live-fire tests on armor-wearing cadavers, McEntire believes engineers can design with much greater confidence.

“We can calculate the energy, we can calculate the impulse, the momentum, the deformation,” he said. “That’s one of their tasks, is to help us identify which metric is the best predictor, which best correlates with injury and then ... the different severities of injury you can have.”

And he’s already expecting other entities to benefit from the Army’s research. The National Institute of Justice, the regulating agency for law enforcement body armor, will have access to the BABT findings, McEntire said.

The automotive and athletic gear industries, among others, may also benefit from the work, he added. But McEntire said he’s most motivated by the impact he hopes to have on future combat troops.

“If we’re successful, and can get this out and get it transitioned to the material developers,” McEntire said, “then I’ll be touching every soldier for the next 50 years who wears body armor.”

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

Company Name | Website