Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

It's impossible to fear diversity and to enter the future at the same time."

- Gene Roddenberry

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."

- Marcus Aurelius

"I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."

- Baruch Spinoza

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 30, 2023

2. Ukraine’s Elite Snipers Fight Russians, Bullet by Bullet

3. US OKs military aid to Taiwan under program usually reserved for sovereign nations

4. Pentagon's global train and equip projects plagued by delays, unreliable equipment: GAO

5. How Ukraine Can Win a Long War by Mick Ryan

6. The time is right to honor the Vietnam War’s most secret warriors by Paris D. Davis

7. Beyond Joint: The Need for an Interests-Centric Approach to Integrated Campaigning

8. 'Largest conundrum of them all': Air Force still unsure how to keep forces supplied in Indo-Pacific

9. Policy Paper: Afghan Allies Out of War

10. Move Soldiers Less: A Divisional System in the U.S. Army

11. New Outbound Investment Rules Can Help Strengthen American Economic Security

12. Japan’s Defense Ministry seeks record $52.9 billion for 2nd year of military buildup

13. Ukrainian Counteroffensive Pierces Main Russian Defensive Line in Southeast

14. Goldman Sachs bought US firms with Chinese state cash in $2.5 BILLION 'partnership fund'

15. FBI Hoovering Up DNA at a Pace That Rivals China, Holds 21 Million Samples and Counting

16. There’s a Vast Source of Clean Energy Beneath Our Feet. And a Race to Tap It.

17. Opinion | The Chinese economy is doing better than you might think

18. The Complicated Legacy of Jean Larteguy’s “The Centurions” and America’s Post-9/11 Wars

19. Supporting Ukraine and the price of American leadership

20. Ukraine’s Valley Forge Moment

21. Statement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III Marking Two Years Since the End of the Afghanistan War

22. A Russian Defector Flew a Chopper Full of Jet Fighter Parts to Ukraine. That's Major.

23. A Clash of Worldviews – The United States and China Have Reached an Ideological Impasse

24. America’s In Much Better Shape (at Home and Abroad) Than You Probably Think

25. US Transits as Part of Taiwan’s Gray Zone Diplomacy

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 30, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-30-2023

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed four Russian Il-76 planes during a drone strike on a Russian airfield in Pskov Oblast on the night of August 29 to 30.
Russian propagandists and milbloggers criticized Russian forces for their inability to defend Russian territory and military facilities, while simultaneously criticizing recent Russian MoD censorship efforts.
Russian forces conducted a large-scale missile and drone strike predominantly targeting Kyiv on the night of August 29-30, likely in retaliation for the Ukrainian strikes earlier on Moscow and Pskov oblasts.
Ukrainian light infantry - likely reconnaissance elements - infiltrated east of Russian field fortifications near Verbove as of August 30.
The Kremlin has reportedly undertaken several efforts to silence or confuse reports about Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s funeral, which likely indicates that the Kremlin remains worried about Prigozhin’s appeal in Russia and among Wagner forces even after his death.
Some Russian officials may be probing the views of milbloggers about Prigozhin and his death to identify and censor Russian ultranationalists not clearly connected with Prigozhin or Wagner.
Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov reiterated his loyalty to Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 30 in continued attempts to distance himself from Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 30 and reportedly advanced.
Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along at least two sectors of the front on August 30 and advanced near Bakhmut, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly banning Wagner Group soldiers from fighting in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Crimean-based “Atesh” partisan group claimed that its partisans successfully detonated an explosive at the campaign headquarters of the United Russia party in occupied Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast on August 29.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 30, 2023

Aug 30, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 30, 2023

Angelica Evans, Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Christina Harward, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 30, 2023, 7:30 pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 2:30pm ET on August 30. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 31 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed four Russian Il-76 planes during a drone strike on a Russian airfield in Pskov Oblast on the night of August 29 to 30. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Representative Andriy Yusov stated that the drone strike destroyed four Russian Il-76 planes and possibly damaged two other planes at the Pskov airfield but did not comment on the nature of the strike or claim responsibility for it.[1] Geolocated footage and Russian sources confirmed the strike and the destruction of at least two Russian Il-76 planes.[2] Russian milbloggers claimed that over 21 Ukrainian drones struck the Pskov airfield.[3] Russian sources, including the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), claimed that Russian air defenses and electronic warfare (EW) systems also downed Ukrainian drones over Oryol, Tula, Voronezh, Ryazan, Kaluga, Bryansk, and Moscow oblasts.[4] Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin stated that Russian air defenses repelled a massive Ukrainian drone strike on the Central Federal Okrug (a large administrative area including Moscow but not Pskov) and that at least one of the drones was headed toward Moscow, possibly suggesting that Russian authorities may have initially believed that Ukrainian forces intended to strike Moscow or the region around it.[5] Russian forces may have focused their air defenses on covering Moscow and somehow missed the unusually large number of Ukrainian drones that reportedly struck the Pskov airfield. The Ukrainian drones that Russian air defenses downed over the six other oblasts were likely en route to Moscow or Pskov Oblast and likely were not part of a Ukrainian effort to strike targets in the other oblasts.

Russian propagandists and milbloggers criticized Russian forces for their inability to defend Russian territory and military facilities, while simultaneously criticizing recent Russian MoD censorship efforts. A Kremlin-affiliated Russian milblogger claimed that the Ukrainian strike on the Peskov airfield indicates that Russian air defenses have not adapted to defend against repeated Ukrainian drone strikes, in contrast with how Russian air defenses in Crimea have adapted.[6] The milblogger also criticized Russian authorities for not keeping expensive military aircraft in hangars.[7] Another prominent Russian milblogger expressed concern that there will be no safe places in western Russia due to Ukraine’s growing technical capabilities and suggested that Russian forces need to take this into account when securing military and strategic facilities.[8] Still, another milblogger noted that the requirement for Russian authorities to secure and defend Russian airfields is at a “qualitatively different level” from what it had been.[9] Russian sources also challenged the Russian MoD’s recent censorship efforts by noting the need for truth and honesty in reporting about Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory, including one Russian milblogger who criticized official Russian television channels for not reporting the Ukrainian strikes.[10] Prominent Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov expressed his outrage in response to the drone strike and criticized Russian elites who are calling on the Kremlin to freeze the war in Ukraine and negotiate to save Russia’s economy.[11]

Russian forces conducted a large-scale missile and drone strike predominantly targeting Kyiv on the night of August 29-30, likely in retaliation for the Ukrainian strikes earlier on Moscow and Pskov oblasts. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces launched 28 Kh-101, Kh-555, and Kh-55 air-launched cruise missiles from aircraft operating out of Engels airbase in Saratov Oblast and the Caspian Sea, and 16 Shahed-136/131 drones from Krasnodar Krai and Kursk Oblast.[12] Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian air defenses shot down all 28 cruise missiles and 15 drones over Kyiv, Odesa, Cherkasy, and Mykolaiv oblasts.[13] The Kyiv City Military Administration reported that Ukrainian forces shot down over 20 air targets over Kyiv.[14] This Russian strike was considerably larger than other Russian strikes in recent weeks and was likely in retaliation for the Ukrainian strikes on Moscow and Pskov Oblasts earlier in the night.

Ukrainian light infantry - likely reconnaissance elements - infiltrated east of Russian field fortifications near Verbove as of August 30. Geolocated footage published on August 30 shows Ukrainian infantry on the northwestern outskirts of Verbove, indicating that Russian control over the outskirts of the settlement is degraded.[15] The footage, however, does not indicate that Ukrainian forces established control over the area at this time, and Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces have not yet breached the defensive line around Verbove.[16] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces were successful in the Novodanylivka-Novopokropivka (4-15km south of Orikhiv) and Mala Tokmachka-Verbove (7-18km southeast of Orikhiv) directions.[17] Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces continue offensive operations south of Bakhmut, and geolocated footage published on August 28 shows that Ukrainian forces marginally advanced south of Klishchiivka (6km southwest of Bakhmut).[18] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced in the direction of Volodyne (13km south of Velyka Novosilka) on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border and that Russian forces had to retreat from several heights in the area.[19]

The Kremlin has reportedly undertaken several efforts to silence or confuse reports about Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s funeral, which likely indicates that the Kremlin remains worried about Prigozhin’s appeal in Russia and among Wagner forces even after his death. Two acting Russian officials told The Moscow Times that the Russian Presidential Administration and Federal Security Service (FSB) deliberately made Prigozhin’s funeral a secret to avoid further making him a martyr.[20] The officials noted that Russian Presidential Administration’s First Deputy Chief of Staff Sergei Kiriyenko, officers from several intelligence agencies, and FSB officials met to develop a plan that would prevent any chance of public outcry or protest and mislead the public about the location of Prigozhin’s burial. The Moscow Times added that there were many conflicting reports about the location of Prigozhin’s funeral on August 29. Some Russian Telegram channels noted that Russian federal channels largely ignored Prigozhin’s funeral, likely also as part of the Kremlin’s planned “coverage” of the funeral.[21] ISW continued to observe some Russian Telegram channels baselessly speculating that Prigozhin survived the crash, which may have also been an information operation to overwhelm the Russian information space with misleading reports and deflect from Prigozhin’s funeral.[22]

Some Russian officials may be probing the views of milbloggers about Prigozhin and his death to identify and censor Russian ultranationalists not clearly connected with Prigozhin or Wagner. A Russian milblogger claimed that he received a visit from “aggressive” Telegram channel advertisers who had asked him to promote several Telegram channels that exaggerated the topic of the Wagner leadership’s death in “almost an abusive manner.”[23] The milblogger noted that this request was strange because the Kremlin and the Russian state media had “already closed this topic” and he refused to promote these channels. The refusal reportedly prompted one advertiser to accuse him of supporting the rebellion and opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Constitution.[24] The milblogger noted that division within Russian society would not benefit the Russian war effort. The milblogger has been consistently critical of the Russian military leadership and supportive of Russian Airborne Forces Commander Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky – who had previous links to the Prigozhin but who survived the armed rebellion apparently unscathed and still in power.[25] The incident, at the very least, suggests that prominent milbloggers are self-censoring their discussions about Prigozhin’s death and have modeled their coverage of this subject on the Kremlin. The incident may also support the above outlined hypothesis that certain Russian social media actors may be attempting to overwhelm the Russian information space, or it could indicate that Russian officials are trying to identify other prominent ultranationalist voices who may be promoting insubordination of the regime or the military and tie them in some way to Prigozhin.

Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov reiterated his loyalty to Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 30 in continued attempts to distance himself from Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin. Kadyrov posted a picture of himself with Putin and proclaimed that he is “an infantryman of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief” and is “ready to fulfill any order” from Putin.[26] Kadyrov has repeatedly attempted to align himself with Putin and the Russian MoD and away from Prigozhin following Prigozhin’s fall from grace.[27]

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed four Russian Il-76 planes during a drone strike on a Russian airfield in Pskov Oblast on the night of August 29 to 30.
Russian propagandists and milbloggers criticized Russian forces for their inability to defend Russian territory and military facilities, while simultaneously criticizing recent Russian MoD censorship efforts.
Russian forces conducted a large-scale missile and drone strike predominantly targeting Kyiv on the night of August 29-30, likely in retaliation for the Ukrainian strikes earlier on Moscow and Pskov oblasts.
Ukrainian light infantry - likely reconnaissance elements - infiltrated east of Russian field fortifications near Verbove as of August 30.
The Kremlin has reportedly undertaken several efforts to silence or confuse reports about Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s funeral, which likely indicates that the Kremlin remains worried about Prigozhin’s appeal in Russia and among Wagner forces even after his death.
Some Russian officials may be probing the views of milbloggers about Prigozhin and his death to identify and censor Russian ultranationalists not clearly connected with Prigozhin or Wagner.
Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov reiterated his loyalty to Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 30 in continued attempts to distance himself from Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line, near Bakhmut, on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 30 and reportedly advanced.
Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along at least two sectors of the front on August 30 and advanced near Bakhmut, in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly banning Wagner Group soldiers from fighting in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Crimean-based “Atesh” partisan group claimed that its partisans successfully detonated an explosive at the campaign headquarters of the United Russia party in occupied Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast on August 29.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukranian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 30 and did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Novoyehorivka (16km southwest of Svatove) and Bilohorivka (13km south of Kreminna).[28] Ukrainian Eastern Grouping of Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated that the most intense sector of the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line is near Raihorodka (13km west of Svatove) and Kovalivka (12km southwest of Svatove), where Russian forces are conducting armored assaults.[29] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces achieved unspecified successes near Novoyehorivka and Petropavlivka (7km east of Kupyansk).[30] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger also claimed that Russian forces are intensifying their offensive operations from the Yahidne (22km southeast of Kupyansk) direction.[31] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Russian 1st Guards Tank Army (Western Military District) and the 6th Combined Arms Army (Western Military District) continued to advance in the Kupyansk direction.[32]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 30 and did not advance. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk) in Kharkiv Oblast; Serhiivka (12km southwest of Svatove), Novoyehorivka, and the Serebryanske forest area (10km southwest of Kreminna) in Luhansk Oblast; and Bilohorivka (33km south of Kreminna) in Donetsk Oblast.[33] Russian Western Grouping of Forces Press Officer Yaroslav Yakimkin claimed that Russian forces repelled two small Ukrainian counterattacks with tank and artillery support in the Kupyansk direction.[34]

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

Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on Bakhmut’s southern flank and continued to advance as of August 30.[35] Ukrainian Eastern Grouping of Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that Ukrainian forces are gradually advancing despite Russian counterattacks.[36] Syrskyi added that the most intense engagements are near Bakhmut, Kurdyumivka (12km southwest of Bakhmut), Yahidne (directly north of Bakhmut), and Andriivka (9km southwest of Bakhmut). A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian assault groups attacked Russian positions near Klishchiivka (6km southwest of Bakhmut) and Andriivka.[37]

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces regained some previously lost positions on Bakhmut’s southern flank on August 30. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces successfully counterattacked near Kurdyumivka, which allowed Russian forces to expand their area of control in the settlement and push Ukrainian forces to the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas Canal to the west of Kurdyumivka.[38] Another Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces regained some positions near Klishchiivka.[39] The Ukrainian General Staff, however, reported that Russian forces carried out unsuccessful offensive operations in Kurdyumivka, Ozaryanivka (14km southwest of Bakhmut), and Bohdanivka (7km northwest of Bakhmut).[40]

Russian forces continued offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line but did not make new territorial gains on August 30. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces resumed assaults on Marinka (directly west of Donetsk City).[41] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued to repel Russian attacks on Marinka and Novomykhailivka (30km southwest of Donetsk City).[42]

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

Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border and reportedly advanced on August 30. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced in the direction of Volodyne (13km south of Velyka Novosilka), and that Russian forces had to retreat from several heights in the area due to the threat of a tactical encirclement.[43] Other Russian milbloggers and Russian “Vostok” Battalion Commander Alexander Khodakovsky claimed that Ukrainian forces are increasing offensive activity on the Pryyutne-Staromayorske (8-18km south of Velyka Novosilka) line.[44]

Russian forces conducted limited offensive operations along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area and near Vuhledar, and reportedly advanced on August 30. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced during a small arms engagement with Ukrainian forces west of Staromayorske.[45] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian ground attack near Staromayorske.[46] Khodakovsky claimed that the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet) recaptured several positions near Mykilske (27km southwest of Donetsk City) in western Donetsk Oblast on August 30.[47]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and may have advanced west of Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv) on August 30. Geolocated footage published on August 30 shows that Ukrainian infantry advanced to the northwestern outskirts of Verbove, though the extent of these advances and current control over these positions are currently unclear.[48] Ukrainian forces’ ability to advance so close to Verbove indicates degraded Russian control around the settlement, however. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces were successful in the Novodanylivka-Novopokropivka (4-15km south of Orikhiv) and Mala Tokmachka-Verbove (7-18km southeast of Orikhiv) directions.[49] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked the outskirts of Verbove overnight on August 29 to 30 and on the morning of August 30, but that Russian forces repelled the attacks.[50] One Russian milblogger characterized the Russian situation in Verbove as difficult but claimed that Ukrainian forces have not yet breached the Russian defensive line in the area.[51] Russian sources also claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted armored attacks near Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv).[52]

Russian forces conducted limited offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Mala Tokmachka.[53]

Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted further limited raids in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast on August 30.[54] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces landed northwest of Pidstepne (17km east of Kherson City) and on an island in the Dnipro River delta.[55] Another milblogger claimed that Russian forces destroyed the Ukrainian boats as they approached the east bank, however.[56]

Russian forces continued efforts to secure the Kerch Strait Bridge against maritime threats. Satellite imagery dated August 29 and 30 shows that Russian forces have sunk barges near the Kerch Strait Bridge presumably to prevent maritime drones from striking boats near the bridge or the bridge itself.[57] One Russian milblogger criticized this attempt and claimed that the few hundred meters between each barge is sufficient for maritime drones to pass through the barrier.[58]

The Russian MoD and other Russian sources claimed that Russian aviation attack prevented up to 50 Ukrainian troops from landing in occupied Crimea overnight on August 29 to 30.[59] The Ukrainian Special Operations Forces denied the Russian MoD’s claim, however.[60]

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

The Russian MoD is reportedly banning Wagner Group soldiers from fighting in Ukraine. Russian opposition media outlets obtained an audio message in which a Wagner representative encourages Wagner servicemen to look for different work because the Russian MoD is not allowing Wagner forces to fight in Ukraine, citing recent events.[61] The Wagner representative noted that Wagner fighters are also struggling to work in the Middle East or Africa due to “tough competition” with the Russian MoD and National Guard (Rosgvardia) who are trying to operate in those regions.[62] ISW has previously assessed that the Russian MoD and the Kremlin have been destroying the Wagner Group since the June 24 rebellion.[63]

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited defense industrial base (DIB) production facilities in Tula Oblast on August 30 and highlighted the importance of counterbattery capabilities in the Russian war effort - likely in response to recent public complaints about poor counterbattery capabilities.[64] Shoigu visited a radar systems production facility of the Almaz-Antey Corporation in Tula Oblast whose general director claimed that the facility has increased its production and supply of modern counterbattery weapons to support the Russian war effort.[65] Shoigu stated that counterbattery combat and the supply of Russian soldiers with counterbattery capabilities play “the most important” role in the war in Ukraine.[66] Russian military commanders, such as “Vostok” Battalion Commander Alexander Khodakovsky and former 58th Combined Arms Army (Southern Military District) Commander Major General Ivan Popov, and Russian milbloggers have recently complained about the lack of effective Russian counterbattery capabilities on the battlefield.[67]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

The Ukrainian Crimean-based “Atesh” partisan group claimed that its partisans successfully detonated an explosive at the campaign headquarters of the United Russia party in occupied Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast on August 29.[68] “Atesh” claimed that the resulting fire killed three Russian personnel guarding the headquarters and destroyed documents supporting the upcoming September 2023 regional elections.[69]

Russian authorities continue sending workers from Russia to occupied Ukraine to fill out the workforce and artificially alter demographics. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian authorities are sending Russian locksmiths, welders, and drivers to occupied Ukraine to repair damaged equipment and build fortifications.[70] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that the Kremlin-managed “Leningradskyi Rubezh” fund organizes the dispatch of these personnel to occupied Ukraine.[71]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

Belarusian forces reportedly received another Iskander missile system on August 30. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced that another Iskander-M missile system arrived in Belarus and deployed to its permanent base.[72] The Belarusian MoD announced on February 1, 2023, that Belarusian forces were independently operating Russian-provided Iskander systems.[73]

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. Ukraine’s Elite Snipers Fight Russians, Bullet by Bullet

As an aside, I do not know why we Americans are so afraid of or resistant to women in combat arms and special operations. Seems like the Ukrainian women are holding their own quite well.

Ukraine’s Elite Snipers Fight Russians, Bullet by Bullet

Stealthy assassins aim to sow chaos in enemy ranks by picking off commanders and key troops

By Alistair MacDonaldFollow and Daniel MichaelsFollow

Updated Aug. 30, 2023 12:01 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraines-elite-snipers-fight-russians-bullet-by-bullet-3e84db9d

HRODIVKA, Ukraine—The war in Ukraine is a meat grinder of artillery, missiles and deadly minefields. Running silently aside all that is a test of battlefield marksmanship for snipers pursuing the fight one shot at a time.

Around 15 miles from the front line, near Bakhmut, three Ukrainian snipers recently emerged unseen from undergrowth. Their team, which calls itself “Devils and Angels,” is on orders to kill Russian senior commanders, critical members of artillery teams and other high-profile targets.

The war in Ukraine is rich territory for snipers, reminiscent of World War I, with its long and largely static firing line across a flat landscape. The snipers training near Bakhmut are top shots, but they were honing a skill even more important for snipers: stealth.

“We work quietly, we are invisible,” said a team member whose call sign is Fisher.

A British sniper during World War I near Verdun, France. PHOTO: PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES

As Kyiv looks to tip the balance in its continuing counteroffensive, the role of the sniper is evolving. Russian mines make a sniper’s trips into no man’s land more treacherous, while drones make it harder for them to hide. Training snipers also takes weeks that Ukraine doesn’t have to spare.

In response, Ukraine—like militaries in the West—is adding more sharpshooters with less technical training than elite snipers to back up ordinary infantry troops with precise targeting.

“Sniper shooting can’t win the war on its own, but one good shot can change a situation at a particular moment on a particular line,” said Ruslan Shpakovych, a former Ukrainian special forces sniper now training soldiers for the role.

Stealth is vital in part because snipers do more than just killing targets from a distance. They conduct reconnaissance and, when shooting, their goal is to shock and demoralize enemy troops, sowing disorganization—an enemy of any military.

“If you’re assembling to attack and your lieutenant is picked off, the unit goes into disarray,” said retired Army Major General Robert Scales, a military historian who served as commandant of the U.S. Army War College.

Russia’s army is dependent on officers for leadership because it doesn’t have a corps of noncommissioned officers, or soldiers who rose through the ranks to leadership positions, as in Western militaries and, increasingly, in Ukraine. Russian officers can often be identified from afar by their uniforms and even their boots.

A Ukrainian sniper coach. Ukraine is adding more sharpshooters with less technical training. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Ukrainian snipers in training. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“When you kill a Russian small-unit leader, you completely discombobulate the unit,” said Scales.

The Soviet Union often elevated its snipers to hero status. Ukrainian-born Lyudmila Pavlichenko was nicknamed “Lady Death” by Soviet authorities for her high kill rate in World War II. Another sniper, Vasily Zaitsev, won some of the Soviet Union’s highest honors during the Battle of Stalingrad.

Even now, Russian media and official channels laud individual snipers in Ukraine.

Urban warfare, such as Stalingrad and Bakhmut, is perfect for snipers.

“But snipers also become much more important when the front lines stabilize, as they have for the last many months in Ukraine,” said Mark Cancian, an adviser with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Stable front lines allow snipers to develop good ‘hides’ and fields of fire,” he said.

Ukrainian-born Lyudmila Pavlichenko was nicknamed Lady Death by Soviet authorities for her high kill rate in World War II. PHOTO: MARY EVANS/ZUMA PRESS

Modern sniping developed among German and British troops along the static trench lines of World War I. Similar trenches now line the Ukraine front, and just like a century ago, soldiers rising above their security can get killed by snipers.

Ukraine’s terrain of fields and gently rolling hills, offering clear vistas, is “a sniper’s paradise,” said Scales.

Snipers generally work in teams of two, with one typically serving as a spotter, calculating distance, wind speed and other variables that can affect a shot. When one sleeps, the other watches.

Trips into no man’s land can last for as long as nine days, though more typically are around a day and a half, during which snipers are cut off from their unit, said members of the Devils and Angels. Infantry units support them from afar, providing cover fire if needed. Snipers feed crucial front-line intelligence back to commanders.

No enemy sneak attack should get past a trained sniper squad or shooter out front, “because they can spot it coming and they can shoot at it and correct artillery toward it,” said Shpakovych, who trains snipers for “Come Back Alive,” a Ukrainian charity that raises money to train and equip local forces.

US OKs military aid to Taiwan under program usually reserved for sovereign nations

AP · August 30, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration has approved the first-ever U.S. military transfer to Taiwan under a program generally reserved for assistance to sovereign, independent states.

The State Department notified Congress of the sale on Wednesday. It said the material would “be used to strengthen Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities through joint and combined defense capability and enhanced maritime domain awareness and maritime security capability.”

The package is modest — only $80 million of what Congress had set aside as a potential $2 billion — but the implications of using the so-called Foreign Military Financing program to provide it will likely infuriate China.

Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province, has repeatedly not ruled out the use of force to reunite it with the mainland and vociferously protests all U.S. arms sales to the self-governing island.

However, previous arms sales to Taiwan have been approved under other authorities that do not necessarily imply statehood. U.S. officials were quick to say that the provision of FMF funding to Taiwan did not represent a change in policy. It’s a position the Chinese are sure to disagree with.

In explaining the change, two U.S. officials said: “The United States has provided Foreign Military Sales (FMS) to Taiwan for years. FMF simply enables eligible partner nations to purchase U.S. defense articles, services, and training through either FMS or, for a limited number of countries, through the foreign military financing of direct commercial contracts (FMF/DCC) program.” The officials were not authorized to comment publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.

But the language used implied that Taiwan is or could be compared to a “nation” or a “country” — something China has fervently opposed, blocking Taiwan’s full membership in any number of U.N. and other international organizations unless it is identified as part of China.

The only other time the U.S. has provided a non-nation-state with military assistance under FMF was to the African Union, an organization of sovereign states based in Ethiopia, according to American officials.

The notification, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, did not specify what military equipment or systems would be paid for under FMF, which commits U.S. taxpayer dollars to pay for the supply of materiel to foreign countries.

But, it said items that could be covered would include: air and coastal defense systems, armored vehicles, infantry fighting vehicles, drones, ballistic missile and cyber defenses, and advanced communications equipment. It added that protective gear, an array of small, medium and heavy weapons systems, ammunition, armored and infantry fighting vehicles could also be included.

In addition to equipment, FMF may also be used to support training for Taiwanese military forces.

Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, welcomed the FMF being provided to Taiwan.

“These weapons will not only help Taiwan and protect other democracies in the region, but also strengthen the U.S. deterrence posture and ensure our national security from an increasingly aggressive CCP,” he said in a statement, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

—-

Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.

AP · August 30, 2023

4. Pentagon's global train and equip projects plagued by delays, unreliable equipment: GAO

How can we effectively support US national security objectives when we function this way?

Excerpt:

“Specifically, 82 percent of equipment deliveries, 68 percent of training deliveries, 72 percent of services deliveries, and 95 percent of small-scale construction deliveries were delayed,” the office wrote. “Of equipment deliveries that were delayed and later completed during 2018 through 2022, nearly 55 percent were completed at least one year after the estimated delivery date.”

Pentagon's global train and equip projects plagued by delays, unreliable equipment: GAO - Breaking Defense

"The system functioned for approximately three months before becoming inoperative because of factors such as insufficient battery life, damage to ground wiring by local fauna, and sensor failures in extreme temperatures,” the GAO wrote about one $7.6 million project with a partner nation for a ground sensor system.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · August 30, 2023

A U.S. Army advisor assigned to 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade observes a Colombian Army range in Colombia, April 2023. Advisors are employed in the country building interoperability with security force counterparts. (DVIDS)

WASHINGTON — One of the Pentagon’s largest international security cooperation programs is experiencing “persistent issues” meeting delivery timelines, while some projects have altogether “failed” to provide reliable and suitable capabilities, according to a government watchdog office.

Between fiscal 2018 and 2022, the Department of Defense (DoD) allocated $5.6 billion for Section 333 projects that involve the US providing training and equipment to at least 90 partner nations nations to help with everything from counternarcotics operations to border security to simple construction projects, according to a new pair of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports published on Tuesday. From that period, roughly 75 percent of the projects were “delayed when compared to DoD’s projected timeline submitted to Congress.

“Specifically, 82 percent of equipment deliveries, 68 percent of training deliveries, 72 percent of services deliveries, and 95 percent of small-scale construction deliveries were delayed,” the office wrote. “Of equipment deliveries that were delayed and later completed during 2018 through 2022, nearly 55 percent were completed at least one year after the estimated delivery date.”

Delivery timelines aside, GAO set out to analyze projects’ effectiveness and used department records to do a deep dive on six that took place in Colombia, Jordan, Kosovo, Oman and Tajikistan. All six included equipment, while four included training, two involved providing services, and one involved a “small-scale” road paving project. The results were mixed.

“Four of the six projects were successful in improving the partner nations’ capabilities to conduct border security, counterterrorism, and counter-illicit drug trafficking operations,” the GAO wrote. “For example, one evaluation concluded that Humvees provided to a country’s security forces strengthened their capability to traverse difficult terrain and transport equipment and thus to respond to crises and secure the border.”

Another project centered around supporting a helicopter training center, and the GAO found that it did improve an air force training squadron’s ability to conduct flight, aircrew, and maintenance training.

That was the good news. DoD evaluation also found that two of the six Section 333 projects “failed” to improve partner forces’ capabilities because of “unsuitable or unreliable equipment,” the GAO concluded.

One $7.6 million project included providing a partner nation with a ground sensor system for its border forces to use. However, the system was “not well suited” for the environment and “was not reliable.”

“The system functioned for approximately three months before becoming inoperative because of factors such as insufficient battery life, damage to ground wiring by local fauna, and sensor failures in extreme temperatures,” the government watchdog added.

The second failed project of the bunch received $12 million and centered around the US providing a partner nation with what the GAO said were unreliable mobile border security-system trailers.

“From 2019 through 2022, the trailers were operational for a total of approximately three months, according to the evaluation,” the GAO wrote. “The trailers were nonfunctional for extended periods, primarily because of problems with the electrical generators. The evaluation also noted that two of the trailers sustained damage in shipping and required extensive repairs. In addition, partner nation maintenance personnel were unable to independently maintain and repair the trailers.”

In addition to project delays and questions about adequate and working equipment, the office found fundamental flaws with how the DoD and State Department work together and approach Section 333 projects. For example, it cited DoD’s “longstanding gaps” with project planning.

“Most of the Section 333 project proposals GAO reviewed lacked one or more key planning elements critical to project success,” the office wrote. “For example, 42 of 46 proposals did not fully document a plan for project sustainment, an analysis of the partner nation’s absorptive capacity, or measurable objectives.”

The State Department, meanwhile, experienced “inconsistent involvement” with the projects because there isn’t a joint DOD–State planning process and there is insufficient training.

“DOD has not worked with State to define a joint process, including timelines for State’s review, which has hindered State’s ability to contribute expertise,” the GAO wrote. “For example, State officials told GAO there is pressure to concur on projects quickly, without sufficient time for review. As a result, projects may have negative outcomes, such as assistance that cannot be used.”

Both reports — one titled “DoD Should Assess Delivery Delays in Train and Equip Projects and Improve Evaluations”, and the other titled “DoD and State Should Strengthen Planning for Train and Equip Projects” — the GAO provided the Pentagon with eight recommendations and the State Department with two. All 10 recommendations remain open points, but both departments either agree or concur with all suggestions. That list recommendation list includes:

The Secretary of Defense should ensure that the Defense Security Cooperation Agency director works with implementing agencies to identify and analyze reasons for the delivery delays;
DSCA should take steps to improve the quality of Section 333 project evaluations to better align with international best practices;
The Secretary of Defense should work with the Secretary of State to define and document, such as through a memorandum of understanding, a joint process that specifies when and how State should be involved in the planning of Section 333 projects; and more.

5. How Ukraine Can Win a Long War by Mick Ryan

Excerpts:

This kind of Ukraine strategy would let Western governments more rapidly offer Kyiv support, ending the sluggishness that has been one of the war’s biggest issues. “We need speed, speed of decisions to limit Russian potential,” Zelensky said during his 2023 Munich Security Conference address. “There is no alternative to speed. Because it is the speed that life depends on. Delay has always been and still is a mistake.” Western decisions on tanks, air defense systems, and fighter jets have taken many months. But when received, these new systems have been quickly absorbed into Ukrainian organizations and used in an innovative fashion. A new strategy must accept that Ukraine is capable of absorbing advanced weapon systems quickly and, indeed, has much to teach the West about their use.

Offering Kyiv enduring support may not be welcome news to many Western politicians, given the upcoming elections in the United States and some European countries. But over the past 18 months, the Ukrainians have demonstrated a will to fight, the capacity to absorb new weapons, and the ability to learn, adapt, and improve their military effectiveness. The next way to help the Ukrainians continue their evolution in quality and endurance is making sure they know the West is prepared to support them in their fight to defeat Russia and to offer this support in 2024 and beyond.

How Ukraine Can Win a Long War

The West Needs a Strategy for After the Counteroffensive

By Mick Ryan

August 30, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Mick Ryan · August 30, 2023

The war in Ukraine has just passed the 18-month mark. The country’s people, having fought and won three major offensive campaigns in 2022, are now using a mix of old Soviet and new Western equipment to fight a campaign in the south. Although severing the land link between Russia is an important aim, so is liberating the large swaths of land containing agricultural and mineral wealth that provide significant revenue for the Ukrainian government.

The offensive has been, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described it, a slow affair. The sluggish pace should not surprise people who have studied military conflicts and the challenges of offensive operations. But to many observers, ones used to instant gratification (or who want a major resolution before the 2024 U.S. election), the deliberate, steady pace of the Ukrainians can be difficult to appreciate. Some U.S. security officials and policymakers have even suggested that the lack of rapid progress means the counteroffensive will not succeed.

It is, however, much too soon to say which way the conflict will go. By way of comparison, 18 months into World War I, the allies had lost the campaign for Turkey’s eastern peninsula and the Battle of Verdun was still underway. And after the first 18 months of World War II, most of Europe was occupied by the Nazis, Singapore had fallen to Japan, and the United States was fighting on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines.

Comparatively, there is much to be optimistic about in Ukraine’s fight against Russia. But as the grinding attrition on Ukraine’s southern front demonstrates, Kyiv faces many challenges before the entire country can be liberated. Perhaps the greatest one is that the West, although it has provided substantial support, lacks a coherent Ukraine strategy. Given that this war will likely continue into 2024, and potentially even longer, the United States and Europe need to come up with one. They need to figure out how to better harness their physical and intellectual resources to support Ukraine now, over the coming winter, and in the coming years so that Kyiv can achieve a just and durable victory.

To that end, the United States and NATO need to make clear that their explicit goal is for Ukraine to defeat Russia’s forces in Ukraine—and to silence Russia’s global narrative. They then need to provide Ukraine with standardized equipment and enhanced individual and collective training. They need to give Kyiv more mine-clearing equipment and help it develop new tactics to push through Russian defenses. Doing so is the best way of ensuring that Ukraine’s fight for freedom ends with an unambiguous victory.

STATE OF PLAY

The Ukrainian offensives have been underway for just over two months. They began with an initial thrust aimed at rapidly penetrating Russian defensive lines in the south. But unfortunately, this effort faltered against a competent Russian scheme of defense including extensive minefields; the lack of a designated main effort (at least in the minds of anonymous U.S. officials); and according to the military analyst Michael Kofman, shortfalls in the integration of armor, infantry, engineers, and artillery at higher levels.

The challenges created by Russian defenses have received insufficient attention by Ukraine’s supporters. These obstacles should not have been overlooked: the perils of minefields are well known in Western military doctrine. NATO states ought to have provided Ukraine with more mechanized breaching and mine-clearing equipment. Their failure to do so is indicative of the intellectual shortfalls that infect many Western military institutions. Battle is king, and so in many armies, the units that operate the complex equipment required to clear and break through minefields are underfunded. They are underfunded even though breaching is a high-risk undertaking and even though large amounts of equipment are lost in the process (as the Ukrainians have discovered). More engineering equipment of this type could and should have been provided to Ukraine earlier.

This failure is compounded by the fact that the doctrine and training for combined-arms obstacle and minefield clearance are decades old, and the West had limited time to prepare Ukrainian formation-level combined-arms teams—particularly in newly formed brigades. The glories of the 1991 Gulf War, in which a U.S.-led coalition quickly pushed the Iraqi military out of Kuwait, are simply not possible in an environment where friendly air control is absent and the battlefield is covered by a dense mesh of sensors that allow Russians to quickly detect and then hit Ukrainian targets.

It is much too soon to say which way the war in Ukraine will go.

Despite these challenges, the Ukrainians have adapted—one of their institutional strengths—and adopted a gradual “bite and hold” strategy in the south, minimizing casualties while also gradually increasing the pressure on Russian defenses. As a result, the Ukrainians are making progress in the south, liberating multiple important towns. At the same time, the Ukrainian high command is managing multiple other campaigns. In the east, it is undertaking another offensive around the city of Bakhmut. Here, without the extensive Russian defensive positions that exist in the south, the Ukrainians are making headway. And they are no longer fighting Wagner convicts, as they were earlier in the summer. The Russian troops around Bakhmut are higher quality, regular forces, and their attrition will degrade Russia’s future offensive options.

Farther to the north, the Ukrainians are fighting a defensive campaign against a Russian offensive in the province of Luhansk. So far, they are holding their ground. Despite the resources Moscow has allocated to this offensive, the Russians are experiencing no more success here than they did in early 2023. Concurrently, Ukraine is continuing its defensive campaign against Russian air, missile, and drone attacks and conducting an offensive naval campaign with a constantly evolving generation of semisubmersible and stealthy maritime attack drones. And on top of all these physical campaigns, Ukraine is carrying out strategic influence operations, which include its global diplomacy efforts—such as Zelensky’s short trips to foreign nations. Ukraine’s operations also include long-range drone strikes into Russia, which are designed to degrade Russians’ will to fight.

It is difficult to objectively measure Ukraine’s progress because only a few of the most senior Ukrainian military and civilian leaders know the actual strategic and operational objectives for the country’s offensives. But for outsiders viewing the war, the country’s progress might be measured in ground taken, Russian forces destroyed, progress toward placing Russian forces in Crimea at peril, and the extent to which Ukraine has persuaded Western governments it is succeeding. After two months, it might be stated that each of these goals is “in progress.”

THE UKRAINIAN WAY OF WAR

Ukraine’s complex and interrelated series of campaigns would tax even the largest and most sophisticated Western military institutions. For Kyiv, the ability to orchestrate these strategic, operational, and tactical challenges has been normalized over the past 18 months. In improving how they coordinate various levels of war across multiple campaigns under modern conditions without clear air, naval, or firepower superiority, the Ukrainians have blended NATO and Soviet-era weapons and doctrine. In doing so, the Ukrainians have developed their own distinct approach to modern war.

This evolving Ukrainian way of war is worthy of study because most Western military institutions probably resemble the Ukrainian military more than they do the U.S. armed forces, whose doctrine they all inevitably copy. And a central part of the Ukrainian way of war is the ability to learn, absorb new equipment and ideas, and adapt tactics and strategy.

But even the most adaptive institutions have a limit to their ability to absorb new ideas and technologies. The building, sustaining, and evolving of a highly capable military organization—especially one with many new formations—can take months or years. As Aimée Fox-Godden observed in Learning to Fight, a study of the massive institutional learning and adaptation that occurred within the British Army between 1914 and 1918, the United Kingdom was able to gradually improve its performance thanks to “a combination of its pre-war ethos and increased fluidity in wartime” that created “organizational and cultural flexibility, promoting informal learning and encouraging individuals to innovate.”

The West must accept, as the British did in World War I, that it will take time to carry out the recruit training, technical training, leadership development, and collective training needed to make a military organization like Ukraine’s into a large, integrated, and durable force capable of major offensive maneuvers under its own umbrella of air control and mastery of electronic warfare.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Both the Ukrainians and the Russians possess the resources and the will for an extended war. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in particular, has sustained his narrative that NATO poses a threat to Russia. He continues to advance the deluded notion of a greater Russia. On August 2, for example, he gave a speech promoting “the integration of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions into the common Russian cultural space.”

The West must therefore accept that this will be a long war. Many generations have flirted with the notion that wars between large, populous, and technologically savvy states can be short. At the time each began, for example, analysts argued that World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Iraq war would be brief, only to be proved incorrect. The same will be true with today’s conflict. It will take time to continue enhancing Ukraine’s ground, air, naval, cyber, industrial, and information capabilities so the country can prevail over Russia. Although the Russians have made many strategic and tactical errors in this war, they have also learned and adapted. As Oleksandr Syrsky—the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces—put it, the Russians “are not idiots.” Kyiv will need many months to defeat and eject them from the approximately 18 percent of Ukraine they illegally occupy.

The West is now engaged in a generational struggle against big, ruthless, and wealthy authoritarian regimes. In accepting that this will be a long war, the West should make explicit that its goal is a Ukrainian victory achieved through a Russian defeat. By committing to support Ukraine for the duration of the conflict, the West can undermine Putin’s efforts to outlast Ukraine’s patrons. This commitment also provides certainty to donor countries, which can scale up production and engage in necessary research and development for counter-drone and counter-mine endeavors.

It is difficult to objectively measure Ukraine’s progress.

Another element of Western strategy is identifying the key operational and institutional problems requiring support. The United States may need to accept that its doctrine for highly complex air-land warfare is not fully suited to Ukraine. This fact does not mean that combined-arms warfare is not effective. But NATO needs to lead a rapid reevaluation of its doctrine now to develop the tactics and doctrine of combined arms on a shoestring. That means, collectively, that the states of the West have to find a way to conduct ground combat in an environment where they will be subject to frequent air attacks—something they have not had to do in generations, but that Ukraine must do now.

Such a review must incorporate the effects of the new-era meshed network of civilian and military sensors that is making the Ukrainian counteroffensives some of the most important and deadly battles in the modern age. The proliferation of drones, connected to modern digitized battle-command networks, allows for both militaries to rapidly identify and target each other’s forces. Current Western doctrine has not adequately adapted to this new environment. Doctrine is the foundation for the training and education of all soldiers, sailors, marines, and aviators. If this intellectual component of a country’s military is deficient, the overall combat potential of that force is compromised. And although Ukraine is pioneering its own approach to war, it still depends on Western doctrine for many of its operations.

This failing in Western military doctrine is therefore perhaps best exemplified by Ukraine’s current struggle to penetrate Russian minefields in the south. Dense obstacle belts, including minefields, are hardly a new development. But if this defensive scheme is overlaid with meshed civil-military sensors, assessments, and fires, it makes breaching these belts an order of magnitude more difficult. The technologies and tactics of such breaches have not changed in nearly half a century. A new-age Manhattan Project designed to discover new ways to rapidly detect and clear mines would help Ukrainian offensives down the line. It would also assist in clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from vast swaths of liberated Ukrainian territory.

The Russians have learned and adapted.

A new Western strategy could also promote the standardization of equipment and training support for Ukraine. The menagerie of armored vehicles and artillery provided to Ukraine has been generous, but it is not sustainable. There is a reason why armies generally have one type of tank or one kind of artillery for each need. The training and logistical burden of holding multiple types of similar systems would be large for a peacetime military. It will become unbearable for Ukraine over time. A more strategic approach to support Ukraine would provide standardized equipment sets for the country’s army.

At the same time, the training of personnel needs to shift beyond training recruits and offering technical instruction on how to use equipment. Collective training is a vital aspect of building effective military institutions, and it is an area where the West should provide additional support. The development of company, battalion, and brigade leaders and command teams will, over time, give Ukraine the basis of an army that can orchestrate major operations and campaigns across time and space. Informed by Ukrainian battlefield experience and evolved NATO doctrine, collective training would provide Ukraine with a crucial advantage over its Russian adversary.

This kind of Ukraine strategy would let Western governments more rapidly offer Kyiv support, ending the sluggishness that has been one of the war’s biggest issues. “We need speed, speed of decisions to limit Russian potential,” Zelensky said during his 2023 Munich Security Conference address. “There is no alternative to speed. Because it is the speed that life depends on. Delay has always been and still is a mistake.” Western decisions on tanks, air defense systems, and fighter jets have taken many months. But when received, these new systems have been quickly absorbed into Ukrainian organizations and used in an innovative fashion. A new strategy must accept that Ukraine is capable of absorbing advanced weapon systems quickly and, indeed, has much to teach the West about their use.

Offering Kyiv enduring support may not be welcome news to many Western politicians, given the upcoming elections in the United States and some European countries. But over the past 18 months, the Ukrainians have demonstrated a will to fight, the capacity to absorb new weapons, and the ability to learn, adapt, and improve their military effectiveness. The next way to help the Ukrainians continue their evolution in quality and endurance is making sure they know the West is prepared to support them in their fight to defeat Russia and to offer this support in 2024 and beyond.

MICK RYAN is a military strategist, retired Australian Army major general, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Foreign Affairs · by Mick Ryan · August 30, 2023

6. The time is right to honor the Vietnam War’s most secret warriors by Paris D. Davis

MACV-SOG is one of the greatest special operations units ever developed (after the OSS).

The time is right to honor the Vietnam War’s most secret warriors

navytimes.com · by Col. Paris Davis · August 30, 2023

The nation is commemorating the 50th anniversary of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam through Veterans Day 2025, per presidential decree. But we cannot allow any lingering ambivalence on the legacy of the war — or anything else — to further delay honoring the extraordinary contributions of our most covert warriors of that era.

When I recently received the Medal of Honor for the 19-hour battle my Army Special Forces unit fought in Bong Son, Vietnam in 1965, President Joe Biden said, “It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

Indeed, we are well past time to do what’s right, and finally honor the elite U.S Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group, or MACV-SOG, with a Congressional Gold Medal.

Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group, or MACV-SOG, veterans and Vietnamese Montgard pose together during MACV-SOG heritage week, Fort Bragg N.C., Nov. 10, 2021. (Sgt. Gavin J. Lewis/Army)

This revolutionary, top-secret group operated in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1964 to 1972. Its members fought deep within enemy territory to gather invaluable intelligence for the highest levels of government, including the White House. Their tasks included strategic reconnaissance, sabotage, direct-action raids, psychological operations, deception operations, and rescue missions. The group targeted the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a crucial enemy supply line for the North Vietnamese enemy. Aerial reconnaissance was challenging, making the intelligence provided by SOG teams on the ground invaluable.

Casualty rates for SOG reconnaissance teams exceeded 100%, meaning every man was wounded at least once and approximately half were killed. Of the 1,579 Americans missing in action from the Vietnam War, 50 are from the group. At least 11 SOG teams, perhaps more, simply vanished.

The covert operations of SOG remained unacknowledged by military leadership until partial declassification began in the 1990s. Members of the unit had signed confidentiality agreements and their wartime activities remained mostly secret for decades. As SOG member John Stryker Meyer wrote in his book, Across the Fence: The Secret War in Vietnam, “If I died, no one would tell my mother the truth.”

The Congressional Gold Medal for MACV-SOG would help the American public better understand the members’ extraordinary service, sacrifices, and contributions to our nation. The men of this unit battled not only the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, but also the harsh terrain, debilitating climate, and the chaos and uncertainty of guerilla warfare. They served with valor, often in situations where survival was the only measure of success. Let’s face it: The nation can handle the truth of their service.

Perhaps more importantly, a Congressional Gold Medal would provide more robust public acknowledgment to the SOG families who lost loved ones during the war. We should shed more light on the pivotal roles these soldiers played in our military history. Recognition of their service may also bring some healing and closure to them and their families.

There’s also work to be done for living SOG members, too. From what I have observed at Veterans Administration medical facilities and anecdotally, too many of the SOG veterans still suffer from post-traumatic stress and other issues.

From a military history perspective, SOG significantly influenced the evolution of our military forces. As the origin of today’s Joint Special Operations Command task forces, every special operations unit today studies SOG history. Their innovative tactics, techniques, and equipment continue to influence and set the standard for our special operations forces. In 2019, the Army Special Operations Command History Office noted that SOG “blazed a trail” in the war against transnational terrorism.

In their time, of course, the Vietnam War-era special operators took ultimate risks and often overcame incredible danger — too often without obvious or adequate support. For that, this group of heroes has more than earned our gratitude and recognition. The Congressional Gold Medal, as the highest expression of national appreciation for distinguished achievements and contributions by individuals or institutions, would honor about 2,000 SOG personnel who came from the Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, Force Reconnaissance, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

This past year, people have occasionally asked me if I was embittered by the 57-year delay in the award of the Medal of Honor. Generally, I was not, I said, because, in the end, we saw the best of America at work. For decades, friends within the military, my family, and from elsewhere around the nation kept alive the story of A-team, A-321 at Bong Son. I still think often of those fateful 19 hours on June 18, 1965, and what our team did to ensure we left no man behind on that battlefield.

I feel the same way about those who served in MACV-SOG: We cannot leave them behind in our nation’s history. For that reason, many of us are walking the halls of Congress to build support for the draft legislation to support awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to MACV-SOG. Please urge your representatives in Congress to support the legislation and ensure their legacy of these soldiers’ extraordinary service will endure.

Paris D. Davis, a retired U.S. Army colonel, was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Joe Biden on March 3, 2023.

7. Beyond Joint: The Need for an Interests-Centric Approach to Integrated Campaigning

This is a key point: "building budgets for deterrence does not yield the funds or systems needed for campaigning."

We sure could use a new and revised PDD-56.

Excerpts:

Finally, any legislative reform must recognize that building budgets for deterrence does not yield the funds or systems needed for campaigning. Campaigning needs a separate appropriation, coordinating the wide variety of funding streams currently in use. Counter-narcotics trafficking funding, foreign military sales and financing, and development aid are all examples of the panoply of funding streams that weave together when campaigning. Yet, while these funding streams are often used towards the same strategic ends, their appropriation sponsors are disparate. Further, the sponsoring departments often see these funds as secondary to their primary missions of diplomacy, defense, or law enforcement. Creating a single umbrella appropriation and, more importantly, bringing these streams together under the oversight of a single appropriations sub-committee could vastly improve coordination and orchestration.

When General Dempsey pondered what comes after jointness, he was trying to see over the horizon towards our next era of struggle. That era has come. From the levée en masse to mechanized warfare and the advent of the networked world, social and technological revolutions have underpinned the great conflicts of the past. Another such inflection point looms. Gray-zone warfare, the blurring line between war and peace, and the boundary-erasing zeitgeist of social media all point to a rapidly changing security environment. The joint force must not wait to be dragged into the future, but rather act as the vanguard of change. Recognizing the paradox that increased deterrence can result in decreased security will be key. The U.S. cannot survive without the underlying doctrine and forces that ensure deterrence. But, in an era of persistent, unrestricted competition, deterrence will not be enough. Victory in the next era of competition will not come to the side with the most imposing forces, but to the nation best able to gather partners and allies motivated not by the shared threat of a common adversary, but on the alignment of mutual interest.

Beyond Joint: The Need for an Interests-Centric Approach to Integrated Campaigning

Lawrence M. Doane August 30, 2023

thestrategybridge.org · August 30, 2023

Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked civilian and military students around the world to participate in our seventh annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy.

Now, we are pleased to present one of the Third Place winners from Lawrence Doane, a recent graduate of the National War College.

“What’s after Joint?”

—General Martin Dempsey

In 2018, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs released the Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning (JCIC). Three years in the making, this document outlined a paradigm for use of the military, particularly below the threshold of armed conflict, to address broader national security objectives. Heavily influenced by H.R. McMaster’s work at the Army Capabilities and Integration Center, the Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning was principally inspired by the rise of so-called gray-zone challenges and the need to develop a military framework to meet adversary actions below the threshold of war.[1] The authors of the Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning also sought to close the perceived gap between America’s military successes on the battlefield and more lasting, strategic success. The solution proposed was a deviation from the rigid, structured tools of operational planning and the adoption of an approach capable of countering more opportunistic, fluid adversaries. A year later, Joint Doctrine Note 1-19 expanded upon the Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning and underscored the importance of viewing competition as a continuum of degrees of conflict, ranging from cooperative relations to outright combat. Most recently, the Joint Concept for Competing (JCC) was signed in February 2023, cementing a call for an expansion of the Joint Force’s mindset to encompass all aspects of competition into the foundation of future doctrine. Each of these documents seek a departure from a binary formulation of being at war or peace and to shift thinking to a more amorphous view of competition.

General Martin E. Dempsey as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (DoD Photo)

Yet, while this new emphasis on campaigning rather than campaigns, and continuous competition instead of finite operations, is a helpful step forward, it is not enough. U.S. doctrine, to include the new Joint Concept for Competition, are overly focused on adversaries—nations against whom U.S. policymakers can envisage using force. However, for the U.S. and its military to truly compete in all arenas short of war, it must recognize that integrated campaigning requires not just a different mindset and toolkit, but an entirely new perspective. When considering campaigning, the adversary focused, force-centric approach embedded in operational planning must take a back seat and make room for an interest-focused, alignment-centric approach to take hold.

An Innovation Inflection Point

Warfare, and its planning, is inherently conservative. The deadly consequences of error in the conception and execution of war tends to breed caution in its practitioners. Innovation and adaptation in both the theory and practice of war is uneven, often requiring jolts from outside forces or events to dislodge the orthodoxy.[2] Yet, when the conditions demand, vast doctrinal and theoretical shifts are possible. The development of operational art, adoption of the idea of a deep battle, and the concept of targeting an enemy as a system of systems all grew out of a period of shifting military technology and political demands.[3] While still controversial in some circles, the departure from a linear battlefield, defined by engagements along a frontline, to a conception of a deep battlefield with interlinked actions across distance and time drove much of the American military’s change in the 1980s. Concurrently, development of weapons such as the Army’s Big 5 or precision strike weapons for the Navy and Air Force made implementing the theory of deep battle or effects-based targeting possible.[4] Politically, the Goldwater-Nichols act drove doctrinal and policy reforms necessary to harness these new systems. In many ways, this process culminated in the sweeping victory of Operation Desert Storm. While some have seen Desert Storm as the opening war in a new era of history, it may be more useful to see it as the final battle in America’s last great period of military innovation.

The limits of the last innovative era are approaching. Evolutionary changes in the reach and precision of weapons continue, but more revolutionary changes in the way nations compete strain the current system’s ability to keep up. While operational art was developed to meet the increased physical reach and power of military formations, the very success of that formulation drove opponents to consider new ways of warfare.[5] While the idea of competition below the threshold of armed conflict is not new, the emergence of the so-called gray zone as a pivotal battlefield harkens back to the emergence of the deep battlefield’s rise in the development of operational art. Instead of new military hardware, it is the rise of social media, cyber warfare, and the blurring of combatants through the use of unmanned or unacknowledged forces that characterizes much of gray-zone warfare. Operational art’s development acknowledged the shift in international struggle from a linear, border-focused battle to a much larger battlefield, characterized by deep strikes and attacks on an enemy’s systems of command and control. Today’s challenge expands that struggle beyond even the confines of traditional warfare or even declared hostilities to encompass tactics such as information strikes against an opponent’s very culture and attacks on a nation’s cognition.[6]

Meeting the challenge of the gray zone and great power competition will require a return to innovation. Some of this work has already begun under the guise of integrated deterrence, but there is still far to go. As in the last great period of innovation, a wholesale reexamination of America’s way of war is needed. The culmination of the 1990s was the embrace of jointness, but the joint force, and the entire national security enterprise, must now lift its eyes to the horizon. The field of competition has expanded beyond where current conceptions of force can win the day. To meet these new challenges, America must embrace the challenge of a new innovative era, find what lies beyond Joint, and, most importantly, craft the tools we will need to get there.

Adversary-Focused, Force-Centric vs. Interest-Focused, Alignment-Centric

An adversary-focused, force-centric approach is vital to proper operational planning. It is impossible to develop a plan to defend Korea, for example, or restore access to the Persian Gulf without a clear focus on the likely adversary. This type of thinking is fundamental to good operational design, military campaign planning, and, to some extent, force design and budgetary formulation. This type of thinking generates a myriad of operational plans, base estimates, and other documents that detail how the United States will prepare for and fight its adversaries. While the nation has found long-term strategic gains elusive, the force-centric approach has proved remarkably effective at fielding a military that has dominated battlefields since the 1990s. As such, adversary focus and centrality of force are correctly at the core of joint planning and underpin much of the work at both the Defense Department and within the combatant commands.

Yet, an adversarial focus has its limits. When considering improving America’s overall security, a force-centric, deterrence-focused model may paradoxically reduce American security. The Clausewitzian conceptualization of warfare as a violent struggle between opposing parties is a valuable tool for understanding war, and by extension, the deterrence of war. The Clausewitzian analogy of a wrestling match provides the proper logical framework for force-centrism, placing primacy on gaining positional, temporal, or material advantage to win a fight, or, in the case of deterrence, showing an opponent they could either never win or only win at an unacceptable cost. Yet, this formulation reduces any third parties to either permanently uninvolved, irrelevant observers or participants eventually subsumed into one side of the equation of the other. While this may be a generally accurate view during armed conflict, applying this force-centric lens to relationships outside of open warfare may preclude a more nuanced approach.

In contrast, an interest-focused approach considers particular issues as problems to be solved. Rather than a wrestling match, the interest-based approach sees all parties as facing a problem together, such as disputed boundary lines in the South China Sea.[7] This is not to say that an interest-based approach equates to a cooperative approach. Some parties, antagonists, will be opposed to the preferred outcome of the United States. Other nations, protagonists, will be in support of the preferred outcome, but still may differ in approach or levels of interest. Interestingly, countries normally thought of as either allies or adversaries may be either protagonists or antagonists to a U.S. position, depending on the issue. The two statuses are not intrinsically linked.

Unlike the force-centric approach, using an interest-based model leads to an alignment-centric approach. The binary dichotomy of the wrestling match, so central to the effective use of force, gives way to a game of many players. In this multi-party game, the U.S. goal is to shift the environment to increasingly align other nation’s interests with the U.S. position. While force, or the threat of force, may play a role, the importance of a wider variety of techniques takes hold. Ultimately, the key to the interest-based model is acceptance that the United States and its security interests are not at the center of other nations’ decision making. Where the adversary-focused model distills struggles down to an “us vs. them” formulation, the interest-based approach leaves room to acknowledge and shape the varied interests of each party on their own merits, rather than as an eventual counterweight to deter a potentially shared adversary.

It is on this front that the Joint Concept for Competing may be most in need of improvement. The Joint Concept for Competing explicitly states that its precepts apply only to competition with nations that are potentially hostile and against whom the use of force may be envisaged, parties defined as adversaries in Joint Doctrine.[8] Yet, competition is not a binary state, nor limited to just two-party contests. Nations compete with each other in nearly all they do, from establishing trade agreements to setting immigration policy. Constraining the military’s mindset to considering only adversarial relationships in relation to competition is unhelpful and antithetical to the concept of integrated campaigning. When facing the need to either use or deter the use of force, the joint force must rightly adopt the adversary-centric approach. But, if integrated campaigning, which is to say the integration of the military instrument alongside all others, is to succeed, it must do so from an interest-centric perspective.

The Tools of Force vs. The Tools of Interest

As previously noted, when facing conflict, adversary-centrism works. While varying approaches are available, from center-of-gravity tactics to the never-ending search for the decisive point, an adversary-centered mindset is the foundational intellectual framework behind military success on the battlefield. At its core, adversary-centrism hones tactical logic, or the logic one uses to develop plans that gain decisive positional, material, or temporal advantage for the use of force on an enemy.

It is important to note that the term tactical, often used somewhat pejoratively in certain circles, does not imply a lower or less difficult form of intellectual endeavor. The use of tactical logic at the theater scale, such as War Plan Orange or Desert Storm, requires massive skill and military genius. Indeed, some have referred to the practice used to develop plans at this scale with terms such as military strategy or operations to delineate them from “simple tactics.”[9] Clearly, the practice of tactical logic at the theater or global scale is the province of only the most experienced, educated practitioners. While orders of magnitude more difficult and broader in scale than small unit tactics, however, the core logic behind these massive operations is not different. Each plan, fundamentally, sought to defeat an adversary through gaining positional, material, or temporal advantage.

Images from War Plan Orange (Miller)

Even at timescales that stretch decades, as envisioned by the adversarial competitions described in the Joint Concept for Competing, tactical logic may still be employed. Fundamentally, the Joint Concept for Competing describes strategic competition as a quest for competitive advantage. This advantage is framed through the net assessment of each party’s strengths and weaknesses with a goal to exploit or protect associated vulnerabilities.[10] Many geographic combatant commanders have come to see the competition phase as “setting the theater,” or seeking advantage for the eventual execution of an operational war plan. While at a generational timescale and operating below the threshold of armed conflict, strategic competition as envisioned by the Joint Concept for Competing is still threat-centric and uses tactical logic to understand its goals.

This tactical logic informs nearly all that the Department of Defense does. The adversary-centric model generates the operational plans that defend the nation, the raison d’etre of the combatant commanders. In turn, these plans also inform the force design and allocation process, each built upon mitigating the risk between budget allocations and the requirements derived from operational plans. The entire joint planning process is built with tools based on tactical logic, designed to deliver the needed advantages for the successful defeat or deterrence of an adversary. While defense cooperation, theater security plans, and campaign plans at both the theater and global level exist, they are still constructed with the end goal gaining competitive advantage to set the theater in preparation for the execution of an operational plan. Partners and allies are a means to an end.

By contrast, the interest-centric approach does not seek to directly achieve advantage over an adversary. Rather, this approach seeks to align interests with other nations where possible and, over time, to apply national power to create a situation where an increasing number of interests coincide. The core assumption of this approach is the more nations share interests, the more secure each will be. Fundamentally, countries with aligned interests do not tend to go to war with each other and are more likely to support each other’s perspective in international disputes.[11] Developing these relationships requires strategic logic, or the logic one uses to shape an environment through the application and arrangement of instruments of power. It is often characterized by indirect methods, rather than direct engagements. While the ends-ways-means paradigm is the most familiar expression of this framework, it is not the sole formulation.[12] What is fundamental is that strategic logic weaves together all instruments, to include the military, towards a realignment of interests.

An interests-based approach shifts the United States from an unrelenting focus on an adversary to viewing country and regional campaigns on their own terms. This has a two-fold benefit. The first is that such an approach will inevitably engender greater cooperation from other nations, even potentially hostile ones. While gains will be meager to non-existent for the most intransigent states, an interest-based approach, rather than a focus on a great power adversary, provides room for fence-sitting countries to find areas of potential cooperation. By not framing relationships through the sole lens of deterrence and threats, traditionally non-aligned nations such as Indonesia or most of Africa may be more open to areas of cooperation. Even staunch U.S. partners, like Singapore, blanch when the United States publicly trumpets combined military operations in deterrence of China.[13] The United States already uses this interest-based approach in much of its statecraft, particularly in the diplomatic and economic realm. To achieve integrated campaigns, the military must be able to do the same.

Beyond Joint is Integrated

Achieving integrated deterrence will require a period of innovation echoing the development of purported revolution in military affairs of the 1980s and 1990s. As then, a three-pronged approach is needed. The development of capabilities to meet gray-zone threats is already underway. The term harnessing, rather than development, may be more appropriate as the rapid rise of cyber and information tools, social media platforms, and unmanned systems is driven more by private sector advancements than those identified by military requirements. Indeed, the tools most powerful in the gray zone may not be traditional military capabilities at all.

Alongside new capabilities must come the doctrine and theory behind their use. As this paper has detailed, the most fundamental challenge facing national security leaders is finding a way to both maintain deterrence and overmatch against adversaries while ensuring other nations are not pushed into zero-sum “us vs. them” games. While the Department of Defense has made strides in recognizing the need to compete below the threshold of armed conflict and integrate itself into a whole-of-government approach, this is incomplete. Integration is not possible without adopting a new set of intellectual tools and frameworks. The Department of Defense’s challenge is finding a way to balance warfighting and deterrence-based doctrine with a new doctrine of interest alignment. The cornerstone of the Department is its already established potent and effective warfighting capability. The logic and toolset that creates this capability must be preserved. Yet, the Department must prove it can walk and chew gum at the same time and develop an alternative set of concepts. These concepts aligned along strategic logic, interest alignment, and long-term shifts in cooperation and competition must be additive to the Department’s existing capabilities.

This imperative to expand beyond the adversary-centric point of view is driven by budgets as much as by logic. In 2019, the U.S. government spent 900 billion dollars on the national security enterprise.[14] Of those funds, more than 80% was directly appropriated to the Department of Defense. Yet, Department leadership and planning cadre have fought to narrowly define their role as threat-based and military oriented. As previously discussed, this is a necessary stance to create deterrence, but should budgets continue to be highly skewed towards the “M” of DIME (Diplomacy-Information-Military-Economy), the Department of Defense will have to either expand its thinking to encompass an interest-based approach or continue to be an anchor on the way of thinking in the national security enterprise.

Finally, and perhaps most difficult, integration will require structural reform beyond the Department of Defense. Where Goldwater-Nichols ushered in an era of jointness and its myriad benefits, a new Goldwater-Nichols will be needed to create the era of integration and the harnessing of all of government to pursue national security and prosperity in this age. The details of such an act are far beyond the scope of this paper, or the skill of its author, but the broad outlines of reform are clear.

Interagency experience, both within the Department of Defense and other U.S. government and other entities, must become statutorily valued in the same way that joint experience is. Senior leaders, be they ambassadors, undersecretaries, or flag officers must come to the table with the network, experience, and tools to build unity of effort across the U.S. government. While many senior personnel already have these skills, formalizing this requirement will encourage more junior officers and officials to seek out and engage with interagency partners earlier in their careers. Organizations will also be pressed to find opportunities and resources to provide the most promising talent as they prepare them for future service. Congressional requirements, and resources, for this endeavor will be vital.

Alongside experience, a form of the joint professional military education model should be propagated across the national security enterprise. While all joint professional military education institutions have requirements for a varying number of interagency attendees, the institutions are still largely owned by the military. Beyond the mission of educating middle- to senior-grade officials, these institutions, and their envisioned interagency counterparts, should also be charged with researching innovative ways to apply their particular instrument of power to national security problems. Expansion of this culture of life-long learning, and placing the resourcing and funding behind it, will provide the foundation for creating integration, much as the original Goldwater-Nichols reforms in professional military education laid the groundwork for jointness.

Finally, any legislative reform must recognize that building budgets for deterrence does not yield the funds or systems needed for campaigning. Campaigning needs a separate appropriation, coordinating the wide variety of funding streams currently in use. Counter-narcotics trafficking funding, foreign military sales and financing, and development aid are all examples of the panoply of funding streams that weave together when campaigning. Yet, while these funding streams are often used towards the same strategic ends, their appropriation sponsors are disparate. Further, the sponsoring departments often see these funds as secondary to their primary missions of diplomacy, defense, or law enforcement. Creating a single umbrella appropriation and, more importantly, bringing these streams together under the oversight of a single appropriations sub-committee could vastly improve coordination and orchestration.

When General Dempsey pondered what comes after jointness, he was trying to see over the horizon towards our next era of struggle. That era has come. From the levée en masse to mechanized warfare and the advent of the networked world, social and technological revolutions have underpinned the great conflicts of the past. Another such inflection point looms. Gray-zone warfare, the blurring line between war and peace, and the boundary-erasing zeitgeist of social media all point to a rapidly changing security environment. The joint force must not wait to be dragged into the future, but rather act as the vanguard of change. Recognizing the paradox that increased deterrence can result in decreased security will be key. The U.S. cannot survive without the underlying doctrine and forces that ensure deterrence. But, in an era of persistent, unrestricted competition, deterrence will not be enough. Victory in the next era of competition will not come to the side with the most imposing forces, but to the nation best able to gather partners and allies motivated not by the shared threat of a common adversary, but on the alignment of mutual interest.

Larry Doane is a U.S. Army National Guard officer currently serving as the National Guard Bureau Current Operations Division Chief. His assignments include operational tours as a platoon leader in Iraq , cavalry troop commander in Afghanistan, and ground force commander in the Horn of Africa. He holds a Master's degree in Legislative Affairs from George Washington University and is a distinguished graduate of both the National War College and the Marine Corps Command and Staff College. These views are strictly his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

The Strategy Bridge is read, respected, and referenced across the worldwide national security community—in conversation, education, and professional and academic discourse.

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Header Image: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, The Pentagon, Virginia, 2022 (Chad McNeeley).

Notes:

[1] Phillip Lohaus, “A New Blueprint for Competing Below the Threshold of War: The Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning,” War on the Rocks, May 23, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/05/a-new-blueprint-for-competing-below-the-threshold-the-joint-concept-for-integrated-campaigning/

[2] For a broader treatment of this topic, consider Williamson Murray Military Adaptation in War: With Fear of Change, Murray and Millet’s Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, or more recently, David Barno and Nora Bensahel’s Adaptation under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime.

[3] Wilson C. Blythe, “History of Operational Art,”, Military Review, November-December 2018, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/November-December-2018/Blythe-Operational-Art/

[4] The “Big 5” traditionally refer to the Abrams Main Battle Tank, Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Apache Attack Helicopter, Blackhawk Utility Helicopter, and the Patriot Air Defense System. Collectively, these systems were the expression of the Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine.

[5] An excellent overview of these developments is Seth G. Jones, Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare, (Washington: WW Norton & Company, 2021).

[6] Russia’s use of information warfare is emblematic of this approach. Elina Treyger, Joe Cheravitch, Raphael S. Cohen, “Russian Disinformation Efforts on Social Media,” RAND Corporation Combating Foreign Disinformation on Social Media Series, November 13, 2019, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR4373z2.html.

[7] The interests-based approach is not new to the field of negotiation. Consider William Ury and Roger Fisher, Getting to Yes: Negotiation Agreement Without Giving In, (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2011).

[8] Department of Defense, “Joint Concept for Competing,” February, 2023, p. 64.

[9] Dale C. Eikmeier, “Operational Art and the Operational Level of War, are they Synonymous? Well It Depends,” Small Wars Journal, September 9, 2015, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/operational-art-and-the-operational-level-of-war-are-they-synonymous-well-it-depends.

[10] Joint Concept for Competing, p.10-11.

[11] Consider evidence that trade networks, rather than military alliances, may be more effective at preventing interstate war. See Matthew O. Jackson, “Networks of military alliances, wars, and international trade,” National Academy of Sciences Inaugural Papers, December 14, 2015, https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1520970112

[12] It may not even be the best formulation. Consider the argument for a theory of success focused model in JW Meiser, “Ends+Ways+Means = (Bad)Strategy,” Parameters, Winter 2016, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3000&context=parameters

[13] Bhavan Jaipragas, “A US Navy First Fleet in the Indian Ocean, based out of Singapore? Not Likely, analysts say,” South China Morning Post, November 18, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3110406/us-navy-first-fleet-indian-ocean-based-out-singapore-not-likely.

[14] This rough estimate excludes funds appropriated for the Veterans Affairs Administration or defense related debt interest. Mandy Smithberger and William Hartung, “Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget,” Project on Government Oversight, May 7, 2019, https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/05/making-sense-of-the-1-25-trillion-national-security-state-budget.

thestrategybridge.org · August 30, 2023

8. 'Largest conundrum of them all': Air Force still unsure how to keep forces supplied in Indo-Pacific

Logistics wins wars. Not only must we be able to out fight our enemies, to be successful we must out produce and "out-logistics" them.

'Largest conundrum of them all': Air Force still unsure how to keep forces supplied in Indo-Pacific - Breaking Defense

breakingdefense.com · by Michael Marrow · August 30, 2023

Crew chiefs from the 317th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas wait for take-off Mar. 12, 2018 at Little Rock Air Force Base, Ark. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Dana J. Cable)

WASHINGTON — The challenge of resupplying forces across vast distances in the Indo-Pacific in the event of a fight is still vexing the Pentagon, with a key Air Force logistician saying that though there are several options to solve the problem, officials aren’t sure what path might be best.

“That is probably the largest conundrum of them all as we look at this problem set,” Air Force Col. James Hartle said Tuesday when discussing how to resupply troops in the Indo-Pacific during a virtual discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “I don’t think we have a good answer yet.”

Figuring out how to keep supplies flowing in the Indo-Pacific will be a key task for planners seeking to head off a potential conflict with China over an invasion of Taiwan. Unlike Ukraine, which is sandwiched between NATO supply hubs, the island of Taiwan poses a different problem altogether, with wargame analysis showing that resupplying troops could be a leading issue for both US- and Chinese-aligned forces.

Anticipating that stacking too many airmen or supplies in one location could cripple operations if it’s attacked, the Air Force is spreading out its Indo-Pacific forces through its Agile Combat Employment (ACE) concept. The number of bases it could use is also set to increase as a result, with Brig Gen. Mike Zuhlsdorf stating during the Mitchell Institute event that the number “will grow in increments that are visible through time, across probably two or three FYDPs [future year defense plans] as we work through that.”

Zuhlsdorf, Air Force deputy chief of staff for logistics, engineering and force protection, didn’t share exactly how many bases that would be but said that the final number depends on funding.

But Hartle, also a senior member of the service’s logistics staff, made clear Tuesday that officials have “a lot of options” and are still “working through that problem.” He noted that one solution seems to be gaining “traction” among planners: Instead of waiting for supplies to be requested, officials could “automatically” ship out certain materials that are likely to be in need. The arrangement, he said, would be similar to a subscription service that regularly sends new items every month.

“Let’s push the things that the data tells us that those forward units will probably be using, not [wait] for the airmen to write the order, submit it in the computer and then ask for a required delivery date,” he said. “We just know we’re going to push a lot of that forward. I think that is a good way to get after the first opening stages of that.”

Package ETA

Still, even if they’re ordered ahead of time, officials might have a hard time keeping tabs on those supplies when they’re in transit, a US Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) official warned on Monday.

Speaking during a panel at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies for Defense conference in Washington, TRANSCOM Deputy Commander Army Lt. Gen. John Sullivan said that officials at TRANSCOM are wedded to decades-old technology to track supplies in real time, a capability known as “in-transit visibility.” And following what Sullivan called a “somewhat underwhelming” industry day in April, more work to improve the command’s tracking tech is needed.

“We want to avail ourselves of the technologies out there to help us improve in-transit visibility. We’re not where we need to be right now,” he said.

Being able to accurately track supplies in real time is a critical component of command and control, Sullivan noted, who emphasized that it would be “imprudent if not foolish” for planners to expect that recent decades of uncontested logistics operations would continue for future conflict.

“We see this as a challenge. We also see this as an opportunity. And we’re very much focused on this going forward,” he said.

breakingdefense.com · by Michael Marrow · August 30, 2023

9. Policy Paper: Afghan Allies Out of War

Access the 37 page paper at this link: https://www.trustafterbetrayal.org/_files/ugd/2fd284_0db45d62871d4f49a5cc64413d911ed5.pdf

Policy Paper: Afghan Allies Out of War

Addressing the Needs of the Afghan Special Forces Community

and their Families in the United States

Author(s): Dr Erin McFee, Connor Christensen, Luke Magyar

Published: August 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59498/34295

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Policy Paper:

Addressing the Needs of the Afghan Special Forces Community

and their Families in the United States

Author(s): Dr Erin McFee, Connor Christensen, Luke Magyar

Published: August 2023

Afghan Allies Out of War

View Pdf

This policy paper examines the challenges faced by ex-Afghan National Army Special Operations Command (ANASOC) soldiers who resettled in the U.S. after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The research, based on interviews and surveys with 36 veterans, reveals leadership dynamics, evacuation disparities, family reunification struggles, language barriers, and psychosocial stress. The recommendations include designating ANASOC veterans for Special Immigrant Visas, streamlining family reunification, facilitating military service pathways, providing language and education support, and establishing comprehensive psychosocial service frameworks. These measures not only honor their sacrifices but also enhance national security, reinforce partnerships, and contribute to the American workforce.

To cite this policy paper:

McFee, Erin et al. 2023. “Afghan Allies Out of War Addressing the Needs of the Afghan Special Forces Community and their Families in the United States”. Trust After Betrayal.

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10. Move Soldiers Less: A Divisional System in the U.S. Army

Personally we moved 21 times in 30 years.

However, a different system would be necessary for other types of Army organizations, such as special operations. One size does not fit all.

Excerpts;

Like every system, a divisional construct would have tradeoffs. The Army’s current method of stationing and developing personnel helps expose soldiers to a variety of units in different geographic locations. A private in the 25th Infantry Division might learn about jungle fighting before becoming a non-commissioned officer at the 11th Airborne Division and training for Arctic warfare.

There’s no doubt that this has value. The question is, how much? And how does that value compare with the value of keeping soldiers in the same environment longer so they can develop true expertise? Or of providing geographic stability for a soldier and their family? Or drastically reducing how much money and time the Army spends on moving soldiers between duty stations?

At a minimum, the adoption of a divisional system deserves study. Moving at two-to-three-year intervals over the course of a 20-plus-year military career places extreme strain on families and soldiers. Under a divisional system, those who wanted to move frequently still could, while those who desired more stability could find it. Life has changed over the past 50 years. Army families no longer live solely in tight-knit communities on base, and most American households now consist of dual-income families. Adopting a divisional system could simultaneously strengthen the service, foster tradition, and accommodate the realities of 21st-century society.

Move Soldiers Less: A Divisional System in the U.S. Army - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Jules Hurst · August 30, 2023

The Army spends over $1.8 billion on permanent change-of-station moves annually. That’s 40 percent of what the Army receives each year to purchase weapons and tracked combat vehicles, nearly as much as its fiscal year 2024 investments to modernize long-range fires or create modern air defenses, and approximately twice as much as it plans to spend on building new barracks or improving its pre-positioned stocks.

Beyond cost, the Army’s current model of career development also inhibits spousal employment. Survey data indicates that military spouses experience unemployment rates above 20 percent, despite having a higher level of education on average than the general population. Both spousal unemployment and underemployment undoubtedly contribute to nearly 25 percent of servicemembers expressing some level of food insecurity. Then there’s the cost on children, who often find themselves at the bottom of long waitlists to enroll in new schools or childcare centers. This barely begins to address the turmoil that results from moving families away from their social networks at two-to-three-year intervals, or the expense, time and effort required to relocate a household.

Adopting a divisional system could save money for the military and improve satisfaction and retention among servicemembers — many of whom leave under pressure from family members who want geographic stability. Instead of repeatedly moving between units, soldiers would be assigned to a division upon entering the Army. Enlisted soldiers who aligned themselves to a division, with its nearly 16,000 different positions, would have adequate opportunities to promote to master sergeant (E-8) or even sergeant major (E-9) in nearly any military occupational specialty. Even officers would have the ability to achieve lieutenant colonel (O-5) and possibly colonel (O-6) in many career fields. Adoption of a divisional system in the U.S. Army has the potential to reduce the cost of permanent change-of-station moves, increase unit cohesion, promote stronger local communities in and around military bases, and reduce the disruptions of military life on families.

A Changed World

Many of the issues with repeatedly moving soldiers to new duty stations were previously mitigated by the strength of military communities. Soldiers arriving at a new installation could expect to find a robust, welcoming reception. Weekly socials at officer and non-commissioned officer clubs, quality on-post housing, and lively community events on Army installations were hallmarks of Army life.

Become a Member

Unfortunately, Army posts are no longer as vibrant. Security reforms implemented after 9/11 limit interaction with the local community. Clubs have long been in decline, and the questionable value of on-post housing leads many officers and non-commissioned officers to buy off-post. Some Army installations still offer a good quality of life and a strong community, but many of the aspects of Army life that made frequent moves more bearable have faded.

Moving the U.S. Army to a divisional system could directly counter these negative developments. Soldiers stationed at a single post for most of their careers would form strong attachments to their local community and they would have additional incentives to invest in the cities, schools and civil life around their posts. Money the Army currently spends on moves could instead be used to beautify and improve post structures, housing, and schools. Furthermore, keeping soldiers in the same division would cause them to develop more cohesive teams and social relationships, improving both the working environment and the effectiveness of units under the division. The Army’s current system emphasizes exposing soldiers to diverse experiences, but at what cost? The value of cohesion must be considered, and new methods for soldiers to gain new experiences found.

Life in a Divisional System

Under the current system, an officer or non-commissioned officer can expect to move at least 10 times during a 20-year career. Some careers require more frequent moves, some less. In a divisional system, that same officer could reduce the number of moves that their family experiences and spend over three-quarters of their career (15–18 years) at a single duty station. An officer could increase this further by completing their command and general staff college through distance learning or a shortened satellite course, and by foregoing joint duty assignments if they did not plan to compete to be a general officer. In sum, a divisional system has the potential to allow an officer or non-commissioned officer to stay in a single location — except for deployments, professional military education, and temporary duty assignments — while still having a full career.

Sample timelines of an officer’s 20-year career under the current stationing construct and under a divisional system. Prepared by the author.

Keeping an officer or non-commissioned officer at a single division would do little to harm their advancement up to the rank of lieutenant colonel (O-5) or master sergeant (E-8). Infantry divisions contain six different brigades: three infantry, one artillery, one sustainment, and one aviation. Each of these is an O-6 command. Within every infantry brigade, there are seven battalions or O-5 commands: three infantry, one support battalion, one engineer battalion, one artillery battalion, and one cavalry squadron. At the rank of captain (O-3), command opportunities are even greater. A single infantry brigade combat team has 15 infantry companies, nine logistics companies, four cavalry squadrons, four artillery batteries, three engineer companies, and singular medical, signal, and intelligence companies. Lieutenants, captains, and majors can easily move between battalions and brigades within the division’s structure to obtain the key staff and command assignments they need to professionally develop.

An example of a division and its structure. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Enlisted soldiers can easily serve full careers under a divisional system as well. Each brigade and battalion in the division’s structure contains a billet for a sergeant major (E-9), the terminal enlisted rank. The dozens of companies in a division each provide opportunities for soldiers to serve as first sergeants (E-8), a rank that often marks the end of a respected career. An enlisted soldier, even in a lower-density career field like intelligence, could easily move between the three to four intelligence companies within a division to serve as a team leader, squad leader, and platoon sergeant, while they round out their experience serving on battalion, brigade, and divisional staff in S2 sections (intelligence). Denser career fields — like infantry, armor, artillery, and logistics — would have robust opportunities to move around internally.

In addition to the stability a division-centric career offers, this system could also do much to create traditions, instill pride, and build a sense of history. Great leaders already attempt to do these things, but it is difficult to achieve during a two-to-three-year assignment. Keeping soldiers on station for longer will allow much of this to occur organically, thereby strengthening the culture already in place.

Flaws in the System

A divisional system would not, of course, solve everything. It would provide ample opportunities for combat arms soldiers and logisticians. But lower-density career fields like cyber, finance, medical, signal, functional areas, and other critical enablers may not be able to avoid significant moves through a 20-plus-year career. The British Army deals with lower-density fields like this by assigning them to corps, in which duty stations change in a similar pattern to the U.S. Army.

If the Army wanted to provide servicemembers in these lower-density career fields additional stability, they could offer them the opportunity to at least begin their careers in a division (or independent brigades or battalions). A signal officer, for instance, could likely stay within a division or brigade to the rank of major (O-4) before they would need to join the signal corps and accept assignments at the requirements of the service. Alternatively, the Army could seek to extend the length of assignments for lower-density specialties, making them four to seven years at a duty station. Either method, or a mix of them, would provide additional geographic stability.

And what about the servicemembers who like to move frequently? They still could. Any divisional system would require a method for soldiers to transfer between divisions. While divisional staff would quickly develop methods to screen soldiers for “fit,” as they have for the Army’s assignment interactive module, no system is perfect. Moreover, life circumstances may drive a soldier and his or her family to desire a change of scenery. One method of creating this mobility between divisions would be to keep 20 percent of all billets in a division reserved for soldiers from outside it. This would allow soldiers to try life in a different division and provide broadening experiences by exposing them to different geographic environments, mission sets, and force structures.

Other opportunities to move would come from the need to fill billets at headquarters, corps, independent detachments and companies — not to mention within the interagency, independent commands, internal agencies and joint commands. Most positions could be filled by volunteers, but some moves would still undoubtedly need to be mandated.

Much of the moving that soldiers do today occurs to provide them with different experiences. Artillerymen rotate between cannon and missile units, infantrymen do tours in light and mechanized formations, and logisticians serve at different echelons and in different specialties to develop holistically. Many of these experiences can be replicated within a division — the National Guard, for example, manages to develop officers under a divisional footprint — but others cannot. Still, in lieu of sending officers and non-commissioned officers off to joint or higher headquarters assignments, they could also consider giving them an opportunity to lead units outside of their basic branch. An infantryman could lead a logistics company for a year or two and better develop a complete sense of how the Army sustains combat operations. Ensuring officers and non-commissioned officers have these diverse experiences may also require something like an exchange program, where soldiers from different divisions and units switch places for four to six months of temporary duty.

If the Army had concerns about soldiers becoming overly specialized or tribal, it could create a divisional construct that shields younger non-commissioned officers and enlisted soldiers from moving frequently, but still requires officers and senior non-commissioned officers to regularly change stations. A soldier could stay at the same division until he or she reached sergeant first class (E-7), but to accept promotion to master sergeant (E-8), that individual would need to change stations to a new unit. Under this model of a divisional system, officers could either have longer assignments at duty stations, be assigned to divisions up to the rank of major (O-4), or rotate every two to three years as they do under the current system. This would shield the most financially vulnerable servicemembers from frequent moves and ensure that divisions retain a fresh influx of leaders with diverse experiences from other units. Officers and senior non-commissioned officers control training and unit standards. Rotating them into divisions under this model would ensure that best practices and different perspectives continue to be exchanged across the Army.

Conclusion

Like every system, a divisional construct would have tradeoffs. The Army’s current method of stationing and developing personnel helps expose soldiers to a variety of units in different geographic locations. A private in the 25th Infantry Division might learn about jungle fighting before becoming a non-commissioned officer at the 11th Airborne Division and training for Arctic warfare.

There’s no doubt that this has value. The question is, how much? And how does that value compare with the value of keeping soldiers in the same environment longer so they can develop true expertise? Or of providing geographic stability for a soldier and their family? Or drastically reducing how much money and time the Army spends on moving soldiers between duty stations?

At a minimum, the adoption of a divisional system deserves study. Moving at two-to-three-year intervals over the course of a 20-plus-year military career places extreme strain on families and soldiers. Under a divisional system, those who wanted to move frequently still could, while those who desired more stability could find it. Life has changed over the past 50 years. Army families no longer live solely in tight-knit communities on base, and most American households now consist of dual-income families. Adopting a divisional system could simultaneously strengthen the service, foster tradition, and accommodate the realities of 21st-century society.

Become a Member

Lieutenant Colonel Jules “Jay” Hurst is an army strategist. He currently serves as a legislative liaison. He would like to express his thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Alex Wray for the conversation that led to this idea.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or U.S. government.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Jules Hurst · August 30, 2023

11. New Outbound Investment Rules Can Help Strengthen American Economic Security

Excerpts:

To truly succeed, outbound investment regulations drafted based on this EO will need to pay attention to two critical dynamics:

First, any regulations must be clearly defined and combined with an enforcement framework that is robust and palatable to private companies seeking to make legitimate investments in higher-risk countries.

Second, regulators must launch an open and frank ongoing dialogue with investors (with similar dialogues between the United States and its allies), as we seek to collectively reimagine how private investment can and should support our shared national and economic security.

If policymakers commit to enforcement and meaningful communication, outbound investment rules could help facilitate a global realignment of capital that benefits all those countries committed to playing fair.

New Outbound Investment Rules Can Help Strengthen American Economic Security

If policymakers commit to enforcement and meaningful communication, outbound investment rules could help facilitate a global realignment of capital that benefits all those countries committed to playing fair.

nationalinterest.org

New Outbound Investment Rules Can Help Strengthen American Economic Security | The National Interest

August 30, 2023 Topic: U.S. Economic Policy Region: United States

by Elaine Dezenski

A new weapon has just been added to America’s economic statecraft arsenal—one that has the potential to realign Western capital flows in ways that support U.S. national and economic security, at home and abroad. In an August 9 executive order (EO), the Biden administration imposed new rules on outbound investments in three critical industries—semiconductors, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence—to prevent “countries of concern” from turning U.S. technology against its creators.

The new EO lists a single country of concern (China) but the designation could be extended to a host of other adversarial nations. The Treasury Department will still need to draft regulations based on the order. In addition, multiple bills have been introduced in Congress to address problematic outbound investments that weaken American security. Interestingly, even the currently narrow EO lays out a framework that could later be expanded to address the risks posed by new industries or countries that, as the EO states, support our adversaries’ “military, intelligence, surveillance, or cyber-enabled capabilities.”

The limited focus of the new EO may obscure what it truly represents for global markets: Washington’s recognition that outbound capital flows are strategic extensions of national power—whether used to build foreign industry or, in China’s case, funding dual-use technology and research with known military applications. While America has long relied on inbound investment screening, sanctions, import restrictions, and export controls to constrain the malign or disruptive behavior of foreign adversaries, outbound investment restrictions have the potential to evolve into a more potent economic tool.

Outbound investment rules can limit the flow of capital to worrying sectors of a foreign economy and significantly constrain the funding that otherwise might be keeping adversarial industries afloat. Most importantly, it sends a critical message to the private sector to carefully examine geopolitical risks when investing in foreign regimes.

Outbound investment rules could also help America, its allies, and the powerful engines of private Western capital work in greater alignment to support democratic and economic guardrails. Like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s belligerence towards Taiwan threatens our globally integrated world economy.

Outbound investment restrictions could evolve into a critical new tool to curb our adversaries’ weaponization of technologies that disrupt America’s economic and national security, by handicapping key industries that adversaries use to wage war, promote authoritarianism, or build surveillance states that oppress their citizens. While outbound capital restrictions will not necessarily prevent the domestic support of those industries—China will undoubtedly still continue to fund domestic AI industries—it does keep Western capital from inadvertently furthering investments counter to U.S. and allied interests in highly critical areas. Given the size and power of the Western private sector, that is an ambitious objective.

Like any weapon, economic or ballistic, risks are inherent to its deployment: unintended consequences, collateral injuries, and the temptation to overuse. If poorly implemented, outbound investment screening can obstruct or burden legitimate investments and could easily harm U.S. investors who would face competitive disadvantages against overseas rivals. Further, U.S. companies with legitimate and productive investments in countries like China could face unwarranted retaliation.

Despite that, outbound investment screening has tremendous promise—in large part derived from its ability to harness the power of the U.S. financial sector and highlight the long-term market risks that derive from propping up dangerous regimes. While this might have once seemed heavy-handed, the private sector risk appetite is shifting. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, private multinationals pulled out of Russia in record numbers, taking losses and closing off markets that they had worked hard to establish. As tensions have risen with China, in parallel with China’s self-inflicting government actions against industry, the United States and global private sectors have not waited for a possible invasion of Taiwan to act. Even without any outbound investment restrictions in place, foreign investment in China has nosedived. Indeed, Chinese officials who used to come back from foreign trips with briefcases full of private sector agreements to invest in the country are now coming back empty-handed.

With the private sector paying close attention to geopolitical risk and rising divisions between those who support the global order and those countries seeking to supplant it, the timing is excellent for the US and its allies to help drive the alignment forward, helping to support the rules of the road by which all nations can prosper.

To truly succeed, outbound investment regulations drafted based on this EO will need to pay attention to two critical dynamics:

First, any regulations must be clearly defined and combined with an enforcement framework that is robust and palatable to private companies seeking to make legitimate investments in higher-risk countries.

Second, regulators must launch an open and frank ongoing dialogue with investors (with similar dialogues between the United States and its allies), as we seek to collectively reimagine how private investment can and should support our shared national and economic security.

Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Image: Shutterstock.

nationalinterest.org

12. Japan’s Defense Ministry seeks record $52.9 billion for 2nd year of military buildup

Japan’s Defense Ministry seeks record $52.9 billion for 2nd year of military buildup

Stars and Stripes · by Hana Kusumoto · August 31, 2023

Japanese marines take part in an amphibious assault during Talisman Sabre training in Queensland, Australia, Aug. 2, 2023. (Vincent Pham/U.S. Marine Corps)

TOKYO — Japan’s Ministry of Defense has asked for a 13.5% increase in military spending for next fiscal year, the second year of a buildup against perceived threats from China, North Korea and Russia.

The ministry on Thursday unveiled its $52.9 billion spending request, a record-high amount and the 12th consecutive year of increased military spending. If approved by the nation’s parliament, the plan would top this year’s defense budget by $6.8 billion.

"For the budget request for fiscal 2024, which will be the second year of the Defense Buildup Program, we will maintain necessary equipment and Self-Defense Forces facilities in order to fundamentally strengthen our defense capabilities by fiscal 2027, and therefore request increased expenditures than last fiscal year in most fields," the budget request document states.

The spending increase is rooted in three significant policy statements Japan adopted in December, the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy and Defense Buildup Program.

A July white paper by Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada stressed diplomacy first in conflict resolution but said Japan must also prepare to "defend our country by ourselves" with increased deterrence. “In other words, we need to make the opponent think that ‘attacking Japan will not achieve its goals.’”

The proposed defense budget seeks $5.2 billion to develop, manufacture and acquire various types of stand-off missile capabilities, a key component of Japan’s strategy. This includes development and mass production of improved surface-to-ship guided missiles, which could be used to strike enemy bases.

It also requested $259.6 million to build two destroyers equipped with the Aegis Combat System, the anti-air and anti-missile defense system. The destroyers are an alternative to a previously scrapped plan for a land-based Aegis Ashore missile defense system.

Japan Air Self-Defense Force cadets visit Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan, Aug. 23, 2023. (Raymond Tong/U.S. Marine Corps)

Although no specific amount is listed, the budget request includes a plan to set up a permanent joint command with about 240 personnel that oversees three Self-Defense Force branches in central Tokyo by March 2025.

The National Defense Strategy calls for a permanent, joint command linking the Ground, Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces for effective operations in the space, cyber and electromagnetic domains. The budget request states a need for a counterpart to the Hawaii-based U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

Japan set a spending goal in its defense building of $295 billion between 2023 and 2027. The military’s budget is expected to peak at $60.8 billion in fiscal 2027. The Japanese fiscal year begins April 1.

This year's defense budget, the first under the buildup program, is a record-high $46.6 billion, a 26.3% increase from the previous year.

Hana Kusumoto

Hana Kusumoto is a reporter/translator who has been covering local authorities in Japan since 2002. She was born in Nagoya, Japan, and lived in Australia and Illinois growing up. She holds a journalism degree from Boston University and previously worked for the Christian Science Monitor’s Tokyo bureau.

Stars and Stripes · by Hana Kusumoto · August 31, 2023

13. Ukrainian Counteroffensive Pierces Main Russian Defensive Line in Southeast

Ukrainian Counteroffensive Pierces Main Russian Defensive Line in Southeast

After three months of grinding advances in Western-backed operation, Kyiv accelerates advances along main line of attack

By James MarsonFollow

Aug. 31, 2023 7:25 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukrainian-counteroffensive-pierces-main-russian-defensive-line-in-southeast-9441e204

Ukrainian forces have penetrated the main Russian defensive line in their country’s southeast, raising hopes of a breakthrough that would reinvigorate the slow-moving counteroffensive.

Ukrainian paratroopers are fighting through entrenched Russian positions on the edge of the village of Verbove, a Ukrainian officer in the area said. Ukrainian forces have also reached the main defensive line to the south of nearby Robotyne village, he said. Ukraine’s military confirmed advances toward Verbove and south of Robotyne, without giving details.

Describing the advance, the Ukrainian officer held up three fingers representing lines of attack through entrenched Russian positions on the western flank of Verbove, an agricultural village of some 1,000 residents before the war. The significance of the advance is that it marks the first time Ukraine has penetrated the main Russian defensive line, an extensive system of minefields, trenches and antitank obstacles covered by artillery.

Ukrainian forces are now working to expand the cracks in the line to create a hole large enough for Western-provided armored vehicles to push through with sufficient logistical support.

“It’s like inflating a ball,” the officer said.

In this still image from a video, Ukrainian soldiers enter the embattled village of Robotyne, Ukraine. PHOTO: UKRAINIAN ARMED FORCES/REUTERS

Ukrainian advances in recent days have led to cautious optimism among Western intelligence services that Ukraine can retake the occupied city of Tokmak, a logistical hub for Russia, according to senior Western intelligence officials.

To be sure, there are still serious obstacles to turning the current penetration into a full-fledged breach. Russia is targeting Ukrainian troops there with heavy artillery fire directed by aerial drones, and there is no sign of a collapse in Russian lines. Russia appears to be sending reinforcements, including paratroopers, to help hold their positions.

Any breakthrough would be a major boost for Ukraine’s three-month-old counteroffensive, which has turned into a grinding, field-by-field advance rather than the lightning operation that Kyiv and its allies had envisaged.

The counteroffensive is aimed at slicing down to the Sea of Azov in Ukraine’s southeast, cutting Russian occupation forces in two and seizing back some of the nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory that Moscow holds. The West supplied Ukraine with hundreds of armored vehicles, including tanks, and trained thousands of troops for the operation.

During the early summer, Ukraine seized a handful of villages in the eastern Donetsk region and forced Russian troops back around the city of Bakhmut, but made little progress with its main push south toward the Sea of Azov from the city of Orikhiv.

Powerful Russian defenses thwarted initial assaults, so Ukraine switched to methodical advances by small teams on foot. The slow progress sparked intense behind-the-scenes debates between Washington and Kyiv over strategy and tactics.

Ukrainian soldiers in an undisclosed location near Orikhiv, Ukraine, before heading for combat. PHOTO: EMANUELE SATOLLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Ukrainian forces’ main goal has been to advance south from Orikhiv. PHOTO: EMANUELE SATOLLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

But progress accelerated in August. Accurate counter-battery fire helped suppress Russian artillery. Infantry advances seized trenches and lines of trees along the edges of farm fields. Ukrainian troops took the village of Robotyne and pushed south toward Tokmak.

Ukraine deployed fresh troops, including powerful airborne units like the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, equipped with Western-made Stryker armored fighting vehicles. In recent days, Ukrainian forces fought their way into the outskirts of Verbove, posing what now appears to be the biggest threat to Russian lines.

The advance is facing fierce resistance. The Ukrainian officer said the Russians were so well dug in that his men found carpets and pictures hung on the walls of dugouts that they captured. They are facing elite Russian forces, including the 7th Guards Air Assault Division.

Russia is targeting Ukrainian troops and vehicles using heavy artillery fire guided by aerial drones and explosive drones directed from the ground by pilots wearing video goggles. In some places, there are so many drones flying that the Ukrainians call the phenomenon “Boryspil,” after the country’s main international airport in Kyiv.

U.S.-supplied cluster bombs are having a significant impact, soldiers said. Ukrainians on the offensive are using the munitions—which release dozens of smaller bomblets and can cause devastation over a broader area than ordinary artillery shells—to target Russian troops running across open ground, either to flee or to provide reinforcements.

Ukraine’s aim is to create a corridor through the Russian lines, pushing enemy artillery back far enough to allow Western-provided armored vehicles to move through the gap and receive supplies.

Goldman Sachs bought US firms with Chinese state cash in $2.5 BILLION 'partnership fund' that invested in drones, AI, cloud computing and supply chains - despite rock bottom relations with Beijing

By Laura Parnaby For Dailymail.Com Daily Mail

August 30, 2023

View Original

Goldman Sachs bought US firms with Chinese state cash in $2.5 BILLION 'partnership fund' that invested in drones, AI, cloud computing and supply chains - despite rock bottom relations with Beijing

Goldman Sachs has quietly been using Chinese cash from a $2.5 billion 'partnership fund' to invest in several US companies in the field of AI and computing.

The Wall Street giant is funneling funds from a private equity stash it created with the China Investment Corporation, the Financial Times reports.

Since its launch in 2017, the China-US Industrial Cooperation Partnership Fund has been used for deals with US companies from the fields of cloud computing, drug-testing, global supply chains, and retail tech.

This comes despite increasingly terse relations between the US and China due to disputes about technology, security and Taiwan - and amid Joe Biden signing an executive order to restrict American investments in Chinese companies.

A Goldman spokesman told DailyMail.com the private equity partnership 'is a U.S. fund run by a U.S. manager, and is managed to be in compliance with all laws and regulations'.

Goldman Sachs has quietly been using Chinese cash from a $2.5 billion 'partnership fund' to invest in several US companies in the field of AI and computing

The Wall Street giant is funneling funds from a private equity stash it created with the China Investment Corporation, the Financial Times reports.

Goldman's behind-the-scenes dealings with the Chinese cash flow began when the bank's chief executive at the time, Lloyd Blankfein, launched the private equity fund during Donald Trump's state visit to Beijing in November 2017.

Sources told Reuters that alongside Goldman, the fund invested $3 billion in the Boyd Corporation, a California manufacturer whose products include drone and AI technology, in September 2018.

Other purchases include US company Cprime, which advises on cloud computing, and drug-testing company Parexel.

Also on the partnership's investment portfolio is Project44, a company which tracks global supply chains, retail tech group Aptos, and lighting specialists Visual Comfort & Co.

The fund's activities have ramped up in recent years, according to the FT, with four investments made in 2021 and one last year.

In 2021, Goldman used the partnership fund to help finance the purchase of LRQA, the inspections and cyber unit of UK maritime classifications group Lloyd's Register, per the FT.

LQRA also owns Nettitude, a cyber defense organization which says it has been approved as a provider for the UK government, and whose work includes 'ethical hacking' to assess client's defense vulnerabilities.

'The Cooperation fund is a U.S. fund run by a U.S. manager, and is managed to be in compliance with all laws and regulations,' a Goldman Sachs spokesperson said.

'It continues to invest in US and global companies, helping them increase their sales into the China market.'

This comes amid Western sanctions aimed at reducing Chinese infiltration via business deals.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order earlier this month to block and regulate high-tech U.S.-based investments going toward China - reflecting an intensifying competition between the world's two biggest powers.

The order covers advanced computer chips, micro electronics, quantum information technologies and artificial intelligence.

Senior administration officials said that the effort stemmed from national security goals rather than economic interests, and that the categories it covered were intentionally narrow in scope.

The order seeks to blunt China's ability to use U.S. investments in its technology companies to upgrade its military while also preserving broader levels of trade that are vital for both nations' economies.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce responded in a statement saying it has 'serious concern' about the order and 'reserves the right to take measures.'

15. FBI Hoovering Up DNA at a Pace That Rivals China, Holds 21 Million Samples and Counting

Again our social contract must be examined: individual liberty sacrifices for collective security by the government.

FBI Hoovering Up DNA at a Pace That Rivals China, Holds 21 Million Samples and Counting

China and the U.S. are collecting the same proportion of their populations’ DNA profiles — and the FBI wants to double its budget to get even more.

Ken Klippenstein

August 29 2023, 1:28 p.m.

The Intercept · by Ken Klippenstein · August 29, 2023

The FBI has amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles — equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population — according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept.

The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. “The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” the appeal for an increase says.

“When we’re talking about rapid expansion like this, it’s getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database.”

In an April 2023 statement submitted to Congress to explain the budget request, FBI Director Christopher Wray cited several factors that had “significantly expanded the DNA processing requirements of the FBI.” He said the FBI collected around 90,000 samples a month — “over 10 times the historical sample volume” — and expected that number to swell to about 120,000 a month, totaling about 1.5 million new DNA samples a year. (The FBI declined to comment.)

The staggering increases are raising questions among civil liberties advocates.

“When we’re talking about rapid expansion like this, it’s getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database,” Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in genetic privacy, told The Intercept. “I think the civil liberties implications here are significant.”

The rapid growth of the FBI’s sample load is in large part thanks to a Trump-era rule change that mandated the collection of DNA from migrants who were arrested or detained by immigration authorities.

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Mission Creep in FBI’s DNA

The FBI began building a DNA database as early as 1990. By 1998, it helped create a national database called Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, that spanned all 50 states. Each state maintained its own database, with police or other authorities submitting samples based on their states’ rules, and CODIS allowed all the states to search across the entire country. At first, the collection of data was limited to DNA from people convicted of crimes, from crime scenes, and from unidentified remains.

Even those categories were controversial at the time. When CODIS was launched nationally, most states did not submit DNA from all people convicted of felonies; the only point of consensus among the states’ collection programs was to take DNA from convicted sex offenders.

“If you look back at when CODIS was established, it was originally for violent or sexual offenders,” Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who specializes in the ethical implications of genetics research, told The Intercept. “The ACLU warned that this was going to be a slippery slope, and that’s indeed what we’ve seen.”

Today, police have the authority to take DNA samples from anyone sentenced for a felony charge. In 28 states, police can take DNA samples from suspects arrested for felonies but who have not been convicted of any crime. In some cases, police offer plea deals to reduce felony charges to misdemeanor offenses in exchange for DNA samples. Police are even acquiring DNA samples from unwitting people, as The Intercept recently reported.

“It changed massively,” Lewis said of the rules and regulations around government DNA collection. “You only have to be a person of interest to end up in these databases.”

The database is likely to continue proliferating as DNA technology becomes more sophisticated, Lewis explained, pointing to the advent of environmental DNA, which allows for DNA to be collected from ambient settings like wastewater or air.

“Just by breathing, you’re discarding DNA in a way that can be traced back to you,” Lewis said.

Police Are Getting DNA Data From People Who Think They Opted Out

While this might sound like science fiction, the federal government has already embraced the technology. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offered a contract for laboratory services to assist with “autonomously collected eDNA testing”: environmental DNA testing based on samples that are no longer even manually collected.

Until recently, the U.S. DNA database surpassed even that of authoritarian China, which launched an ambitious DNA collection program in 2017. That year, the BBC reported, the U.S. had about 4 percent of its population’s DNA, while China had about 3 percent. Since then, China announced a plan aimed at collecting between 5 and 10 percent of its male population’s DNA, according to a 2020 study cited by the New York Times.

China has a record of abusing its DNA database for surveillance and crackdowns on dissent. The efforts have been aided by American technology and expertise. In 2021, the U.S. intelligence community raised alarms about China’s widespread DNA collection, including foreigners’ genetic information.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 12, 2023.

Photo: Shuran Huang for The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cheaper, Easier, and Faster”

The changes detailed by Wray include shifts in statutory and regulatory requirements, with the bulk of new samples coming from a new policy mandating collection of DNA from people arrested or detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a Department of Homeland Security agency. The new DHS policy, however, only explains part of the rapid growth of the FBI’s DNA database.

Whereas DNA analysis once had to be conducted in a lab by a cumbersome manual process of manually matching DNA strands that took months, the process has since been fully automated. Under rapid DNA analysis, a DNA profile can be developed in one to two hours after a simple swab of one’s inner cheek without a lab or human involvement.

“When surveillance technology gets cheaper, easier, and faster to use,” said Eidelman, of the ACLU, “it tends to get used more — often in ways that are troubling.”

“When surveillance technology gets cheaper, easier, and faster to use, it tends to get used more — often in ways that are troubling.”

In 2021, the FBI touted as “a major milestone” the contribution of its 20 millionth DNA profile to the national DNA database, calling it “one of the most successful investigative tools available to U.S. law enforcement.”

While DNA has played an important role in prosecuting crimes, less than 3 percent of the profiles have assisted in cases, the Bureau’s data reveals. By comparison, fingerprints collected by the FBI from current and former federal employees linked them to crimes at a rate of 12 percent each year, the Bureau testified in 2004 — when fingerprint technology was far less sophisticated.

For civil liberties advocates, a government database of everyone’s DNA would be rife for abuses.

“A universal database really just would subvert our ideas of autonomy and freedom and the presumption of innocence. It would be saying that it makes sense for the government to track us at any time based on our private information,” Eidelman told The Intercept, adding that DNA collection presents specific risks to privacy. “Our DNA is personal and sensitive: It can expose our propensity for serious health conditions, family members, and ancestry.”

DNA Collection From Migrants

The bulk of the DHS increases stemmed from samples collected from the hundreds of thousands of migrants that ended up arrested or detained by Customs and Border Protection. With the end of Title 42 expulsions, a pandemic-era policy that allowed the U.S. to expel migrants without allowing them to apply for asylum — which finally expired weeks after Wray’s April statement to Congress — the FBI director said he expected the number of new samples to swell to 120,000 a month. (CBP did not respond to a request for comment.)

“This substantial increase has created massive budget and personnel shortfalls for the FBI,” Wray said in his statement. “While the FBI has worked with DHS components to automate and streamline workflows, a backlog of approximately 650,000 samples has developed, increasing the likelihood of arrestees and non-U.S. detainees being released before identification through investigative leads.”

DHS initially sought to collect DNA from detainees in 2009, but the Obama administration exempted the department from collection requirements for non-U.S. detainees. The task would have been too expensive, since Congress had not allocated funding for DNA collection, then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano explained.

In 2019, President Donald Trump’s administration ended the exemptions, and DHS announced that it would collect DNA samples from people arrested or detained by border authorities. At the time, Trump’s policy was widely condemned, including on the grounds that it could lead to widespread civil liberties violations.

President Joe Biden has not reversed the decision, causing the government’s DNA database to balloon in size.

The Intercept · by Ken Klippenstein · August 29, 2023

16. There’s a Vast Source of Clean Energy Beneath Our Feet. And a Race to Tap It.

I hope we can make this work. This is the kind of innovation we need.

There’s a Vast Source of Clean Energy Beneath Our Feet. And a Race to Tap It.

By Brad Plumer

Brad Plumer traveled to Beaver County, Utah to visit geothermal projects there and spoke with dozens of people involved in the industry.

The New York Times · by Brad Plumer · August 28, 2023

The United States has enough geothermal energy to power the entire country. Some are trying to unlock it by using techniques from the fracking boom.

A drilling rig used by Fervo Energy outside Milford, Utah. The geothermal start-up aims to extract heat from underground granite to produce electricity.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Aug. 28, 2023

In a sagebrush valley full of wind turbines and solar panels in western Utah, Tim Latimer gazed up at a very different device he believes could be just as powerful for fighting climate change — maybe even more.

It was a drilling rig, of all things, transplanted from the oil fields of North Dakota. But the softly whirring rig wasn’t searching for fossil fuels. It was drilling for heat.

Mr. Latimer’s company, Fervo Energy, is part of an ambitious effort to unlock vast amounts of geothermal energy from Earth’s hot interior, a source of renewable power that could help displace fossil fuels that are dangerously warming the planet.

“There’s a virtually unlimited resource down there if we can get at it,” said Mr. Latimer. “Geothermal doesn’t use much land, it doesn’t produce emissions, it can complement wind and solar power. Everyone who looks into it gets obsessed with it.”

Traditional geothermal plants, which have existed for decades, work by tapping natural hot water reservoirs underground to power turbines that can generate electricity 24 hours a day. Few sites have the right conditions for this, however, so geothermal only produces 0.4 percent of America’s electricity currently.

But hot, dry rocks lie below the surface everywhere on the planet. And by using advanced drilling techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, some experts think it’s possible to tap that larger store of heat and create geothermal energy almost anywhere. The potential is enormous: The Energy Department estimates there’s enough energy in those rocks to power the entire country five times over and has launched a major push to develop technologies to harvest that heat.

Pipes in an older geothermal field in western Utah. Traditional geothermal plants rely on underground hot water reservoirs that are relatively rare. Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Dozens of geothermal companies have emerged with ideas.

Fervo is using fracking techniques — similar to those used for oil and gas — to crack open dry, hot rock and inject water into the fractures, creating artificial geothermal reservoirs. Eavor, a Canadian start-up, is building large underground radiators with drilling methods pioneered in Alberta’s oil sands. Others dream of using plasma or energy waves to drill even deeper and tap “superhot” temperatures that could cleanly power thousands of coal-fired power plants by substituting steam for coal.

Still, obstacles to geothermal expansion loom. Investors are wary of the cost and risks of novel geothermal projects. Some worry about water use or earthquakes from drilling. Permitting is difficult. And geothermal gets less federal support than other technologies.

Still, the growing interest in geothermal is driven by the fact that the United States has gotten extraordinarily good at drilling since the 2000s. Innovations like horizontal drilling and magnetic sensing have pushed oil and gas production to record highs, much to the dismay of environmentalists. But these innovations can be adapted for geothermal, where drilling can make up half the cost of projects.

“Everyone knows about cost declines for wind and solar,” said Cindy Taff, who worked at Shell for 36 years before joining Sage Geosystems, a geothermal start-up in Houston. “But we also saw steep cost declines for oil and gas drilling during the shale revolution. If we can bring that to geothermal, the growth could be huge.”

States like California are increasingly desperate for clean energy sources that can run at all hours. While wind and solar power are growing fast, they rely on fossil fuels like natural gas for backup when the sun sets and wind fades. Finding a replacement for gas is an acute climate challenge, and geothermal is one of the few plausible options.

“Geothermal has historically been overlooked,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said at a hearing. But with innovation, she added, “the potential is out there, I think, that’s pretty extraordinary.”

Fervo co-founder Tim Latimer at the company’s geothermal drilling site outside of Milford, Utah.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Fracking for clean energy

Near the town of Milford, Utah, sits the Blundell geothermal plant, surrounded by boiling mud pits, hissing steam vents and the skeletal ruins of a hot springs resort. Built in 1984, the 38-megawatt plant produces enough electricity for about 31,000 homes.

The Blundell plant relies on ancient volcanism and quirks of geology: Just below the surface are hot, naturally porous rocks that allow groundwater to percolate and heat up enough to create steam for generating electricity. But such conditions are rare. In much of the region, the underground hot rock is hard granite, and water can’t flow easily.

Three miles east, two teams are trying to tap that hot granite. One is Utah FORGE, a $220 million research effort funded by the Energy Department. The other is Fervo, a Houston-based start-up.

Both use similar methods: First, drill two wells shaped like giant L’s, extending thousands of feet down into hot granite before curving and extending thousands of feet horizontally. Then, use fracking, which involves controlled explosives and high-pressure fluids, to create a series of cracks between the two wells. Finally, inject water into one well, where it will hopefully migrate through the cracks, heat up past 300 degrees Fahrenheit and come out the other well.

This is “enhanced geothermal,” and people have struggled with the engineering difficulties since the 1970s.

Pipes from the Blundell geothermal plant carrying hot water to generate electricity.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

But in July, FORGE announced it had successfully sent water between two wells. Two weeks later, Fervo announced its own breakthrough: A 30-day test in Nevada found the process could produce enough heat for electricity. Fervo is now drilling wells for its first 400-megawatt commercial power plant in Utah, next to the FORGE site.

“Those are major accomplishments, in a time frame faster than we expected,” said Lauren Boyd, head of the Energy Department’s Geothermal Technologies Office, which estimates that geothermal could supply 12 percent of America’s electricity by 2050 if technology improves.

Mr. Latimer seemed less surprised. Before founding Fervo in 2017, he worked as a drilling engineer for BHP, an oil and gas firm. There, he became convinced that previous attempts at enhanced geothermal failed because they hadn’t taken advantage of oil and gas innovations like horizontal drilling or fiber-optic sensors.

Fervo didn’t invent many of the tools it uses. In Utah, drilling is conducted by Helmerich & Payne, a major oil and gas contractor that developed a high-tech rig with software and sensors that allow operators to precisely steer drill bits underground. Sixty percent of Fervo’s employees came from oil and gas.

“If we had to invent this stuff ourselves it would have taken years or decades,” Mr. Latimer said. “Our big insight was that people in geothermal simply weren’t talking enough to people in oil and gas.”

The hard part now is making enhanced geothermal affordable. The Energy Department wants costs to plummet to $45 per megawatt-hour for widespread deployment. Fervo’s costs are “much higher,” Mr. Latimer said, though he thinks repeated drilling can lower them.

FORGE and Fervo are drilling a few miles from the Roosevelt Hot Springs, pictured here, which are created by underground heated rocks relatively near the Earth’s surface.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Research at FORGE could help. Drilling deeper and hotter can make projects more cost-effective, since more heat means more energy. But existing oil and gas equipment wasn’t designed for temperatures above 350 degrees, so FORGE is testing new tools in hotter rock.

“No one else is willing to take the risks we can take,” said Joseph Moore, a University of Utah geologist who leads FORGE.

Enhanced geothermal faces other challenges, Dr. Moore cautioned. Underground geology is complex, and it’s tricky to create fractures that maintain heat and don’t lose too much water over time. Drillers must avoid triggering earthquakes, a problem that plagued geothermal projects in South Korea and Switzerland. FORGE closely monitors its Utah site for seismic activity and has found nothing worrisome.

Permitting is tough. While enhanced geothermal could, in theory, work anywhere, the best resources are on federal land, where regulatory reviews take years and it’s often easier to win permission for oil and gas drilling because of exemptions won by fossil fuel companies.

Still, interest is rising. California is struggling with electricity shortfalls and recently had to extend the life of three old, polluting gas plants. Regulators have ordered utilities to add 1,000 megawatts of electricity from clean sources that can run at all hours to backstop fluctuating wind and solar supplies. One electricity provider, Clean Power Alliance, agreed to buy 33 megawatts from Fervo’s Utah plant.

“If we can find it, we have a pretty big appetite for geothermal,” said Ted Bardacke, Clean Power Alliance’s chief executive. “We’re adding more solar every year for daytime and have a huge build-out of batteries to shift power to the evening. But what do we do at night? That’s where geothermal can really help out.”

Geologist Joseph Moore, left, and Mr. Latimer examining a wellhead at the site of FORGE, a federally funded geothermal research project.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Underground radiators and superhot rocks

Fervo faces fierce competition for the future of geothermal.

One alternative is a “closed loop” system, which involves drilling sealed pipes into hot, dry rocks and then circulating fluid through the pipes, creating a giant radiator. This avoids the unpredictability of water flowing through underground rock and doesn’t involve fracking, which is banned in some areas. The downside: more complicated drilling.

Eavor, a Calgary-based company, has already tested a closed-loop system in Alberta and is now building its first 65-megawatt plant in Germany.

“If geothermal is ever going to scale, it has to be a repeatable process you can do over and over,” said John Redfern, Eavor’s chief executive. “We think we’ve got the best way to do that.”

In Texas, Sage Geosystems is pursuing fracked wells that act as batteries. When there’s surplus electricity on the grid, water gets pumped into the well. In times of need, pressure and heat in the fractures pushes water back up, delivering energy.

The most audacious vision for geothermal is to drill six miles or more underground where temperatures exceed 750 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point, water goes supercritical and can hold five to 10 times as much energy as normal steam. If it works, experts say, “superhot” geothermal could provide cheap, abundant clean energy anywhere.

“The ultimate goal should be to get to the superhot stuff,” said Bruce Hill of the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.

But going that deep requires futuristic tools. GA Drilling, a Slovakian company, is developing plasma torches for drilling at high temperatures. Quaise, a Massachusetts-based start-up, wants to use millimeter waves — high-frequency microwaves — to pulverize rock and reach depths of up to 12 miles.

“There are huge engineering challenges,” said Carlos Araque, Quaise’s chief executive.

“But,” he added, “imagine if you could drill down next to a coal plant and get steam that’s hot enough to power that plant’s turbines. Replacing coal at thousands of coal plants around the world. That’s the level of geothermal we’re trying to unlock.”

Workers on the platform of the drilling rig at Fervo Energy’s geothermal drilling site in July.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Oil interest

The federal government plays a leading role in nurturing risky new energy technologies. But lawmakers often overlook geothermal. The recent infrastructure bill provided $9.5 billion for clean hydrogen but just $84 million for advanced geothermal.

“It’s been hard for geothermal to fight its way into the conversation,” said Jamie Beard, founder of Project InnerSpace, a Texas-based nonprofit that promotes geothermal.

Ms. Beard has spent years trying to get oil and gas companies excited about geothermal. That’s slowly happening: Devon Energy invested $10 million into Fervo, while BP and Chevron are backing Eavor. Nabors, a drilling-service provider, has invested in GA Drilling, Quaise and Sage.

In Oklahoma, a consortium of oil and gas firms led by Baker Hughes recently launched an effort to explore converting abandoned wells into geothermal plants.

“Historically, the upfront costs and risks of geothermal have been challenging,” said Ajit Menon, vice president for geothermal at Baker Hughes. “But we think it’s got a huge role to play. And we have workers with the right skills, the right technology. You can see why it makes sense for us.”

Brad Plumer is a climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. At The Times, he has also covered international climate talks and the changing energy landscape in the United States. More about Brad Plumer

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Race to Drill, Baby, Drill, but This Time for Clean Energy

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The New York Times · by Brad Plumer · August 28, 2023

17. Opinion | The Chinese economy is doing better than you might think

Does our Ambassador to China get to publish OpEds in major Chinese media outlets? Not that I would ever deny any ambassador from publishing in the US media but we should be demanding not only reciprocity but freedom of the press and we should call out the double standards of the axis of authoritarians and especially China.

If I were the editor of the Washington Post I would include this note to remind Post readers about the nature of China: "China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions." ( - said only with some sarcasm - Of course that would never happen - but what would be appropriate would be to publish a counterpoint OpEd which I hope to see from some economic experts on China in coming days.

Opinion | The Chinese economy is doing better than you might think

The Washington Post · by Xie Feng · August 30, 2023

Xie Feng is Chinese ambassador to the United States.

The Chinese economy has been in the headlines recently. How is it really doing? Better than you might think. Allow me to share some facts with you.

This year, China’s economy continues to recover and grow. Our gross domestic product expanded 5.5 percent for the first half of the year, outpacing most major economies. The World Bank has projected China’s economy to grow at 5.6 percent for 2023. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development expects 5.4 percent and the International Monetary Fund projects 5.2 percent. As it has for many years, China remains a most important engine of global growth.

One of the highlights in the first half of 2023 is the rebound in consumption, which contributed 77.2 percent of the growth, more than 44 percentage points higher than last year. Notably, people are spending more on services: From January to July, retail sales in transport, accommodation, catering and others grew 20.3 percent year over year. Some 502 million Chinese went to the movies this summer — more than the entire U.S. population.

China’s economy is also significantly greener and more innovation-driven than in the past. In the first seven months of 2023, the investment in high-tech industries and research and technical services rose 11.5 percent and 23.1 percent, respectively. In July, the output of new energy vehicles, wind turbines and charging facilities all increased roughly by one-fourth. China’s renewable-energy-generation capacity has overtaken its coal-power capacity. Its installed capacity of wind and solar power has topped the world for 13 and eight years, respectively.

Foreign trade remains resilient. China continues to take up about 14 percent of the global export market. China’s exports of electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar cells surged 61.6 percent in the first six months of 2023. As demand continues to revive domestically, China will also import more.

International businesses have voted with their feet. While transnational investment is lackluster globally, investment from overseas continues. France, Britain, Japan and Germany boosted investment in China in the first half of 2023 by 173.3 percent, 135.3 percent, 53 percent and 14.2 percent, respectively. Some 24,000 new foreign firms were established in China in the same period, up by 35.7 percent year over year. Half of Tesla’s global deliveries came from its Shanghai gigafactory last year, which rolls out one EV every 40 seconds on average. Starbucks now operates more than 6,500 stores in China, opening one nearly every nine hours.

And don’t forget: China’s middle-income group — more than 400 million people now — is on a path to exceed 800 million by 2035. As China continues to upgrade consumption, ease market access, optimize the business environment and strengthen supply and industrial chains, the fundamentals sustaining its long-term growth remain unchanged.

Of course, the road to post-covid recovery will not be smooth. It will feature undulating progress, often with twists and turns. In China, we do not shy away from problems. Rather, we address them head on.

In recent months, China has rolled out new policies to reinvigorate consumption, boost the private sector and attract more foreign investment. One of our priorities is to prevent and defuse financial risks, including policies to ensure the steady and sound development of the real estate sector. Such efforts are gradually paying off. With ample room in our policy tool kit, we are confident that we can forestall systemic risks.

According to BCA Research, China has been the source of more than 40 percent of global growth over the past decade, compared with 22 percent from the United States and 9 percent from the euro zone. For many years, some people have dismissed China’s contribution to global growth — or even hyped up the “threat” from a growing China. Now, as China is undergoing temporary economic adjustments, some blame China for dragging the global economy down; others advance the “China may collapse” theory. Is this fair?

This is a challenging time for everyone. The world is yet to recover from the trauma caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The Ukraine crisis is dragging on. Global recovery remains sluggish, and every country has its own problems to tackle.

It would be shortsighted and indeed dangerous to sit idly by, gloat or even make things harder for others. In a globalized era, bad news for anyone is bad news for all. Countries need to pull together to advance economic globalization and build a community with a shared future for mankind where no one is left behind.

More American friends have come to realize that the notion that China could economically collapse and America still thrive is utter fantasy. The United States needs to lift technology export controls, investment restrictions, economic sanctions and high tariffs against China. It must stop building parallel systems and seeking to decouple in the name of “de-risking,” which would only further complicate an already arduous global recovery. Instead, China and the United States should respect each other, coexist in peace and pursue win-win cooperation. This is the only way forward. And the world expects no less.

The Washington Post · by Xie Feng · August 30, 2023

18. The Complicated Legacy of Jean Larteguy’s “The Centurions” and America’s Post-9/11 Wars

We should not take novels and famous quotes too literally. But instead we should use them to improve our critical thinking. The author is helping us do that here but I would submit that many of us, to include senior leaders, do not take these novels too literally but I agree that those who think they provide models for use in the real world may be dangerous. Did we conduct ourselves in the GWOT too much like the Centurions in Algeria? We do need to reflect on that. The author offers a useful critique on civil military relations that we should reflect on.

The Complicated Legacy of Jean Larteguy’s “The Centurions” and America’s Post-9/11 Wars - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Benjamin Van Horrick · August 30, 2023

One of the novels that most heavily influenced the US military’s approach to its post-9/11 wars did not focus on the Middle East. It did not feature American service members. And it was published four decades before the terrorist attacks that precipitated America’s long involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Jean Larteguy’s The Centurions is a tale of captive French paratroopers in Indochina who later to go on to ascend to the zenith of their profession in Algeria during the 1950s. The book besotted senior American military leaders, including Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, leading to its reissue in 2015. The novel’s depiction of professional soldiers confronting the challenges of counterinsurgency resonated with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And its depiction of the tragic fall of Dien Bien Phu and its aftermath serves as haunting literary analog to the chaotic fall of Kabul in August 2021. But there is another layer that was too often ignored but must be reckoned with. Larteguy’s novel foretold the challenges that arise when prolonged deployments in a war characterized by nebulous goals estrange soldiers from their country.

The most recognizable excerpt from the book has become the now infamous “two armies” speech. The monologue by Lieutenant Colonel Raspéguy, a central figure in the story, appears in the novel’s first pages and is delivered following the French forces’ capture. It introduces the notion of distinction between classes, between warriors and the others.

I’d like to have two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers . . . an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country. The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but . . . to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the army in which I should like to fight.

Unsure if he will survive the ordeal, Raspéguy expresses his deepest desire: ascent to the upper reaches of the profession of arms, an ascent which in his mind leaves him free from the constraints that impede mission accomplishment. The experience crystallizes the obsession and asceticism warfare demands and elite practitioners seek. Raspéguy’s monologue served as the literary true north for generations of warriors. Yet far more poignant is what immediately follows. After hearing the monologue, a fellow paratrooper retorts, “You’re heading for a lot of trouble.”

The lean, taut prose yields luscious emotional content. Sculpted sentences convey the horrors of incarceration, the longing for home, and the cunning counterinsurgency demands. But while Larteguy’s work provides a realistic portrayal of lower-level military leadership and the challenges of counterinsurgency, it also illuminates the psychological effects of combatants’ estrangement from their peers and nation. The paratroopers formed their tribe separate and distinct from not only the people in whose name they served, but also those in uniform who they perceived as less capable, less consequential, and beneath them. Their experience as prisoners of war isolated the paratroopers from both their brothers in arms and their countrymen—but their actions and their attitudes as the story unfolds reinforced this isolation.

The Centurions consists of three parts: the beginning in Indochina, an uneasy return to France, and a new mission in Algeria. In part one, both before their capture and even more so as prisoners of war following the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the paratroopers receive a graduate-level course in revolutionary warfare. Part two traces their return to France, where they no longer feel connected to their homeland. Some of the paratroopers indulge in every pleasure and whim, but satisfaction and relief remain elusive. Their reentry into French society proves complicated by the ill-formed strategic decision that led to the fall of Dien Bien Phu and how little French citizens grasps the defeat’s implications. Curious citizens seek out the paratrooper commander, Raspéguy, to explain the ordeal they had suffered. The colonel feels incapable of doing so. “What should he tell them,” he wonders to himself, “these peasants sitting here with their gnarled hands spread flat out on the knees of their black Sunday-best trousers?” Unable to connect with his fellow citizens, Raspéguy is representative of a small class of warriors who remain separate from a population unaware of their sacrifice and ignorant of their purpose. Without relief, the paratroopers grow restless in France.

In counterinsurgencies and small wars, like those in Indochina, Iraq, and Afghanistan, one of the extraordinary difficulties is transforming tactical, battlefield successes into sustainable political outcomes. In such cases, the combatants who earned those battlefield successes may be left feeling alienated from the strategic decisions that sent them to war and determined its conduct. Counterinsurgency blurs both front lines and objectives. With no clear distinction between friendly and enemy terrain, the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan operated within an unfamiliar physical and human topography where threats lurked at every turn. Murky objectives further confused the implementors of counterinsurgency strategy as measures of success shifted from one day to the next. The prescient themes of The Centurions foretold the difficulty of waging messy wars, their disorienting effects, and how the experience of fighting in them enhances difficulties with reentry into civil society.

In the novel’s third part, a mission in Algeria provides an escape from these difficulties. Raspéguy receives command of paratrooper regiment and hand selects his staff, all veterans of Dien Bien Phu and the period of captivity. The cadre from Indochina will fight together again in Algeria, armed with hard-earned knowledge of warfare and the unwavering resolve forged during incarceration. Absent from their desire to deploy—both individual and collective—is the advancement of France’s strategic goals. Brandishing their bona fides as practitioners in a new conflict takes priority over a strategic end state.

The counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that commenced after 9/11 followed a similar cadence and tempo, but over a longer period, as new fronts opened and the initial mission mushroomed. Where Raspéguy’s paratroopers found a new battlefield in France’s loosely connected wars of decolonization, US service members found new theaters in its ambiguously defined global effort to combat violent extremist groups. Some Americans whose service began in Afghanistan and Iraq would move on to missions in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Cameroon, and elsewhere. Some did so in uniform, others as contractors. American society largely (although not wholly) preferred not to ask questions about the strategic wisdom of expanding an ill-defined and indefinite conflict, and old hands continued to do their job in new venues.

In The Centurions, the brutality of their experience as prisoners seared one paratrooper to another. Following their return to France, it is this commitment to one another, not patriotism, that animated the paratroopers’ desire to deploy to Algeria. The closest contemporary analogs to Larteguy’s pop culture reflection of a generation of warfighters are films. Movies like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty placed elite US special operations forces on a pedestal, though in the all-volunteer force this societal elevation also extends to all those who raise their hands and choose to carry the burden of warfighting while others’ lives continue with little impact from year after year of war. The cost of this professionalism is the same separation from society as the French paratroopers experienced. In both cases, combatants are bound tightly to others who shoulder risk and possess the skills needed for messy missions. Fellow citizens offer their thanks but remain detached from the realities and implications of waging a war in their name.

Larteguy shows how the pain of defeat diminished the horizons of the vanquished. In the first days after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, a paratrooper remarked, “The age of heroics is over.” In place of the heroism they failed to find as the French war in Indochina disintegrated, the French paratroopers adopted a detached resolve as they found a new war in Algeria. For a generation of US service members, it was the elusiveness of success rather than outright defeat that they experienced, but the result was largely similar. Perhaps this explains, in part, the zeal with which many veterans of Afghanistan joined the frantic effort to evacuate Afghan citizens to safety as Kabul fell to the Taliban. Veterans who assisted with the airlift sought to ease suffering and transmute their aguish into one final heroic act. Both Larteguy’s French paratroopers and American veterans coped with tragedy with a familiar remedy: action.

On one hand, the reasons why such esteemed figures as McChrystal and Petraeus would have lauded the book are obvious. Yet on another, its popularity among military leaders might have registered a warning to their fellow citizens. The byproduct of a society divorcing itself from a counterinsurgency fought in its name is a weakening connection between that society and its warfighters. Larteguy’s protagonists were seduced into believing they could dissolve the sinews that tether them to society and focus on the military mission they alone were equipped to complete. Likewise for US service members, prolonged deployments and messy missions place them in a convoluted moral space, where some might feel less bound by service to their country than by adherence to their own code. When battlefield excesses occurred and when the civil-military divide grew, a close reading of Larteguy’s work would have posed a question to citizens: What did you expect?

Major Benjamin Van Horrick is the current logistics operations officer for TF 76/3.

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

Image credit: Staff Sgt. Mark Burrell, US Army

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Benjamin Van Horrick · August 30, 2023

19. Supporting Ukraine and the price of American leadership

Supporting Ukraine and the price of American leadership

washingtontimes.com · by Clifford D. May

By - - Tuesday, August 29, 2023

OPINION:

“A fool is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Oscar Wilde famously quipped. In Milwaukee last week, the Republican candidates for president – minus one Donald J. Trump – quarreled over both the price and value of American support for Ukraine.

Only former Gov. Nikki Haley crunched the numbers correctly. From the February 2022 Russian invasion to August of this year, the United States has committed roughly $43 billion to Ukraine. As Ms. Haley suggested, that’s just 3.5% of U.S. spending on the Defense Department over the same period.

In other words, without American troops spilling a single drop of blood, Ukrainians are delivering body blows to the offensive military capabilities – e.g., the loss of more than 2,000 tanks to date – of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, America’s No. 2 adversary. (America’s No. 1 adversary, of course, is Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping whom Mr. Putin has embraced in a “no limits” alliance.)

Another way to look at it: U.S. assistance to Ukraine – military and humanitarian combined – represents just 1.2% of U.S. government spending over the past 18 months.

Is that not outstanding value? When have American taxpayers received a better – or even comparable – return on investment?

I’m not arguing that $43 billion is chump change. But to put that number in perspective, a recent AP investigation found that more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding may have been stolen, with another $123 billion wasted or misspent.

Consider three other misallocations (in my humble opinion) of your tax dollars.

President Biden is adding $80 billion over ten years to the budget of the Internal Revenue Service.

His plan to socialize student loans was to cost as much as $430 billion. Since the Supreme Court found that plan unconstitutional, the White House has come up with a new plan to transfer $39 billion worth of loans from students to taxpayers.

The misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act is projected to cost taxpayers $1.2 trillion over ten years in “green” subsidies. This will “address” but not actually impact climate change.

You also should know: Much of the materiel we’re sending to Ukraine is drawn from existing Defense Department stockpiles and is decades old.

Money spent on new and improved equipment to replace what we’ve transferred to Ukraine bolsters the U.S. defense industrial base, which is employing a growing number of skilled American workers.

That base has been in steep decline since what we believed (wrongly, I think) was the end of the Cold War in 1991. We took a premature “peace dividend.”

The U.S. defense industry also is expected to receive billions of dollars in new orders from European countries to replace materiel they have transferred to Ukraine.

So, support for Ukraine is modernizing American forces and the forces of America’s allies while building U.S. defense industrial capacity so we can better compete with other countries – the People’s Republic of China among them – that make and sell arms.

All this is necessary if Americans are to reliably deter their enemies. Deterrence doesn’t come cheap, but it’s a bargain compared to what it costs when our enemies see us as weak – lacking martial capability or will, or both – and decide to take a shot.

What about diplomacy?

We can try, one more time with feeling, to “reset” relations with Mr. Putin as President Obama did one year after the Russian dictator carved two provinces off neighboring Georgia and five years before he invaded Ukraine for the first time.

We can continue to attempt to “thaw” relations with Mr. Xi. We can bribe Ali Khamenei of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

These dictators would be pleased but not appeased.

Offers of “win-win” compromises do not tempt them. Outreached hands in search of unclenched fists hold no appeal. They recognize and respect power – nothing else.

Trust me: If Mr. Putin comes out on top in the current conflict, he won’t devote his golden years to gardening and pickleball.

He’ll use the continuing revenue from oil sales to, shall we say, build back better militarily and pursue his dream: the restoration of the Russian Empire (which was later branded as the Soviet Empire). He’ll also utilize Ukrainian resources – both natural and human (the latter with bayonets at their backs).

Because Finland and Sweden grasp this reality, they’re no longer neutral. They’re now on our side. Poland is beefing up its defenses.

Indeed, eleven European countries have given more to Ukraine as a percentage of GDP than the United States. Several other NATO countries have not stepped up as they should – that’s where U.S. diplomacy can be put to good use.

Meanwhile, in South Africa last week, the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – held a summit at which they agreed to admit Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina, and the United Arab Emirates. More than 20 other countries have expressed an interest in joining.

With Messrs. Xi and Putin at the helm, and Mr. Khamenei holding their hands, this will become the latest anti-American “international community” – a growth industry.

Of course, if you’re an isolationist, you think: Let nations “non-align” against America! Let Russia erase Ukraine! Let NATO crumble! Let Beijing take Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific! Why worry?

No need – if you’re oblivious to the impact all that will have on the security, freedom, rights, and prosperity of your children and grandchildren; if you can’t imagine what it will mean if America becomes a has-been hegemon in a world dominated by Chinese Communists and their America-hating partners in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Havana, Managua, and a lengthening list of other capitals.

Yes, the price of maintaining American leadership is high. But the value is higher. Significantly. To refuse to see that is just foolish.

• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.

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washingtontimes.com · by Clifford D. May

20. Ukraine’s Valley Forge Moment

Excerpts:

No one today can know with certainty the outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Perhaps Ukraine will fall. Perhaps Russia will pull itself together after tearing itself apart. But Ukraine has the reason and will to fight, while Russians do not. Ukraine has substantial outside help, while Russians only have Iran. Ukraine has a moral cause, while Russians do not.

Anyone who bet against George Washington in 1777-1778 would have lost. Anyone who bets against Ukraine in 2023-2024 should be prepared for the same outcome.

Ukraine’s Valley Forge Moment

There is good reason for optimism about Ukraine’s fight for freedom.

cepa.org · by Kurt Volker · August 30, 2023

In Philadelphia, on July 4, 1776, Americans declared their independence from Britain. Only 18 months later, General George Washington, leading a somewhat rag-tag Continental Army, was enduring a tough winter at Valley Forge, while British forces occupied Philadelphia and New York. Things looked bleak.

We know now that Washington was a brilliant general, that the American people had an iron-clad resolve to fight for freedom, and that with help from an outside power — France — the 13 colonies prevailed and truly established the United States of America. But in the winter of 1777-1778, no one could know this. It took an enormous effort of will, persistence, and moral clarity in the face of uncertainty. And a bit of outside help.

No doubt there were plenty of naysayers and armchair generals at the time who simply assumed the Americans would be defeated by overwhelming force and the superior resources of the British Empire. But Americans refused to give up. In the end, Britain’s resounding defeat resulted from long supply lines, American willpower, and foreign help.

Ukraine’s Independence Day falls on August 24, and for the second year in a row, it has been celebrated under the pressure of a full-scale Russian invasion. After 18 months of brutal fighting, much of Eastern and Southern Ukraine is still occupied, and another tough winter looms. Yet Russia has long supply lines, and Ukrainians have iron-clad will and outside help. Sound familiar?

This year, Ukraine’s muted independence celebrations took place amid a growing chorus of commentary in the West arguing that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is failing, that Ukraine has made poor tactical and strategic decisions, that the West itself cannot continue to support Ukraine militarily and financially at the same level it has done to date, and that Ukraine cannot possibly recover all of its lost territory and must begin to negotiate with Russia.

Ukrainians are told to face reality and, in essence, to give up.

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Would these same commentators have given the same advice to George Washington in 1777? Perhaps. And they would have been just as wrong. Such defeatism fundamentally underestimates the moral case, the utter resolve of people defending their lives and freedom, and the stakes that all free people have in their success.

Ukrainians are no more inclined to give up than Americans were in 1777-1778. So where is the call for Ukraine to negotiate coming from? It comes from those focused on a desire to stabilize relations with Russia, no matter what. That denigrates both the Ukrainian people and the cause of freedom they are fighting for. Some Westerners may feel they have the luxury of signing away Ukrainian lands along with its people and freedom. Ukrainians do not.

Obscured in all this is the fact that — contrary to the naysayers’ narrative — Ukraine’s counteroffensive is indeed making progress. The Ukrainians have methodically weakened and exhausted Russian forces, inflicting as many as 300,000 casualties including 120,000 dead. They have made substantial hits on Russian logistical supply chains. They have brought the war home to Russians in Moscow, and have launched complex drone attacks on military airfields, naval forces, and shipping.

The Russians have made no territorial gains since their destruction and temporary occupation of Bakhmut, while Ukrainian forces have kept up pressure along the entire front line – forcing Russia to defend in multiple areas – and have penetrated the first line of heavily mined areas in the south near Robotyne. This is opening a pathway to cutting off Russia’s supply lines to Crimea and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces.

Back in Russia, we have seen a serious mutiny, the regime-orchestrated assassination of the uprising’s leader when his plane was blown out of the sky near Moscow, the flight of a million young Russians to avoid conscription, the growing impatience of non-ethnic Russian regions, and more. While Ukraine is advancing step-by-step, Russia is tearing itself apart.

Anyone who expected Ukraine’s counter-offensive to make rapid and substantial territorial gains had their expectations in the wrong place. Unlike the Russians, the Ukrainians care about protecting the lives of their soldiers and are proceeding in a careful, methodical, and patient manner. Of course, it might go faster if they already had M1A1 Abrams tanks, F-16 aircraft, and ATACMs long-range artillery in their inventory, but those articles have not yet arrived on the battlefield due to the West’s own slow decision-making. And yet, Ukraine is advancing.

No one today can know with certainty the outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Perhaps Ukraine will fall. Perhaps Russia will pull itself together after tearing itself apart. But Ukraine has the reason and will to fight, while Russians do not. Ukraine has substantial outside help, while Russians only have Iran. Ukraine has a moral cause, while Russians do not.

Anyone who bet against George Washington in 1777-1778 would have lost. Anyone who bets against Ukraine in 2023-2024 should be prepared for the same outcome.

Ambassador Kurt Volker is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. A leading expert in US foreign and national security policy, he served as US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations from 2017-2019, and as US Ambassador to NATO from 2008-2009. 

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

Europe's Edge

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

cepa.org · by Kurt Volker · August 30, 2023

21. Statement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III Marking Two Years Since the End of the Afghanistan War

Statement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III Marking Two Years Since the End of the Afghanistan War

defense.gov

Release

Immediate Release

Aug. 31, 2023 |×

As we mark two years since the conclusion of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, we salute the valor, patriotism, and selflessness of the American service members and civilians who fought and served there over the course of 20 years.

Throughout America’s longest war, our troops showed great courage and compassion. My thoughts today are with all of the brave Americans who answered the call to duty after al-Qaeda’s terrorists attacked America—including the Pentagon itself—on September 11, 2001. We bow our heads today in memory of the 2,461 U.S. service members who never made it home, including the 13 courageous troops taken from us in the attack at Abbey Gate in the final hours of the war. We also remember the hundreds of service members from allied and partner countries who lost their lives during this 20-year war. And we honor the more than 20,000 Americans who were injured waging war in Afghanistan, including many who still bear wounds that are not visible.

In the war’s final days, the United States, along with our allies and partners, safely evacuated more than 124,000 civilians from Afghanistan, in the midst of the pandemic and in the teeth of danger. In recognition of teams that operated and excelled under these difficult and dangerous conditions, I am proud to announce the approval of the Presidential Unit Citation for the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force-Crisis Response-Central Command, and Joint Task Force 82 of the 82nd Airborne Division and its supporting units.

We remain deeply committed to supporting the Afghan allies who fought by our sides and to helping those who are now building new lives outside their troubled homeland. We will continue to push to help resettle our Afghan allies, and I am proud that we have welcomed more than 115,000 Afghans who stood by our side to the United States over the past two years.

Today, our hearts and our prayers are with the brave Americans who volunteered to keep our country safe, with the Gold Star families whose loved ones fell in Afghanistan, with the military families who endured so much over those two decades, and with the veterans who still carry the memories and the scars of war. The war in Afghanistan is over, but our gratitude to the Americans who fought it is unending.

Austin Defense Secretary Afghanistan

defense.gov

22. A Russian Defector Flew a Chopper Full of Jet Fighter Parts to Ukraine. That's Major.

A Russian Defector Flew a Chopper Full of Jet Fighter Parts to Ukraine. That's Major.

This marks what may be the first defection involving a helicopter operated by Russia’s armed forces.

BY SÉBASTIEN ROBLINPUBLISHED: AUG 30, 2023

Popular Mechanics · August 30, 2023

Last Wednesday, Ukrainian media reported that a Russian helicopter pilot flew his Mi-8AMTSh “Hip-H” assault transport helicopter loaded full of spare parts for jet fighters right into the hands of Ukraine’s military. It was part of a defection operation planned in coordination with the GUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.

The successful caper may be the first defection involving a helicopter operated by Russia’s armed forces.

An article by Ukrainian Pravda indicates that this delicate operation involved six months of planning by Ukraine. The helicopter pilot took off in his aircraft (“Red 62” with serial number RF-04428), which was loaded with spare parts for Su-27 and Su-30SM jet fighters that were intended to be delivered to another Russian airbase.

How significant is the captured Mi-8AMTSh?

The Mi-8 ‘Hip’ medium-lift twin-engine helicopter has been a workhorse of Russia’s vertical-lift aviation since it entered Soviet service in 1967. It remains in production today, with over 17,000 built—in dozens of different models—and in the service of over 50 countries, including some U.S. government agencies.

Both Ukraine and Russia actively employ Mi-8s in support and ground attack roles—the latter usually involving rocket barrages released in an arc at extremely low altitude. Early in the war, Russia used Mi-8s to insert troops in costly air assault landing operations, while Ukraine’s flew risky night missions over Russian lines to resupply the surrounded garrison of Mariupol and evacuate wounded.

This content is imported from twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Ukrainian Mi-8s still doing low-level Ukrainian Mi-8 things (lobbing S-8 80mm unguided rockets at Russian positions).#Ukraine #UkraineWar @Osinttechnical pic.twitter.com/nAxa3rV5Ic

— NewsUkrainian24 (@NewsUkrainian24) June 12, 2023

The Mi-8AMTSh sub-model captured this week will likely have bits of newer technology of interest to Ukrainian and Western intelligence services, as it is the latest air-assault variant of the Mi-8, which entered service in 2009. That means it’s armed and armored to deploy infantry directly into combat while supporting them with its own firepower.

Mi-8AMTSH at 2015 MAKS airshow. Note the new side door, the six rails on the stub wing with two rockets pods mounted, and the elements of the Vitebsk self defense system including directional infrared jamming turrets on the wingtip and tail.

Vitaly V. Kuzmin//Wikimedia Commons

The AMTSh can carry 26 fully-equipped infantry, or over 4 tons of cargo, and features an additional right-side door and more convenient rear ramp to allow faster unloading than the Mi-8’s usual clamshell rear doors. Meanwhile, the six rails on the AMTSh’s stub-wings can carry 9M120 Ataka radio-guided anti-tank missiles, 80-millimeter rocket pods, podded machine guns, or 23-millimeter autocannons. A handful of Mi-8s have also been upgraded with Vitebsk self-defense, which includes a missile approach warning sensor and multiple laser turrets that can blind approaching infrared guided missiles.

Ukraine Will Pay $1 Million to Russian Defectors

AMTShs can also carry up to two sideways-facing window-mount 7.62-millimeter machine guns, ideal for providing covering fire while descending on a landing zone.

Other features include redesigned rotors and VK-2500 turboshaft with digital engine controls that improve hot climate and high altitude performance, modern cockpit displays to support night flying, GPS/GLONASS satellite navigation, and beefed-up armor plating around the engine and cockpit. Russia’s Air Force may have received between 100 and 200 Mi-8AMTShs out of around 780 Mi-8s in service.

Including the defector’s ‘Hip,’ photos confirm that Russia has lost at least 20 Mi-8 transports (many early in the war), as well as four Mi-8MTPR-1 electronic warfare helicopters used for jamming. Ukraine has also lost 20 Mi-8s, but has received or been pledged 44 Mi-8s and Mi-17s (the export model designation for Mi-8Ms with uprated engines).

Once analysts are done picking over the most interesting technology (particularly sensors and self-defense systems), this helicopter will reportedly serve in the Ukrainian military—service with the potential to be colorful, given its more advanced capabilities than the Mi-8s already in Ukrainian service.

The Su-27 and Su-30SM components being transported will also likely interest Ukrainian and Western analysts, particularly if any relate to the aircraft’s sensors, weapons, or self-defense systems. Data obtained could potentially aid in detecting, classifying, and overcoming the defenses of those aircraft types. The older Su-27 ‘Flanker’ parts may even be directly applicable to sustaining Ukraine’s fleet of Su-27 fighters.

Two Ukrainian Air Force Su-27s seen flying over Zhytomyr in 2018. While Ukraine is reinforcing its fleet of short-range MiG-29 fighters with donations from its allies, it faces greater challenges obtaining spare parts for its more powerful Su-27 Flanker fighters, a type also employed in combat by Russia to a limited extent in this war.

SOPA Images//Getty Images

However the defection’s impact may primarily be on morale—revealing that a pilot in Russia’s military was sufficiently demoralized by the war to take on the considerable risks of defection in wartime. His stated reasons for doing so will be of particular interest, should they surface to the public. The incident may also trigger internal ripples of doubt concerning the loyalty of other Russian military pilots, which could lead to crack downs and disruptions to the pilot roster.

A legacy of defections

During the Cold War, several Communist pilots—often motivated by lucrative cash prizes advertised by Western-allied intelligence agencies—were enticed into flying over to the West, bringing with them state-of-the-art MiG-15, MiG-25 and MiG-29 jet fighters that were hungrily snapped up for analysis.

Military ID documents of Viktor Belenko who in 1976 landed his MiG-25 ’Foxbat’ interceptor at Hakodate airport near Tokyo. Analysis of his MiG-25 rapidly dispelled exaggerated Western fears of the extremely fast but clumsy Foxbat.

CIA Photo//Wikimedia Commons

It’s claimed that Ukraine’s captured ‘Hip’ is the first helicopter lost by the Soviet/Russian military to defection. That may be, though both a Hip helicopter and two Mi-24 Hind gunships supplied to the communist-backed Afghan Air Force did defect to Pakistan in the 1980s.

The particular context that facilitated the luring elite pilots into defecting with their advance planes may have ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 saw those circumstances reemerge. Initially, Russia targeted Ukrainian pilots, having already secured the defection of many Ukrainian Navy personnel when it seized Crimea in 2014.

Wagner Warlord Prigozhin Dead in Jet Crash

Ukrainian military historian Mikhail Zhirokov wrote that Russian intelligence successfully contacted one Ukrainian pilot during the brief Minsk quasi-truce in the fall of 2014.

While flying a surveillance mission along the Russian border over the Sumy region of Ukraine on September 8, 2014, this pilot seemingly attempted to fly his Su-24MR supersonic reconnaissance jet to Russia’s Khalino Airbase not far across the border—but was stopped at the intervention of the navigator sitting beside him and returned to base.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s parliament approved legislation offering $1 million to Russian pilots who defected with their aircraft.

Ukraine’s intelligence service pursued its own operation, contacting Russian bomber pilots flying Su-24s, Su-34 and Tu-22Ms in a bid to entice defection. A few played along, but only because Russia’s own intelligence service was hoping to lure the Ukrainian agents into their own trap—a scheme that the Ukrainian agents detected in turn. After feeding disinformation back, the Ukrainian agents thought that they had secured the defection of a Russian bomber pilot named Nosenko, who promised to land at Kanatovo airfield on the morning of July 23.

Flying towards the base, however was not one defecting plane, but eight Kalibr and Kh-22 cruise missiles. These missiles killed one Ukrainian, injured 17, and destroyed two combat aircraft. Afterwards, the Ukrainian government tried a former intelligence agent involved in the defection effort for conducting the operation without authorization.

Ukraine’s Mi-8AMTSh caper clearly worked much better for Ukraine’s intelligence service, achieving another win for Ukraine on the same day that the country knocked out an important S-400 air defense battery in Crimea. Russia, meanwhile, fired air force chief General Surovikin and appears likely to have assassinated mercenary warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in his private jet, along with nine other passengers onboard.

Sébastien Roblin

Contributor

Sébastien Roblin has written on the technical, historical, and political aspects of international security and conflict for publications including 19FortyFive, The National Interest, MSNBC, Forbes.com, Inside Unmanned Systems and War is Boring. He holds a Master’s degree from Georgetown University and served with the Peace Corps in China. You can follow his articles on Twitter.

Popular Mechanics · August 30, 2023

23. A Clash of Worldviews – The United States and China Have Reached an Ideological Impasse

Conclusion:

Thus the two countries are at a serious impasse: an ideologically driven security dilemma. Washington seems to have not yet fully recognized this impasse. It is most likely that the United States and China will remain trapped in a tense and uncomfortable rivalry for the foreseeable future, with the mutual desire to avoid outright war serving as the last remaining floor for the relationship. The fact that the ideological dispute is unlikely to be resolved only makes buttressing this increasingly fragile floor especially crucial. Reinforcing it demands persistent, concerted, and extensive efforts from both sides. There are simply no other options left, at least until a time when the United States, China, or both are willing to adjust their worldviews and find a way to share the same world.

A Clash of Worldviews

The United States and China Have Reached an Ideological Impasse

By Nathan Levine

August 30, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Nathan Levine · August 30, 2023

Leaders in both China and the United States appear genuinely interested in trying to stabilize their relationship, which is now at its rockiest point in 50 years. Both countries recognize that the tension between them has become so acute that they face a real and growing risk of war. In recent months, Beijing and Washington have worked to renew dialogue by resuming regular diplomatic visits and setting up new high-level communications channels; in July, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry suggested that China and the United States may arrange a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden to coincide with this November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders Meeting in San Francisco. Such a meeting could offer Biden his only significant opportunity to put the U.S.-Chinese relationship on firmer footing before the distractions of the 2024 presidential election campaign set in.

But a fundamental issue stands in the way of truly solidifying this progress: the two countries lack a mutually acceptable narrative to define their relationship. U.S. leaders, in their diplomatic engagements and public remarks, routinely assert that the United States and China are engaged in a great-power “competition.” Fundamentally, the Biden administration’s approach to China is premised on the idea of “managed strategic competition,” a theory that requires both sides to accept the prospect of engaging in sustained and steady strategic competition for the long term. This strategy demands that each party be transparent about its redlines in order to keep competition from spiraling into conflict and to make room for necessary cooperation. It cannot function if one side refuses even to accept that long-term competition is an inevitable and legitimate state of affairs.

But China’s leaders will not let “competition” define the U.S.-Chinese relationship. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it in an Asia Society speech last year, Beijing sees “so-called strategic competition” as a “win-lose” dynamic that brings “tremendous uncertainty” to the relationship and pushes the two powers further toward “confrontation and conflict.” China instead demands that the United States commit to describing the relationship in terms of “mutual respect,” “peaceful coexistence,” and “win-win” cooperation. When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Xi in Beijing in June, Xi demanded that neither country “try to shape the other side” and declared that “peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation” is the only “right way” forward.

This is no mere semantic squabble. China demands the “coexistence” concept out of a deep anxiety regarding what “competition” could mean for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—a view that the U.S. side does not fully understand. Practically, the disconnect has frustrated even such straightforward steps as establishing effective military-to-military crisis communications and dialogue on nuclear arms control.

The truth is that current U.S.-Chinese tensions and distrust cannot be reduced to any specific flash point such as Taiwan or technology. Nor are these tensions the necessary result of some inevitable rivalry between two great powers. They stem from profound differences between China and the United States on the issues of worldview, ideology, and regime legitimacy. This idea may come as a surprise for many in the West, who prefer to think about China in economic and military terms and who often see Beijing as laser-focused on its national self-interest rather than distracted by ideological considerations. The role of subconscious ideological assumptions in the U.S. approach to China has also been badly underestimated. But these differences reveal themselves in the dispute over how to describe the relationship—and they must be considered carefully, lest the misunderstandings degenerate into open conflict.

YOU WIN OR YOU DIE

When U.S. leaders press Chinese leaders to permit “competition” to be the conceptual basis for their countries’ relationship, they are drawing on a specific conception of what competition entails, one based on the ideals envisioned by classical democratic liberalism. In this vision—core to the liberal tradition of political philosophy—political competition is competitive in the sense of a sporting match: a contest of ideas that may be waged with great passion but that, at the end of the day, can be resolved peaceably, even amicably. Both competitors know the outcome is not final and the loser has the right to return and compete again. Political competition is, if not a game, at least not a matter of life or death.

This understanding of competition could not differ more from the vision of politics held by Xi and the CCP leadership. While the modern CCP has tried to leave behind aspects of Mao Zedong’s legacy—by reforming and opening the economy after 1979 and loosening its collectivist ambitions—Mao’s Marxist-Leninist view of political “competition” remains central to its thinking. This vision presented politics as precisely the life-or-death struggle the democratic liberal ideal claims it is not. In this view, political competition is a raw struggle for power between groups or factions that can only be a prelude to the eradication of one’s competitor; indeed, the history of Leninist politics in China is replete with purges, prison camps, and political murders. As Mao framed it, political competition comes down to “Ni si; wo huo” (You die; I live).

Xi was raised during the brutal factional violence of the Cultural Revolution; his father was purged from the CCP’s leadership and imprisoned when Xi was nine years old, and to him the zero-sum view is the only conception of political competition that is not fatally naive. In 2000, Xi reflected in an interview with the Chinese Times that “people who have little experience with power, those who have been far away from it, tend to regard [it] as mysterious and novel,” and unserious. “But I look past the superficial things … the flowers and the glory and the applause,” he went on. “I see the detention houses [and] the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level.”

Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-ranked leader, has claimed that Western rhetoric has “stoked ideological prejudice and hatred” such that China is now “seeing acts of encirclement and oppression.” In the West, these kinds of references to ideology frequently go unnoticed or are dismissed as mere propaganda. This is a mistake. In fact, from the perspective of the top leadership of the CCP, ideology is the central arena of conflict, and the United States is mainly driven by a desire to wield its own Western, liberal ideology to subvert and overthrow their regime.

Understanding the CCP’s view illuminates Beijing’s problem with the “competition” frame. Whereas the Biden administration’s liberal vision of politics allows it to see “managed competition” as a way for both sides to survive, and even to thrive, while avoiding conflict, the CCP’s leadership reads the concept as a papering-over of the real, existential struggle—and a way to trick China into tying its own hands. The Chinese leadership is therefore fundamentally skeptical of any U.S. assurances that the two countries’ competition will actually remain bounded.

PARTY LINE

No one has expressed these views more consistently and forthrightly than Xi himself. In a speech delivered to top party leaders months after he took office in 2013, Xi declared that in China, Western “hostile forces” were “doing their utmost to propagate so-called universal values.” Their objective was “to vie with us [on] the battlefields of people’s hearts … to overthrow [China’s] socialist system.” Though “invisible,” the “extraordinarily fierce” ongoing struggle in the ideological sphere was, he warned, “a matter of life and death.” He has not swayed from this conviction: in 2016 he declared that Westerners regard “China’s growth as a threat to Western values,” and thus “they have not for a moment ceased their ideological infiltration of China.” In 2017, he affirmed that “ideology is about the heart and soul of a nation,” and this July, he warned the assembled leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that they all must be ready to resist Western-instigated “color revolutions.”

Western analysts and policymakers often attribute this growing emphasis on ideology to Xi’s personal understanding of power. But some of the most knowledgeable political observers inside China argue that Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, initiated the country’s intensified focus on ideological and geopolitical struggles. After Mao’s death, the CCP experimented with easing off ideological rhetoric to facilitate economic growth and build profitable ties with the West. But its deep-rooted ideological convictions remained dormant, ready to reassert themselves, especially during times of turbulence or perceived danger.

So when, in December 2008, over 300 prominent Chinese lawyers, intellectuals, and activists unveiled the “Charter 08” manifesto—which advocated for comprehensive liberalization of the regime—the CCP’s leadership saw in it a confirmation that Western influence posed a direct challenge to its legitimacy. Charter 08 became a decisive factor in convincing the party’s leadership that it had to change course fast. A leaked 2013 internal party communique called “Document 9” reflected the CCP’s renewed conviction that “Western anti-China forces,” driven by liberal ideology, were dead set on forcing “Westernization, splitting, and color revolutions” on China in order to overthrow the CCP and make the country into a democracy.

This growing belief in a fierce ongoing ideological struggle has supercharged the CCP’s distrust of Washington’s intentions. Ideology helps underwrite the legitimacy of regimes, and a regime’s legitimacy is likely to determine whether it survives. Combined with the CCP’s view of politics, this belief makes ideological competition between regimes in fact the ultimate “matter of life and death” that Xi has described. Indeed, Xi and other top CCP leaders understand that political defeat, including from regime change, could put their own lives at risk.

TWO TO TANGO

To many Americans, absorbed by their own democracy’s weaknesses, the idea that “Western anti-China forces” are on a crusade to overthrow the CCP may sound irrational, even paranoid. But it is crucial also to consider the fuller nature and history of Western liberalism as an ideology. Many Westerners are, by now, so acculturated to liberalism that they do not perceive it as an ideology at all. They swim in it like fish through water. But Document 9 also identified liberalism as a missionary faith that claims its values “are the prevailing norm for all human civilization” and must apply universally “to all humanity.” And as practiced abroad by the United States this is, in fact, true—not only in theory but in practice.

After World War II, the United States began to embrace a maximalist strain of liberalism that came to view the existence of illiberal societies anywhere as a threat to liberty everywhere. This conception, rooted in Hegelian universalism, takes a view of historical progress that sees liberalism as history’s natural endpoint and the destiny of human government. It cannot permanently tolerate any illiberal societies, as their existence undermines its claim to universality. Accelerating after the end of the Cold War, this conviction helped underwrite ambitious U.S. attempts to reorder other societies along liberal lines, such as in Iraq and Libya—interventions that, notably, left those countries’ regimes destroyed and leaders dead. In the CCP’s view, this is precisely the impetus now driving U.S. hostility toward China.

U.S. politicians have, in recent decades, provided no shortage of rhetorical fodder to reinforce that perception. Under President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the United States must “engage and empower the Chinese people” to enact regime change, claiming that “if the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.” Biden has publicly avoided any such hawkish calls for regime change in China, but he has made the promotion of liberal values a core foreign policy priority around the world and frequently speaks of an ongoing global “battle between democracy and autocracy.” This perceived imperialistic pressure is occurring precisely when Chinese leaders feel increasingly insecure at home.

For China, “competition” implies that one side or the other will be destroyed.

The CCP is genuinely worried about its legitimacy. It faces a slowing economy with alarmingly high youth unemployment as well as a weakening of the unspoken bargain between the government and the people: that a lack of political liberalization would be offset by steadily increasing economic prosperity. Precisely because of their ideological worldview, Xi and other top CCP leaders understand that any serious economic setback could further open the door to liberal ideas and pose an existential threat to their rule.

Xi hopes to resolve this legitimacy problem by seeking to revive the Chinese economy and promoting “common prosperity” to address inequality. He is also trying to instill Chinese “cultural confidence,” as he puts it, by promoting Chinese nationalism and focusing on national security issues. Most important, he is attempting to forge a new social contract by stressing a continuity between China’s triumphal, pre-Marxist past and the present era under his leadership.

When Xi speaks of creating “multipolar world,” he does not only mean making China a military and economic power equal to the United States. He seeks to assert that China is and will continue to be a great civilization that has a right to exist on its own terms, without conforming to Western liberalism. He hopes to bolster the CCP’s perceived legitimacy at home as well as abroad precisely by positing that Chinese civilization serves as a counterexample to liberalism. This is the message he delivered, for example, in a recent speech in which he spoke of making the world safe for a “diversity of civilizations.”

Hence, from Beijing’s perspective, it is vital, not trivial, to demand that Washington accept “coexistence” with China. For the CCP, “competition” implies that one side or the other will be destroyed. In truth, the party is not very confident about which side that would be.

TAKE THE FLOOR

Neither China nor the United States can easily accept the other’s proposition for how to understand and approach their relationship. This creates a hard ceiling to what diplomatic dialogues and stabilization efforts can accomplish. In practical terms, the ideological disconnect makes Beijing hesitant to embrace any mutual “guardrails” intended to prevent escalation in a competitive environment. Recently, for example, Beijing has refused to accommodate Washington’s request for dialogues on nuclear strategic stability and arms control. Because of its ideological suppositions, Beijing assumes these are traps laid for its destruction, not genuine attempts to maintain stability. Even potential collaboration in areas of shared interest such as climate change, global food security, and international macroeconomic stability are now typically seen by China as a vehicle for one party to impose its will on the other.

Ultimately, what China wants is for the United States to explicitly agree to an end goal for the relationship: peaceful coexistence or something similar, in which the CCP’s right to rule remains permanently off limits. This sounds easy enough: Washington already claims that it accepts the CCP’s legitimacy and will not try to overthrow the Chinese regime. But Beijing does not trust Washington’s protestations, as it does not believe that American liberal ideology can ever truly accept this scenario.

Changing that belief would likely require the United States to substantially shift course from how it approaches the world, abandoning any claims to liberal universalism and cultural superiority and explicitly adopting a worldview and a foreign policy more strictly centered on national sovereignty—in other words, a worldview more like China’s. For the United States, “coexistence” also implies ceasing all competitive pressure on issues such as technology, trade, and human rights. This is not something the United States is likely to be willing to do. The American ideological tendency toward a crusading international liberalism runs very deep on both sides of the domestic political divide—just as the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist instinct does in China.

Thus the two countries are at a serious impasse: an ideologically driven security dilemma. Washington seems to have not yet fully recognized this impasse. It is most likely that the United States and China will remain trapped in a tense and uncomfortable rivalry for the foreseeable future, with the mutual desire to avoid outright war serving as the last remaining floor for the relationship. The fact that the ideological dispute is unlikely to be resolved only makes buttressing this increasingly fragile floor especially crucial. Reinforcing it demands persistent, concerted, and extensive efforts from both sides. There are simply no other options left, at least until a time when the United States, China, or both are willing to adjust their worldviews and find a way to share the same world.

NATHAN LEVINE is Assistant Director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

Foreign Affairs · by Nathan Levine · August 30, 2023

24. America’s In Much Better Shape (at Home and Abroad) Than You Probably Think

Hmmm... Rothkopf tells us perhaps only half the sky is dangerously near to falling.

America’s In Much Better Shape (at Home and Abroad) Than You Probably Think

TAKE A BREATH

We still face existential threats to our democracy, but the U.S. is far stronger than it was before the pandemic.

David Rothkopf

Updated Aug. 30, 2023 2:52PM EDT / Published Aug. 30, 2023 4:22AM EDT

The Daily Beast · August 30, 2023

opinion

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Getty

What if America is actually going to be alright, after all?

What if, in fact, it turns out we are living in a moment of not just American resilience, but of resurgence? What if, as has happened so often in American history, when confronted by great challenges we are emerging stronger, confounding expectations?

Think where we were on Jan. 6, 2021. Our democracy was on the ropes. Our president had betrayed the country. For the first time in our history, we failed to have a peaceful transfer of power between our elected leaders. The movement led by Donald Trump fed on the worst flaws in our national character—the racism, sexism, hyper-nationalism, and greed that had so often tormented us in the preceding two and a half centuries.

The nation was wracked by a pandemic. The toll the disease was taking was compounded by science deniers who pressured the vulnerable into rejecting the advice and benefits offered by medicine. Our economy was shaken, as was that of the world. U.S. GDP had fallen by 3.5 percent the previous year, more than a 5-point decline from the year before.

Our rivals in the world were rising. By some measures, China’s economy had already eclipsed ours in size. But regardless of metrics, the momentum was with them. The U.S. was wounded, faltering, bleeding out.

It would be foolish to suggest that we have solved all the problems we faced nearly 1,000 days ago at the moment of the insurrection. Our politics are still broken. Inequality continues to soar. A substantial percentage of our electorate still feeds on hate and contempt for our institutions, seemingly ready to support a presidential candidate currently facing 91 felony counts in four separate court cases.

In this handout provided by the Fulton County Sheriff's Office, former U.S. President Donald Trump poses for his booking photo at the Fulton County Jail on August 24, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Fulton County Sheriff's Office / Getty

If the election next year goes to Trump, if our justice system fails to hold him accountable, if he can live up to his promises to gut the checks and balances in our system, to fire our dedicated civil servants, to make the country effectively pledge its loyalty not to our ideals or our Constitution to but to just one man, then the American experiment will have met a terrible end.

But, as we look back on the past three years, as we assess where we are against where we were and where we might have been, there is cause for hope.

While we cannot be complacent about the threats we face, given their gravity we should not deny ourselves the lift we might gain from assessing just where things have gone right. We should find it motivating to acknowledge seeing what is best about our country triumph over what is most malign, and seeing the natural strengths of the American people—and of our system—withstand the grave threats they have faced and are facing.

After all, from the depths of the COVID pandemic, and despite the gross mismanagement of the previous U.S. administration, America has recovered more rapidly than the other advanced economies of the G7.

This recovery has included job growth that has broken records and the sound management of inflation—which was associated chiefly with the pandemic-caused supply chain squeezes and corporate profiteering linked to those supply chain problems. The recovery has been marked by low unemployment, low energy costs, and an active program of investing in the U.S. economy.

Despite the fact that U.S. politics is so polarized and toxic, the past three years have seen more major public initiatives investing in American growth than at any time in the past 60 years.

There may have been mini-eras that are generally viewed more positively in hindsight during that period—but the Bipartisan Infrastructure Package was the biggest such piece of legislation since the Eisenhower years. The Inflation Reduction Act was the biggest investment in combating climate change and in green growth in U.S. history. The CHIPs and Science Act will help make America less dependent on foreign sources for vital technologies while ensuring we remain the world’s leader in critical technologies. The American Rescue Plan lifted millions out of poverty and helped millions more rebound from the consequences of the pandemic’s devastation.

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures to a map while speaking during a news conference about his administration's response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic at the White House on July 23, 2020 in Washington, D.C.

Drew Angerer / Getty

At the same time, this administration looks more like the American people—all of them—than any in our history. And it has brought more diversity to our courts than any of its predecessors.

President Biden and his administration and their allies on Capitol Hill deserve recognition for these accomplishments. What they have achieved has truly been remarkable. But the credit is hardly theirs alone.

American voters soundly rejected the abuses of Trump and the extremists he promoted in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. Following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which ended 50 years of women’s rights to bodily autonomy, even “red” states like Kansas and Ohio and “purple” states like Wisconsin and Michigan rejected extremist measures and courts.

And judges appointed by both Republicans and Democrats have frequently ruled against the most extreme measures. Not always. But often enough to believe that the system is still capable of working, and to send a message to the far right that Americans will fight for their fundamental rights time and time again.

Trump may have been able to pack the Supreme Court (thanks to the rule bending of Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans) and to avoid conviction in two impeachment trials thanks to the same group, but he now faces seven different trials, including four major criminal prosecutions. And so far, with few exceptions, we have every reason to believe that those cases will be conducted according to the letter and spirit of the law and untainted by politics—despite the worst efforts of the former president and his supporters.

Indeed, we should even garner encouragement from the fact that the Biden administration has honored tradition and oath by remaining hands-off in the case involving the president’s own son. His attorney general even appointed a special counsel, appearing to objective observers to be bending over backwards to be fair.

Yes, there are dark forces at work in our system. Yes, we must continue to call them out, resist, and defeat them.

Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

Brent Stirton / Getty

But three years ago, if you had said that the U.S. would be stronger than ever in the eyes of the world, that our NATO alliance would be larger and more vital, that we would be building vast new alliances across the Pacific, few would have believed it. Had you said we would go from Trump’s subordinating U.S. interests to those of Russia, to standing up to Putin and helping Ukraine score victory after unimaginable victory over their much bigger neighbor, you would have rejected the idea as too improbable an about-face.

Indeed, taking an even longer-term perspective, I recall 30 years ago when I was working in the Clinton administration and we were starting to focus on the rise of what we called Big Emerging Markets—what the world ultimately came to call BRICS—most felt that the emerging powers would inevitably rise to preeminence and we would falter.

But now, one by one the BRICS have faltered. Russia has succumbed to the dreadful costs of Putin’s hubris. Brazil has suffered with weak leaders or worse. India has drifted away from democracy and toward ethno-nationalism. Sadly, South Africa—like most other economies in Africa—failed to find its footing. Even China, by far the most potent of them, may be facing long-term economic reversals.

Yet, here we are, stronger than ever.

And next year, if Trump and the MAGA movement are defeated at the November elections (as independents and Democrats unite as polls suggest they might to reject the right’s brazen criminality and hate-fueled policies), and Trump is held to account in the courts, America will have completed a remarkable comeback, truly one for the ages.

We will have defeated COVID. We will have risen to face down grave international challenges. We will have begun the process of fixing much of what is broken in our own system. We will have invested in a more independent, innovative, technologically advanced, climate-friendly, job-producing economy. And, as a consequence, we will once again be in a position to lead for many years to come.

Of course, those outcomes are not written in stone. But frankly, as we look back on the past several years, we should take heart in the fact that they are in reach. Just as we did when we faced the trauma of the revolution that gave birth to this country, or the growing pains of a divided nation, or the Civil War, or two World Wars, or rampant racism, or robber barons from one age to another—though we may struggle, we have a uniquely American way of gaining strength from our travails.

We have much work to do. But we also have something we had no reason to expect to have right now. Once again, we have hope.

The Daily Beast · August 30, 2023

25. US Transits as Part of Taiwan’s Gray Zone Diplomacy

Excerpts:

As China accelerates its gray zone warfare toward Taiwan, Beijing must recognize that Taipei has many options to increase its gray zone diplomacy in response. Whereas official transits have fallen into a restrained and predictable rhythm since the Lee’s Cornell trip and the ensuing crisis, campaign trips have broken most assumed “red lines” and may break new paths for future presidential activity. Future transits, for instance, could see Taiwanese presidents stopping at three or more cities in the U.S. and delivering public speeches to an American audience.

Despite China’s vociferous opposition to the recent visit of William Lai, transit and trip diplomacy has become ingrained in Taiwanese political culture. If past is prologue, we can expect a continued trend of lengthened transits and trips. As such visits become increasingly visible, Beijing will be hard-pressed to effectively stem waves of new gray zone diplomacy.

US Transits as Part of Taiwan’s Gray Zone Diplomacy

Taiwanese politicians’ “transits” through the United States have a 30-year history spanning both DPP and KMT administrations.

thediplomat.com · by Edward Kuperman · August 31, 2023

As Taiwan’s campaign season heats up ahead of the January 2024 national elections, foreign policy is once again front and center. As per usual, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate, sitting Vice President William Lai, must contend with not only his Taiwanese competitors but also election interference from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Earlier this month, on either side of a seven-day diplomatic excursion to attend inauguration ceremonies in Paraguay, Lai made stopovers in New York City and San Francisco where he met with Taiwanese expats and campaign supporters. In response, the Chinese Foreign Ministry demanded that the United States “refuse to let William Lai ‘transit’ the U.S.,” as CCP-owned media named Lai a “die-hard secessionist” and “outright troublemaker” whose transit “significantly damaged China’s sovereignty and territory.”

When China complains about such transits, the U.S. defense is that it is “routine” and “common practice.” Indeed, the normalization of travel to the United States by Taiwanese leaders and presidential candidates is the result of a 30-year history of unofficial visits. The origin of this trend dates back thirty years to the 1990s when President Lee Teng-hui of the Kuomintang (KMT) pursued a strategy of “flexible diplomacy” to expand Taiwan’s international footprint without provoking cross-strait hostilities.

Aspects of Lee’s foreign policy were unsuccessful: Taiwan was not admitted to any U.N. organizations, even as an observer, and China has continued to poach from Taiwan’s dwindling number of diplomatic allies. Yet with its unofficial strategic partners, especially the United States, Lee Teng-hui’s “transit diplomacy” played a groundbreaking role in strengthening Taiwanese security.

Transits, Trips, and Electioneering

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In 1979, the United States cut official ties with the Republic of China (ROC) government in Taiwan in favor of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and agreed to “acknowledge” Beijing’s one-China principle. For 15 years after that, no Taiwanese leader set foot on U.S. soil. Amid warming relations between the U.S. and Lee Teng-hui, sitting president and pioneer of democratic reforms in Taiwan, the Clinton State Department updated its rules against official travel. In 1994, Lee was denied a visa but allowed a refueling stopover at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaiʻi during a worldwide tour of Taiwan’s allies on three continents.

Lee aimed to initiate closer coordination between the United States and Taiwan on cross-strait issues and was unsatisfied with the Hawai’i stopover, during which he stayed cooped up in his plane. The following year, Lee lobbied the U.S. Congress to allow him to attend a reunion hosted by his alma mater, Cornell University, where he would deliver a brief lecture on his democratization efforts. Expanding upon the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, Congress passed Public Law 103-416 in October 1994 to clarify that ROC presidents and high-level officials “shall be admitted” for business, security, environmental, or humanitarian purposes. The Clinton administration ultimately approved the Taiwanese president’s visa, accepting the argument by Lee’s supporters that his visa was for a personal trip, meaning the administration’s verdict could not be construed as a change to the United States’ one-China policy.

China responded to Lee’s five-day trip by initiating the so-called “Third Taiwan Crisis”: an onslaught of missile tests and live-fire exercises designed to oppose Lee’s foreign policy efforts and to promote accommodationist candidates in the upcoming 1996 presidential contest. Since the Third Taiwan Crisis, Beijing has expanded its use of “gray zone warfare,” or coercion tactics that fall below the threshold of war, using unprofessional behavior, coordinated civilian action, and new domains of conflict to punish Taiwanese leaders for strengthening the island’s democratic system or international profile. Superficially, the United States has effectively been cowed by these threats, as no Taiwanese president since Lee has been granted a visa for travel with the express purpose of visiting the United States.

Yet as with all things related to Taiwan, things are complicated. Beneath the letter of U.S. policy, two major loopholes have allowed visits by Taiwanese leaders to be normalized over the ensuing decades.

First, while the United States has not approved travel by a Taiwanese president whose final destination was U.S. territory, presidents since 1997 have “refueled” or “transferred” on their way to visit diplomatic allies nearly 30 times, completing stopovers in 12 cities spread over nine states and Guam. According to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the average length of such transit visits since 1994 has increased from 1.3 nights to 2.4 nights. While no Taiwanese president has made more than two stopovers in the U.S. on a single trip, the locations selected for stopovers have increasingly varied. It is now customary for Taiwanese presidents transiting through the United States to meet with allies in Congress, local government officials, and members of the Taiwanese expat community.

Second, Washington allows much freer rein to Taiwanese not currently holding office, which generally includes presidential candidates. After all, Lee Teng-hui’s 1995 visit to Cornell, the first and last of its kind, functioned both as a foreign policy maneuver and a campaign tactic. By demonstrating his commitment to relations with the United States, Lee won respect for the KMT among native Taiwanese, many of whom feared unification would lead to a renewed crackdown on their culture, language, and civil liberties.

Unlike Taiwanese officials, presidential candidates without official capacities can freely traverse the United States, canvassing support and donations among America’s large Taiwanese population. All serious presidential candidates are now expected to visit the U.S. during election season, seeking an understanding with Washington and expat support. Lai’s trip received the most headlines, given he concurrently holds office as vice president, but his rival candidates are also making the trek. Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party spent three weeks touring the United States in April, and Hou Yu-ih of the KMT will spend eight days in the U.S. in September.

Taiwan’s Gray Zone Diplomacy

Since 1994, an explosion of visits by Taiwanese presidents and candidates in the form of transits and trips has greatly expanded the international profile of Taiwan without constituting a formal challenge to Beijing’s one-China principle. President Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT, elected in 2008 with a mandate to improve cross-strait relations, continued to make transits of the U.S. despite negotiating a “diplomatic truce” with Beijing. During Ma’s eight-year tenure, Taiwan neither gained nor lost a single diplomatic ally to China; yet unofficially, Taiwan’s international influence continued to grow.

In addition to transits by Taiwanese presidents, the incorporation of campaign trips abroad into Taiwanese political culture has greatly expanded Taiwan-U.S. understanding. Of the 200 days Taiwanese presidents and hopefuls have spent in the United States, transit diplomacy comprised less than half that total. In 1999, a year after losing the Taipei mayorship to a young Ma Ying-jeou, Chen Shui-bian of the DPP flew to New York City to rub shoulders with important figures in the Taiwanese diaspora. According to an estimate by the Taiwanese American Association of New York, the Chen campaign convinced over 2,000 Taiwanese nationals in North America to fly home and vote in the March 2000 election (Taiwan does not allow absentee voting), which Chen won.

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While Taiwan is ill-equipped to compete with China when it comes to official state-to-state relations, trips, transits, and other “gray-zone” diplomatic efforts have substantially expanded Taiwan’s international support. China has successfully picked off several formal allies since it resumed “diplomatic war” with Taiwan during the Tsai Ing-wen administration, yet these official relationships pale in strategic importance compared to Taiwan’s “business, security, environmental, and humanitarian” ties with the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines – none of which officially recognize the ROC.

The chart above captures how such unofficial relations have changed with Taiwan’s most important strategic partner, the United States, as measured by transits. The trend is clear: between the relationship’s nadir in 1979 and today, the Taiwanese have made steady soft power gains. It took six years (1995-2001) before any transiting president was allowed to meet with an American congressperson. Then, during the Chen administration, the president met with several U.S. representatives, Secretary of State Colin Powell (in Panama), former President Bill Clinton (in Taiwan), and was decorated by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. As the itineraries of transiting presidents grew longer, meetings extended to include business and tech leaders, academics, governors, and activists. In 2016, Donald Trump, then the U.S. president-elect, took a phone call from President Tsai Ing-wen.

The effect of Taiwan’s gray-zone diplomacy is evident. A Global Taiwan brief demonstrated a trend of increasing U.S. support, particularly among those familiar with Taiwan. Taiwanese gray zone diplomacy further helps to “set conditions” for official diplomatic advances later on, such as its bids for inclusion into the World Health Assembly, INTERPOL, and U.N. working groups. Under the cover of tacit agreement by its main strategic partners, Taiwan has built itself into a network of semi-official organizations, including 40 intergovernmental bodies, and today its passport is twice as strong as that of PRC citizens per the Henley & Partners ranking.

Part of effective gray zone tactics is knowing when to de-escalate. The only election season in which the average time in the U.S. spent by Taiwanese leaders and hopefuls did not increase was 2012, during the first four years of Ma’s “diplomatic truce.” After the Chen administration was accused of moving too fast and dragging the United States into provocations against China, lower-key trips and transits helped rebuild trust on all sides. Despite taking a harder line against Chinese coercion than Ma, Tsai also maintained a low profile on her first campaign trip to Washington. Yet in 2016, with relations on an upswing, Tsai returned to the United States for a trip four times longer than in 2012. As the name “flexible diplomacy” suggests, unofficial exchanges proved to be more adaptable to cross-strait conditions given a general lack of set timetables, fixed responsibilities, and diplomatic protocol.

Most importantly, Taiwan’s gray zone diplomacy has been bipartisan. Even KMT leaders like Ma, who recently completed a tour of China and has met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, exhibit typical transit and trip behavior. Ma may have criticized Chen’s eye-grabbing U.S. transit itineraries, but Ma’s 10 transits through the United States were as numerous or more numerous than every other modern Taiwanese president, and he spent eight days in 2006 on a campaign trip through the United States, meeting with officials to burnish his policy chops.

When KMT officials are involved, however, China seems willing to swallow its tongue. KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih departs on September 14 for his campaign trip through the U.S.; expect the apparatchiks in Beijing who vociferously criticized Lai to be silent.

Conclusion

Taiwan has a long and successful history of building its international space. By conceptualizing the diplomatic domain as a three-dimensional “space,” rather than a zero-sum tug-of-war with China over a limited number of official allies, Taiwanese leaders since Lee Teng-hui have pursued a “flexible diplomacy” incorporating various degrees of unofficial visits, including presidential transits and campaign trips abroad by candidates. Exploiting the “gray zone” of unofficial and people-to-people exchanges in the “business, security, environmental, and humanitarian” arenas has allowed Taiwan to enhance its strategic partnerships without crossing Beijing’s “red lines.”

The second point to highlight is that the trend in Taiwan’s increasing international influence over the last 30 years is clear and sustained, stretching beyond any individual president. Under Tsai, Taiwan’s gray zone diplomacy opened up new swaths of international space; in 2021 Tsai hosted a first-of-its-kind delegation from the EU and presided over the upgrade of diplomatic offices in Lithuania to a “de facto embassy.” Yet even Ma, despite his “diplomatic truce” with China, opened up more space to Taiwan on the international stage. During visits to diplomatic allies in Africa, Ma made history with unprecedented transits through India (Mumbai) and Germany (Frankfurt). These trends have continued through both KMT and DPP leadership, reflecting a sustained interest on the part of Taiwanese voters in strengthening international ties.

Unofficial diplomacy extends beyond the president’s office, extending to a variety of public and private foundations for international exchange and development. (For example, the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund handed out 11.6 billion Taiwanese dollars in ODA grants in 2020 alone). Yet transit and trip diplomacy remain one of the most high-profile mechanisms to stimulate international exchange. Such efforts have allowed Taiwan to shift the “Overton window” on acceptable unofficial relations. This historical process has helped inoculate transited countries from China’s pressure campaigns intended to isolate Taiwan. It has also internationalized political culture, habituating voters to prioritize international expertise from their candidates, and inured the Taiwanese to increasingly ineffective scare tactics from China.

As China accelerates its gray zone warfare toward Taiwan, Beijing must recognize that Taipei has many options to increase its gray zone diplomacy in response. Whereas official transits have fallen into a restrained and predictable rhythm since the Lee’s Cornell trip and the ensuing crisis, campaign trips have broken most assumed “red lines” and may break new paths for future presidential activity. Future transits, for instance, could see Taiwanese presidents stopping at three or more cities in the U.S. and delivering public speeches to an American audience.

Despite China’s vociferous opposition to the recent visit of William Lai, transit and trip diplomacy has become ingrained in Taiwanese political culture. If past is prologue, we can expect a continued trend of lengthened transits and trips. As such visits become increasingly visible, Beijing will be hard-pressed to effectively stem waves of new gray zone diplomacy.

GUEST AUTHOR

Edward Kuperman

Edward Kuperman is completing a joint BA-MA program at Yale University, where he is studying China’s foreign policy. His writings have appeared in the Tampa Bay Times, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, and Yale Daily News.

thediplomat.com · by Edward Kuperman · August 31, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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US Transits as Part of Taiwan’s Gray Zone Diplomacy