Quotes of the Day:
"People can contradict an opinion solely because of the tone in which it was expressed."
- Nietzsche
"Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.”
- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1. Exercise in the Caucasus returns Green Berets to resistance roots
2. The U.S. Won Afghanistan Before Losing It
3. Japan ups the ante against China, plans to deploy nukes near Taiwan next year
4. The Porcupine in No Man’s Sea: Arming Taiwan for Sea Denial
5. Buoyed by rising nationalism, China’s keyboard warriors take aim at Olympic athletes
6. How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda
7. ISIS remains a persistent 'low-level' threat in Iraq and Syria, US report says
8. Sailor accused of starting USS Bonhomme Richard fire identified in warrant
9. Help, Not Just Hunt, Violent Extremists in the Military
10. U.S. Airstrikes in Afghanistan Could Be a Sign of What Comes Next
11. Would a 'neighborhood watch' really deter China's Asia-Pacific aggression?
12. First Taiwan Arms Sale in Biden Administration Is Approved
13. ‘A Poison in the System’: The Epidemic of Military Sexual Assault
14. The long game: China’s grand strategy to displace American order
15. How the Creative Class Broke America
16. How China Helps the Cuban Regime Stay Afloat and Shut Down Protests
17. China clamps down as Covid surges far and wide
18. US weighs the cost of Indo-Pacific readiness
19. Enduring Struggle: Why USAID Plays a Critical Role in the National Security Realm
20. India Deploys Warships in South China Sea as Part of 'Act East' Policy
21. The British are coming! UK carrier strike group arriving on Guam this week
22. Sanitizing Censorship: The Twitter-AP-Reuters News Partnership
1. Exercise in the Caucasus returns Green Berets to resistance roots
Yes.
SF (or the cross functional teams of the 1st Special Forces Command (SF, PSYOP, and CA) HERE) can contribute to US national security objectives in great power competition by helping friends, partners, and allies develop resilience and resistance to malign actors (HERE). A line of effort of integrated deterrence (HERE)must be unconventional deterrence (HERE) to complement nuclear and conventional deterrence.
We need a return to our roots for a vision of the vision. HERE
Exercise in the Caucasus returns Green Berets to resistance roots
The Army is wrapping up a groundbreaking multinational exercise in the Caucasus nation of Georgia this week that featured a combined airborne operation and the largest special operations exercise ever hosted by the country.
According to an Army press release, approximately 2,500 personnel from 15 countries participated in the biennial Agile Spirit exercise, including 700 U.S. troops led by U.S. Army Europe and Africa. The exercise ends Friday.
The exercise included a pair of airborne jumps, in addition to parallel conventional and special operations training scenarios.
Georgian, Polish, and U.S. special operations forces join a notional Georgian guerrilla to force breach a door to demonstrate close quarter combat tactics during the 10th Annual Agile Spirit Exercise in Senaki, Georgia, Aug. 4, 2021. (Army/Spc. Preston Hammon)
The exercise’s goals are “increasing interoperability among participating nation militaries and strengthening regional security cooperation,” the release said.
More than 250 jumpers from the Georgian Defense Forces and the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment, executed a pair of airborne operations — one during the day Sunday, and another late Monday night into Tuesday morning.
The jumps occurred at Georgia’s Vaziani Drop Zone, according to Maj. Chris Bradley, a 173rd Airborne Brigade spokesperson.
Soldiers from the U.S. state of Georgia — the Georgia Army National Guard, to be exact — participated alongside troops from 21st Theater Sustainment Command, 7th Army Training Command, 173rd Airborne Brigade, 1st Infantry Division Combat Aviation Brigade, U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa, and U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, according to the release.
A Green Beret officer representing Special Operations Command-Europe at the exercise, who spoke on background in order to freely discuss the details of the training, told Army Times that this was the first-ever special operations exercise hosted by Georgia.
Green Berets, psychological operations soldiers and civil affairs troops joined their peers from Georgia, in addition to Polish, British and Romanian special operations troops, for the exercise.
Georgian and Romanian special operations forces rappel out of a UH-60 Huey Helicopter and pull security during the 10th Annual Agile Spirit Exercise in Senaki, Georgia, Aug. 4, 2021. (Army/Sgt. Hayden Hallman)
The special operations training scenario focused on enabling a Georgian resistance force in the event of invasion by an overwhelming enemy force, he explained — such as the Russian armored columns that poured into the small country during their 2008 war.
The five-day war saw Russian forces permanently occupy the Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which the U.S. government considers a part of Georgia.
“Twenty percent of their country is currently occupied by Russia,” noted the Green Beret officer.
During the exercise, the troops honed their ability “to prevent the [notional] occupying enemy from consolidating their gains within the recently occupied territory,” the Green Beret officer said. He added that the scenario included ambushes, raids, and sabotage to practice “some of those specific tactical skills within that overall resistance context.”
“Resistance operations are a large part of unconventional warfare, which is one of the core tasks of special forces,” the Green Beret officer said.
The focus on resistance operations in Georgia is part of the special operations community’s broader return to its unconventional warfare roots for great power competition. The shift comes after nearly two decades of focus on counterterrorism missions during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Much of SOCEUR’s partner force work right now centers around the “resistance operating concept,” a newly codified doctrine that seeks to help partner nations develop the ability and framework to field legitimate, effective resistance forces in the event of enemy invasion and occupation, according to a 1st Special Forces Command podcast explaining the concept.
“The whole point of [the resistance operating concept] is that you hopefully never have to execute it,” the Green Beret officer said. “Building up this internal strength is able to act as a deterrent against aggression.”
But thanks to exercises like Agile Spirit and the commitment of partner nations, the resistance efforts are ready if needed.
“The people here are very cognizant [of the ongoing Russian occupation],” the Green Beret said. “This concept of total defense is not new to Georgia, and they’re very proud to embody it.”
2.The U.S. Won Afghanistan Before Losing It
The punitive expedition that is. (and do not forget air power: CIA, SF, and air power - not mentioned in the subtitle but it is in the text).
If the Japanese did put nukes on any of these islands I am sure they would be TRP #1 for the PLA.
The U.S. Won Afghanistan Before Losing It
Victory came quickly to the CIA and special forces in October 2001. Then the mission changed to a self-defeating invasion.
By Toby Harnden
Aug. 3, 2021 12:27 pm ET
A U.S. Special Operations soldier stands guard over Northern Alliance fighters in Khwaja Bahuaddin, Afghanistan, Nov. 15, 2001.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
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The tragedy of the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan is that days after 9/11, President George W. Bush had settled on a plan based on principles that could have ensured enduring success.
Remarkably, the Pentagon had no contingency for Afghanistan in 2001. The Central Intelligence Agency filled the void. Its plan was for small teams of CIA officers, along with Green Berets and U.S. air power, to assist the indigenous Afghan resistance—the Northern Alliance. On Oct. 17, 2001, eight members of the CIA’s Team Alpha became the first Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. They linked up with the ethnic Uzbek fighters of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, along with Tajik and Hazara forces.
This wasn’t an invasion. The Afghans did most of the fighting. The “foreigners” weren’t the Americans, but the mainly Arab fighters of al Qaeda. The role of Team Alpha and the 10 or so other CIA teams in Afghanistan was clear: to hunt down the perpetrators of 9/11. The Taliban regime had to be toppled because it was providing sanctuary for Osama bin Laden, but America’s enemy was al Qaeda.
No one personified this mission more than Team Alpha’s courageous Johnny Micheal Spann, a CIA paramilitary and former Marine Corps officer from Winfield, Ala. He became America’s first combat death when he was shot in a prison uprising outside Mazar-e-Sharif on Nov. 25, 2001. But Team Alpha also included Afghan specialists. Its chief was J.R. Seeger, a Dari-speaking case officer who had worked with the mujahedeen in the 1980s. David Tyson was an Uzbek linguist and former academic who’d spent years living in Central Asia. He managed miraculously to survive after Spann was killed, shooting his way out as al Qaeda prisoners swarmed him.
Messrs. Seeger and Tyson knew that imposing American solutions on Afghanistan wouldn’t work. They managed tribal rivalries but didn’t seek to turn Afghan leaders into paragons of virtue. The U.S. role wasn’t to defeat the Taliban for the Afghans. It was their fight and their country.
Victory came quickly. So did warnings of the pitfalls of deeper American involvement in Afghanistan—ethnic rivalries, false surrenders, mistreatment of prisoners and errant bombs. In December 2001, Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-backed new president of Afghanistan, sought to strike a deal with the remnants of the Taliban, a practice consistent with Afghan tradition. The Bush administration blocked the deal, branding the entire Taliban as terrorists no different from al Qaeda.
At that juncture, the U.S. could have negotiated from a position of strength. Instead, 20 years later, the Biden administration is rushing for the exits, desperate to secure a deal that amounts to surrender.
While Mr. Karzai’s overtures to the defeated Taliban were being rebuffed by the U.S. in late 2001, the Pentagon began staging an invasion after the fact. Conventional forces poured into Afghanistan and huge bases were built. Victory had been achieved in 2001 with only hundreds of Americans on the ground; by 2010, the number had mushroomed to 100,000.
The Afghans came to see American forces not as advisers and allies, but as invaders and occupiers. Rather than working with established tribal networks and ethic leaders—including the so-called warlords—the U.S. sought to marginalize them and create a centralized democracy. Mission creep was rampant. Afghanistan became, variously, a fight to secure women’s rights, to extend education, to stop drugs destined for the West—to fix everything.
The CIA had dealt with Afghans as they were. The hands of every one of their leaders were, like Gen. Dostum’s, stained with blood. After that initial victory, however, the State Department wanted to work only with those Afghans it deemed worthy.
When I met with Gen. Dostum last November in his stronghold of Sheberghan—already surrounded by Taliban forces—he was mystified by how he had gone almost overnight from being a hero lauded by his CIA comrades to an American pariah. He was overcome by the futility of it all. “We have been killing each other for no reason,” he told me plaintively.
In 1898, Winston Churchill summarized British options on the North-West Frontier: complete withdrawal, urged by “bad and nervous sailors”; “full steam ahead,” preferred by generals; and a middle course “of gradual advance, of political intrigue among the tribes, of subsidies and small expeditions.” After the failure of “full steam ahead,” President Biden has now chosen complete withdrawal. America is lurching from all to nothing.
Rather than abandoning Afghanistan and those who fought with the U.S. in 2001, the Biden administration should recommit to the principles that delivered initial victory—essentially, Churchill’s middle course. A small residual force of CIA officers and special forces, using U.S. air power when needed, while letting the Afghans fight would prevent a Taliban rout. Such an approach could prevent Afghanistan returning to what it was before 9/11—an ungoverned space where terrorists can plot with impunity.
Mr. Harnden is author of “First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11,” forthcoming Sept. 7.
3. Japan ups the ante against China, plans to deploy nukes near Taiwan next year
Certainly a provocative and clickbait headline. This is from the Hindustan Times. I did not know the Japanese had nukes. I wonder where the reporter obtained this information.
Japan ups the ante against China, plans to deploy nukes near Taiwan next year
Japan's new missile installations are meant to serve as a deterrent and are well within the range of disputed territories such as the Diaoyutai Islands, ensuring that the country will have a suitable defence in the case of a potential Chinese attack in the region.
Written by Joydeep Bose, Hindustan Times, New Delhi
PUBLISHED ON AUG 05, 2021 11:50 AM IST
In a move that is expected to challenge China's dominance in the South China Sea, Japan has reportedly planned to deploy missile units next year on an island that is merely 300 kilometres off the coast of Taiwan. The move is aimed at countering Beijing's increasing naval presence in an area that carries a history of military disputes, reported Japanese media, adding that the nukes will also help defend against a potential Chinese attack.
Japan is planning to deploy the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) missile units on the island of Ishigaki, which is only 306km from the Taoyuan Taiwan International Airport. The new unit, which aims to be operational in 2022, is also set to be manned by 500 to 600 troops of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (SDF).
The Japanese defense ministry is also reportedly planning to install an electronic warfare unit on the Yonaguni island by the end of 2023. According to local news outlets, the country is also building a new SDF base on the island of Mageshima.
A brief history of the dispute
Chinese naval forces -- the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) -- have recently increased their presence in the Miyako Strait, a waterway that lies between the Miyako Island and the Okinawa Island and consists of a wide passageway with international waters and airspace. Being the widest strait in the Ryukyu Islands, it is one of the only few international waterways that China intends to use to gain access to the Pacific Ocean from the East China Sea.
It is in this region that Japan and China are involved in a dispute over the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyutai Islands), a territorial row that has mired diplomatic relations between both countries since at least the early 2010s. Beijing, which continues to claim the Senkaku Islands as the country's 'inherent territory', has rapidly built up artificial islands with military infrastructure in the region.
China also claims complete sovereignty over Taiwan, a democracy of about 24 million people located off the southeastern coast of mainland China, despite the fact that the two lands have been governed separately for more than seven decades.
In the process, China is now laying claim of sovereignty over almost the entire maritime region.
Japan's defence plan against China
Japan's new missile installations are meant to serve as a deterrent and are well within the range of disputed territories such as the Diaoyutai Islands, ensuring that the country will have a suitable defence in the case of a potential Chinese attack in the region.
With the new missile chain set to be deployed next year, the Ishikagi Island will become the fourth land in the Nansei island chain to be armed with missiles. This island chain runs southwest from Kyushu to Taiwan and is situated on the strategic first island chain that stretches from the Kuril Islands in the north to Borneo in the south.
One of the new units will also reportedly include surface-to-ship and ground-to-air missiles, while another unit will handle the initial reaction to a military attack. The missile batteries on Ishigaki will join existing units on Amami-Oshima, Okinawa, and Miyako Islands, according to Taiwan News.
(With inputs from agencies)
4. The Porcupine in No Man’s Sea: Arming Taiwan for Sea Denial
Excerpts:
Heavily reinforcing Taiwan through focused security subsidies while maintaining a policy of strategic ambiguity would maintain conventional deterrence through denial against China. This approach would also greatly reduce the risk of a fait accompli, thereby giving American political leadership time to discover the best outcome for its strategic ambiguity: to rally support at home and abroad, to pressure China through a variety of means, and to enter combat at a time, place, and manner of its own choosing – or even to forego the conflict entirely.
These investments to harden Taiwan would buy time on the order of months and so enable slower, de-escalatory strategies like offshore control while also preserving more aggressive options. On the other hand, Taiwan might only be able to hold out for weeks under a plausible status quo scenario. In such a case, the United States would either risk major escalation by immediately executing a rapid but confrontational approach like JAM-GC, or watch Taiwan collapse from the sidelines.
The United States can make wise investments to pursue its own strategic interests, frustrate Chinese hegemony, and save a threatened democracy in the process. Taiwan needs focused U.S. support to substantially grow its sea denial capabilities quickly. Congress should update legislation and appropriate funds to that end.
The Porcupine in No Man’s Sea: Arming Taiwan for Sea Denial
By Collin Fox
Precision munitions have been sinking warships for the better part of a century, but never before have they been so capable, so widely proliferated, or benefited so much from omniscient surveillance and precise targeting. These convergent factors have propelled modern sea combat in a violently stagnant direction that strongly favors the defensive. A transit through contested waters in the Western Pacific would draw effective fire like a casual stroll through no-man’s land on the Western Front, circa 1916. Now, as then, tactical forces must stay invisible or out of range to stay alive and combat effective, lurking to deploy their own withering fires against emergent targets.
After years of bemoaning the impact of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) on its own power projection paradigm, the United States military is belatedly adapting the same methods with its own forces, while overlooking the geopolitically unique contributions that certain allies and partners can bring to the fight. The factors that have made sea denial easier, sea control harder, and contested power projection a real challenge apply to virtually all potential belligerents – including China and Taiwan. The United States should not simply rely on its own conventional military forces to deter Chinese aggression in the Pacific, but should also start major military foreign assistance to Taiwan and so transform the island into a prickly fortress of sea denial.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen reviews a Republic of China Marine Corps battalion in Kaohsiung in July 2020. (Photo via Ministry of National Defense of the Republic of China)
Omnipresent Weapons, Omniscient Surveillance
The improvements in the intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting cycle are even more impactful than these growing arsenals. Satellite constellations produce optical, infrared, and radar-generated imagery of every non-polar square meter on the planet several times per day. When combined with other sources and then distilled through increasingly capable artificial intelligence algorithms, this data can pinpoint most naval surface forces. The title of a recent USNI article encapsulated the change: “From Battleship to Chess.” Hiding is ever-harder, finding is ever-easier.
The reality of tactical omniscience applies to all major surface vessels, and catalyzes long-range precision weapons to create a massive maritime no-man’s land. To be seen is to be targeted, and, more than likely, killed.
Keeping Below the Trenchline
Prevailing in this future battle hinges on keeping forces alive, supplied, connected, and tactically relevant within a thousand-mile no-man’s land. Each service’s operational concept tackles this challenge through the same basic approach of survival through networked dispersion.
Each service’s distributed concept would still incur significant risk—stationing offensive fires on foreign soil demands dangerously uncertain political assent from each host nation, while the Air Force would be hard-pressed to maintain enough persistent and timely fires within a distant and contested environment. The Navy’s existing surface platforms might bring the assured access, persistence, and mass that the other services lack, but would nevertheless remain more exposed to enemy targeting and fires. Aside from service-specific risks, each of these disaggregated concepts rests on the dangerously flawed assumption of assured communications. In sum, victory is hardly assured and defeat is possible.
The net uncertainty of American overmatch erodes conventional deterrence against China, which increases the risk of miscalculation, escalation, and conflict. The United States should zoom out to reframe the strategic problem, rather just fixating on tactical and operational solutions.
Building a Better Porcupine, or Subsidized Buck-Passing
The conventional problem framing for defending Taiwan casts the deterrent value of American forces as the essential guarantor of regional stability. As the balance of power continues to shift, this binary framing—either China can be deterred by American power, or it can’t— has produced strongly divergent policy proposals. Richard Haass and David Sacks argued that an unambiguous security guarantee for Taiwan would restore deterrence and so keep the peace; Charles Glaser advocated “letting go of Taiwan” to mitigate the decreasingly justifiable risk of a major war with China. Like other proposals, both frame the problem too tightly – through the basic paradigm of American military power.
The Lowy Institute’s insightful study takes a more nuanced and Australian perspective on the problem. It skips the false choice between doubling down and retrenchment, advocating instead that the “United States should act as armourer, but not guarantor.” The logic is sound:
“If Taiwan acquires, over roughly the next five years, large numbers of additional anti-ship missiles, more extensive ground-based air defence capabilities, smart mines, better trained and more effective reserve forces, a significantly bolstered capacity for offensive cyber warfare, a large suite of unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike systems, and counterstrike capabilities able to hit coastal targets on the mainland, it will continually increase the price China will have to pay to win a war.”
With help, Taiwan could deny China the sea and air control it requires to take the island, while also imposing significant costs on the mainland. Thousands of anti-ship missiles and sea mines would reinforce the stopping power of water, while dispersed air defense systems would help deter or attrite Chinese airpower. The United States should help Taiwan become a better porcupine by subsidizing and directing a new arsenal of democracy.
A delegation from the American Institute in Taiwan with Republic of China naval officers in Kaohsiung, August 20, 2019. (Photo via AIT)
This approach recalls the effective grand strategy that first Britain and then the United States executed as offshore balancers through the 19th and 20th centuries. Offshore balancing is not mere isolationism, retrenchment, or simple buck-passing. When a rising power threatens the regional balance, along with the offshore balancer’s interests, a savvy offshore balancer first puts money and arms on the scale to restore balance through allies, partners, and proxies. For insular great powers like the United States, this initial option of external balancing, or subsidized buck passing, represents a far better option than joining every war on the Eurasian Rimlands. Whenever this subsidized buck passing proves insufficient, though, the offshore balancer has the option, though not the obligation, to enter the conflict with military force against a weakened enemy and so restore the balance of power.
The key to both external balancing and buck-passing against a competitor is that the ally needs to stay in the fight, at least for a while. Britain’s buck-passing to France in the late 1930s did little to help Britain after France’s rapid and calamitous defeat. Offshore balancers should subsidize and strengthen their allies and partners so they can deter, defeat, or at least bleed their mutual foes, buying time and buying down the risk of rapid defeat.
Simply “letting go of Taiwan” would be an unforced error for the United States; any grand bargain that China might offer to encourage appeasement over Taiwan would have no more credibility or durability than the breached Sino-British Joint Declaration concerning Hong Kong. Letting go of Taiwan would unilaterally cede strategic terrain and advantage to China, allowing it to sidestep the potentially ruinous and deterrent costs that a subsidized defense would impose.
Gifts Come with Strings
Taiwan has not received significant military foreign assistance since the United States shifted recognition to Beijing in 1979, and so has a long history of buying American military hardware with its own funds. This cash-and-carry arrangement has allowed it to choose prestige platforms like M-1 tanks and F-16 fighters that better support anachronistic fantasies of retaking the mainland than a realistic defense of the island.
On the other hand, security assistance and security cooperation funds come with focused caveats that seek to build specific capabilities of mutual importance. These funds include Foreign Military Finance (FMF) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) grants under Department of State authorities, and Building Partner Capacity and other authorities under the Department of Defense.
Congress could include Taiwan in one or more of these appropriations while creating structured incentives aimed at both Taiwanese and Chinese policy choices. For Taiwan, FMF appropriations above a certain base level could be contingent on Taiwan’s defense reforms and funding levels, or come in the form of matching funds for specific capabilities, such as those ideal for sea denial. Provocative Chinese actions, such as air and sea incursions over the past year, could also trigger additional FMF funding. If each Chinese incursion essentially bought another anti-ship missile for Taiwan, Beijing might not be so casual about the practice.
Republic of China sailors walk by the corvette Tuo Chiang (Photo via AFP/Sam Yeh)
For context, the United States subsidizes Israel’s defense with $3.3 billion per year, which is a bit less than the annual operating costs for two Armored Brigade Combat Teams. Funding Taiwan’s security to a similar or greater level would create a fearsome A2/AD challenge for China, while also reducing plausible American costs and risks for a Taiwan contingency scenario. It would certainly provide better warfighting value than two armored brigades in a maritime theater. This level of assistance would buy greater access, influence, and amicable leverage to pursue American strategic interests in both defense and non-defense areas, such as chip supply chains.
China would certainly protest this security funding, just as it protests existing weapons sales, but these specific investments would constrain China’s escalation options. Arming Taiwan to the teeth with A2/AD weaponry could effectively and quickly deter China through denial without the escalation and entrapment risks that would come with aggressive proposals to base American forces in Taiwan.
The Limits of Power Projection
Notable critics have argued that Taiwan is simply indefensible, asserting that a “Chinese attack would be shock and awe with Chinese characteristics, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, rocket artillery, drones, and probably thousands of aircraft. There would be decapitation, disruption of Taiwan’s air force and navy in their bases, targeting of U.S. bases in Guam and Okinawa.” To be sure, China could batter Taiwan from across the 100-mile strait, but would this “shock and awe with Chinese characteristics” compel Taiwan’s rapid capitulation or even prepare the battlespace for a successful amphibious assault?
Every comparison is fraught, but China would be hard-pressed to match the intensity of fires that American forces once directed at Okinawa – an island 1/30th the size of Taiwan and 400 miles distant, but sharing its mountainous geology. Despite a full week of hellish pre-invasion bombardment from battleships and attack aircraft, the island’s entrenched Japanese defenders not only survived this “the typhoon of steel and bombs,” but then emerged to fight another three months in the longest and bloodiest battle of the Pacific theater. “Shock and awe” only goes so far – particularly when it can be reciprocated.
Technological progress since the Battle of Okinawa has also not alleviated the fundamental difficulty of taking well-defended terrain or targeting elusive defenders. Indeed, the American military’s frustration in hunting for SCUD missiles in the Iraqi desert, for military vehicles in Kosovo, and for Taliban fighters in Afghan caves simply reflects the limits of airpower – even with functional or complete air supremacy. These limits also apply to China, which would have no less difficulty in finding, fixing, discriminating, tracking, targeting, and neutralizing the thousands of mobile anti-ship, anti-air, and strike missile launchers hiding amongst many more decoys, and all scattered through the jungles, mountains, caves, and cities of Taiwan.
Buying Time, Buying Options
Heavily reinforcing Taiwan through focused security subsidies while maintaining a policy of strategic ambiguity would maintain conventional deterrence through denial against China. This approach would also greatly reduce the risk of a fait accompli, thereby giving American political leadership time to discover the best outcome for its strategic ambiguity: to rally support at home and abroad, to pressure China through a variety of means, and to enter combat at a time, place, and manner of its own choosing – or even to forego the conflict entirely.
These investments to harden Taiwan would buy time on the order of months and so enable slower, de-escalatory strategies like offshore control while also preserving more aggressive options. On the other hand, Taiwan might only be able to hold out for weeks under a plausible status quo scenario. In such a case, the United States would either risk major escalation by immediately executing a rapid but confrontational approach like JAM-GC, or watch Taiwan collapse from the sidelines.
The United States can make wise investments to pursue its own strategic interests, frustrate Chinese hegemony, and save a threatened democracy in the process. Taiwan needs focused U.S. support to substantially grow its sea denial capabilities quickly. Congress should update legislation and appropriate funds to that end.
Commander (select) Collin Fox, U.S. Navy, is a Foreign Area Officer serving as a military advisor with the Department of State. He is a graduate of the Naval Postgraduate School and the Chilean Naval War College. The views presented are his alone and do not necessarily represent the views of Department of Defense, the Department of State, or the Department of the Navy.
Featured Image: Taiwanese sailors at Kaohsiung’s Zuoying naval base in 2018. (Photo via Tyrone Siu/Reuters)
5. Buoyed by rising nationalism, China’s keyboard warriors take aim at Olympic athletes
Information warfare at the Olympics.
Excerpts:
Nationalist fervor has already become a “dangerous driving force” in China, Zhao said, constraining the government’s foreign policy approach and limiting options for how to improve ties with the United States, Japan, Taiwan and others. And with just six months until the Beijing Winter Olympics, hypernationalists in the country could continue to expand their influence.
“Can this type of emotional and irrational sentiment really serve China’s interest?” Zhao asked. “How far will Xi let this go on? We have to wait and see.”
Buoyed by rising nationalism, China’s keyboard warriors take aim at Olympic athletes
After the Japanese table tennis team mounted an upset against the Chinese in the mixed doubles Olympic final, they found themselves facing a barrage of online hate. Even before the competitors took to the podium, death threats and messages to “go to hell” and “disappear” flooded their social media accounts.
They weren’t the only ones.
A Taiwanese badminton player was slammed for dedicating his gold medal to “my country, Taiwan.” A Japanese gymnast who beat a Chinese favorite was accused of winning on unfair grounds. A Chinese sports shooter was bullied into deleting a selfie after failing to qualify for her final.
Throughout the Tokyo Olympics, online nationalists in China have scrutinized the behavior of Chinese athletes and their competitors, pouncing on perceived insults and extolling symbolic shows of strength.
In a news conference Wednesday, Japanese table tennis player Jun Mizutani condemned the online abuse that he and his partner Mima Ito have received.
“I’ve been attacked probably more than others, so I have more immunity than others,” Mizutani said. “But that doesn’t mean that I can forgive them, and if I do, they will just move to the next target, so it needs to be dealt with properly.”
It isn’t unusual for nationalist sentiment in China to surge during the Olympics, especially one held in historic foe Japan, experts say. But the unrelenting fervor of Chinese Internet trolls seems to have hit a fever pitch in Tokyo, a symptom of a state-backed rise in nationalism that is showing signs of spiraling out of control.
“This variant of nationalism — it’s more intense, more uncompromising, and more unabashed,” said Ali Wyne, a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group who studies China. Keyboard warriors do not represent most everyday Chinese people, he emphasized, but they nonetheless reflect a citizenry that feels more powerful — and more eager to flex that power — than in years past.
Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to strategically stoke national pride, declaring at the recent 100th year party centenary that China’s rise is unstoppable. This has served to strengthen the government’s — and Xi’s — grip on power, but has fueled intense anti-foreigner sentiment that has erupted in unexpected ways during the Olympics, including backlash against some Chinese athletes for losing and attacks against their victorious rivals.
The online abuse has garnered attention at a time when high-profile athletes have made public statements on the importance of mental health. In China, state-run media outlets and pockets of community members have tried to tamp down anger toward Olympians, but with limited success.
“Nationalism — once that genie is out of that bottle, it can be hard to contain,” Wyne said.
This is especially true in a country where 1 billion people have ready access to the Internet — albeit one that is tightly controlled, said Baogang He, a professor of international relations at Deakin University in Australia. Like Facebook and Twitter in the United States, China’s widely used social media platforms have evolved into environments where polarizing and extremist posts thrive. Government censorship has erased much of the nuance in online discourse, he added, leaving zealotry to take center stage.
A 23-year-old Chinese sports shooter deleted a post apologizing for not making her final when she got a deluge of comments saying that a selfie was “inappropriate” given her loss.
When Chinese table tennis players Liu Shiwen and Xu Xin lost the mixed doubles final to Mizutani and Ito, they both made public apologies as nationalist users criticized their performance on the microblogging site Weibo.
“I feel like I’ve failed the team,” Liu said to reporters after the match, tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry everyone.”
“The whole country was looking forward to this final,” Xu said. “I think the entire Chinese team cannot accept this result.”
The Olympic Games hold strong symbolic resonance in China, said Suisheng Zhao, director of the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation at the University of Denver. If the 2008 Beijing Olympics marked China’s reentry onto the world stage, this year’s Games, held amid intensifying competition between China and other world powers, are seen as a chance to show that the country is no longer rising, but at the top.
“The message is that they have regained their position,” Zhao said. “It’s a very unique sense of Chinese national rejuvenation.”
Athletes who contribute to the gold medal tally — considered the most important metric to China — have been rewarded in the public sphere.
Sprinter Su Bingtian, a 31-year-old Guangdong native who has been lionized in state media as a national star, was anointed as the “miracle of the yellow race” on Weibo after becoming the first Asian athlete since the 1930s to qualify for the men’s 100-meter final. Tang Xijing, an 18-year-old gymnast who clinched gold on the balance beam, was lauded by nationalists for using songs from a pro-China, anti-Japanese film during her floor routine.
Earlier this week, two Chinese cyclists wore pins of former communist leader Mao Zedong during their medal ceremony — a gesture praised by branches of the Communist Party, but flagged by Olympic officials as a potential violation of rules that bar political propaganda.
“We are in contact with the Chinese Olympic Committee, who have assured us that we will receive a full formal answer soon,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said. “But they’ve also assured us already that this will not happen again.”
Even when athletes win, they’re not always safe from scrutiny.
Yang Qian, a shooter who clinched China’s first gold, was briefly attacked for an old Weibo post showing off her collection of shoes from Nike — a brand that nationalists have sought to boycott for expressing concerns over forced labor practices in Xinjiang.
Taiwanese badminton duo Lee Yang and Wang Chi-lin, who beat the Chinese team in the men’s doubles, have been scorned for comments that nationalists see as undermining the Communist Party’s “One-China” policy. A Taiwanese celebrity lost sponsorship deals in China after showing support for Taiwanese players as “national athletes” without specifying which nation she was referring to. An agent for Lee and Wang declined to comment on the issue, saying that it was “too sensitive.”
“In Taiwan, no athlete needs to apologize for losing a competition and not winning a gold medal, and no entertainer needs to apologize for supporting his or her country’s athlete,” Taiwan’s ministry of culture said in a pointed Facebook post on Tuesday.
Nationalist fervor has already become a “dangerous driving force” in China, Zhao said, constraining the government’s foreign policy approach and limiting options for how to improve ties with the United States, Japan, Taiwan and others. And with just six months until the Beijing Winter Olympics, hypernationalists in the country could continue to expand their influence.
“Can this type of emotional and irrational sentiment really serve China’s interest?” Zhao asked. “How far will Xi let this go on? We have to wait and see.”
Lyric Li in Seoul, Alicia Chen in Taipei and Julia Mio Inuma in Tokyo contributed to this report.
6. How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda
How to counter this? What is the GEC doing? The first of course is to understand the Chinese strategy and then expose it. The public needs to be informed and educated about the threat and given the information to help defend themselves.
Again, from the 2017 NSS:
"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."
How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda
By Flora Carmichael
BBC News
Published
1 hour ago
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A sprawling network of more than 350 fake social media profiles is pushing pro-China narratives and attempting to discredit those seen as opponents of China's government, according to a new study.
The aim is to delegitimise the West and boost China's influence and image overseas, the report by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) suggests.
The study, shared with the BBC, found that the network of fake profiles circulated garish cartoons depicting, among others, exiled Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui, an outspoken critic of China.
Other controversial figures featured in the cartoons included "whistleblower" scientist Li-Meng Yang, and Steve Bannon, former political strategist for Donald Trump.
Each of these individuals has themselves been accused of spreading disinformation, including false information about Covid-19.
image captionThe cartoons shared seek to ridicule (left-right) Bannon, Li Meng Yang and Guo Wengui
Some of the accounts - spread across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube - use fake AI-generated profile pictures, while others appear to have been hijacked after previously posting in other languages.
There is no concrete evidence that the network is linked to the Chinese government, but according to the CIR, a non-profit group which works to counter disinformation, it resembles pro-China networks previously taken down by Twitter and Facebook.
These networks amplified pro-China narratives similar to those promoted by Chinese state representatives and state media.
Much of the content shared by the network focuses on the US, and in particular on divisive issues like gun laws and race politics.
One of the narratives pushed by the network paints the US as having a poor human rights record. Posts from the fake accounts cite the murder of George Floyd among examples, as well as discrimination against Asians.
image captionThis account has since been suspended by Twitter for violating its rules
Some accounts repeatedly deny human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, where experts say China has detained at least a million Muslims against their will, calling the allegations "lies fabricated by the United States and the West".
"The aim of the network appears to be to delegitimise the West by amplifying pro-Chinese narratives," said Benjamin Strick, the author of the CIR report.
How was the network uncovered?
The CIR mapped hashtags favoured by previously identified networks, unearthing more accounts that showed signs of being part of an influence operation.
Tell-tale signs included high levels of activity pushing propaganda narratives and repeated use of the same hashtags. Newly created accounts, accounts with usernames that appeared to be randomly generated, and accounts with very few followers also raised red flags.
Some profiles were created to post original content, while others only shared, liked and commented on those original posts, to help them reach a wider audience.
This kind of activity is often referred to as "astroturfing" because it is designed to create the appearance of a grass-roots campaign.
image sourceBenjamin Strick / CIR
image captionThe study visualises how different accounts amplify each other - each small node represents a Twitter account
Fake people
Many of the fake profiles used AI generated photos - a relatively new phenomenon that allows computers to create realistic looking images of people who don't exist. Unlike stolen profile images of real people, the AI generated images, which are created by a type of machine learning framework called StyleGAN, cannot be traced using a reverse image search.
The use of fake profile pictures in disinformation campaigns is becoming more common as users and platforms become more wary of suspicious accounts.
The CIR used various techniques to identify fake profile pictures in the network. The synthetic images always put the eyes in the same location, so lining them all up can help identify a collection of fake profile pictures.
Normally, a random collection of profile pictures would display much more variety in the cropping and the alignment of the eyes.
image sourceBenjamin Strick / CIR
image captionThe network uses images of people who do not exist
Other signs include blurred edges around the hair, teeth at strange angles, and blurred objects around the face.
Many of the Facebook accounts believed to be part of the network appeared to have Turkish names. These accounts may once have belonged to real people but were later hijacked or sold and given new profile pictures.
Hijacked accounts also spread the network's pro-China narratives on YouTube. Accounts that had previously posted in English or German and then lain dormant for years suddenly started posting Chinese language content from official Chinese state broadcasters.
image sourceBenjamin Strick / CIR
image captionThe report found spam Tweets using the same text, tags and images all uploaded on the same day
The CIR shared its research with the social media platforms involved.
Facebook has removed the accounts on its platform highlighted in the study.
A Facebook spokesman said: "In September 2019, we removed a network of spam activity that posted lifestyle and political clickbait, primarily in Chinese. This network had almost no engagement on our platform, and we continue to work with researchers and our industry peers to detect and block their attempts to come back, like those accounts mentioned in this report."
YouTube also terminated accounts in the network for violating YouTube's community guidelines.
Twitter said it had also now removed almost all of the accounts identified by CIR, as well as a number of others engaged in similar behaviour. It said its investigations are still ongoing.
"When we identify information operation campaigns that we can reliably attribute to state-linked activity - either domestic or foreign-led - we disclose them to our public archive."
Analysis - Kerry Allen, BBC Monitoring China media analyst
Over the past decade, billions of dollars have gone into funding the growth of China's presence on international platforms.
But with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube blocked in the mainland, and only accessible via a VPN, the country has struggled to get such platforms recognised as viable competitors to Western juggernauts. It has needed not only Chinese voices, but foreign voices, to show that the country has "arrived".
"Wolf warrior diplomacy" has emerged, with officials using Twitter accounts to fly the flag for Communist Party rhetoric. China wants to portray itself as a friend to the world - and not a repressive, authoritarian state, as it perceives Western nations make it out to be.
With more than one billion internet users, China certainly has the capability to orchestrate large-scale social media campaigns, and target what it sees as anti-China voices with a wealth of opposing opinions.
But with English-language skills limited in China, there are often clumsy tell-tale signs that a Chinese troll is behind such accounts. Many rely on automatic translation software to turn Chinese messages into English, meaning such messages are riddled with typos, or contain clumsy grammatical structures.
And with many Western outlets inaccessible to them within China, users generally have very little knowledge of who they are meant to be targeting, so they simply piggyback off the replies of others from within the same network.
Graphics by Simon Martin
7. ISIS remains a persistent 'low-level' threat in Iraq and Syria, US report says
Steven Metz' tweet to this article is a useful reminder.
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Evergreen comment. The Mafia remains a low level threat in US cities after a century of fighting it.
ISIS remains a persistent 'low-level' threat in Iraq and Syria, US report says
Syrian Democratic Forces conduct a patrol during a joint operation with U.S. soldiers in Syria on May 8, 2021. Seven years after the Islamic State group swept through parts of Syria and Iraq, ISIS it remains a threat, but hasn't been able to mount any deliberate attacks on coalition forces in more than two years, the U.S. military said. (Isaiah J Scott/U.S. Army)
The Islamic State group remains a threat seven years after it swept through Syria and Iraq, but it has not mounted any deliberate attacks on coalition forces in over two years, the U.S. military said.
This week marks the anniversary of ISIS’s slaughter of some 5,500 members of the Yazidi minority in northwestern Iraq and forced enslavement of over 6,000 others in 2014.
It’s been over two years since the terrorist group was ousted from the last of its territorial strongholds in Iraq and Syria, but it continues to exploit sectarian, political and security weaknesses in the region.
U.S. Central Command believes that the terrorists can likely “operate indefinitely in the Syrian desert” at current levels, the Defense Department Inspector General’s office said in a quarterly report to Congress published Tuesday.
“ISIS continued operating as a ‘low-level’ and ‘well-entrenched’ insurgency in rural areas of Iraq and Syria,” said the IG report, covering the period from April to June.
Syrian Democratic Forces conduct a patrol during a joint operation with U.S. soldiers in Syria in May 2021. Seven years after the Islamic State group swept through parts of Syria and Iraq, ISIS it remains a threat, but hasn’t been able to mount any deliberate attacks on coalition forces in more than two years, the U.S. military said. (Isaiah J Scott/U.S. Army)
The group continues to use hit-and-run style attacks and roadside bombings, and it maintains cash reserves likely in the tens of millions of dollars, stated the report, which cited assessments by CENTCOM, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Treasury Department and other agencies.
ISIS is also seeking to recruit boys at the sprawling al-Hol displacement camp in Syria and is financially backing foreign female residents of the camp who have increased radicalization efforts on social media, the report stated.
Radicalization of lone actors remains the “most serious threat” from ISIS to the U.S. homeland and Europe, the DIA told the IG.
Hundreds of American troops are expected to remain in Iraq to provide training, advice and support to government forces, which continue to struggle to secure the border with Syria, the IG report states.
ISIS fighters in Iraq likely have “a higher level of operational maturity,” compared with those in Syria, as suggested by their ability to carry out more complex attacks, the DIA told the IG.
In recent months, the militants have attacked electrical transmission towers and carried out bombings in urban areas, including a pair of blasts in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad in April and June.
They have also long exploited a security vacuum in a rugged and remote disputed area between federally controlled territory and the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government.
But in June, the Kurdish security forces known as peshmerga conducted their first joint patrol with troops under Baghdad’s command.
Calling the patrol “a milestone in the ability of the two forces to fight ISIS together,” DOD IG Sean W. O’Donnell said the two sides have also set up four new joint coordination centers in the northern provinces.
The U.S. this year resumed paying stipends to the peshmerga that were suspended last year in anticipation of a drawdown in counteroffensive operations, O’Donnell said in the report.
The payments also help provide security for U.S. and coalition troops.
Chad Garland
Chad is a Marine Corps veteran who covers the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and sometimes elsewhere for Stars and Stripes. An Illinois native who’s reported for news outlets in Washington, D.C., Arizona, Oregon and California, he’s an alumnus of the Defense Language Institute, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Arizona State University.
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8. Sailor accused of starting USS Bonhomme Richard fire identified in warrant
This seems like a difficult case for the prosecutors.
Or maybe not if Mays responses are any indication. This seems like a scene out of a TV law and order show.
During that interview, Mays recalled a conversation after the fire among deck department sailors in which they talked about seeing an individual in coveralls and a mask carrying a bucket into the Lower V before the blaze started.
“Investigators had not previously mentioned during the course of the interview that the individual had been seen wearing a mask,” the affidavit states. “At one point MAYS told investigators the witness could not have identified him because, ‘I had a face mask on.’”
He was arrested after his interview and booked into the Navy brig aboard Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California.
During the booking process, two masters-at-arms “heard MAYS say (unasked) that he was guilty, seemingly talking to himself,” the affidavit states.
After learning this, NCIS agents brought Mays back in for requestioning that same day, but “MAYS denied he was guilty and denied having said so,” the affidavit states.
Sailor accused of starting USS Bonhomme Richard fire identified in warrant
A federal search warrant affidavit unsealed this week has identified the sailor suspected of starting the 2020 fire aboard the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard as Seaman Apprentice Ryan Sawyer Mays, a SEAL training washout who some shipmates said “hates” the Navy.
The affidavit by Naval Criminal Investigative Service Agent Maya Kamat was filed Sept. 3 to compel Google to grant access to Mays’ Gmail account.
The Navy on July 29 announced arson and hazarding a vessel charges against a sailor for starting the multiday fire that began on July 12, 2020, as the ship was undergoing maintenance in San Diego.
While the Navy declined to identify the sailor ahead of an Article 32 hearing that will help determine whether the case goes to trial, a motion filed Tuesday by government prosecutors asking to unseal the affidavit involving Mays states that “a sailor was arrested and charged” in connection to the investigation and that the affidavit should be made public so that it can be disclosed to that sailor’s defense team.
A defense official has confirmed to Navy Times that Mays is the sailor against whom the Navy has preferred charges.
The affidavit for the first time reveals information about the sailor accused of starting the fire and suggests that key firefighting stations may have been tampered with, hindering efforts to extinguish the inferno, which burned for four days and left dozens of military and civilians firefighters injured, according to the affidavit.
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While no one has been charged in connection with the Bonhomme Richard fire, emails indicate a Navy prosecutor's involvement.
Mays, 20, told investigators he did not start the fire and was being “setup,” according to the affidavit.
A Kentucky native, Mays could not be reached for comment and began a new assignment with Amphibious Squadron 5 in April, according to his service record.
His civilian attorney, Gary Barthel, said his client remains on a regular duty status and is innocent of the charges.
Barthel said Mays retained him in September and that his client was held in the brig for 56 days last year.
“My client has always maintained his innocence and denies any wrongdoing with regard to the fire aboard the Bonhomme Richard,” Barthel told Navy Times.
According to the affidavit unsealed this week, Seaman Kenji Velasco reported that he was standing watch near the ramp down to the Lower V storage area of the ship at about 8 a.m. July 12, 2020, when he saw a sailor wearing coveralls and a mask carry a bucket down into the Lower V about five minutes before the first reports of smoke emerged, according to the affidavit.
Velasco later said, “he was ‘fairly sure’ and ‘90% sure’” that it was Mays, the affidavit states.
“I love deck,” the sailor “sarcastically stated” while passing Velasco, a phrase the sailor knew Mays to say, according to the affidavit.
Velasco told investigators that Mays “‘hates’ the U.S. Navy and the Fleet,” according to the affidavit.
“Velasco further explained that after the fire on the BHR, he was attending a muster at the base theater, when he asked MAYS if he had gone to the Lower V before the fire started,” the affidavit states. “According to Velasco, MAYS replied, ‘yes.’”
In an interview with NCIS agents, Mays “repeatedly denied having started the fire on the BHR or having been in the Lower V on the day of the fire,” the affidavit states.
“He maintained his innocence as to being the cause of the fire throughout the entire interview,” it continues. “At one point, after being told that he had been identified as having descended the ramp to the Lower V, before the fire started, Mays stated that he was being setup.”
About six days after the fire began, investigators determined that it originated in the Lower V.
Images of the badly scorched interior of the U.S. amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard, which burned for four days at a San Diego pier, show the extent of the damage to the ship.,
No one reported seeing any sailors come back up the ramp out of the Lower V after the sailor Velasco believed to be Mays went down there the morning of the fire, according to the affidavit.
Other sailors surmised that Mays “could have went up the escape truck, went into the deck berthing area, and took his coveralls off while wearing his cammies underneath,” the affidavit states.
While Mays initially told investigators that anyone in the Lower V during a fire would be “f*****” because the only way back to the Upper V was the ramp, he eventually admitted knowing about other exit points from the Lower V.
“MAYS admitted he had traversed at least one of the two conflagration station ladders where he learned to ‘skate off and hide’ from work,” the affidavit states.
Mays joined the Navy in 2019 and started BUD/S training to become a SEAL in October 2019 but dropped out after five days, according to the affidavit.
He was reassigned to Bonhomme Richard as an undesignated seaman.
“According to Navy leadership, the morale and behavior of sailors who had aspired to become a SEAL, and then find themselves serving in a more traditional role on a Navy ship, are frequently very challenging,” the affidavit states.
On July 21, Command Master Chief Jose Hernandez “identified MAYS as a person who showed disdain towards authority and the U.S. Navy,” according to the affidavit.
The affidavit also cites a June 14 Instagram post of a shirtless Mays which stated, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Mays would later tell investigators it was a reference to the iconic line form the Vietnam War movie “Apocalypse Now,” according to the affidavit.
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The four-day fire destroyer the amphibious assault ship last summer.
Navy Chief Lino Aguilarbarron told investigators on Aug. 12, 2020, that he had spoken with Mays on an unknown date after the fire, and that May said he had been in the Lower V that day to store some hoses.
“Mays stated he did not see anything in the Lower V that would have ignited the fire by itself, more likely the fire was started by someone,” Aguilarbarron told investigators, according to the affidavit.
During a 10-hour interview with NCIS agents on Aug. 20, 2020, Mays said “he was training for special operations and planned to reapply to become a member of the SEAL teams,” the affidavit states.
Smoke rises from the USS Bonhomme Richard at Naval Base San Diego July 12, 2020, after a fire and explosion on board the ship. A sailor has been charged with setting the blaze. (Denis Poroy/AP)
He also said he mustered the day of the fire with the rest of his duty section on the flight deck at about 8 a.m. and was in the hangar bay when he became aware of the fire, according to the affidavit.
During that interview, Mays recalled a conversation after the fire among deck department sailors in which they talked about seeing an individual in coveralls and a mask carrying a bucket into the Lower V before the blaze started.
“Investigators had not previously mentioned during the course of the interview that the individual had been seen wearing a mask,” the affidavit states. “At one point MAYS told investigators the witness could not have identified him because, ‘I had a face mask on.’”
He was arrested after his interview and booked into the Navy brig aboard Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California.
During the booking process, two masters-at-arms “heard MAYS say (unasked) that he was guilty, seemingly talking to himself,” the affidavit states.
After learning this, NCIS agents brought Mays back in for requestioning that same day, but “MAYS denied he was guilty and denied having said so,” the affidavit states.
Mays asked to take a polygraph test and one was administered on Aug. 21, 2020.
“When he was informed of the possible deception indications, MAYS became extremely upset and denied any involvement in starting the fire,” the affidavit states.
Investigators discovered plastic bottles near the fire’s origin that contained “heavy petroleum distillates,” which can include diesel, kerosene and jet fuel, according to the affidavit.
That affidavit also contains insight from Bonhomme Richard officers suggesting that the Lower and Upper V firefighting stations had been tampered with before the fire.
A few weeks after the fire, the ship’s damage control assistant, Lt. Cmdr. Felix Perez, walked through the Upper and Lower V compartments with investigators and stated that three of the four firefighting stations in those areas “were not in their normal configuration,” the affidavit states.
“One station located on the port side of the Upper V did not have any hoses connected to the firefighting station,” the record states.
“Perez stated that, regardless of maintenance status, there should have been hoses on the racks with at least one hose connected to the fire station,” the affidavit states.
Other Upper V hoses were found cut during initial firefighting efforts, and Perez reported that four months earlier at another ship location, “a fire hose was found cut,” according to the affidavit.
Perez said his team walked the spaces for inspection on July 10, 2020, two days before the fire, and that while one station might have been overlooked, it was “nearly impossible for three of the four closest to and inside the Lower V to have been missed.”
“Perez opined that three of the four fire stations aboard BHR appeared to have been purposely tampered with and/or disconnected,” the affidavit states.
Mays told investigators he broke off a relationship with a pregnant female sailor after he found out he was not the father, according to the affidavit.
That woman told investigators she never became pregnant and “described MAYS as being volatile and ‘bipolar,’” it states.
A few weeks before the fire, CMC Hernandez told investigators that Mays was caught sleeping in berthing during his duty day on July 5, 2020.
He was awoken by a contractor and reacted by “verbally confronting the contractor in an aggressive way, causing the contractor to report the incident to Navy personnel,” according to the affidavit.
Mays told a NCIS special agent that he had taken a picture of the fire with his phone, and that he felt “a small amount of adrenaline and anxiety,” when he learned about the fire, according to the affidavit.
The agent requested the affidavit be sealed when it was filed last fall because “MAYS is not aware of the full extent of the investigation,” and if he was, the agent feared he would seek to evade prosecution and destroy evidence.
9. Help, Not Just Hunt, Violent Extremists in the Military
Interesting take on an important problem that must be correctly addressed.
A small but growing network of civil society organizations is now implementing these types of interventions to help people walk away from extremism. For example, the nonprofit Parents for Peace has developed a hotline that family members and friends can call to learn how to help loved ones caught in the grip of extremism. Parents for Peace and organizations like Beyond Barriers and Life After Hate draw on a network of former violent extremists to help counsel individuals through the deradicalization process.
...
This type of direct outreach to families has precedent. The military employs a service called One Source, which provides military families access to a 24-hour hotline and non-medical counseling. And the Veterans Affairs has developed a national telephone service, Coaching into Care, which aims to support and empower family members and friends who are seeking care or service for a veteran.
The Pentagon could protect the U.S. military and its mission by identifying and removing those whose extremist beliefs and behavior threaten the force. But family and friends could also play a critical role in helping extremists walk away from hate and violence before it's too late. And the Pentagon could help them do it.
Help, Not Just Hunt, Violent Extremists in the Military
The Pentagon is working to rid itself of violent extremist members. In addition to strengthening the chain of command to detect and remove extremist members from its ranks, the military could also empower military family members to intervene.
Ever since the discovery that current and former military personnel played a significant role in the January 6 insurrection, the Pentagon has taken steps to counter extremism in the armed forces.
It implemented a Department of Defense (DoD) wide stand-down to educate the force on extremism and reinforce the oath of service, and it has enacted tougher screening protocols to catch extremists before they can enlist. The DoD also created a Countering Extremism Working Group that is preparing to offer the Secretary a slate of new policy proposals.
Among these proposals, the Working Group may recommend steps to better train and empower commanders and NCOs to identify extremist members and report them to the chain of command. Thorough investigations could then follow, and if an individual's extremist views or behavior were shown to negatively affect his or her duties, that individual could face discharge from service.
This may be a necessary approach, but it could drive extremists, fearful of dismissal, underground. And it might sidestep an audience most critical to reversing the tide of extremism: family members, spouses, life partners, and friends.
Our own research has documented that violent extremism is not a dead-end path. In characterizing the lives of 32 domestic extremists, we found that many left extremist organizations and turned away from hateful ideology. They did this not from threats from employers or law enforcement but from the patient assistance of family members and friends, including members of groups they once hated.
Indeed, most of those in our study described interventions by life partners, friends, former radicals, or acquaintances from different racial or ethnic groups. And a helpful intervention was one that was offered with support and kindness (as opposed to anger, judgment, or punishment) and that exposed extremists to diverse cultures and the hated minority or group.
A small but growing network of civil society organizations is now implementing these types of interventions to help people walk away from extremism. For example, the nonprofit Parents for Peace has developed a hotline that family members and friends can call to learn how to help loved ones caught in the grip of extremism. Parents for Peace and organizations like Beyond Barriers and Life After Hate draw on a network of former violent extremists to help counsel individuals through the deradicalization process.
The Pentagon could provide channels that are outside the chain of command to help extremist service members and their families. First, they could provide a way for family members and friends to directly seek help either for themselves or for loved ones that might be headed down the path of extremism. The DoD could work with organizations like Parents for Peace to create and publicize helpline numbers that family members can call for emotional support and guidance. They could also provide a way for family members to secure professional assistance from civil society organizations that can develop interventions that motivate individuals to walk away from extremism and counseling that can give them the courage to do so. Finally, they could help evaluate the impact of these promising interventions, ensuring that prospective evaluations assess the degree to which interventions help family members and affected service personnel.
This type of direct outreach to families has precedent. The military employs a service called One Source, which provides military families access to a 24-hour hotline and non-medical counseling. And the Veterans Affairs has developed a national telephone service, Coaching into Care, which aims to support and empower family members and friends who are seeking care or service for a veteran.
The Pentagon could protect the U.S. military and its mission by identifying and removing those whose extremist beliefs and behavior threaten the force. But family and friends could also play a critical role in helping extremists walk away from hate and violence before it's too late. And the Pentagon could help them do it.
Todd C. Helmus is a senior behavioral scientist, Ryan Andrew Brown is a senior behavioral/social scientist and Rajeev Ramchand is a senior behavioral scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
10. U.S. Airstrikes in Afghanistan Could Be a Sign of What Comes Next
Excerpts:
A Taliban official shrugged off the presence of hulking B-52 bombers that have appeared in Afghanistan’s skies, though officially the group has decried the bombings as a breach of the 2020 peace agreement with the United States and promised consequences.
The American airstrikes have underscored the shortcomings of the Afghan Air Force, which U.S. officials say is overstretched and breaking down.
“All of the Afghan Air Force’s aircraft platforms are overtaxed due to increased requests for close air support, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance missions and aerial resupply now that the ANDSF largely lacks U.S. air support,” the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said in a report released last week, referring to Afghan security forces.
The departure of all but a couple of hundred U.S. aircraft maintenance contractors has led to sharp decreases in readiness rates for five of the seven aircraft in the Afghan air fleet, the report found. But even with the litany of issues, including the loss of aircraft to Taliban fire at an increasing rate, Afghan pilots have been trying to support the forces.
U.S. Airstrikes in Afghanistan Could Be a Sign of What Comes Next
Aug. 3, 2021
News Analysis
American forces have stepped up a bombing campaign, but the White House and the Pentagon insist these are the final days of combat support.
Afghan soldiers guarding a road in Herat Province on Sunday. Taliban fighters have entered several important provincial capitals such as Herat city in recent days and weeks.
Aug. 3, 2021
WASHINGTON — The White House authorization of one more bombing campaign in Afghanistan, just weeks before the U.S. military mission is set to end, has a modest stated goal — to buy time for Afghan security forces to marshal some kind of defense around the major cities that are under siege by a surging Taliban.
But the dozens of airstrikes, which began two weeks ago as the Taliban pushed their front lines deep into urban areas, also laid bare the big question now facing President Biden and the Pentagon as the United States seeks to wind down its longest war. Will the American air campaign continue after Aug. 31, the date the president has said would be the end of combat involvement in Afghanistan?
The White House and the Pentagon insist these are truly the final days of American combat support, after the withdrawal of most troops this summer after 20 years of war. Beginning next month, the president has said, the United States will engage militarily in Afghanistan only for counterterrorism reasons, to prevent the country from becoming a launchpad for attacks against the West. That would give Afghan security forces mere weeks to fix years of poor leadership and institutional failures, and rally their forces to defend what territory they still control.
Pentagon and White House officials say the current air campaign can blunt the Taliban’s momentum by destroying some of their artillery and other equipment, and lift the sagging morale of Afghan security forces.
But administration officials say the Pentagon will most likely request authorization from the president for another air campaign in the next months, should Kandahar or Kabul, the capital, appear on the verge of falling. Mr. Biden appeared to hold out that possibility last month when he said that the United States had “worked out an over-the-horizon capacity that can be value added” if Kabul came under serious threat, phrasing the military often uses to suggest possible airstrikes.
Such a move would foreshadow the inching toward a longer campaign that could give Mr. Biden space between his decision to withdraw American troops and an eventual fall of Kabul, and the possible specter of evacuations of the U.S. and other Western embassies, like the scene that preceded the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans were evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter.
Mr. Biden’s aides say that he is aware of the risks, but that he remains skeptical of any effort by the Pentagon that looks as though it is prolonging the American military engagement. Still, officials say that they expect Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to approach Mr. Biden at the end of August about the possibility of continuing airstrikes into September if the Taliban look as if they are about to overrun key population centers.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, left, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, plan to approach President Biden about the possibility of continuing airstrikes if the Taliban are positioned to take over key cities.
Already, the Taliban have been making advances, sweeping through the Afghan countryside and closing in on the center of Kandahar. Taliban fighters launched rockets over the weekend at the airport in Kandahar, and fierce fighting near Herat shut down the airport there.
At the moment, the official line from the White House and the Pentagon is that these are truly the final days of American combat support.
“My personal belief is that the closer the Taliban get to the urban areas, I think the fighting gets more intense, and they can’t take advantage like they could in the rural areas,” said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the former commander of United States Central Command. “As they get to the built-up areas, where there’s leadership in place who will be fighting for their lives, I think those fights will become more difficult.”
But that has not been the case in recent days and weeks, as Taliban fighters have entered several provincial capitals such as Kunduz in the north, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south and Herat in the west.
One Afghan officer in the city described the situation last week as “hell.” Even now, with reinforcements and continued American airstrikes — there were at least two on Monday morning — fighting was still continuing in nearly every part of the city.
But helping Afghan partners fight for their lives is the point of the stepped-up bombing campaign, military officials said.
Mohammad Sadiq Essa, a spokesman for the Afghan Army corps fighting in Kandahar, said the U.S. strikes had been useful in “busting the momentum of the Taliban.” But continued strikes from both U.S. and Afghan aircraft, especially around urban areas, run the risk of causing a high number of civilian casualties.
Afghan special forces training in Kabul last month. The U.S. is hoping to buy time for Afghan security forces to marshal a defense around the major cities that are under siege by the Taliban. Credit...Rahmat Gul/Associated Press
Since the U.S. military began its official withdrawal in May, thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded — the highest number recorded for the May-to-June period since the United Nations began monitoring these casualties in 2009.
Mr. Biden, in announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops, initially gave Sept. 11 as the date when the American combat mission was to end. Then last month, he said it would wrap up by Aug. 31. That gave the Pentagon — and Afghan forces — just over a month to slow the Taliban surge.
“We’re prepared to continue this heightened level of support in the coming weeks if the Taliban continue their attacks,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the top American general overseeing operations in Afghanistan, said last week in explaining the intensified airstrikes.
What is happening now echoes the past. After the end of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan in 2014, the Obama administration had to backtrack and permit more airstrikes for the Afghan security forces as they lost the bases and outposts that international forces had transferred to them.
In the past, air power has not been enough unless it was accompanied by a competent force on the ground. Right now, those forces are still lacking, with the Afghan military relying on an exhausted commando corps to fill in for many police officers who have fled or surrendered and army troops who refuse to fight or even venture outside their bases.
Administration and military officials have voiced conflicting views on whether the United States will continue airstrikes after Aug. 31 to prevent Afghan cities and the Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, from falling. General McKenzie declined last week to say that U.S. airstrikes would end at the end of the month.
Mr. Biden has been clear in meetings with his senior aides and advisers that continued American bombing runs from the skies over Afghanistan after the pullout are not what he wants, administration officials said. But his hand might be forced if Taliban forces are on the verge of overrunning Kandahar or even Kabul, where the United States maintains an embassy, with some 4,000 people.
An honor guard during the arrival of President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul this week. Mr. Biden appeared to hold out the option that the U.S. could help if Kabul was in imminent danger.
The Afghan military is trying to hold key cities and roads, a strategy that American military officers have pushed for years while the Afghan security forces, backed by U.S. air power, clung to far-flung, isolated and indefensible districts after the U.S. combat mission ended in 2014. Afghan officials largely ignored the suggestions until now, unwilling to cede any territory — despite its strategic insignificance — to the insurgents.
So for the time being, the United States is trying to make the fight as difficult as it can for the Taliban. “This is about buying time,” General Votel said in an interview. “It’s about blunting and slowing down the Taliban and helping the Afghans to get a little more organized.”
Defense Department officials said they expected the strikes, up to five a day, to continue at least through August. The attacks, carried out by armed Reaper drones and AC-130 aerial gunships, are targeting specific Taliban equipment, including heavy artillery, that could be used to threaten population centers, foreign embassies, Afghan government buildings or compounds, or airports, officials said.
A Taliban official shrugged off the presence of hulking B-52 bombers that have appeared in Afghanistan’s skies, though officially the group has decried the bombings as a breach of the 2020 peace agreement with the United States and promised consequences.
The American airstrikes have underscored the shortcomings of the Afghan Air Force, which U.S. officials say is overstretched and breaking down.
“All of the Afghan Air Force’s aircraft platforms are overtaxed due to increased requests for close air support, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance missions and aerial resupply now that the ANDSF largely lacks U.S. air support,” the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said in a report released last week, referring to Afghan security forces.
The departure of all but a couple of hundred U.S. aircraft maintenance contractors has led to sharp decreases in readiness rates for five of the seven aircraft in the Afghan air fleet, the report found. But even with the litany of issues, including the loss of aircraft to Taliban fire at an increasing rate, Afghan pilots have been trying to support the forces.
Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kabul, Afghanistan. Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
11. Would a 'neighborhood watch' really deter China's Asia-Pacific aggression?
Excerpts:
The verbs and models used in the proposal expose some of its flaws. In a neighborhood watch, the neighbors watch and if they observe something suspicious, they call the police. Who will be the police in the Asia-Pacific neighborhood watch? Short of formal NATO-like rules and structures that commit members to collective military action, it seems problematic that a less formal “watch” agreement will deter China without the threat of action.
The issue with collective structures such as NATO traditionally has been free-riding (as the economists call it), leaving the U.S. to spend a much larger amount on European security. Perhaps the opportunity for a more balanced approach to multilateral defense is emerging in the Asia-Pacific.
It is encouraging that countries such as Japan are committed to deterring China independently with improved military capability. A neighborhood watch with more capable neighbors like Tokyo will make any future collective security arrangement more credible vis-à-vis China. The same could be said of India’s military modernization.
A neighborhood watch that fosters both collective and independent capability, and takes advantage of member states’ technical leads in artificial intelligence and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, could be a first step in exploring the mechanics of multilateral security. That promotes U.S. objectives in the region.
Would a 'neighborhood watch' really deter China's Asia-Pacific aggression?
The Hill · by Bob Nugent, opinion contributor · August 4, 2021
A recent report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) suggests a “neighborhood watch approach” to coordinate unmanned systems and sensors. This approach to multilateral security, described as “low risk” by the authors, is advocated as a means to deter China’s political and military moves in the Asia-Pacific.
While mostly technical and tactical in scope, the report’s approach touches on an issue of broader military and political import for the region — namely, is a multilateral security architecture the most effective way to deter China? And if so, are methods such as coordinated surveillance a good way to start building such an architecture?
The CSBA report comes at an interesting time, in view of the Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of Japan’s efforts to develop an independent military capability to deter China. This capability, while explicitly connected to Taiwan’s security, does not depart from Tokyo’s firm commitment to alliance with the U.S. Similar investments are being made in India, where modernization of naval and other capability is driven by concerns about China’s aggression.
U.S. military/security relationships in the Asia-Pacific region since World War II have been bilateral, rather than tied to a multilateral structure such as NATO. That arrangement suited the times when the U.S. was the most capable military partner in these regional bilateral relationships. However, such arrangements create seams in Asia-Pacific security that are not lost on China.
Beijing pursues a “divide and conquer” strategy that takes advantage of these seams amid declining U.S. security focus and resources in the region over the past 20 years. China’s economic boycotts of Australia and maneuvers to exclude Philippine and Malaysia maritime commerce and fishing in the South China Sea are cases in point.
Calls to shift to a more collective security approach in the Asia-Pacific — something like the “neighborhood watch” outlined in the CSBA study — are not new. They are more urgent in view of China’s stated intent and capability to exert military and political dominance in the region.
Multilateral military consultations and exercises are already in place, with Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) as one of several venues designed to reinforce naval interoperability among participants. But the authors make a strong point that additional arrangements centered on areas of common interest and common technical and tactical advantage between the U.S. and allies and friendly states in the Asia- Pacific have a place in U.S. policy.
Past attempts at creating a multilateral defense architecture in the Asia-Pacific do not offer much grounds for optimism about future collective defense arrangement in the region. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was established in 1954 as such a defense treaty, but did not adequately address bilateral frictions and differences, and generally has been assessed as a failure to achieve its stated objectives.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has created an architecture for communication and some interoperability for regional maritime security among member states in Southeast Asia. However, ASEAN is not a collective defense agreement. Its achievements in coordinating maritime security efforts stumble on what commentators at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute describe as a complicated and bureaucratic structure. Further, the U.S. is not a member of ASEAN.
The “neighborhood watch” label makes sense as a next tactical and technical step to expand on multilateral security commitments. It recalls Franklin Roosevelt’s “garden hose” justification of Lend Lease — similarly arguing how more can be done to counter growing threats, without suggesting a more formal alliance. This makes a virtue of necessity since an Asian NATO still appears a bridge too far — existing historical frictions (Japan-Korea) continue to work against a full collective security alliance in the region.
The verbs and models used in the proposal expose some of its flaws. In a neighborhood watch, the neighbors watch and if they observe something suspicious, they call the police. Who will be the police in the Asia-Pacific neighborhood watch? Short of formal NATO-like rules and structures that commit members to collective military action, it seems problematic that a less formal “watch” agreement will deter China without the threat of action.
The issue with collective structures such as NATO traditionally has been free-riding (as the economists call it), leaving the U.S. to spend a much larger amount on European security. Perhaps the opportunity for a more balanced approach to multilateral defense is emerging in the Asia-Pacific.
It is encouraging that countries such as Japan are committed to deterring China independently with improved military capability. A neighborhood watch with more capable neighbors like Tokyo will make any future collective security arrangement more credible vis-à-vis China. The same could be said of India’s military modernization.
A neighborhood watch that fosters both collective and independent capability, and takes advantage of member states’ technical leads in artificial intelligence and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, could be a first step in exploring the mechanics of multilateral security. That promotes U.S. objectives in the region.
Bob Nugent is a retired U.S. Navy officer who served in the intelligence, operations and acquisition communities. He teaches in the Strategy, Management and Operations Department of the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America.
The Hill · by Bob Nugent, opinion contributor · August 4, 2021
12. First Taiwan Arms Sale in Biden Administration Is Approved
Excerpts:
The deal includes not only the weapons platforms and precision guidance kits but also logistics and sustainment equipment to make the howitzers viable systems, such as 20 ammunition-hauling M992A2 vehicles that would follow the howitzers into battle as well as GPS receivers for the weapons platforms, technical manuals, projectile fuses and smoke-grenade launchers.
The new package follows high-profile sales to Taiwan approved in the last year of the Trump administration, including 66 new model F-16 Block 70 aircraft from Lockheed Martin Corp. and a potential $2.4 billion sale of Boeing Co. Harpoon antiship missiles for coastal defense.
Another package late in the Trump administration includes 135 SLAM-extended-range land attack missiles from Boeing valued at $1 billion if the entire sale goes through, $436 million for Himars mobile artillery rocket systems made by Lockheed and $367 million in surveillance and reconnaissance sensors from Raytheon Technologies Corp. to be mounted on aircraft. Since 2010, the U.S. has announced more than $23 billion in arms sales to Taiwan.
First Taiwan Arms Sale in Biden Administration Is Approved
August 4, 2021, 3:15 PM EDT Updated on August 5, 2021, 4:04 AM EDT
- $750 million deal includes 40 new self-propelled howitzers
- Deal includes 1,700 kits to convert shells with GPS guidance
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The Biden administration has approved its first arms sale to the island democracy of Taiwan, a potential $750 million deal, amid rising tensions with China.
It calls for selling Taiwan 40 new M109 self-propelled howitzers and almost 1,700 kits to convert projectiles into more precise GPS-guided munitions, according to a State Department notification to Congress on Wednesday.
Taiwan’s military M109 self-propelled Howitzers move during military exercises in Taiwan in 2019.Photographer: Chiang Ying-ying/AP Photo
The proposed sale must go through a congressional review process and then through negotiations between Taiwan and contractor BAE Systems Plc, which is also providing the U.S. Army with the latest version of the howitzer, before a contract is signed and delivery times are hashed out.
Taiwan’s presidential office expressed thanks to the U.S., saying the weapons would give Taiwan more confidence to ensure peace. “Taiwan will continue to deepen cooperation with the U.S. and other like-minded countries,” said spokesman Chang Tun-han in an online statement. The Taiwanese Defense Ministry said it expected the sale to take effect after one month.
China sees Taiwan as part of its territory and hasn’t ruled out the use of force in the pursuit of unification. President Xi Jinping called his country’s quest to gain control of Taiwan a “historic mission” in a speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has labeled China the key threat guiding U.S. defense spending priorities.
China’s warplanes made incursions into the southern part of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone on 87 days in 2020 -- more than in the previous five years combined -- and have surpassed that number already this year.
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The proposal “serves as a timely reminder of the close national security partnership between the United States and Taiwan,” as China is now violating Taiwan’s air defense identification zone “on a near-daily basis,” said Rupert J. Hammond-Chambers, president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council. “We also hope to see additional offers from the Biden administration of new capabilities to Taiwan to both help expand its current military posture and to continue improving its multilayered self-defense capacity.”
The proposed A6-model howitzer sale would beef up Taiwan’s aging inventory of earlier-model M109 self-propelled weapons and improve its capability to blunt a Chinese land invasion. The Precision Guidance Kits would convert 155m projectiles with GPS navigation for greater accuracy. The U.S. Army has deployed similar kits.
The deal includes not only the weapons platforms and precision guidance kits but also logistics and sustainment equipment to make the howitzers viable systems, such as 20 ammunition-hauling M992A2 vehicles that would follow the howitzers into battle as well as GPS receivers for the weapons platforms, technical manuals, projectile fuses and smoke-grenade launchers.
The new package follows high-profile sales to Taiwan approved in the last year of the Trump administration, including 66 new model F-16 Block 70 aircraft from Lockheed Martin Corp. and a potential $2.4 billion sale of Boeing Co. Harpoon antiship missiles for coastal defense.
Another package late in the Trump administration includes 135 SLAM-extended-range land attack missiles from Boeing valued at $1 billion if the entire sale goes through, $436 million for Himars mobile artillery rocket systems made by Lockheed and $367 million in surveillance and reconnaissance sensors from Raytheon Technologies Corp. to be mounted on aircraft. Since 2010, the U.S. has announced more than $23 billion in arms sales to Taiwan.
— With assistance by Lucille Liu, Cindy Wang, and Jon Herskovitz
(Updates with comments from China and Taiwan.)
13. ‘A Poison in the System’: The Epidemic of Military Sexual Assault
A poison and scourge. But is it really our culture that causes the actual sexual assault? I think the culture has to change as to how we combat it and address it when it happens. We have made a lot of mistakes. Criminals and deviants conduct sexual assault. Our cultural problems lie in combating and handling it.
‘A Poison in the System’: The Epidemic of Military Sexual Assault
Nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted in the military. Why has it been so difficult to change the culture?
Florence Shmorgoner was raped by a fellow Marine in 2015. After she reported it and N.C.I.S. investigated, a commander decided not to press charges against her assailant.Credit...Danna Singer for The New York Times
Nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted in the military. Why has it been so difficult to change the culture?
Florence Shmorgoner was raped by a fellow Marine in 2015. After she reported it and N.C.I.S. investigated, a commander decided not to press charges against her assailant.Credit...Danna Singer for The New York Times
By
Pfc. Florence Shmorgoner woke up one afternoon in 2015 and realized that she was in someone else’s bed in someone else’s room. Something was wrong. The 19-year-old had been playing video games in her friend’s room in the barracks with the door open — the rule at their base at Twentynine Palms in California was that if male and female Marines were together in the same room, the door had to be left open. Although it was midafternoon, at some point she had dozed off on his bed. Now the door was closed, and her friend was groping her. She felt as if she was having an out-of-body experience, as if she was watching what was happening but not actually experiencing it. He took off her clothes and penetrated her.
Afterward, she got off the bed and couldn’t look at him. “I told him, ‘You know I didn’t want to,’” she recalls. “And I remember this distinctly — he goes, ‘I know.’”
Shmorgoner left, went back to her room and tried to scrub her skin raw in the shower. It didn’t occur to her to tell anyone what had happened, and she didn’t particularly want to. She was the only woman in the training course she was taking to become a computer-and-telephone-repair technician, and she didn’t get along with the few other women she had met in her barracks — women in the Marines often felt a competitive animosity toward one another, Shmorgoner says. She also didn’t know what resources were available to Marines in the aftermath of sexual assault. “I don’t remember that we were told who the victim advocate was when I was in Twentynine Palms,” she says. “I really didn’t have the resources to report if I wanted to.”
Shmorgoner fell into a deep depression. She saw her assailant a few times a week — they lived in the same building and used the same gym — and he acted as if nothing had happened. She was terrified that she would be attacked again, either by him or someone else. “Even walking from my room to where we ate, the chow hall — it was a task I had to prep myself for every day. It was almost a sit-down conversation with myself of, OK, it’s time to go to the chow hall. You’re going to pass all of these males and you need to prepare yourself. Just look down and keep walking,” Shmorgoner told me.
Soon, her fear gave way to self-loathing. She woke up every morning angry that she’d woken up at all. She began to believe that she deserved the attack and that the world would be better off without her. “It kind of tied back into the misogynistic view of myself,” she says. “I’m not as fast. I’m not as strong. It was a very weird rabbit hole that I went down of, well, maybe it was my fault. And maybe I was asking for it. And maybe I’m the bad person, and I’m the burden. And I’m just better off gone.”
Over the next four years, Shmorgoner tried to kill herself six times. She can still feel the scars on her wrists, but they are now mostly hidden by tattoos. Somehow, she always stopped just short of cutting deeply enough to die. “I don’t know what stopped me,” she says. “I was very prepared and pretty unafraid to take my own life.” Shmorgoner bore the pain and trauma of her rape without telling anyone, all while deploying to Bahrain, Japan and Australia as a computer-and-telephone technician and then returning to the United States to work on Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego in the same role.
In 2017, she met Ecko Arnold, another Marine who had also been sexually assaulted while on active duty. “Everything she told me about herself, I saw it in myself,” she recalls. That’s when Shmorgoner, whose friends call her Shmo, finally opened up. She told Arnold what happened, and Arnold encouraged Shmorgoner to report her rape. Shmorgoner first filed what in the military is called a restricted report in October 2017. This category of report allows a complainant to disclose what happened and receive counseling and health care, but the details remain confidential, with no investigation pursued. A month later, she filed an unrestricted report, too, initiating a rape investigation.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (N.C.I.S.) then began investigating. Shmorgoner had to tell the investigating agent, over and over again and in painstaking detail, what she could remember from that afternoon. By that point, her assailant was in Hawaii, and N.C.I.S. organized and recorded a phone call between her and the perpetrator to see if he would confess to the rape. The agent coached her on what to say and how to say it. It was the first time she had an extended conversation with her assailant since the assault, and she was terrified. “That was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” she says.
Shmorgoner started the telephone conversation casually, asking him about Hawaii and his job. Then she shifted the conversation to the assault. “I told him: ‘Hey, that really hurt me. I didn’t want to, we weren’t romantically involved,’” she says. “He ended up apologizing and said, ‘I’m sorry.’” An N.C.I.S. officer who was in the room with her signaled that she’d gotten what they needed and that she could end the call.
At this point, Shmorgoner assumed that the case was clear-cut — they had a recorded confession in hand. She was floored when a Marine commander and the N.C.I.S. recommended against a court-martial. They told her that, despite the confession, her assailant’s character witnesses had said good things about him and there was no physical evidence to prove that a rape had happened. They warned Shmorgoner that a court-martial would probably be hard on her and that she might not want to go through with it because it was unlikely to end with a conviction. (N.C.I.S. declined to comment for this article, referring all questions to the Marine commandant’s office, which confirmed that N.C.I.S. investigated the case and that a commander recommended against a court-martial but would not confirm that there was a recorded confession. Shmorgoner declined to name her assailant, so The Times was unable to contact him for comment.)
Shmorgoner was heartbroken and confused, but she agreed — she didn’t want to go through a trial if it was only going to end in an acquittal. And she had seen what had happened to Arnold after reporting her assault and transferring. “She was sexually harassed,” Shmorgoner says. “There were things that people said about her that were beyond awful.” One male colleague, she remembers, told Arnold that she deserved what happened to her.
Shmorgoner then asked N.C.I.S. if the military could at least take some kind of administrative action against her perpetrator. Again, she says, she was told no.
The rape investigation was closed in 2018, and Shmorgoner says her attacker was able to serve out his Marine contract and receive an honorable discharge. She fell deeper into depression and despair. “My viewpoint of the Marine Corps really changed from then on, to it’s an institution that doesn’t really look after the people that comprise it,” she recalls. “We’re not in the business of taking care of people — it seemed to me that we were in the business of using them.”
Shmorgoner in 2019 at Camp Kinser, Okinawa, Japan.Credit...Photograph from Florence Shmorgoner
For decades, sexual assault and harassment have festered through the ranks of the armed forces with military leaders repeatedly promising reform and then failing to live up to those promises. Women remain a distinct minority, making up only 16.5 percent of the armed services, yet nearly one in four servicewomen reports experiencing sexual assault in the military, and more than half report experiencing harassment, according to a meta-analysis of 69 studies published in 2018 in the journal Trauma, Violence & Abuse. (Men are victims of assault and harassment, too, though at significantly lower rates than women.) One key reason troops who are assaulted rarely see justice is the way in which such crimes are investigated and prosecuted. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, military commanders decide whether to investigate and pursue legal action — responsibilities that in the civilian world are overseen by dedicated law enforcement.
Some politicians have been fighting, and failing, for years to change these military laws. Every year since 2013, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has introduced legislation to move the decision to prosecute major military crimes, including sex crimes, out of the hands of commanders and into those of independent prosecutors. And every year, it has failed to move forward. Historically, the Pentagon has vehemently opposed the idea, saying that it would undermine institutional leadership. During a 2019 Senate hearing, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink, judge advocate general of the Navy, testified that removing authority over serious crimes from commanders “would have a detrimental impact on the ability of those commanders — and other commanders — to ensure good order and discipline.”
But this year has seen the arrival of a new administration, the end of a 20-year war in Afghanistan and the United States military’s reckoning with many of the politically heated questions also being debated across America, including demands to change the names of bases named after Confederate leaders, accusations of racial bias and sexism across the armed services and right-wing backlash over the supposed teaching of “critical race theory” to service members. It’s a combination of events that could help shepherd into the Pentagon some of the most significant policy reforms in a generation.
The bill that Gillibrand reintroduced in April, the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, has far more bipartisan support than ever. In May, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated that he no longer opposes the bill. Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, a sexual-assault survivor and a retired lieutenant colonel in the National Guard, is now co-sponsoring the legislation, after previously opposing it. Ernst has said that she had a change of heart because she spent years working to address the issue of military sexual assault within the existing system, yet “we are not seeing a dent in the numbers.”
At least 70 senators and President Biden have indicated their support for Gillibrand’s bill this year. But it still faces staunch opposition from the leaders of the Armed Services Committee — Senators Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, and James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma. Reed blocked an attempt by Gillibrand in May to bring the bill to a floor vote, saying that he found the legislation too broad because it seeks to change how the military handles all serious crimes, not just sexual assaults. In July, a bill with provisions put forward by both Gillibrand and Reed was incorporated into the annual defense bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, which will most likely be taken up by Congress for a vote later this year.
Col. Don Christensen, a retired chief Air Force prosecutor who is now president of Protect Our Defenders, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing rape and sexual assault in the military, says that this year is different in large part because of the murder of Specialist Vanessa Guillén, whose body was found in Texas in June 2020. Guillén had reportedly been sexually harassed by a fellow soldier before her death, and an Army investigation revealed a culture of harassment and bullying at Fort Hood where she was based. “The independent review of what was going on at Fort Hood was incredibly damning,” Christensen told me. In April 2021, according to The Intercept, the Army also had to suspend 22 instructors from Fort Sill in Oklahoma after a trainee was sexually assaulted.
If these policy changes move forward, prosecutions will no longer be at the whim of commanders and influenced so easily by military politics. Decisions may happen faster, too, Christensen says; right now, prosecutorial decisions go up the chain of commanders one by one, culminating in a final decision made by a commander of senior rank, which can take many months. But these prosecutorial reforms won’t eradicate the military’s sexual-assault problem, because the issue is rooted in military culture, not its justice system. “I hope it makes an impact, but I’m not sure,” says Col. Ellen Haring, a retired Army officer and research fellow at the nonprofit Service Women’s Action Network, which advocates for improved policies that affect women in the military. “It doesn’t get to the root problem, which is, why are the assaults happening in the first place?”
Sexual assault is often the initial signal event in a long line of painful traumas that can culminate in post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicide. In a 2019 study, scientists at the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the University of Utah and the University of Colorado surveyed more than 300 servicewomen and female veterans who had experienced a sexual assault and found that 29 percent were currently contemplating suicide. From 2007 to 2017, the age-adjusted suicide rate among women veterans rose by 73 percent; according to Department of Defense data, in 2019, women accounted for 31 percent of all suicide attempts among active-duty service members.
Because a military sexual assault triggers multiple traumas, victims frequently experience feelings of betrayal, isolation and worthlessness that can sap them of the will to keep going. For one thing, military sexual assaults happen in an environment in which, multiple surveys show, women feel they are repeatedly treated as if they don’t belong. And women are typically assaulted by the men they serve with — sometimes even their direct superiors — so they have to continually see and work with their assailants, wondering if it will happen again.
After their attacks, victims also rarely see justice. Of the more than 6,200 sexual-assault reports made by United States service members in fiscal year 2020, only 50 — 0.8 percent — ended in sex-offense convictions under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, roughly one-third as many convictions as in 2019. It’s unclear why sexual-assault convictions have gone down, but it’s part of a much larger trend: Courts-martial dropped by 69 percent from 2007 to 2017, according to Military Times, perhaps because commanders are instead choosing administrative punishments, which are bureaucratically easier but also result in milder punishments for the perpetrators, such as deductions in rank or administrative discharges.
Even when convicted, perpetrators often don’t spend time in prison. “Many people don’t receive a single day of confinement,” Christensen says. He pointed to the case of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was convicted of three counts of sexual assault but spent only three months in prison. “The uproar that was caused in California and across the nation by his sentence is kind of a weekly occurrence in the military,” he says. “That’s the lie that is perpetrated before Congress constantly — that ‘Oh, commanders are crushing these people. They want to hold them accountable,’” Christensen adds. “No, they don’t.”
Many service members leave the military soon after experiencing sexual trauma — and not voluntarily. Not only are military rapists rarely punished, but their victims are often punished for reporting what happened. According to a 2018 survey of active-duty service members by the Department of Defense, 38 percent of servicewomen who reported their assaults experienced professional retaliation afterward.
From 2009 to 2015, more than 22 percent of service members who left the military after reporting a sexual assault received a less-than-fully-honorable discharge, according to a 2016 investigation by the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General. That’s nearly one and a half times more than the percentage of overall service members who received less-than-fully-honorable discharges from 2002 to 2013, according to data compiled in a March 2016 report by Swords to Plowshares, a veterans advocacy group.
‘I’m still kind of stuck picking up the pieces.’
Called bad-paper discharges, these administrative separations can cut veterans off from jobs and V.A. services, as well as education benefits via the G.I. Bill. (Veterans can apply to get a character-of-service upgrade to access V.A. health care, but few are granted.) Since 2010, the V.A. has been required by law to provide health care services to any veteran who has experienced a military sexual assault, regardless of discharge or disability status — but in reality, many are turned away and told they’re ineligible. The 2020 Veterans Legal Clinic report found that the V.A. has denied services to as many as 400,000 potentially eligible veterans. “They’re summarily just kicked out,” says Rose Carmen Goldberg, a California lawyer who for years represented veterans who survived military sexual trauma. “It is very, very frustrating.”
The original assault, the absence of a reliable system of justice and the lingering isolation can send victims into spirals of anger and self-blame and cause them to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. They are twice as likely as other women veterans to later experience intimate-partner violence. (After her assault, Shmorgoner herself was in a relationship with a man who became abusive.) Women veterans who suffer a military sexual assault are also roughly twice as likely as other women veterans to become homeless. Yet many don’t “realize what the pain they were experiencing stemmed from,” says Sara Kintzle, a research professor in the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, so they don’t know what kind of help they need.
Even when veterans can get V.A. health care, they don’t always feel safe enough to pursue it. In many V.A. clinics, women find themselves surrounded by men, some of whom harass and assault them, compounding their traumas: A 2019 study found that one in four female veterans was harassed by other veterans during visits to V.A. health care facilities.
In September 2019, Andrea N. Goldstein, then a lead staff member for the Women Veterans Task Force on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and a reserve Navy intelligence officer, was assaulted at the V.A. Medical Center in Washington while she was waiting for a smoothie at the center’s cafe. As she recalls, a man approached her, pressed his body against her and told her she looked like she could use a good time. When she later reported the incident, no charges were brought against the man, and Curtis Cashour, then the V.A. deputy assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs, told a journalist to dig into her past and see if she had made similar allegations before.
“There’s this very real life-or-death situation,” Goldstein says, “where if women are being deferred from care because they’re getting harassed, or even physically assaulted, they’re not accessing life-saving care.”
Seven women and a service dog in training named Jax sat in a circle on the floor of a dark, sparsely furnished cabin at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Everyone was crying, and every few minutes a box of tissues slid across the floor for moral support. The women had come from all around the country in June 2019 to attend an annual healing retreat for survivors of military sexual assault.
Kellie-Lynn Shuble in front of her storage locker in Coraopolis, Pa., in July. She was harassed and assaulted throughout her time in the Army.Credit...Danna Singer for The New York Times
These women and others in attendance used aliases with me during the retreat, introducing themselves as the adjectives they thought described them: Joyful, Caring, Grateful, Awesome, Lovely, Crazy Cool, Sassy and Diva, sunny names that belied the deep pain they all were clearly experiencing. Over the two days I was there, many of the women opened up and told me their real names.
At this gathering on the second day, the first veteran to talk was Kellie-Lynn Shuble, a 47-year-old former Army combat medic who was sitting cross-legged in a green T-shirt. Her voice shaking, Shuble told the group how she’d first been sexually harassed by a lieutenant colonel — although she reported it, he went on to be promoted — and then, while deployed in Kuwait and Iraq, she was raped three times by different soldiers. She never reported those assaults. Given how the Army had handled her harassment investigation, she felt it would be useless, and she feared retaliation.
On her third deployment, in August 2006, she suffered her final assault, which would lead to her discharge. While outside filling sandbags, she got into a disagreement with a first sergeant over a Gatorade. Suddenly, he ordered her to get on her knees, pressed the barrel of a loaded handgun against her forehead and started unbuckling his pants. He demanded she perform oral sex.
Shuble said she then stood up and told him, “If you’re going to shoot me, you better shoot me now and you will have to shoot me in the back.” Immediately after that, Shuble told a peer what happened and that person reported her for threatening to kill the first sergeant. Within 72 hours, Shuble said, she was on a military transport plane back to the United States. There, she was medically evaluated and eventually deemed unfit for service. She didn’t fight the decision for the same reasons that she hadn’t reported the men who assaulted her. (The Army would not comment on the harassment investigation, but a spokesperson said that “there is no place in the Army for corrosive behaviors like sexual harassment and assault.”)
After leaving the Army, Shuble struggled. Over the nearly 13 years she spent as a soldier, she picked up many military-style mannerisms — talking loudly, cursing, standing erect with her feet planted wide — all of which made it harder to transition back to civilian life. She was told by those around her that she was too brash, too different, and that made her feel more isolated and alone.
Later that summer, Kate Hendricks Thomas, a Marine veteran and a behavioral-medicine researcher at George Mason University, told me how difficult the transition into civilian life can be for women. “When I left the military, on one of my first job interviews, I was criticized for my handshake being too firm,” Thomas said. “I gave a talk and my stance was a little too wide to be feminine and somebody said, ‘You look like you’re standing funny.’” Kintzle, the U.S.C. professor, agrees: “The kind of characteristics that the military fosters aren’t necessarily characteristics that the civilian world celebrates in women,” she said.
Shuble’s experience was also made harder by the PTSD she developed from her sexual and combat traumas. She described her PTSD as two monkeys clinging to her back that she couldn’t reach to throw off. “You’re carrying that extra 50 pounds every day — sleeping, dreaming, waking — with everything you do,” she said. She is angry a lot. She often can’t sleep. She has considered suicide. She was homeless for about a year and a half, the only woman living in a veterans’ sanctuary with her service dog.
In 2011, the Veterans Benefits Administration lowered the threshold of evidence for veterans to “prove” they were sexually assaulted, which helps them qualify for PTSD-related disability benefits. A 2018 report by the V.A. Inspector General found that the agency nevertheless denied 46 percent of all medical claims related to military sexual-trauma-induced PTSD and that nearly half of those denied claims were improperly processed.
For women at the Omega retreat, the military had won their trust and allegiance and then betrayed them over and over again, fueling feelings of doubt and shame and making them second-guess their self-worth. “When the organization lets you down in that profound way — I feel like that’s one of the reasons the trauma is so powerful, because it gets at the core of identity,” Thomas said.
When veterans do access V.A. treatment, they often improve, although some sexual-assault survivors find the recommended regimens difficult. One popular approach used by the V.A. to treat PTSD is prolonged-exposure therapy, which requires that veterans repeatedly revisit the trauma memory and recount it aloud in detail, which can be challenging for sexual-assault survivors. Another common treatment is cognitive-processing therapy, or C.P.T., which teaches veterans to identify and change inaccurate and distressing thoughts about each of their traumas. But Shuble, for one, found C.P.T. excruciating, because the therapy focused on one trauma at a time and she had experienced countless between her sexual traumas and her combat experiences. “It was awful,” she said. “It was not effective for me.”
The women at the Omega Institute were receiving a form of therapy developed by the psychologist Lori S. Katz, an energetic woman who has worked for the V.A. since 1991 and has run this retreat every year since 2015 (except during the pandemic) at the institute, which offers scholarships for room, board and tuition but not for travel costs. Her program, called Warrior Renew, is based in part on the idea that people process information both rationally and emotionally, and that permanent healing requires tapping into that emotional side through metaphors and imagery. Through this holistic approach, veterans learn to manage their trauma symptoms, resolve feelings of anger, self-blame and injustice, identify problematic patterns in their lives (such as harmful relationships) and cope with feelings of loss.
All trauma survivors, Katz explained to the women at the retreat, come back to the questions: Why did this happen to me? What did I do? “You look back at the event with hindsight, and you say: ‘I should never have gone in this car. I should never have agreed to do that. What’s wrong with me? I’m so stupid.’ And we blame ourselves. We inevitably come to that,” Katz said. The women in the room, some of whom were crying, all nodded along. Military commanders sometimes blame victims for their assaults, too, compounding the problem. “There’s a focus on ‘Well, what was she doing? What was she wearing?’ And that has nothing to do with what happened,” Katz said.
Perhaps most important, the Warrior Renew program occurs in a group setting, where the women can bond and build relationships that will help prevent them from feeling isolated enough to act on suicidal thoughts. “One of the things that can thwart that risk is connection,” Katz said to the women at the retreat. “You guys have a connection, and you have a new family and people who do understand it. That’s a really important part of the healing.” As one of the women at the retreat, who called herself Awesome, said to the group at one point, “We’re queens, and we’re here to fix each other’s crowns.”
Shuble had never shared her assaults with a group before, and when she finished, she could hardly speak. The room was buzzing with grief, with pride, with anger. All of the women in the room believed her — it was as if they were giving Shuble, for the first time, a steady foundation on which to rest her heavy and unsteady pain. With tears streaming down her face, Shuble turned to Katz and thanked her. “It’s been the first real healing that I’ve gotten,” she said.
Shuble at an aid station in Taji, Iraq, in 2004. After a final assault in 2006, she was sent home and eventually discharged from the Army after being deemed medically unfit for service.Credit...Photograph from Kellie-Lynn Shuble
Next, a woman named Jessica raised her hand. She told the group about the time she jumped off a second-floor balcony and shattered her pelvis to escape a Navy sailor who was trying to kill her. Shelly, a blond woman with wide-set eyes and pink sneakers, spoke up, saying that she was tied up, threatened with a razor blade and raped in Japan on a Navy deployment when she was 19; even though she reported it the next day, her assailant walked. Linda, a quiet woman with short highlighted hair, described being raped multiple times in service, including by commanders and an Army chaplain.
By the end of the Omega session, the floor was freckled with tear-soaked tissues, and Katz spoke up. “You’re brilliant and you’re beautiful and you’re strong and you’ve got a voice and you are anything but worthless,” she said to the women, who nodded in response, some more convincingly than others. Then, quietly, she asked how many of the seven women in the circle had considered suicide. Every hand went up. She asked how many had actually acted on it, and four of the seven raised their hands.
What the women kept coming back to in the discussions were not the specific horrific assaults they had endured, but the ways in which the military had failed them over and over again — and the ways in which these failings had shaped their lives and identities years, even decades, later. Many of the women were stuck in cycles of self-blame that caused them to make terrible choices; most suffered from mental and physical disabilities that made it hard for them to function or hold a job.
Jennifer Leigh Johnson, a Navy veteran, may end up paralyzed because of her gang rape by fellow servicemen in Bahrain 20 years ago: The assault injured her back so badly that she was given steroid injections for the pain, yet as a side-effect of these injections, she developed a rare degenerative spinal disease. (Lt. Cmdr. Patricia Kreuzberger, a Navy spokeswoman, would not comment on Johnson’s case, but said by email that the service “continually strives to foster an environment of dignity and respect, where sexual assault and sexual harassment are never tolerated, condoned or ignored.” )
“Trauma doesn’t scare me anymore,” Johnson said one evening while lying on the floor on a pile of pillows. “It’s surviving the trauma that scares the [expletive] out of me. Because the four hours,” she said, referring to the rape, “yeah — that was horrible and hurtful. But it ended. This never ends.”
Under increasing pressure and scrutiny, the military and the V.A. have been taking some steps to better support survivors of sexual trauma. Since 2011, service members who experience military sexual assault and file an unrestricted report can request a transfer to a new unit or installation, as Arnold, Shmorgoner’s friend, did, so they don’t have to work and live with their rapists. Since 2013, service members also have the option of asking for special victims’ counsels, who provide them with information, resources and support after sexual assault. But according to Goldberg, there aren’t enough of these counselors, so they tend to be overwhelmed and unable to give each case the attention it deserves. “I’ve heard anecdotally about victims just not being able to reach their special victims’ counsel, not having enough time with them, not really getting to benefit from the program,” she says.
The V.A. is also trying to reach and support more veterans who have experienced military sexual trauma. It has mailed out more than 475,000 letters to veterans with other-than-honorable discharges informing them of available V.A. services. With a universal screening program, the V.A. now asks every veteran receiving health care whether they experienced a sexual trauma during service, and those who did are told about the support they can receive. There are also now designated veterans service representatives, located within five central offices, who specialize in processing military sexual-trauma-related claims, and the V.A. has eliminated follow-up phone calls that could retraumatize veterans.
In January 2021, President Trump signed into law the Deborah Sampson Act, a comprehensive bill named after the woman who posed as a man during the Revolutionary War in order to serve in the Continental Army. The law includes provisions to monitor and address sexual harassment and sexual assault at V.A. health centers, and requires V.A. centers to make it easier for women to report harassment or assault; it also requires V.A. employees to report harassment they observe (and be punished if they don’t). The department “is committed to a culture rooted in our mission and core values where everyone is treated with civility, compassion and respect. Everyone should feel welcomed and safe when doing business with V.A.,” a spokesperson for the V.A. said in a statement.
If Gillibrand’s bill becomes law, it will herald a major shift — a voting out of the old way of doing things, and an admission by the government that the military-justice system must finally change. It won’t, however, be a panacea. If independent military prosecutors, rather than commanders, handle the prosecutorial decision-making process, more accused rapists and other assailants may be brought to court-martial. But without sentencing reform, they may not ultimately be held more accountable.
For that, the military will need a pervasive shift in its culture and the mind-set of its leaders. Yet Christensen, the retired Air Force lawyer, says that in recent months he has noticed increasing backlash against the notion that servicewomen are being mistreated and deserve more respect. “There’s been a poison in the system — of disbelief,” he says, and some in the military now argue that the push for reform reflects nothing but a politically correct, anti-male witch hunt. Shmorgoner says she noticed these reactions, too. Men, she suggests, are “angry that women are finally standing up for themselves.”
Looking back, Shmorgoner says that perhaps she should have expected what happened to her. She was warned about the Marine Corps before she joined — by her recruiter.
Shmorgoner grew up with a passion for riding horses, competing in show-jumping events from age 7. But after graduating from high school in 2014, she decided that instead of continuing to compete, she wanted to serve her country. Her parents emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States before she was born, and she felt joining the military was “almost a way to thank them for giving me this opportunity to live here,” she says. She made an appointment to meet with a Marine recruiter. “I think I was the very first female that he put in the Marine Corps,” she says. “He sat me down, and he told me, ‘You’re going to have a rough time.’” Yet Shmorgoner didn’t understand — she thought he was either patronizing her or using reverse psychology. “He was genuinely trying to warn me,” she says, “and I thought it was a challenge.”
The only reason she re-enlisted after the rape investigation was to encourage other women in her situation to report — just as learning about Arnold’s assault helped her come forward. “I thought, Maybe I could do that for someone else,” she says. Almost immediately, a woman was transferred into her battalion because of a sexual assault. “Within like three days of her arriving, her noncommissioned officers were giving her a hard time and making her feel as though she was a problem,” Shmorgoner recalls. But Shmorgoner was there, ready to support her.
The Marine Corps deemed Shmorgoner unfit for service because of her PTSD in May. She now works as a horse trainer at Hidden Brook Stables in Maryland.Credit...Danna Singer for The New York Times
Two years ago, Shmorgoner’s PTSD symptoms started affecting her more at work after she transferred to Camp Pendleton in California. On bad days, she would have six or seven panic attacks: Her heart would race, she would start visibly shaking and she would sit behind her desk trying to make herself as small as possible. Sometimes these attacks came on randomly; other times they were triggered by seeing a male Marine who resembled her assailant. Every time she started working with a new unit or under a new commander, she had to tell them about her assault and PTSD so they would understand her panic attacks, as well as her propensity to close and lock her office door when she worked. “It was just so exhausting mentally and emotionally,” she says, to have to explain “why I am the way I am.”
Around the same time, she started receiving intensive therapy to treat her depression, anxiety and PTSD. That was only because she was asked to complete a mental-health history form and filled out portions she wasn’t supposed to — sections intended for her superiors — which included questions about prior suicide attempts. “I just checked the boxes, for ‘all of the above,’ and I sent it up to my leadership, and they pulled me aside,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what happened.’”
The military, she says, can be blind to mental health issues because they simmer unseen beneath the surface. Mental health is often treated as a joke, as an aspect of military life that is kind of beside the point. When colleagues asked her how she was doing, she would sometimes say, “I wake up every day wishing I didn’t.” But everyone always assumed she was just trying to be funny. In the Marine Corps, “We joke about suicide in a very odd, dysfunctional and, frankly, toxic way,” she says.
In April 2020, Shmorgoner’s psychologist recommended that she be medically evaluated by the Marine Corps to determine if her PTSD was interfering with her ability to do her job. “I didn’t even feel comfortable standing duty,” Shmorgoner says, referring to having to work alone to guard the front desk of the barracks for 24 hours straight. “And with the suicidal ideations, they didn’t want me armed while on duty by myself.”
The results of the evaluation, which took longer than usual because of the pandemic, came back in early May of this year: The Marine Corps deemed her unfit for service because of her PTSD and eligible for medical retirement with V.A. benefits. At first, the news felt like yet another punishment for having been raped. Shmorgoner joined the Marine Corps hoping to stay in service for 20 years. Then she was assaulted, and everything unraveled — while her assailant suffered no apparent consequences. “My life has changed significantly over the last six years, and from everything that I know, his life has not,” she says. “I’m still kind of stuck picking up the pieces.”
Shmorgoner officially left the Marines in June. And although she is disappointed and angry and misses her colleagues, she’s relieved to get a fresh start. Earlier this year, Shmorgoner got married to a fellow Marine with two children who has since left the military. In July, she landed her dream job as a horse trainer at a training-and-breeding facility in Maryland, and she’s becoming close with the other women she works with. She is finding it easier to befriend civilian women than the women she met in the Marines. “I don’t think any of us meant to, but we all had a kind of a metaphorical wall up with our emotions — just because we were taught that that’s how Marines should be,” she explains. The women she has met this summer, on the other hand, seem willing to “build friendships and to be emotionally available.” She has also started seeing a therapist through the local V.A. Being so far removed from the Marine environment is helping her heal. “I’ve noticed I’ve gotten quite a bit better,” she says. She has been having fewer panic attacks, as few as one a day.
The biggest noticeable change came a few weeks ago. A man catcalled her while she was walking to a gas station, shouting, “Hey, mama, how you doing?” It was something that in the past would have immediately triggered a panic attack. This time, she felt anxious and gripped her keys, but she didn’t falter. “I just kept walking.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
Melinda Wenner Moyer is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. Her first book, “How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes,” was published in July. Danna Singer is an American photographer based in Philadelphia. In 2020, she was named a Guggenheim fellow; she currently holds the position of lecturer at the Yale School of Art and Rowan University.
14. The long game: China’s grand strategy to displace American order
Another book for the "to read pile."
The long game: China’s grand strategy to displace American order
August 2, 2021
This introductory chapter summarizes the book’s argument. It explains that U.S.-China competition is over regional and global order, outlines what Chinese-led order might look like, explores why grand strategy matters and how to study it, and discusses competing views of whether China has a grand strategy. It argues that China has sought to displace America from regional and global order through three sequential “strategies of displacement” pursued at the military, political, and economic levels. The first of these strategies sought to blunt American order regionally, the second sought to build Chinese order regionally, and the third — a strategy of expansion — now seeks to do both globally. The introduction explains that shifts in China’s strategy are profoundly shaped by key events that change its perception of American power.
Introduction
It was 1872, and Li Hongzhang was writing at a time of historic upheaval. A Qing Dynasty general and official who dedicated much of his life to reforming a dying empire, Li was often compared to his contemporary Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification and national power whose portrait Li was said to keep for inspiration.
Like Bismarck, Li had military experience that he parlayed into considerable influence, including over foreign and military policy. He had been instrumental in putting down the fourteen-year Taiping rebellion—the bloodiest conflict of the entire nineteenth century—which had seen a millenarian Christian state rise from the growing vacuum of Qing authority to launch a civil war that claimed tens of millions of lives. This campaign against the rebels provided Li with an appreciation for Western weapons and technology, a fear of European and Japanese predations, a commitment to Chinese self-strengthening and modernization—and critically—the influence and prestige to do something about it.
In a memorandum advocating for more investment in Chinese shipbuilding, [Li Hongzhang] penned a line since repeated for generations: China was experiencing “great changes not seen in three thousand years.”
Left: Li Hongzhang, also romanised as Li Hung-chang, in 1896. Source: Alice E. Neve Little, Li Hung-Chang: His Life and Times (London: Cassell & Company, 1903).
And so it was in 1872 that in one of his many correspondences, Li reflected on the groundbreaking geopolitical and technological transformations he had seen in his own life that posed an existential threat to the Qing. In a memorandum advocating for more investment in Chinese shipbuilding, he penned a line since repeated for generations: China was experiencing “great changes not seen in three thousand years.”
That famous, sweeping statement is to many Chinese nationalists a reminder of the country’s own humiliation. Li ultimately failed to modernize China, lost a war to Japan, and signed the embarrassing Treaty of Shimonoseki with Tokyo. But to many, Li’s line was both prescient and accurate—China’s decline was the product of the Qing Dynasty’s inability to reckon with transformative geopolitical and technological forces that had not been seen for three thousand years, forces which changed the international balance of power and ushered in China’s “Century of Humiliation.” These were trends that all of Li’s striving could not reverse.
If Li’s line marks the highpoint of China’s humiliation, then Xi’s marks an occasion for its rejuvenation. If Li’s evokes tragedy, then Xi’s evokes opportunity.
Right: Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China since 2013. Source: Reuters
Now, Li’s line has been repurposed by China’s leader Xi Jinping to inaugurate a new phase in China’s post–Cold War grand strategy. Since 2017, Xi has in many of the country’s critical foreign policy addresses declared that the world is in the midst of “great changes unseen in a century” [百年未有之大变局]. If Li’s line marks the highpoint of China’s humiliation, then Xi’s marks an occasion for its rejuvenation. If Li’s evokes tragedy, then Xi’s evokes opportunity. But both capture something essential: the idea that world order is once again at stake because of unprecedented geopolitical and technological shifts, and that this requires strategic adjustment.
For Xi, the origin of these shifts is China’s growing power and what it saw as the West’s apparent self-destruction. On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Then, a little more than three months later, a populist surge catapulted Donald Trump into office as president of the United States. From China’s perspective—which is highly sensitive to changes in its perceptions of American power and threat—these two events were shocking. Beijing believed that the world’s most powerful democracies were withdrawing from the international order they had helped erect abroad and were struggling to govern themselves at home. The West’s subsequent response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and then the storming of the US Capitol by extremists in 2021, reinforced a sense that “time and momentum are on our side,” as Xi Jinping put it shortly after those events. China’s leadership and foreign policy elite declared that a “period of historical opportunity” [历史机遇期] had emerged to expand the country’s strategic focus from Asia to the wider globe and its governance systems.
We are now in the early years of what comes next—a China that not only seeks regional influence as so many great powers do, but as Evan Osnos has argued, “that is preparing to shape the twenty-first century, much as the U.S. shaped the twentieth.” That competition for influence will be a global one, and Beijing believes with good reason that the next decade will likely determine the outcome.
What are China’s ambitions, and does it have a grand strategy to achieve them? If it does, what is that strategy, what shapes it, and what should the United States do about it?
As we enter this new stretch of acute competition, we lack answers to critical foundational questions. What are China’s ambitions, and does it have a grand strategy to achieve them? If it does, what is that strategy, what shapes it, and what should the United States do about it? These are basic questions for American policymakers grappling with this century’s greatest geopolitical challenge, not least because knowing an opponent’s strategy is the first step to countering it. And yet, as great power tensions flare, there is no consensus on the answers.
This book attempts to provide an answer. In its argument and structure, the book takes its inspiration in part from Cold War studies of US grand strategy. Where those works analyzed the theory and practice of US “strategies of containment” toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War, this book seeks to analyze the theory and practice of China’s “strategies of displacement” toward the United States after the Cold War.
To do so, the book makes use of an original database of Chinese Communist Party documents—memoirs, biographies, and daily records of senior officials—painstakingly gathered and then digitized over the last several years from libraries, bookstores in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Chinese e-commerce sites (see Appendix). Many of the documents take readers behind the closed doors of the Chinese Communist Party, bring them into its high-level foreign policy institutions and meetings, and introduce readers to a wide cast of Chinese political leaders, generals, and diplomats charged with devising and implementing China’s grand strategy. While no one master document contains all of Chinese grand strategy, its outline can be found across a wide corpus of texts. Within them, the Party uses hierarchical statements that represent internal consensus on key issues to guide the ship of state, and these statements can be traced across time. The most important of these is the Party line (路线), then the guideline (方针), and finally the policy (政策), among other terms. Understanding them sometimes requires proficiency not only in Chinese, but also in seemingly impenetrable and archaic ideological concepts like “dialectical unities” and “historical materialism.”
Argument in Brief
The book argues that the core of US-China competition since the Cold War has been over regional and now global order. It focuses on the strategies that rising powers like China use to displace an established hegemon like the United States short of war. A hegemon’s position in regional and global order emerges from three broad “forms of control” that are used to regulate the behavior of other states: coercive capability (to force compliance), consensual inducements (to incentivize it), and legitimacy (to rightfully command it). For rising states, the act of peacefully displacing the hegemon consists of two broad strategies generally pursued in sequence. The first strategy is to blunt the hegemon’s exercise of those forms of control, particularly those extended over the rising state; after all, no rising state can displace the hegemon if it remains at the hegemon’s mercy. The second is to build forms of control over others; indeed, no rising state can become a hegemon if it cannot secure the deference of other states through coercive threats, consensual inducements, or rightful legitimacy. Unless a rising power has first blunted the hegemon, efforts to build order are likely to be futile and easily opposed. And until a rising power has successfully conducted a good degree of blunting and building in its home region, it remains too vulnerable to the hegemon’s influence to confidently turn to a third strategy, global expansion, which pursues both blunting and building at the global level to displace the hegemon from international leadership. Together, these strategies at the regional and then global levels provide a rough means of ascent for the Chinese Communist Party’s nationalist elites, who seek to restore China to its due place and roll back the historical aberration of the West’s overwhelming global influence.
This is a template China has followed, and in its review of China’s strategies of displacement, the book argues that shifts from one strategy to the next have been triggered by sharp discontinuities in the most important variable shaping Chinese grand strategy: its perception of US power and threat. China’s first strategy of displacement (1989–2008) was to quietly blunt American power over China, particularly in Asia, and it emerged after the traumatic trifecta of Tiananmen Square, the Gulf War, and the Soviet collapse led Beijing to sharply increase its perception of US threat. China’s second strategy of displacement (2008–2016) sought to build the foundation for regional hegemony in Asia, and it was launched after the Global Financial Crisis led Beijing to see US power as diminished and emboldened it to take a more confident approach. Now, with the invocation of “great changes unseen in a century” following Brexit, President Trump’s election, and the coronavirus pandemic, China is launching a third strategy of displacement, one that expands its blunting and building efforts worldwide to displace the United States as the global leader. In its final chapters, this book uses insights about China’s strategy to formulate an asymmetric US grand strategy in response—one that takes a page from China’s own book—and would seek to contest China’s regional and global ambitions without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.
Order abroad is often a reflection of order at home, and China’s order-building would be distinctly illiberal relative to US order-building.
The book also illustrates what Chinese order might look like if China is able to achieve its goal of “national rejuvenation” by the centennial of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 2049. At the regional level, China already accounts for more than half of Asian GDP and half of all Asian military spending, which is pushing the region out of balance and toward a Chinese sphere of influence. A fully realized Chinese order might eventually involve the withdrawal of US forces from Japan and Korea, the end of American regional alliances, the effective removal of the US Navy from the Western Pacific, deference from China’s regional neighbors, unification with Taiwan, and the resolution of territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas. Chinese order would likely be more coercive than the present order, consensual in ways that primarily benefit connected elites even at the expense of voting publics, and considered legitimate mostly to those few who it directly rewards. China would deploy this order in ways that damage liberal values, with authoritarian winds blowing stronger across the region. Order abroad is often a reflection of order at home, and China’s order-building would be distinctly illiberal relative to US order-building.
At the global level, Chinese order would involve seizing the opportunities of the “great changes unseen in a century” and displacing the United States as the world’s leading state. This would require successfully managing the principal risk flowing from the “great changes”—Washington’s unwillingness to gracefully accept decline—by weakening the forms of control supporting American global order while strengthening those forms of control supporting a Chinese alternative. That order would span a “zone of super-ordinate influence” in Asia as well as “partial hegemony” in swaths of the developing world that might gradually expand to encompass the world’s industrialized centers—a vision some Chinese popular writers describe using Mao’s revolutionary guidance to “surround the cities from the countryside” [农村包围城市]. More authoritative sources put this approach in less sweeping terms, suggesting Chinese order would be anchored in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its Community of Common Destiny, with the former in particular creating networks of coercive capability, consensual inducement, and legitimacy.
The “struggle for mastery,” once confined to Asia, is now over the global order and its future. If there are two paths to hegemony—a regional one and a global one—China is now pursuing both.
Some of the strategy to achieve this global order is already discernable in Xi’s speeches. Politically, Beijing would project leadership over global governance and international institutions, split Western alliances, and advance autocratic norms at the expense of liberal ones. Economically, it would weaken the financial advantages that underwrite US hegemony and seize the commanding heights of the “fourth industrial revolution” from artificial intelligence to quantum computing, with the United States declining into a “deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion.” Militarily, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would field a world-class force with bases around the world that could defend China’s interests in most regions and even in new domains like space, the poles, and the deep sea. The fact that aspects of this vision are visible in high-level speeches is strong evidence that China’s ambitions are not limited to Taiwan or to dominating the Indo-Pacific. The “struggle for mastery,” once confined to Asia, is now over the global order and its future. If there are two paths to hegemony—a regional one and a global one—China is now pursuing both.
This glimpse at possible Chinese order maybe striking, but it should not be surprising. Over a decade ago, Lee Kuan Yew—the visionary politician who built modern Singapore and personally knew China’s top leaders—was asked by an interviewer, “Are Chinese leaders serious about displacing the United States as the number one power in Asia and in the world?” He answered with an emphatic yes. “Of course. Why not?” he began, “They have transformed a poor society by an economic miracle to become now the second-largest economy in the world—on track . . . to become the world’s largest economy.” China, he continued, boasts “a culture 4,000 years old with 1.3 billion people, with a huge and very talented pool to draw from. How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia, and in time the world?” China was “growing at rates unimaginable 50 years ago, a dramatic transformation no one predicted,” he observed, and “every Chinese wants a strong and rich China, a nation as prosperous, advanced, and technologically competent as America, Europe, and Japan.” He closed his answer with a key insight: “This reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force. . . . China wants to be China and accepted as such, not as an honorary member of the West.” China might want to “share this century” with the United States, perhaps as “co-equals,” he noted, but certainly not as subordinates.
Why Grand Strategy Matters
The need for a grounded understanding of China’s intentions and strategy has never been more urgent. China now poses a challenge unlike any the United States has ever faced. For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries has reached 60 percent of US GDP. Neither Wilhelmine Germany during the First World War, the combined might of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany during the Second World War, nor the Soviet Union at the height of its economic power ever crossed this threshold. And yet, this is a milestone that China itself quietly reached as early as 2014. When one adjusts for the relative price of goods, China’s economy is already 25 percent larger than the US economy. It is clear, then, that China is the most significant competitor that the United States has faced and that the way Washington handles its emergence to superpower status will shape the course of the next century.
What makes grand strategy “grand” is not simply the size of the strategic objectives but also the fact that disparate “means” are coordinated together to achieve it.
What is less clear, at least in Washington, is whether China has a grand strategy and what it might be. This book defines grand strategy as a state’s theory of how it can achieve its strategic objectives that is intentional, coordinated, and implemented across multiple means of statecraft—military, economic, and political. What makes grand strategy “grand” is not simply the size of the strategic objectives but also the fact that disparate “means” are coordinated together to achieve it. That kind of coordination is rare, and most great powers consequently do not have a grand strategy.
When states do have grand strategies, however, they can reshape world history. Nazi Germany wielded a grand strategy that used economic tools to constrain its neighbors, military buildups to intimidate its rivals, and political alignments to encircle its adversaries—allowing it to outperform its great power competitors for a considerable time even though its GDP was less than one-third theirs. During the Cold War, Washington pursued a grand strategy that at times used military power to deter Soviet aggression, economic aid to curtail communist influence, and political institutions to bind liberal states together—limiting Soviet influence without a US-Soviet war. How China similarly integrates its instruments of statecraft in pursuit of overarching regional and global objectives remains an area that has received abundant speculation but little rigorous study despite its enormous consequences. The coordination and long-term planning involved in grand strategy allow a state to punch above its weight; since China is already a heavyweight, if it has a coherent scheme that coordinates its $14 trillion economy with its blue-water navy and rising political influence around the world—and the United States either misses it or misunderstands it—the course of the twenty-first century may unfold in ways detrimental to the United States and the liberal values it has long championed.
Washington is belatedly coming to terms with this reality, and the result is the most consequential reassessment of its China policy in over a generation. And yet, amid this reassessment, there is wide-ranging disagreement over what China wants and where it is going. Some believe Beijing has global ambitions; others argue that its focus is largely regional. Some claim it has a coordinated 100-year plan; others that it is opportunistic and error-prone. Some label Beijing a boldly revisionist power; others see it as a sober-minded stakeholder of the current order. Some say Beijing wants the United States out of Asia; and others that it tolerates a modest US role. Where analysts increasingly agree is on the idea that China’s recent assertiveness is a product of Chinese President Xi’s personality—a mistaken notion that ignores the long-standing Party consensus in which China’s behavior is actually rooted. The fact that the contemporary debate remains divided on so many fundamental questions related to China’s grand strategy—and inaccurate even in its major areas of agreement—is troubling, especially since each question holds wildly different policy implications.
The Unsettled Debate
This book enters a largely unresolved debate over Chinese strategy divided between “skeptics” and “believers.” The skeptics have not yet been persuaded that China has a grand strategy to displace the United States regionally or globally; by contrast, the believers have not truly attempted persuasion.
The skeptics are a wide-ranging and deeply knowledgeable group. “China has yet to formulate a true ‘grand strategy,’” notes one member, “and the question is whether it wants to do so at all.” Others have argued that China’s goals are “inchoate” and that Beijing lacks a “well-defined” strategy. Chinese authors like Professor Wang Jisi, former dean of Peking University’s School of International Relations, are also in the skeptical camp. “There is no strategy that we could come up with by racking our brains that would be able to cover all the aspects of our national interests,” he notes.
Other skeptics believe that China’s aims are limited, arguing that China does not wish to displace the United States regionally or globally and remains focused primarily on development and domestic stability. One deeply experienced White House official was not yet convinced of “Xi’s desire to throw the United States out of Asia and destroy U.S. regional alliances.” Other prominent scholars put the point more forcefully: “[One] hugely distorted notion is the now all-too-common assumption that China seeks to eject the United States from Asia and subjugate the region. In fact, no conclusive evidence exists of such Chinese goals.”
In contrast to these skeptics are the believers. This group is persuaded that China has a grand strategy to displace the United States regionally and globally, but it has not put forward a work to persuade the skeptics. Within government, some top intelligence officials—including former director of national intelligence Dan Coates—have stated publicly that “the Chinese fundamentally seek to replace the United States as the leading power in the world” but have not (or perhaps could not) elaborate further, nor did they suggest that this goal was accompanied by a specific strategy.
Outside of government, only a few recent works attempt to make the case at length. The most famous is Pentagon official Michael Pillsbury’s bestselling One Hundred Year Marathon, though it argues somewhat overstatedly that China has had a secret grand plan for global hegemony since 1949 and, in key places, relies heavily on personal authority and anecdote. Many other books come to similar conclusions and get much right, but they are more intuitive than rigorously empirical and could have been more persuasive with a social scientific approach and a richer evidentiary base. A handful of works on Chinese grand strategy take a broader perspective emphasizing the distant past or future, but they therefore dedicate less time to the critical stretch from the post–Cold War era to the present that is the locus of US-China competition. Finally, some works mix a more empirical approach with careful and precise arguments about China’s contemporary grand strategy. These works form the foundation for this book’s approach.
This book, which draws on the research of so many others, also hopes to stand apart in key ways. These include a unique social-scientific approach to defining and studying grand strategy; a large trove of rarely cited or previously inaccessible Chinese texts; a systematic study of key puzzles in Chinese military, political, and economic behavior; and a close look at the variables shaping strategic adjustment. Taken together, it is hoped that the book makes a contribution to the emerging China debate with a unique method for systematically and rigorously uncovering China’s grand strategy.
Uncovering Grand Strategy
The challenge of deciphering a rival’s grand strategy from its disparate behavior is not a new one. In the years before the First World War, the British diplomat Eyre Crowe wrote an important 20,000-word “Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany” that attempted to explain the wide-ranging behavior of a rising Germany. Crowe was a keen observer of Anglo-German relations with a passion and perspective for the subject informed by his own heritage. Born in Leipzig and educated in Berlin and Düsseldorf, Crowe was half German, spoke German-accented English, and joined the British Foreign Office at the age of twenty-one. During World War I, his British and German families were literally at war with one another—his British nephew perished at sea while his German cousin rose to become chief of the German Naval Staff.
Crowe argued in his framing of the enterprise, “the choice must lie between . . . two hypotheses”—each of which resemble the positions of today’s skeptics and believers with respect to China’s grand strategy.
Left: British diplomat Eyre Crowe (1864-1925). Date unknown. Author unknown. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Crowe, who wrote his memorandum in 1907, sought to systematically analyze the disparate, complex, and seemingly uncoordinated range of German foreign behavior, to determine whether Berlin had a “grand design” that ran through it, and to report to his superiors what it might be. In order to “formulate and accept a theory that will fit all the ascertained facts of German foreign policy,” Crowe argued in his framing of the enterprise, “the choice must lie between . . . two hypotheses”—each of which resemble the positions of today’s skeptics and believers with respect to China’s grand strategy.
Crowe’s first hypothesis was that Germany had no grand strategy, only what he called a “vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship.” In this view, Crowe wrote, it is possible that “Germany does not really know what she is driving at, and that all her excursions and alarums, all her underhand intrigues do not contribute to the steady working out of a well conceived and relentlessly followed system of policy.” Today, this argument mirrors those of skeptics who claim China’s bureaucratic politics, factional infighting, economic priorities, and nationalist knee-jerk reactions all conspire to thwart Beijing from formulating or executing an overarching strategy.
Crowe’s second hypothesis was that important elements of German behavior were coordinated together through a grand strategy “consciously aiming at the establishment of a German hegemony, at first in Europe, and eventually in the world.” Crowe ultimately endorsed a more cautious version of this hypothesis, and he concluded that German strategy was “deeply rooted in the relative position of the two countries,” with Berlin dissatisfied by the prospect of remaining subordinate to London in perpetuity. This argument mirrors the position of believers in Chinese grand strategy. It also resembles the argument of this book: China has pursued a variety of strategies to displace the United States at the regional and global level which are fundamentally driven by its relative position with Washington.
The fact that the questions the Crowe memorandum explored have a striking similarity to those we are grappling with today has not been lost on US officials. Henry Kissinger quotes from it in On China. Max Baucus, former US ambassador to China, frequently mentioned the memo to his Chinese interlocutors as a roundabout way of inquiring about Chinese strategy.
Crowe’s memorandum has a mixed legacy, with contemporary assessments split over whether he was right about Germany. Nevertheless, the task Crowe set remains critical and no less difficult today, particularly because China is a “hard target” for information collection. One might hope to improve on Crowe’s method with a more rigorous and falsifiable approach anchored in social science. As the next chapter discusses in detail, this book argues that to identify the existence, content, and adjustment of China’s grand strategy, researchers must find evidence of (1) grand strategic concepts in authoritative texts; (2) grand strategic capabilities in national security institutions; and (3) grand strategic conduct in state behavior. Without such an approach, any analysis is more likely to fall victim to the kinds of natural biases in “perception and misperception” that often recur in assessments of other powers.
Chapter Summaries
This book argues that, since the end of the Cold War, China has pursued a grand strategy to displace American order first at the regional and now at the global level.
Chapter 1 defines grand strategy and international order, and then explores how rising powers displace hegemonic order through strategies of blunting, building, and expansion. It explains how perceptions of the established hegemon’s power and threat shape the selection of rising power grand strategies.
Chapter 2 focuses on the Chinese Communist Party as the connective institutional tissue for China’s grand strategy. As a nationalist institution that emerged from the patriotic ferment of the late Qing period, the Party now seeks to restore China to its rightful place in the global hierarchy by 2049. As a Leninist institution with a centralized structure, ruthless amorality, and a Leninist vanguard seeing itself as stewarding a nationalist project, the Party possesses the “grand strategic capability” to coordinate multiple instruments of statecraft while pursuing national interests over parochial ones. Together, the Party’s nationalist orientation helps set the ends of Chinese grand strategy while Leninism provides an instrument for realizing them. Now, as China rises, the same Party that sat uneasily within Soviet order during the Cold War is unlikely to permanently tolerate a subordinate role in American order. Finally, the chapter focuses on the Party as a subject of research, noting how a careful review of the Party’s voluminous publications can provide insight into its grand strategic concepts.
Part I begins with Chapter 3, which explores the blunting phase of China’s post–Cold War grand strategy using Chinese Communist Party texts. It demonstrates that China went from seeing the United States as a quasi-ally against the Soviets to seeing it as China’s greatest threat and “main adversary” in the wake of three events: the traumatic trifecta of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Gulf War, and the Soviet Collapse. In response, Beijing launched its blunting strategy under the Party guideline of “hiding capabilities and biding time.” This strategy was instrumental and tactical. Party leaders explicitly tied the guideline to perceptions of US power captured in phrases like the “international balance of forces” and “multipolarity,” and they sought to quietly and asymmetrically weaken American power in Asia across military, economic, and political instruments, each of which is considered in the subsequent three book chapters.
Chapter 4 considers blunting at the military level. It shows that the trifecta prompted China to depart from a “sea control” strategy increasingly focused on holding distant maritime territory to a “sea denial” strategy focused on preventing the US military from traversing, controlling, or intervening in the waters near China. That shift was challenging, so Beijing declared it would “catch up in some areas and not others” and vowed to build “whatever the enemy fears” to accomplish it—ultimately delaying the acquisition of costly and vulnerable vessels like aircraft carriers and instead investing in cheaper asymmetric denial weapons. Beijing then built the world’s largest mine arsenal, the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile, and the world’s largest submarine fleet—all to undermine US military power.
Chapter 5 considers blunting at the political level. It demonstrates that the trifecta led China to reverse its previous opposition to joining regional institutions. Beijing feared that multilateral organizations like Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF) might be used by Washington to build a liberal regional order or even an Asian NATO, so China joined them to blunt American power. It stalled institutional progress, wielded institutional rules to constrain US freedom of maneuver, and hoped participation would reassure wary neighbors otherwise tempted to join a US-led balancing coalition.
Chapter 6 considers blunting at the economic level. It argues that the trifecta laid bare China’s dependence on the US market, capital, and technology—notably through Washington’s post-Tiananmen sanctions and its threats to revoke most-favored-nation (MFN) trade status, which could have seriously damaged China’s economy. Beijing sought not to decouple from the United States but instead to bind the discretionary use of American economic power, and it worked hard to remove MFN from congressional review through “permanent normal trading relations,” leveraging negotiations in APEC and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to obtain it.
Because Party leaders explicitly tied blunting to assessments of American power, that meant that when those perceptions changed, so too did China’s grand strategy. Part II of the book explores this second phase in Chinese grand strategy, which was focused on building regional order. The strategy took place under a modification to Deng’s guidance to “hide capabilities and bide time,” one that instead emphasized “actively accomplishing something.”
Chapter 7 explores this building strategy in Party texts, demonstrating that the shock of the Global Financial Crisis led China to see the United States as weakening and emboldened it to shift to a building strategy. It begins with a thorough review of China’s discourse on “multipolarity” and the “international balance of forces.” It then shows that the Party sought to lay the foundations for order—coercive capacity, consensual bargains, and legitimacy—under the auspices of the revised guidance “actively accomplish something” [积极有所作为] issued by Chinese leader Hu Jintao. This strategy, like blunting before it, was implemented across multiple instruments of statecraft—military, political, and economic—each of which receives a chapter.
Chapter 8 focuses on building at the military level, recounting how the Global Financial Crisis accelerated a shift in Chinese military strategy away from a singular focus on blunting American power through sea denial to a new focus on building order through sea control. China now sought the capability to hold distant islands, safeguard sea lines, intervene in neighboring countries, and provide public security goods. For these objectives, China needed a different force structure, one that it had previously postponed for fear that it would be vulnerable to the United States and unsettle China’s neighbors. These were risks a more confident Beijing was now willing to accept. China promptly stepped up investments in aircraft carriers, capable surface vessels, amphibious warfare, marines, and overseas bases.
Chapter 9 focuses on building at the political level. It shows how the Global Financial Crisis caused China to depart from a blunting strategy focused on joining and stalling regional organizations to a building strategy that involved launching its own institutions. China spearheaded the launch of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the elevation and institutionalization of the previously obscure Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA). It then used these institutions, with mixed success, as instruments to shape regional order in the economic and security domains in directions it preferred.
Chapter 10 focuses on building at the economic level. It argues that the Global Financial Crisis helped Beijing depart from a defensive blunting strategy that targeted American economic leverage to an offensive building strategy designed to build China’s own coercive and consensual economic capacities. At the core of this effort were China’s Belt and Road Initiative, its robust use of economic statecraft against its neighbors, and its attempts to gain greater financial influence.
Beijing used these blunting and building strategies to constrain US influence within Asia and to build the foundations for regional hegemony. The relative success of that strategy was remarkable, but Beijing’s ambitions were not limited only to the Indo-Pacific. When Washington was again seen as stumbling, China’s grand strategy evolved—this time in a more global direction. Accordingly, Part III of this book focuses on China’s third grand strategy of displacement, global expansion, which sought to blunt but especially build global order and to displace the United States from its leadership position.
Chapter 11 discusses the dawn of China’s expansion strategy. It argues that the strategy emerged following another trifecta, this time consisting of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the West’s poor initial response to the coronavirus pandemic. In this period, the Chinese Communist Party reached a paradoxical consensus: it concluded that the United States was in retreat globally but at the same time was waking up to the China challenge bilaterally. In Beijing’s mind, “great changes unseen in a century” were underway, and they provided an opportunity to displace the United States as the leading global state by 2049, with the next decade deemed the most critical to this objective.
Chapter 12 discusses the “ways and means” of China’s strategy of expansion. It shows that politically, Beijing would seek to project leadership over global governance and international institutions and to advance autocratic norms. Economically, it would weaken the financial advantages that underwrite US hegemony and seize the commanding heights of the “fourth industrial revolution.” And militarily, the PLA would field a truly global Chinese military with overseas bases around the world.
Chapter 13, the book’s final chapter, outlines a US response to China’s ambitions for displacing the United States from regional and global order. It critiques those who advocate a counterproductive strategy of confrontation or an accommodationist one of grand bargains, each of which respectively discounts US domestic headwinds and China’s strategic ambitions. The chapter instead argues for an asymmetric competitive strategy, one that does not require matching China dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.
This cost-effective approach emphasizes denying China hegemony in its home region and—taking a page from elements of China’s own blunting strategy—focuses on undermining Chinese efforts in Asia and worldwide in ways that are of lower cost than Beijing’s efforts to build hegemony. At the same time, this chapter argues that the United States should pursue order-building as well, reinvesting in the very same foundations of American global order that Beijing presently seeks to weaken. This discussion seeks to convince policymakers that even as the United States faces challenges at home and abroad, it can still secure its interests and resist the spread of an illiberal sphere of influence—but only if it recognizes that the key to defeating an opponent’s strategy is first to understand it.
Endnotes
- Harold James, Krupp: A History of the Legendary British Firm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 51.
- For this memo, see Li Hongzhang [李鸿章], “Memo on Not Abandoning the Manufacture of Ships” [筹议制造轮船未可裁撤折], in The Complete Works of Li Wenzhong [李文忠公全集], vol. 19, 1872, 45. Li Hongzhang was also called Li Wenzhong.
- Xi Jinping [习近平], “Xi Jinping Delivered an Important Speech at the Opening Ceremony of the Seminar on Learning and Implementing the Spirit of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Party” [习近平在省部级主要领导干部学习贯彻党的十九届五中全会精神专题研讨班开班式上发表重要讲话], Xinhua [新华], January 11, 2021.
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Evan Osnos, “The Future of America’s Contest with China,” The New Yorker, January 13, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-future-of-americas-contest-with-china.
- For example, John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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Robert E. Kelly, “What Would Chinese Hegemony Look Like?,” The Diplomat, February 10, 2014, https://thediplomat.com/2014/02/what-would-chinese-hegemony-look-like/; Nadège Rolland, “China’s Vision for a New World Order” (Washington, DC: The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2020), https://www.nbr.org/publication/chinas-vision-for-a-new-world-order/.
- See Yuan Peng [袁鹏], “The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Great Changes Unseen in a Century,” [新冠疫情与百年变局], Contemporary International Relations [现代国际关系], no. 5 (June 2020): 1–6, by the head of the leading Ministry of State Security think tank.
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Michael Lind, “The China Question,” Tablet, May 19, 2020, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-strategy-trade-lind.
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Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill, “Interview: Lee Kuan Yew on the Future of U.S.-China Relations,” The Atlantic, March 5, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/03/interview-lee-kuan-yew-on-the-future-of-us-china-relations/273657/.
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Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Preserving the Balance: A U.S. Eurasia Defense Strategy” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, January 19, 2017), https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Preserving_the_Balance_%2819Jan17%29HANDOUTS.pdf.
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“GDP, (US$),” World Bank, 2019, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.cd.
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Angela Stanzel, Jabin Jacob, Melanie Hart, and Nadège Rolland, “Grand Designs: Does China Have a ‘Grand Strategy’” (European Council on Foreign Relations, October 18, 2017), https://ecfr.eu/publication/grands_designs_does_china_have_a_grand_strategy/#.
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Susan Shirk, “Course Correction: Toward an Effective and Sustainable China Policy” (remarks, National Press Club, Washington, DC, February 12, 2019), https://asiasociety.org/center-us-china-relations/events/course-correction-toward-effective-and-sustainable-china-policy.
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Quoted in Robert Sutter, Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy since the Cold War, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 9–10. See also Wang Jisi, “China’s Search for a Grand Strategy: A Rising Great Power Finds Its Way,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 2 (2011): 68–79, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2011-02-20/chinas-search-grand-strategy.
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Jeffrey A. Bader, “How Xi Jinping Sees the World, and Why” (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/xi_jinping_worldview_bader-1.pdf.
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Michael Swaine, “The U.S. Can’t Afford to Demonize China,” Foreign Policy, June 29, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/29/the-u-s-cant-afford-to-demonize-china/.
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Jamie Tarabay, “CIA Official: China Wants to Replace US as World Superpower,” CNN, July 21, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/20/politics/china-cold-war-us-superpower-influence/index.html. Daniel Coats, “Annual Threat Assessment,” (testimony, January 29, 2019), https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/2019-01-29-ATA-Opening-Statement_Final.pdf.
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Alastair Iain Johnston, “Shaky Foundations: The ‘Intellectual Architecture’ of Trump’s China Policy,” Survival 61, no. 2 (2019): 189–202, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2019.1589096; Jude Blanchette, “The Devil Is in the Footnotes: On Reading Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon” (La Jolla, CA: UC San Diego 21st Century China Program, 2018), https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/The-Hundred-Year-Marathon.pdf.
- Jonathan Ward, China’s Vision of Victory (Washington, DC: Atlas Publishing and Media Company, 2019); Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World (New York: Penguin, 2012).
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Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Andrew Scobell, Edmund J. Burke, Cortez A. Cooper III, Sale Lilly, Chad J. R. Ohlandt, Eric Warner, J.D. Williams, China’s Grand Strategy Trends, Trajectories, and Long-Term Competition (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2798.html.
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See Avery Goldstein, Rising to the Challenge China’s Grand Strategy and International Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013); Ashley J. Tellis, “Pursuing Global Reach: China’s Not So Long March toward Preeminence,” in Strategic Asia 2019: China’s Expanding Strategic Ambitions, eds. Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2019), 3–46, https://www.nbr.org/publication/strategic-asia-2019-chinas-expanding-strategic-ambitions/.
- For the full text, as well as the responses to it within the British Foreign Office, see Eyre Crowe, “Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany,” in British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, eds. G. P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1926), 397–420.
- Ibid., 417.
- Ibid., 415.
- Ibid., 415.
- Ibid., 414.
- Ibid., 414.
- Interview.
- Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
About the Author
Former Brookings Expert
Rush Doshi was the director of the Brookings China Strategy Initiative and a fellow in Brookings Foreign Policy. He was also a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and part of the inaugural class of Wilson China fellows. His research focused on Chinese grand strategy as well as Indo-Pacific security issues. He is currently serving in the Biden administration.
Acknowledgments
Web design: Rachel Slattery
Rush Doshi is currently serving as director for China on the Biden administration’s National Security Council (NSC), but the book this excerpt was drawn from was completed before his government service, is based entirely on open sources, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government or NSC.
© 2021 The Brookings Institution
15. How the Creative Class Broke America
Quite the critique from David Brooks. - "bourgeois bohemians—the bobos"
Excerpts:
The modern meritocracy is a resentment-generating machine. But even leaving that aside, as a sorting device, it is batshit crazy. The ability to perform academic tasks during adolescence is nice to have, but organizing your society around it is absurd. That ability is not as important as the ability to work in teams; to sacrifice for the common good; to be honest, kind, and trustworthy; to be creative and self-motivated. A sensible society would reward such traits by conferring status on them. A sensible society would not celebrate the skills of a corporate consultant while slighting the skills of a home nurse.
Some 60 years after its birth, the meritocracy seems more and more morally vacuous. Does the ability to take tests when you’re young make you a better person than others? Does a society built on that ability become more just and caring?
This situation produces a world in which the populist right can afford to be intellectually bankrupt. Right-leaning parties don’t need to have a policy agenda. They just need to stoke and harvest the resentment toward the creative class.
The only way to remedy this system is through institutional reform that widens the criteria by which people get sorted. For instance, we need more pathways to success, so those who are not academically inclined have routes to social leadership; programs like national service, so that people with and without college degrees have more direct contact with one another; and an end to policies like residential zoning rules that keep the affluent segregated on top. More broadly, changing this sorting mechanism requires transforming our whole moral ecology, such that possession of a Stanford degree is no longer seen as signifying a higher level of being.
The bobos didn’t set out to be an elite, dominating class. We just fit ourselves into a system that rewarded a certain type of achievement, and then gave our children the resources that would allow them to prosper in that system too. But, blind to our own power, we have created enormous inequalities—financial inequalities and more painful inequalities of respect. The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us.
How the Creative Class Broke America
HOW THE BOBOS BROKE AMERICA
The creative class was supposed to foster progressive values and economic growth. Instead we got resentment, alienation, and endless political dysfunction.
Illustrations by Kimberly Elliott
This article was published online on August 2, 2021.
The dispossessed set out early in the mornings. They were the outsiders, the scorned, the voiceless. But weekend after weekend—unbowed and undeterred—they rallied together. They didn’t have much going for them in their great battle against the privileged elite, but they did have one thing—their yachts.
During the summer and fall of 2020, a series of boat parades—Trumptillas—cruised American waters in support of Donald Trump. The participants gathered rowdily in great clusters. They festooned their boats with flags—American flags, but also message flags: Don’t Tread on Me, No More Bullshit, images of Trump as Rambo.
The women stood on the foredecks in their red, white, and blue bikinis, raising their Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys to salute the patriots in nearby boats. The men stood on the control decks projecting the sort of manly toughness you associate with steelworkers, even though these men were more likely to be real-estate agents. They represent a new social phenomenon: the populist regatta. They are doing pretty well but see themselves as the common people, the regular Joes, the overlooked. They didn’t go to fancy colleges, and they detest the mainstream media. “It’s so encouraging to see so many people just coming together in a spontaneous parade of patriotism,” Bobi Kreumberg, who attended a Trumptilla in Palm Beach, Florida, told a reporter from WPTV.
You can see this phenomenon outside the United States too. In France, the anthropologist Nicolas Chemla calls this social type the “boubours,” the boorish bourgeoisie. If the elite bourgeois bohemians—the bobos—tend to have progressive values and metropolitan tastes, the boubours go out of their way to shock them with nativism, nationalism, and a willful lack of tact. Boubour leaders span the Western world: Trump in the U.S., Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy.
How could people with high-end powerboats possibly think of themselves as the downtrodden? The truth is, they are not totally crazy. The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. We had a clear idea of what class conflict, when it came, would look like—members of the working classes would align with progressive intellectuals to take on the capitalist elite.
But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is. Because of this, the U.S. has polarized into two separate class hierarchies—one red and one blue. Classes struggle not only up and down, against the richer and poorer groups on their own ladder, but against their partisan opposite across the ideological divide.
In June of last year, a Trump regatta was held in Ferrysburg, Michigan. A reporter from WOOD spoke with one of the boaters, a guy in a white T-shirt, a MAGA hat, and a modest fishing boat. “We are always labeled as racists and bigots,” he said. “There’s a lot of Americans that love Donald Trump, but we don’t have the platforms that the Democrats do, including Big Tech. So we have to do this.”
On a bridge overlooking the parade stood an anti-Trump protester, a young man in a black T-shirt carrying an abolish ice sign. “They use inductive reasoning rather than deduction,” he told the reporter, looking out at the pro-Trump boaters. “They only seek information that gives evidence to their presuppositions.” So who’s of a higher social class? The guy in the boat, or the kid with the fancy words?
The Rise of a Countercultural Elite
In 1983, a literary historian named Paul Fussell wrote a book called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Most of the book is a caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers prevalent at the time. After ridiculing every other class, Fussell describes what he called “X people.” These were people just like Fussell: highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural. X people tend to underdress for social occasions, Fussell wrote. They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility. The chapter about X people was insufferably self-regarding, but Fussell was onto something. Every once in a while, in times of transformation, a revolutionary class comes along and disrupts old structures, introduces new values, opens up economic and cultural chasms. In the 19th century, it was the bourgeoisie, the capitalist merchant class. In the latter part of the 20th century, as the information economy revved up and the industrial middle class hollowed out, it was X people.
Seventeen years later, I wrote a book about that same class, Bobos in Paradise. The bobos didn’t necessarily come from money, and they were proud of that; they’d secured their places in selective universities and in the job market through drive and intelligence exhibited from an early age, they believed. X types defined themselves as rebels against the staid elite. They were—as the classic Apple commercial had it—“the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.” But by 2000, the information economy and the tech boom were showering the highly educated with cash. They had to find ways of spending their gobs of money while showing they didn’t care for material things. So they developed an elaborate code of financial correctness to display their superior sensibility. Spending lots of money on any room formerly used by the servants was socially defensible: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. When it came to aesthetics, smoothness was artificial, but texture was authentic. The new elite distressed their furniture, used refurbished factory floorboards in their great rooms, and wore nubby sweaters made by formerly oppressed peoples from Peru.
The bobos have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech.
Two years later, Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class, which lauded the economic and social benefits that the creative class—by which he meant, more or less, the same scientists, engineers, architects, financiers, lawyers, professors, doctors, executives, and other professionals who make up the bobos—produced. Enormous wealth was being generated by these highly educated people, who could turn new ideas into software, entertainment, retail concepts, and more. If you wanted your city to flourish, he argued, you had to attract these people by stocking the streets with art galleries, restaurant rows, and cultural amenities. Florida used a “Gay Index,” based on the supposition that neighborhoods with a lot of gay men are the sort of tolerant, diverse places to which members of the creative class flock.
Florida was a champion of this class. I looked on them pretty benignly myself. “The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.
The New Elite Consolidates
Over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of the bobos has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The bobos—or X people, or the creative class, or whatever you want to call them—have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.
First, we’ve come to hoard spots in the competitive meritocracy that produced us. As Elizabeth Currid-Halkett reported in her 2017 book, The Sum of Small Things, affluent parents have increased their share of educational spending by nearly 300 percent since 1996. Partly as a result, the test-score gap between high- and low-income students has grown by 40 to 50 percent. The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place. Roughly 72 percent of students at these colleges come from the richest quarter of families, whereas only 3 percent come from the poorest quarter. A 2017 study found that 38 schools—including Princeton, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Colgate, and Middlebury—draw more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.
Second, we’ve migrated to just a few great wealth-generating metropolises. Fifteen years after The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida published a reconsideration, The New Urban Crisis. Young creative types were indeed clustering in a few zip codes, which produced enormous innovation and wealth along with soaring home values. As Florida noted in that book, from 2007 to 2017, “the population of college-educated young people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four grew three times faster in downtown areas than in the suburbs of America’s fifty largest metro areas.”
But this concentration of talent, Florida now argued, meant that a few superstar cities have economically blossomed while everywhere else has languished. The 50 largest metro areas around the world house 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of global wealth. Just six metro areas—the San Francisco Bay Area; New York; Boston; Washington, D.C.; San Diego; and London—attract nearly half the high-tech venture capital in the world.
This has also created gaping inequalities within cities, as high housing prices push middle- and lower-class people out. “Over the past decade and a half,” Florida wrote, “nine in ten US metropolitan areas have seen their middle classes shrink. As the middle has been hollowed out, neighborhoods across America are dividing into large areas of concentrated disadvantage and much smaller areas of concentrated affluence.” The large American metro areas most segregated by occupation, he found, are San Jose, San Francisco, Washington, Austin, L.A., and New York.
Third, we’ve come to dominate left-wing parties around the world that were formerly vehicles for the working class. We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity) while watering down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions. As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave. Around 1990, nearly a third of Labour members of the British Parliament were from working-class backgrounds; from 2010 to 2015, the proportion wasn’t even one in 10. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the 50 most-educated counties in America by an average of 26 points—while losing the 50 least-educated counties by an average of 31 points.
These partisan differences overlay economic differences. In 2020, Joe Biden won just 500 or so counties—but together they account for 71 percent of American economic activity, according to the Brookings Institution. Donald Trump won more than 2,500 counties that together generate only 29 percent of that activity. An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent and getting more so. If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities, it’s because they are.
The creative class has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.
Like any class, the bobos are a collection of varied individuals who tend to share certain taken-for-granted assumptions, schema, and cultural rules. Members of our class find it natural to leave their hometown to go to college and get a job, whereas people in other classes do not. In study after study, members of our class display more individualistic values, and a more autonomous sense of self, than other classes. Members of the creative class see their career as the defining feature of their identity, and place a high value on intelligence. Usage of the word smart increased fourfold in The New York Times from 1980 to 2000, according to Michael Sandel’s recent book, The Tyranny of Merit—and by 2018 usage had nearly doubled again.
Without even thinking about it, we in the creative class consolidate our class standing through an ingenious code of “openness.” We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic “localist” tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.
Shamus Rahman Khan is a sociologist who attended and then taught at St. Paul, an elite New England prep school. As the meritocratic creative class displaces the old WASPs, he observes, what the school primarily teaches is no longer upper-crust polish or social etiquette, but “ease”—the knowledge of how to act in open environments where the rules are disguised.
A student who possesses ease can walk into any room and be confident that she can handle whatever situation she finds. She knows how to structure relationships with teachers and other professional superiors so that they are treated both as authority figures and as confidants. A student in possession of ease can comfortably engage the cafeteria workers with a distant friendliness that at once respects social hierarchy and pretends it doesn’t exist. A student with ease knows when irony is appropriate, what historical quotations are overused, how to be unselfconscious in a crowd. These practices, as Khan writes in Privilege, his book about St. Paul, can be absorbed only through long experience within elite social circles and institutions.
Openness in manners is matched by openness in cultural tastes. Once upon a time, high culture—the opera, the ballet—had more social status than popular culture. Now social prestige goes to the no-brow—the person with so much cultural capital that he moves between genres and styles, highbrow and lowbrow, with ease.
“Culture is a resource used by elites to recognize one another and distribute opportunities on the basis of the display of appropriate attributes,” Kahn argues. Today’s elite culture, he concludes, “is even more insidious than it had been in the past because today, unlike years ago, the standards are argued not to advantage anyone. The winners don’t have the odds stacked in their favor. They simply have what it takes.”
I wrote Bobos in Paradise in the late Clinton era. The end of history had allegedly arrived; the American model had been vindicated by the resolution of the Cold War. Somehow, we imagined, our class would be different from all the other elites in world history. In fact, we have many of the same vices as those who came before us.
I got a lot wrong about the bobos. I didn’t anticipate how aggressively we would move to assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and thought codes. I underestimated the way the creative class would successfully raise barriers around itself to protect its economic privilege—not just through schooling, but through zoning regulations that keep home values high, professional-certification structures that keep doctors’ and lawyers’ incomes high while blocking competition from nurses and paralegals, and more. And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five decades, the number of working-class and conservative voices in universities, the mainstream media, and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling.
When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they are going to react badly—and they have.
The Reaction
If our old class structure was like a layer cake—rich, middle, and poor—the creative class is like a bowling ball that was dropped from a great height onto that cake. Chunks splattered everywhere. In The Great Class Shift, Thibault Muzergues argues that the creative class has disrupted politics across the Western world. In nation after nation, the rise of the educated metro elite has led the working class to rebel against them. Trump voters listed the media—the epitome of creative-class production—as the biggest threat to America. “The more than 150-year-old alliance between the industrial working class and what one might call the intellectual-cultural Left is over,” observes the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein. The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls. In revolt, populist Trump voters sometimes create their own reality, inventing absurd conspiracy theories and alternative facts about pedophile rings among the elites who they believe disdain them.
The dominance of the bobos has also engendered a rebellion among its own offspring. The members of the creative class have labored to get their children into good colleges. But they’ve also jacked up college costs and urban housing prices so high that their children struggle under crushing financial burdens. This revolt has boosted Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and so on. Part of the youth revolt is driven by economics, but part is driven by moral contempt. Younger people look at the generations above them and see people who talk about equality but drive inequality. Members of the younger generation see the Clinton-to-Obama era—the formative years for the creative class’s sensibility—as the peak of neoliberal bankruptcy.
A third rebellion is led by people who are doing well financially but who feel culturally humiliated—the boubour rebellion. These are Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the rich St. Louis couple who waved their guns at passing Black protesters last year. These are the people who elected as mayor of Toronto the crude, brash-talking Rob Ford, who attempted to put a very non-bobo shopping mall, a suburban Disneyland, right in the center of the city. These are people who rebel against codes of political correctness.
As these rebellions arose, pundits from the creative class settled upon certain narratives to explain why there was suddenly so much conflict across society. Our first was the open/closed narrative. Society, we argued, is dividing between those who like open trade, open immigration, and open mores, on the one hand, and those who would like to close these things down, on the other. Second, and related, was the diversity narrative. Western nations are transitioning from being white-dominated to being diverse, multiracial societies. Some people welcome these changes whereas others would like to go back to the past.
Both these narratives have a lot of truth to them—racism still divides and stains America—but they ignore the role that the creative class has played in increasing inequality and social conflict.
For all its talk of openness, the creative class is remarkably insular. In Social Class in the 21st Century, the sociologist Mike Savage found that the educated elite tended to be the most socially parochial group, as measured by contact with people in occupational clusters different from their own. In a study for The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley found that the most politically intolerant Americans “tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves.” The most politically intolerant county in the country, Ripley found, is liberal Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes Boston.
If creative-class types just worked hard and made more money than other people, that might not cause such acute political conflict. What causes psychic crisis are the whiffs of “smarter than” and “more enlightened than” and “more tolerant than” that the creative class gives off. People who feel that they have been rendered invisible will do anything to make themselves visible; people who feel humiliated will avenge their humiliation. Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016 because he had a fantastic health-care plan. He won because he made the white working class feel heard.
The New Class Hierarchies
The reaction to the bobos has turned politics into a struggle for status and respect—over whose sensibility is dominant, over which groups are favored and which are denigrated. Political attitudes have displaced consumption patterns as the principal way that people signal class sensibility.
The new map of status competition is worth pausing over, because it helps explain the state of our politics today. Let’s look first at the blue hierarchy.
Atop the Democratic-leaning class ladder sits the blue oligarchy: tech and media executives, university presidents, foundation heads, banking CEOs, highly successful doctors and lawyers. The blue oligarchy leads the key Information Age institutions, and its members live in the biggest cities. They work hard; as Daniel Markovits reported in The Meritocracy Trap, the share of high-income workers who averaged more than 50 hours of work a week almost doubled from 1979 to 2006, while the share of the lowest earners working long hours dropped by almost a third. They are, in many respects, solid progressives; for instance, a 2017 Stanford survey found that Big Tech executives are in favor of higher taxes, redistributive welfare policies, universal health care, green environmental programs. Yet they tend to oppose anything that would make their perch less secure: unionization, government regulation that might affect their own businesses, antitrust or anti-credentialist policies.
With their amazing financial and convening power, blue oligarchs move to absorb any group that threatens their interests, co-opting their symbols, recruiting key leaders, hollowing out their messages. “Woke capitalism” may seem like corporations gravitating to the left, but it’s also corporations watering down the left. Members of the blue oligarchy sit atop systems that produce inequality—and on balance their actions suggest a commitment to sustaining them.
One step down from the blue oligarchy is the creative class itself, a broader leadership class of tenured faculty, established members of the mainstream media, urban and suburban lawyers, senior nonprofit and cultural-institution employees, and corporate managers, whose attitudes largely mirror the blue oligarchs above them, notwithstanding the petty resentments of the former toward the latter.
The bobos believe in human dignity and classical liberalism—free speech, open inquiry, tolerance of different viewpoints, personal autonomy, and pluralism—but our class has not delivered for the people outside it. On our watch, government and other public institutions have deteriorated. Part of the problem is that, steeped in an outsider, pseudo-rebel ethos, we never accepted the fact that we were a leadership class, never took on the institutional responsibilities that go with that acceptance, never got to know or work with people not in our class, and so never earned the legitimacy and trust that is required if any group is going to effectively lead. According to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, 65 percent of Americans believe that “the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good.”
One economic rung below are the younger versions of the educated elite, many of whom live in the newly gentrifying areas of urban America, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York or Shaw in Washington, D.C. More diverse than the elites of earlier generations, they work in the lower rungs of media, education, technology, and the nonprofit sector. Disgusted with how their elders have screwed up the world, they are leading a revolution in moral sentiments. From 1965 to 2000, for instance, about 10 percent of white liberals favored increased immigration. By 2018, according to Zach Goldberg, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, it was more than 50 percent, thanks to the influence of a rising generation on the multicultural left.
Yet wokeness is not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker, a strategy for personal advancement. You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx. By navigating a fluid progressive cultural frontier more skillfully than their hapless Boomer bosses and by calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them, young, educated elites seek power within elite institutions. Wokeness becomes a way to intimidate Boomer administrators and wrest power from them.
Our politics has become sharper-edged and more reactionary, in part because politics is the one arena in which the bobos cannot dominate—there aren’t enough of us.
On the lowest rung of the blue ladder is the caring class, the largest in America (nearly half of all workers, by some measures), and one that in most respects sits quite far from the three above it. It consists of low-paid members of the service sector: manicurists, home health-care workers, restaurant servers, sales clerks, hotel employees. Members of this class are disadvantaged in every way. The gap in life expectancy between those in the top 40 percent and those in the bottom 40 percent widened from 1980 to 2010—from five to 12 years for men and from four to 13 years for women. Only one in 100 of the children raised in the poorest fifth of households will become rich enough to join the top 5 percent.
Surveys suggest that members of this class stay at some remove from the culture wars—they are much less likely to share political content on social media than other groups, and more likely to say they “avoid arguments.” Many are centrists or detached from politics altogether, but as a whole they sit to the right of the bobos on abortion and LGBTQ issues and to the left of the bobos on issues like union power and workers’ rights.
Atop the red hierarchy is the GOP’s slice of the one-percenters. Most rich places are blue, but a lot of the richest people are red. A 2012 study of the richest 4 percent of earners found that 44 percent voted Democrat that year while 41 percent voted Republican. Some are corporate executives or entrepreneurs, but many are top-tier doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who aspire to low taxes and other libertarian ideals. This is the core of the GOP donor class, men and women who feel that they worked hard for their money, that the American dream is real, and that those who built wealth in this country shouldn’t have to apologize for it.
Members of this class are in many ways similar to the conservative elite of the Reagan years. Yet they too have been reshaped by the creative class’s cultural dominance. When I interview members of the GOP donor class, they tell me they often feel they cannot share their true opinions without being scorned. Few of them supported Donald Trump in the 2016 GOP primaries, but by 2020 most of the red one-percenters I know had swung enthusiastically pro-Trump, because at least he’s scorned by those who scorn them. It turns out that having a large investment account is no protection against self-pity.
One step down are the large property-owning families, scattered among small cities and towns like Wichita, Kansas, and Grand Rapids, Michigan—what we might call the GOP gentry. (I’ve adapted the coinage from what the historian Patrick Wyman has written about the local elite in his hometown of Yakima, Washington.) This gentry class derives its wealth not from salary but from the ownership of assets—furniture companies, ranches, a bunch of McDonald’s franchises. This wealth is held in families and passed down through the generations. Members of this elite stay rooted where their properties are and form the leadership class in their regions, chairing a community foundation or the local chamber of commerce.
Below them is the proletarian aristocracy, the people of the populist regatta: contractors, plumbers, electricians, middle managers, and small-business owners. People in this class have succeeded in America, but not through the channels of the university-based meritocracy, from which they feel alienated.
In other circumstances, the GOP gentry would be the natural enemies of the proletarian aristocracy, but now they are aligned. Both embrace the symbolic class markers of the sociologically low—pickup trucks, guns, country music, Christian nationalism. Both fear that their children may not be able to compete in the creative-class-controlled meritocracy. Both dislike sending their kids to schools that disdain their values, yet understand that their children will have to adopt creative-class values if they are going to be accepted in the new elite. As Thibault Muzergues writes, “The boubours and the provincial bourgeois thus have a common agenda: to unmake the Creative Class’s societal transformation of the late 2000s and early 2010s.”
A level below the people of the populist regatta, you find the rural working class. Members of this class have highly supervised jobs in manufacturing, transportation, construction. Their jobs tend to be repetitive and may involve some physical danger. As the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow notes, many people in this class have an identity rooted in loyalty to their small town. They are supported by networks of extended family and friends, who have grown up with one another. Like the poorer members of the blue hierarchy, they value interdependence and are less individualistic.
Many members of the red-hierarchy working class feel totally forgotten. In her book White Working Class, Joan C. Williams shares the account of a woman who says she raised three children on $40,000 a year but “didn’t get any assistance because we did not qualify.” Their towns are not diverse. As Wuthnow notes, two of the most common statements you hear in these towns are “Everybody knows everybody else” and “We’re all pretty much the same.” If educated urbanites go out of their way to enjoy diversity and display their superior cultural taste, one-upmanship is despised in this class. Christmas Tree Shop sincerity is prized over academic, art-house pretentiousness.
By and large, members of the rural working class admire rich people who earned their wealth. Their real hatred is for “Washington”—a concept that encompasses the entire ruling class. “Those people up there in Washington, they think they know more than we do,” one of them told Wuthnow. “They treat us like second-class citizens, like we’re dumb hicks.”
How the Class War Ends
As the bobos achieved a sort of stranglehold on the economy, the culture, and even our understanding of what a good life is, no wonder society has begun to array itself against them, with the old three-part class structure breaking apart into a confusing welter of micro-groups competing for status and standing in any way they can. So, for instance, the bobos have abundant cultural, political, and economic power; the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power; the young, educated elites have tons of cultural power and growing political power, but still not much economic power; and the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen, have almost no power of any kind at all. Our politics, meanwhile, has become sharper-edged, more identity-based, and more reactionary, in part because politics is the one arena in which the bobos cannot dominate—there aren’t enough of us.
Into this fraught, every-which-way class conflict walks Joe Biden. Weirdly, he stands outside it.
Biden is the first president since Ronald Reagan without a degree from an Ivy League university. His sensibility was formed not in the meritocracy but in the working-class neighborhoods of his youth. Condescension is alien to his nature. He has little interest in the culture-war issues that drive those at the top of the hierarchies, and spent his 2020 campaign studiously avoiding them. Biden gets prickly when he is surrounded by intellectual preening; he’s most comfortable hanging around with union guys who don’t pull that crap.
Biden’s working-class version of progressivism is a relic from the pre-bobo era. His programs—his COVID-relief law, his infrastructure bill, his family-support proposal—represent efforts to funnel resources to those who have not graduated from college and who have been left behind by the creative-class economy. As Biden boasted in an April speech to a Joint Session of Congress, “Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree; 75 percent don’t require an associate’s degree.” Those are his people.
If there is an economic solution to the class chasms that have opened up in America, the Biden legislative package is surely it. It would narrow the income gaps that breed much of today’s class animosity.
But economic redistribution only gets you so far. The real problem is the sorting mechanism itself. It determines who gets included in the upper echelons of society and who gets excluded; who gets an escalator ride to premier status and worldly success and who faces a wall.
The modern meritocracy is a resentment-generating machine. But even leaving that aside, as a sorting device, it is batshit crazy. The ability to perform academic tasks during adolescence is nice to have, but organizing your society around it is absurd. That ability is not as important as the ability to work in teams; to sacrifice for the common good; to be honest, kind, and trustworthy; to be creative and self-motivated. A sensible society would reward such traits by conferring status on them. A sensible society would not celebrate the skills of a corporate consultant while slighting the skills of a home nurse.
Some 60 years after its birth, the meritocracy seems more and more morally vacuous. Does the ability to take tests when you’re young make you a better person than others? Does a society built on that ability become more just and caring?
This situation produces a world in which the populist right can afford to be intellectually bankrupt. Right-leaning parties don’t need to have a policy agenda. They just need to stoke and harvest the resentment toward the creative class.
The only way to remedy this system is through institutional reform that widens the criteria by which people get sorted. For instance, we need more pathways to success, so those who are not academically inclined have routes to social leadership; programs like national service, so that people with and without college degrees have more direct contact with one another; and an end to policies like residential zoning rules that keep the affluent segregated on top. More broadly, changing this sorting mechanism requires transforming our whole moral ecology, such that possession of a Stanford degree is no longer seen as signifying a higher level of being.
The bobos didn’t set out to be an elite, dominating class. We just fit ourselves into a system that rewarded a certain type of achievement, and then gave our children the resources that would allow them to prosper in that system too. But, blind to our own power, we have created enormous inequalities—financial inequalities and more painful inequalities of respect. The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us.
This article appears in the September 2021 print edition with the headline “Blame the Bobos.”
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16. How China Helps the Cuban Regime Stay Afloat and Shut Down Protests
Will great power competition play out over Cuba? Great power competition equals political warfare.
How China Helps the Cuban Regime Stay Afloat and Shut Down Protests
Chinese companies have played a key part in building Cuba’s telecommunications infrastructure, a system the regime uses to control its people, just as the CCP does within its own borders.
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On July 11, thousands of people across Cuba took to the streets, fed up with the lack of food, basic products, medicine, and vaccines to combat COVID-19. They were the first large-scale demonstrations in Cuba since 1994, and the largest since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. Protesters used social media to broadcast to the world what was happening, but the communist regime shut off the internet and telephone services, pulling the plug on their connection outside the island.
The key to the regime’s ability to do so was China. Chinese companies have played a key part in building Cuba’s telecommunications infrastructure, a system the regime uses to control its people, just as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does within its own borders.
When the protests began, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio tweeted: “Expect the regime in #Cuba to block internet & cell phone service soon to prevent videos about what is happening to get out to the world… By the way, they use a system made, sold & installed by #China to control and block access to the internet in #Cuba.” An article in Newsweek discussing Beijing’s possible links with the censoring of Cuba’s protests noted that the primary technology providers for Etecsa, Cuba’s sole internet access company, are all Chinese: Huawei, TP-Link, and ZTE. A 2017 report by the Open Observatory of Network Interference found traces of Chinese code in interfaces for Cuban Wi-Fi portals. The Swedish organization Qurium discovered that Cuba uses Huawei network management software eSight to help filter web searches. China’s role in helping the regime cut off communications during the protests has exposed one of the many ways Beijing helps keep the Cuban communist regime afloat.
China’s Interests in Cuba
Since the two countries established diplomatic relations in September of 1960, Sino-Cuban relations have been complicated. Cuba enjoys the sole designation as a “good brother, good comrade, good friend” of China, reflecting their shared communist legacy. Despite that common bond, however, their relationship has been complex; the two were on opposite sides of the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War, and, in some cases, on opposite sides of national liberation struggles in Africa. During that period, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro verbally sparred over ideological supremacy. Mao accused Castro, a Soviet ally, of “revisionism,” a serious offense within communist orthodoxy. When China reduced rice shipments to Cuba, Castro accused it of joining the U.S. embargo. Following Mao’s death, Castro characterized the late leader by saying that Mao “destroyed with his feet what he did with his head.”
China was also arguably deterred in its dealings with Cuba by the United States’ strong reaction to the Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba in 1961. The incident, well known in China, was a cautionary tale that suggested that the U.S. would not tolerate China getting too close to Cuba. Doing so would have potentially risked China’s broader goals of building a strong and wealthy state through commercial dealings with the U.S., including financial interdependence, investment by Western companies, and access to U.S. technology.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and Soviet aid to Cuba abruptly ended, China stepped up support. High-level government officials from China have visited Cuba 22 times since 1993; Cuban high level government officials have visited China 25 times since 1995. During a visit to the island in 2014, President Xi Jinping said, “The two countries advance hand in hand on the road on the path of the construction of socialism with its own characteristics, offering reciprocal support on issues related to our respective vital interests.”
China recognizes Cuba’s geostrategic importance. Due to its position in the Caribbean, Cuba can exert influence over the southeastern maritime approach to the United States, which contains vital sea lanes leading to ports in Miami, New Orleans, and Houston. Author George Friedman has argued that, with an increased presence in Cuba, China could potentially “block American ports without actually blocking them,” just like U.S. naval bases and installations pose a similar challenge to China around the first island chain and Straits of Malacca. Cuba’s influence in the Caribbean also makes it a useful proxy through which Beijing can pressure the four countries in the region (out of the 15 total globally) that recognize Taiwan to switch recognition.
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China’s Economic Support to Cuba
China helps sustain the regime through economic engagement. It is Cuba’s largest trading partner, according to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is Cuba’s largest source of technical assistance. China’s imports from Cuba initially concentrated on sugar and nickel, including a proposed $500 million Chinese investment in Cuba’s nickel industry that ultimately fell through. The Chinese company Greatwall Drilling (GWDC) has also partnered with Cuba’s national petroleum company, Cupet, in extracting oil near Pinar del Rio, although a larger $6 billion project to upgrade the Cienfuegos oil refinery also never came to fruition.
When the United States began opening up to Cuba under the Obama administration in 2014, China recognized the potential for a more robust relationship with Cuba, and raced to catch up. Chinese firms secured a project to expand Cuba’s Santiago container terminal, funded by a $120 million Chinese bank loan. Chinese biopharmaceutical firms have set up operations in Cuba’s Mariel Free Trade Zone. China has even set up an artificial intelligence center on the island.
In November of 2018, Cuba signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In the agricultural sector, Chinese companies are increasing sugar and rice production, improving irrigation to boost crop yields, and providing tractors to plow Cuban fields. Beijing Enterprises Holdings is building a $460 million golf resort on the island.
Chinese influence on the island doesn’t end there. Cubans are now traveling with cars from Geely, trucks from SinoTruck, and buses from Yutong. The company Haier now sells appliances and electronics to Cuba, including the establishment of a computer assembly plant and renewable energy research facility on the island. China’s Jilin province and the city of Changchun have cooperative relations with Cuban biopharmaceutical companies. Cuba was one of the first official destinations for Spanish-language training for Chinese personnel in the hemisphere. Reciprocally, the University of Havana was one of the first Confucius Institutes established by China in the region. And the two maintain close defense relations, including regular institutional and senior leader visits, and a Chinese ship visit to the Port of Havana in 2016. China has not, however, sold Cuba any significant weapons systems, as it has done with other states in the region such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.
Traces of China’s “Digital Authoritarianism” in Cuba and Beyond
China’s contributions to Cuba’s telecommunications development were “firm as a rock in midstream,” according to a 2016 article by China Business Network. Cuba’s ALBA-1 undersea cable linking the island’s telecommunication architecture to South America through Venezuela was partially financed and constructed by Chinese companies. In 2000, the Cuban government signed a contract with Huawei to set up fiber optic cables throughout the island. In recent years, as noted previously, Chinese companies like Huawei, ZTE, and TP-Link have further solidified their crucial role in providing Cuba’s internet, including hotspots, telephones, and other infrastructure across the island – the same infrastructure the regime blacked out to squash protests last month.
This is just one example of China exporting “digital authoritarianism” to illiberal regimes across the region. In Venezuela, Chinese telecommunication firm ZTE helped the Maduro regime establish the “fatherland ID card” system, which it used to control not only voting, but the distribution of scarce food packages (the famous “CLAP” boxes), and more recently, COVID-19 vaccines. Similarly, in 2020, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned China National Electronics Import and Export Corporation for supporting the Maduro regime’s efforts to conduct digital surveillance and cyber operations against political opponents.
The shift in the strategic environment in the region, worsened by the health, fiscal, economic, and political strains of the COVID-19 pandemic, are increasingly evident. Leftist authoritarian regimes are consolidating control in Venezuela and Nicaragua. The populist left has returned to power in Bolivia in the form of the MAS party, in Argentina with the Peronists, and in Mexico with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the Morena movement. In Peru, the recent election of Pedro Castillo, a teacher from Cajamarca with a radical left agenda, similarly raises alarm bells. Upcoming elections in the region raise the prospects for an even broader spread of the populist left, including the prospect of victory by Xiomara Castro in November 2021 elections in Honduras, a President Petro emerging from Colombia’s 2022 elections, or the return of Lula da Silva and his Workers’ Party in Brazil’s October 2022 elections.
China’s continued efforts to prop up the Cuban regime matters to U.S. national security. For both good and bad, Cuba is connected to the United States through geographic proximity, historical connections, and family ties. The U.S. government has long focused on violations of the freedoms and human rights of the Cuban people, and continues to work to improve their situation. By sustaining Cuba, China indirectly serves as an incubator of authoritarianism in the region, providing resources to such regimes as they consolidate power, change constitutions, move against private property and democratic institutions, and silence internal dissent.
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Cuba could also be an area from which China could gather intelligence and conduct cyberattacks against the United States. Currently, the U.S. Justice Department is investigating members of China’s Ministry of State Security for sponsoring cybercrime and other cyber activities including the recent hack of Microsoft, laying bare China’s malign intent against the U.S. in cyberspace.
How the United States Can Respond
In the face of the challenges posed by China’s support to Cuba and other authoritarian regimes in the region, U.S. policymakers should consider the following:
First, the United States should give more attention to the strategic competition with China unfolding in Cuba and the region in general. As Gordon Chang recently wrote in Newsweek, we must realize that “America… is involved in a ferocious struggle everywhere. After all, the battle between dictatorship and democracy, which is not going well at the moment, is global.”
Second, the U.S. should not try to “block” Latin American partners from conducting business with China. Attempting to do so is not possible in a region of sovereign states with ever-growing commercial ties with China. Indeed, the region has been hit especially hard by COVID-19 and will need more commercial engagement from large countries like China to recuperate. Instead, the U.S. should concentrate on helping partners in the region to engage with China in the most healthy, productive ways. For example, an emphasis on transparency inhibits the ability to engage in corrupt backroom deals with the Chinese that benefit the elites signing the deals rather than the country as a whole.
The United States should involve greater support for “good governance” initiatives, including helping partners to more effectively plan and screen investments in critical infrastructure, conduct technically sound evaluations of public auctions, and strengthen legal systems and enforcement to ensure that Chinese and other firms follow nations’ laws and their contractual commitments. This will partly insulate partners from more predatory activities. Such support will also help to convince local citizens, many pessimistic about their governments, that democratic governance, based on market principles, can indeed deliver benefits, address inequalities, and improve living conditions.
As illustrated by the Cuban case, the telecommunication industry is a particularly sensitive area where China could challenge the ability of partner nations to make sovereign decisions and resist the pressures of authoritarianism. However, the U.S. and its partners must provide viable alternatives to the Chinese systems Washington is asking its partners to turn away from. To that end, the United States should look to like-minded democratic nations and their leading companies in the space, such as Nokia (based in Finland) and Ericsson (in Sweden). Institutions like the U.S. Development Finance Corporation and the Inter-American Development Bank can help partner nations finance such alternatives.
With respect to cybersecurity, the United States should similarly look to increase support to partners in protecting their citizens’ privacy and security from malign actors like China. The cybersecurity training provided U.S. Southern Command to its partner nations could be one part of the solution in this regard.While recent events in Cuba show China’s growing influence in the region, the CCP’s emphatic support of the Cuban regime’s repressive acts also highlights that it is on the wrong side of history. The U.S. must deepen partnerships with Latin American and Caribbean friends, based on shared values, in order to ensure that the region remains secure, prosperous, and free.
The views expressed in the article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.
17. China clamps down as Covid surges far and wide
China clamps down as Covid surges far and wide
Authorities impose travel restrictions, mass testing and partial lockdowns as Delta variant causes spike in nationwide infections
Covid-19 has now spread into around half of China’s provinces, causing authorities to impose new movement restrictions nationwide as the country returns to the mass testing and lockdowns imposed when the virus first erupted in early 2020.
Public transport has been restricted in 144 of the worst-hit areas, including in Beijing where at least three new cases were reported on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Beijing has suspended issuing travel documents to residents to travel abroad, fearing they may bring the virus back with them upon their return.
Beijing’s latest de facto international travel ban contrasts with the mandatory quarantine order being reinstated across Hong Kong and Macau on arrivals from mainland China, as both territories are shoring up defenses to fend off any inflow of new cases. Macau is already testing all its residents after a student contracted the virus on the mainland and infected her parents after she returned.
It’s all raising questions if China’s earlier Covid-19 containment success is coming decisively undone. Wuhan, the initial ground zero for the virus that was shut down for 76 days between January and April last year, is poised to return to partial lockdowns after the discovery of at least 20 cases there since Monday.
The government’s mass mobilization despite such a small number of infections is resurrecting concerns that authorities may not be disclosing the true extent of the outbreak, in Wuhan and other cities. Beijing has adopted a “zero tolerance” approach to the virus but that may be difficult to maintain as the highly contagious Delta variant takes hold.
Posts on WeChat and Weibo discussing the possible number of China’s real infections, as opposed to the officially acknowledged figures, have swiftly been censored. However, Communist Party mouthpiece The People’s Daily has warned cadres against withholding information on their region’s outbreaks.
On Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) added 62 local cases to its official national tally, down slightly from the 71 infections reported on Tuesday, which marked the highest single-day number since January. The acknowledged caseload is expected to break the 500 mark as mass testing commences across many cities nationwide.
Almost half the new cases were found in Jiangsu, where its provincial capital Nanjing’s slack prevention measures in receiving foreign flights has been blamed for setting off an outbreak that is now spreading nationwide.
A file photo of Nanjing’s main Lukou Airport. The major transit hub is the source of the current flare-up across China where passengers contracted Covid-19 from airport workers and spread it to their destinations. Photo: Handout
Other cases believed to have spawned from Nanjing are now scattered across Hunan, Hubei, Shandong, Yunnan, Henan and Fujian provinces. Seventeen provinces are now quarantining and isolating more than one million people, who either transited through Nanjing since July or are close or secondary contacts of infections linked to the city.
China has not had so many cities and provinces from north to south scrambling to put themselves on a wartime footing and reinstating anti-pandemic measures since the country largely vanquished the virus, reopened its economy and resumed domestic travel in the second quarter of 2020.
Some sporadic infections had followed since then, but cases were mostly contained to one or two cities. Now, the NHC’s outbreak tracker has listed four communities, including those in Nanjing and Zhengzhou, as extremely high-risk areas for full, indefinite lockdown. At least 168 other areas nationwide, including two in Beijing and one in Shanghai, have been branded as “medium-risk.”
No one is permitted to leave these 159 areas red-flagged by the NHC, which are cordoned off by police to snap infection chains.
On Tuesday, Xinhua revealed that Beijing municipal authorities had requested railway operators to stop selling tickets to passengers from Nanjing and other hotspots like Zhengzhou, Shenyang, Dalian, Changsha, Chengdu and others. Beijing’s two main airports are also curtailing flights from these cities.
China has not seen outbreaks of this magnitude since it brought Covid-19 under control in the second quarter of 2020. Photo: Xinhua
Underscoring the mounting threat, Beijing has dispatched its “crack squad” to the front lines. Chinese Deputy Premier Sun Chunlan, Beijing’s point man on Covid control who stayed in Wuhan for months and commanded the city’s battle against the virus in early 2020, flew to Nanjing earlier this month.
Sun’s itinerary is also said to include Zhengzhou and Hubei province.
State media is also asking people to avoid long-distance travel or even venturing beyond their city limits. Fewer flights and departures are putting a damper on what is usually a bumper period for domestic tourism when hundreds of millions from cities vacation in far-flung regions. The last time Beijing advised people against travel was during the Lunar New Year break in February.
Dr Zhang Wenhong, one of China’s top respiratory disease specialists and a member of a Beijing-convened advisory panel on Covid, candidly admitted on his blog that China’s locally made vaccines now administered to over one billion Chinese “may not help achieve” the previous goal of zero infections and defeating the virus.
Zhang, also the chief of the National Infectious Disease Medical Center in Shanghai, suggested China may have to ditch its zero case goal and learn to “live with Covid,” as has been the case in the West with the United Kingdom and other countries choosing to open up again despite steady new caseloads.
He stressed that all the sweeping measures from closing down and testing an entire city to sealing borders could not be maintained indefinitely.
“China will have to open its borders and infections are bound to soar as a result … The key is to shift the focus from eliminating all infections to rolling out better vaccines, building more medical capacity and lowering risks of severe cases or fatalities so that people’s livelihoods and normal travel and business can be put back on a stronger footing and won’t be easily paused or interrupted by any future resurgence,” said Zhang.
Nanjing airport: Delta virus’s China transit hub
18. US weighs the cost of Indo-Pacific readiness
Is the character of war changing in the Indopacific? We should keep in mind that the dominant form of warfare in great power competition in the Indopacific and around the world that is being practiced by the revisionist, rogue, and revolutionary powers is political warfare with their own unique characteristics. Are we ready to conduct this type of warfare? Because our adversaries are already conducting it.
Some descriptions of ours and theirs:
Ours:
George F. Kennan defined political warfare as “the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace.” While stopping short of the direct kinetic confrontation between two countries’ armed forces, “political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command… to achieve its national objectives.” A country embracing Political Warfare conducts “both overt and covert” operations in the absence of declared war or overt force-on-force hostilities. Efforts “range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures…, and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.” See George Kennan, "Policy Planning Memorandum." May 4, 1948.
Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations. Smith, Paul A., On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989)
Theirs:
Iran:
1. Leave a light footprint
Iran’s preference for a light footprint, especially covert operations, has been confirmed on numerous occasions since 1979;… “The Quds Force is not a front-line unit, but functions as a special operations group whose presence and leadership improves indigenous forces on the battlefield.” This preference, shaped by its experiences in the 1980s, coalesced into a more consistent approach in the aftermath of the killing of 13 Iranian diplomats in its Mazari Sharif consulate by the Afghan Taliban in 1998.
2. Partner with indigenous forces and use unconventional warfare
Iran has historically emphasized partnering with indigenous forces in carrying out its military interventions. While reliable publicly available information remains scant, these partnerships appear to follow a basic pattern epitomized by Hezbollah, though there can be important variations from case to case.
3. Create broad non-sectarian coalitions
In its military interventions, Iran has tried to legitimize its actions and weaken its opponents by creating broad non-sectarian coalitions, meaning that it often seeks to avoid overt sectarianism both in its discourse and actions, where feasible.
Russia:
As a result, it follows that the main guidelines for developing Russian military capabilities by 2020 are:
i. From direct destruction to direct influence;
ii. from direct annihilation of the opponent to its inner decay;
iii. from a war with weapons and technology to a culture war;
iv. from a war with conventional forces to specially prepared forces and commercial irregular groupings;
v. from the traditional (3D) battleground to information/psychological warfare and war of perceptions;
vi. from direct clash to contactless war;
vii. from a superficial and compartmented war to a total war, including the enemy’s internal side and base;
viii. from war in the physical environment to a war in the human consciousness and in cyberspace;
ix. from symmetric to asymmetric warfare by a combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns;
x. From war in a defined period of time to a state of permanent war as the natural condition in national life.
Thus, the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, in order to achieve superiority in troops and weapons control, morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population. The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country. It is interesting to note the notion of permanent war, since it denotes a permanent enemy. In the current geopolitical structure, the clear enemy is Western civilization, its values, culture, political system, and ideology.
China:
Psychological Warfare seeks to disrupt an opponent’s decision-making capacity; create doubts, foment anti-leadership sentiments, deceive and diminish the will to fight among opponents.
Legal Warfare (“lawfare”) can involve enacting domestic law as the basis for making claims in international law and employing “bogus” maps to justify China’s actions.
Media Warfare (or public opinion warfare) is the key to gaining dominance over the venue for implementing psychological and and legal warfare.
Most Important: 1999 Unrestricted Warfare
My assessment of PRC/CCP strategy:
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.
US weighs the cost of Indo-Pacific readiness
Failure to adapt to the changing character of war produces devastating consequences, a top US general warns
“There are very few things as expensive as preventing a war. But there are two that are more expensive. One is fighting a war. And the most expensive of all is fighting and losing a war.”
– Army General Mark A Milley
The man who may very well have stopped a disastrous coup attempt on US democracy, hatched by an unhinged former president, was speaking at the Navy League of the United States’ Sea-Air-Space Global Maritime Exposition at National Harbor in Maryland.
And basically, it had to do with the high cost of maintaining US military readiness in the Indo-Pacific and other regions.
Milley, the 20th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, emphasized that sea control and power projection are critical to sea power superiority.
“In my mind, no one has ever done it better than the United States Navy, in the history of the world. The same is true for air and space and cyber in our ground forces. In fact, our joint force is second to none.
“Failure to recognize, adapt and capitalize on the changing character of war and failure to see the future produces devastating consequences. And it did for our military.
“It resulted in losses on a scale that’s difficult to fathom that none of us alive today have ever experienced,” he said, referring to the hundreds of thousands of US service members killed in World Wars I and II after the nation was slow to arm – a disturbing historic comparison.
Milley also mentioned future capabilities needed to deter aggressors or to win should deterrence fail.
They include artificial intelligence, long-range precision fires, hypersonics, unmanned systems, biotechnology, 3-D printing and miniature electronic components.
“Those technologies are available right now to every country in the world. There’s nothing particularly secret about many of them.
“And I would argue that the country that masters those technologies … is likely to have a significant, and perhaps decisive advantage,” he said.
An MH-60R Seahawk assigned to the ‘Saberhawks’ of Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 77 lands on the flight deck of the USS Ronald Reagan while conducting operations in the South China Sea. Photo: Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason Tarleton
Navy Admiral John C Aquilino was more direct about the US military’s concerns during a presentation this week at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
“We certainly view with concern many of the actions that we’ve seen from Beijing. I think what I view with most concern are certainly not the words, but the actions that we’ve seen,” he said.
China’s actions in Hong Kong, for instance, reneging on promises of autonomy guaranteed there under agreement in 1997 with the British government, are of concern, Aquilino said.
“Those actions were completely disconnected from the words from Beijing to adhere to the agreement that was in place,” he said.
“We see similar actions if you were to look at the border of India – we view that with concern. If you look at the actions associated with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, and the violations of what we believe – the dignity and respect and human rights – that we view those actions with concern.”
Also of concern are China’s claims on the South China Sea – which Aquilino said interfere with the well-being and prosperity of all nations in the region.
“We view with concern [China’s] unlawful claim to the entire South China Sea – directly and negatively impacting all of the countries in the region, from their livelihood, whether it be with fishing or access to natural resources,” Aquilino said.
“Those are the things that lead me to believe that our execution of integrated deterrence has to occur now and with a sense of urgency.”
The US has been operating in the Pacific for more than 80 years now, said Aquilino, and will continue to do so, including in order to maintain the agreed-upon international rules-based orders that the US and all Pacific nations depend on to ensure prosperity.
“We will operate here to ensure that freedom of navigation for all is maintained and that we will preserve the stability and peace in the [region’s] shared prosperity,” he said.
The USS America conducts a replenishment with the Australian frigate HMAS Ballarat during Talisman Saber in the Coral Sea on July 27, 2021. Photo: Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Matthew Cavenaile
That’s a lot of tough talk, but under the surface, other factors are at play, and they are largely budgetary as well as political.
For example, the Air Force’s F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon and A-10 Warthog, along with the Navy’s F/A-18 Hornet, are all 1980s-era aircraft that have been updated numerous times over the years.
New software, weapons, avionics and targeting technologies have made these fourth-generation airplanes relevant and useful.
But according to Kris Osborn, of National Interest, these upgrades do not make a fourth-generation plane stealthy, so if the Defense Department’s plans for large numbers of F-35 jets are canceled or reduced, the US might find itself being massively outmatched by countries with fifth-generation capable forces – Russia and China.
Complicating things is the political tug of war between the Pentagon and politicians who are concerned about losing high-tech jobs in their districts.
Rear Admiral Andrew Loiselle, who leads the chief of naval operation’s air warfare directorate, provided the rationale to USNI News for why the Navy wants to stop buying the Boeing-built aircraft.
Super Hornets are “a 30-year airframe at 10,000 hours. So that takes us out to about 2055. And there isn’t a lot of analysis out there that supports fourth-generation viability against any threat in that timeframe,” Loiselle said at Sea Air Space 2021.
Loiselle was expanding on comments made by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday, who has criticized defense lobbyists for pushing Congress to purchase navy platforms the service does not want.
The Virginia Class attack submarine is an advanced stealth multimission nuclear-powered submarine for deep ocean anti-submarine warfare and littoral, or shallow water, operations. Photo: US Navy
“It’s not the ’90s anymore. If you go to the tri-service strategy, we really try to punctuate the sense of urgency that we feel every day against China to move, to move the needle in a bureaucracy that’s really not designed to move very fast,” Gilday said.
“And so although it’s in industry’s best interest … building the ships that you want to build, lagging on repairs to ships and submarines, lobbying Congress to buy aircraft that we don’t need that are excess to need, it’s not helpful.”
Among those lobbyists are House Armed Services Committee tactical air and land forces subcommittee ranking member Vicky Hartzler, whose state is home to the plant where Boeing builds the Super Hornets.
“While the navy’s justification for this decision is to invest in its next-generation aircraft, its Next Generation Air Dominance program has just begun defining aircraft requirements and developing concepts,” Hartzler wrote in a St Louis Post-Dispatch op-ed.
“These Super Hornets are a proven platform that will make up the vast majority of the strike fighter force for at least the next decade. Modernizing in this regard is a positive step. However, doing so without plans to replace the lost capability is why we need the Super Hornet.”
Meanwhile, the navy is assuring lawmakers that its proposed 2022 budget will meet key priorities and that the budget will support its vision even if not supporting an investment strategy that will meet fleet size goals.
William Davies, Associate Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “The budget that the navy have submitted will likely cause friction with Congress, especially because it does not provide details about how ship numbers will change beyond the next year.
“Congress continues to push for the navy to achieve and maintain the 355-ship goal, but recent budgets have failed to show that the fleet is on track to reach it.”
A US Marine with Force Reconnaissance Platoon, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, uses his M1110 semi-automatic sniper system to provide security during a Maritime Interdiction Operation training exercise aboard the USS Germantown in the Philippine Sea on June 24, 2021. Photo: Marine Corps / Corporal Karis Mattingly
According to Naval Technology, the ships the navy are requesting funding for include one Arleigh Burke-class Flight III destroyer and two Virginia-class attack submarines amongst others, and will cost US$18 billion in total.
Additionally, the navy is requesting to decommission seven Ticonderoga-class cruisers as well as three Freedom-Class Littoral Combat Ships – but this is likely to encounter Congressional pushback.
In a statement that cut through the smoke and mirrors, on the eve of Sea Air Space 2021, Admiral Gilday dryly observed: “We can’t really afford to have a navy bigger than the one that we can sustain … Based on our current budget, I believe the analysis shows we can afford a fleet of around 300 ships.”
According to Forbes magazine, China now has 360 warships in its own navy and looks likely to surpass 400 in the near future.
China’s maritime aspirations lie mostly close to home, whereas the smaller US Navy is expected to police the entire globe.
If that sounds like an impossible task, it is – the navy’s most recent internal budget guidance to the fleet suggests the mismatch will be getting worse in the future.
Meanwhile, President Biden’s first proposed military budget is drawing concerns from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. He wants to spend $753 billion for national defense, $715 billion of that going to the Pentagon’s budget.
It’s a nearly 2% hike from former President Donald Trump’s final budget as president.
But Democrats say during a time of relative peace, now is the time to shift some of that money to other priorities, such as Covid-19.
Amidst all this budgetary arm-twisting, one small but important fact seems to have been lost in the Pentagon shuffle.
As one former Pentagon wag pointed out, until the US knows what to do about China and Russia’s hypersonic glide missiles, isn’t this all rather pointless?
Sources: Department of Defense, National Interest, USNI News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Global Data, Forbes Magazine, Naval Technology, SpectrumNews1
19. Enduring Struggle: Why USAID Plays a Critical Role in the National Security Realm
A key player in US national security that is too often overlooked.
Another book for the "to read pile."
Enduring Struggle: Why USAID Plays a Critical Role in the National Security Realm
A new book, written by John Norris, contains a fascinating account of the history of the least understood U.S. government agency.
On Labor Day in 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act which created a new organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The founding principle of USAID was to collectively unite Americans and the world to fight, in the words of Kennedy’s inaugural address, “tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” Since that auspicious beginning, over the past sixty years, USAID has sought to carry out its ambitious mission against a complicated political background. From the Cold War and a wide range of global and regional tensions and conflicts to the remarkable improvements in health, education, and economic opportunity in the developing world, USAID has struggled, not always successfully, to sustain its development mission while responding to ever-changing political realities and directions. To this day, USAID continues to confront an operating environment shaped by competing humanitarian, political, economic, security, and foreign policy interests.
The Enduring Struggle benefits from previous studies of U.S. foreign assistance, such as Samuel Hale Butterfield’s U.S. Development Aid—An Historic First: Achievements and Failures in the Twentieth Century and Vernon Ruttan’s United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid. But John Norris fills a major gap with this highly readable narrative of the history of a single agency, USAID, through a political, development, and foreign policy lens. The Enduring Struggle illustrates the experiences of that agency through the administrations of eleven presidents, recounting USAID’s achievements and its failures with many personal glimpses of the work of USAID’s overseas staff. In the process, it highlights questions and provides some answers about why foreign aid and USAID have been subjects of controversy since the beginning in 1961 to the present day.
Kennedy, in his travels through Latin America and Asia while in Congress, saw newly independent states emerging from colonialism mired in political and economic turmoil. The novel The Ugly American, written by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer and published in 1958, left a deep impression on him. He believed America was viewed too negatively across the world and that its overlapping foreign assistance programs lacked a coherent purpose. Kennedy thought economic growth and development could become a subset of broader U.S.security policy—particularly in the backdrop of the Cold War.
The Cold War thus became a catalyst for many of USAID’s missions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Eighty percent of foreign aid in the 1960s was sent to countries threatened by communist expansion. America’s security interests influenced USAID programs as foreign policy priorities and anti-communism entangled with USAID’s development agenda from the 1960s to the 1980s. At times, the United States withheld aid from Marxist countries—like Ethiopia—in the 1970s. But also, USAID was sometimes required to promote development in anti-communist authoritarian regimes around the world.
Sometimes, USAID-managed assistance served as an instrument of pressure. For example, President Lyndon B. Johnson insisted on signing off on any food shipments to India until that country adopted economic and agricultural reforms. At the same time, USAID-sponsored research led to a green revolution that contributed to greatly increased grain production in India and helped to avoid continued reliance on foreign aid to prevent starvation,
This is somewhat common in USAID’s experience. Over the past sixty years, USAID has provided aid in countless humanitarian crises, in education, health, economic growth and poverty reduction, and in support of strengthening democratic governance. The Enduring Struggle describes disparate examples of success, as in USAID’s partnership with Korean reformers who transformed their economy and built a more inclusive society. It also discusses failures, as in Haiti where economic and social conditions have continued to deteriorate.
Norris also vividly describes how, at home, USAID has been a target of controversy and relentless criticism. He brings to life the many attempts to drastically cut USAID’s funding, to abolish it, and to absorb its functions into the State Department, and he recounts the creation of new agencies to take on some of the activities that USAID had performed. In responding to these challenges, often as its workforce was shrinking and its historical expertise was in decline, USAID was seen as slow and directionless at times. Yet, with each attempt to reorganize or shut down the agency, USAID has remained resilient. Several effective administrators were able to find support in the White House and in Congress and to restore USAID to relevancy. Today, USAID works in more than one hundred countries and is widely regarded as a thought leader in the international development community.
The Enduring Struggle’s chronicle of USAID successes and failures ranges from issues of historic importance such as the green revolution, vaccination campaigns against devastating childhood diseases, and the innovative President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program to treat AIDS to the disappointments of initiatives such as the Alliance for Progress that were unable to achieve and sustain their often unrealistic expectations. There remain unanswered questions about the limits of development assistance in less than congenial environments, such as in the autocratic regimes where USAID provided support during the Cold War and in societies in conflict such as Vietnam and Iraq.
Many of the historical issues addressed in this book continue to be debated, such as the need for long-term funding and commitment for a long-term process like development and the tension between relying on local ownership as opposed to conditioning aid on demonstrated self-reliance. And there are unending challenges in trying to persuade the American public that USAID programs in poor countries are serving the U.S. national interest.
Former USAID administrator Henrietta Fore has captured well the essence of The Enduring Struggle by describing it as “lively, compelling, and long overdue” and “a must read for anyone who cares about development and America’s place in the world.” Whether for a development practitioner or a member of the public, this book is a fascinating account of the history of perhaps the least understood U.S. government agency.
Daniel F. Runde was a former USAID official in the George W. Bush Administration, the current Chair of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, the official federal advisory committee that advises USAID, and is a Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Image: Reuters
20. India Deploys Warships in South China Sea as Part of 'Act East' Policy
India Deploys Warships in South China Sea as Part of 'Act East' Policy
By U.S. News & World Report2 min
FILE PHOTO: Chinese navy personnel moor the Indian Navy warship INS Kolkata at Qingdao Port for the 70th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), in Qingdao, China, April 21, 2019. REUTERS/Jason Lee/File Photo
By Sanjeev Miglani
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India is sending a naval task force to the South China Sea this month to expand security ties with friendly countries, officials said on Wednesday, signalling its intent to play a bigger role in regional efforts to counter China.
The Indian military has been traditionally wary of antagonising China but the mood has hardened following clashes between troops on the disputed land border last year. The government has since drawn closer to the United States in efforts to push back against China.
Four ships including a guided missile destroyer and a missile frigate will be deployed for a two-month period to southeast Asia, the South China Sea and the western Pacific, the navy said in a statement.
"The deployment of the Indian Navy ships seeks to underscore the operational reach, peaceful presence and solidarity with friendly countries towards ensuring good order in the maritime domain..." the navy said.
The South China Sea has become one of many flashpoints in the testy relationship between China and the United States, with Washington rejecting what it calls unlawful territorial claims by Beijing in the resource-rich waters.
In June, a U.S. aircraft carrier group led by the USS Ronald Reagan entered the South China Sea as part of a routine mission and a British carrier group is due to undertake exercises in the Philippine Sea this month.
As part of their deployment, the Indian ships will take part in annual joint war drills involving the United States, Japan and Australia off the coast of Guam, the navy said.
The four countries make up the Quad, an informal group, that U.S. President Joe Biden's administration is promoting as a way to counter an assertive China.
"These maritime initiatives enhance synergy and coordination between the Indian Navy and friendly countries, based on common maritime interests and commitment towards Freedom of Navigation at sea," the Indian navy said in its statement.
China has in the past criticised multilateral military manoeuvres as destabilising to the region.
(Reporting by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Kim Coghill)
Copyright 2021 Thomson Reuters.
21. The British are coming! UK carrier strike group arriving on Guam this week
Guam (and South Korea soon too).
The British are coming! UK carrier strike group arriving on Guam this week - PNC News First
The Royal Navy's new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth (Wikipedia photo by Dave Jenkins)
The United Kingdom Carrier Strike Group (CSG) will pull into Apra Harbor this week in the midst of the CSG21 deployment to the Indo-Pacific region.
The deployment is the U.K.’s first by a carrier strike group in the Indo-Pacific for almost 25 years and marks a historic achievement in the bilateral partnership between the U.S. and U.K. The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS The Sullivans (DDG-68) is deployed with the strike group, as are F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 211 and Royal Netherlands Navy frigate HNLMS Evertsen (F805).
“CSG21 is a prime example of the powerful partnerships we have, not just with our neighbors in this region, but around the world,” said Rear Adm. Benjamin Nicholson, commander, Joint Region Marianas. “The U.K. is one of our most stalwart and skilled allies, and their participation in our exercises and operations in the Pacific is a demonstration of the deep relationship we share in terms of defense and deterrence of our adversaries.”
Commodore Steve Moorhouse, Commander United Kingdom Carrier Strike Group
said: “The arrival of the Carrier Strike Group in Guam is an important milestone for CSG21. Since we left the UK in May, our journey has taken us from the familiar waters of the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, across the Indian Ocean and into the Western Pacific. During this time we have undertaken exercises and engagements with more than 20 nations,” said Moorhouse. “Our visit to Guam provides an opportunity for some much-deserved rest and recreation. We are grateful to the U.S. Navy for the use of their facilities and we look forward to exploring this beautiful Pacific Island.”
Guam’s low COVID transmission rates and high vaccination status provides a
safe haven port for Sailors to enjoy some downtime before going back to sea.
“True to our CHamoru hospitality, we look forward to welcoming sailors ashore to enjoy our Pacific paradise. The decision to come to Guam was heavily based on our island’s incredible success with COVID-19 vaccinations, which allows for a greater sense of security for both our visitors and our local community,” said Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero.
During the group’s visit, Sailors will adhere to U.S. Naval Base Guam policies and local regulations. While the group has vaccinated 100 percent of its crew, random testing identified positive cases onboard, which were immediately isolated. Any Sailors who test positive for COVID-19 will remain on the ship in isolation.
Navy Base Guam looks forward to welcoming our NATO partners ashore.
“The deployment of Carrier Strike Group 21 is an incredible and historic milestone for both the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy, highlighting the interoperability and global reach of our combined forces, as we work together with our allies and partners towards our shared interest in a free and open rules-based order,” said Capt. Mike Luckett, commander Navy Base Guam. “It marks the culmination of nearly 10 years of carrier cooperation between the U.S. and UK defense establishments and demonstrates the depth of our bilateral defense relationship. U.S. Naval Base Guam is proud to host our allies for this historic visit, which is a vital reminder of Guam’s strategic importance in the Western Pacific.”
CSG21 highlights the strategic value of the Indo-Pacific on the global stage
and importance of developing and maintaining high levels of cooperation and
interoperability with allied and partner nations.
(Joint Region Marianas Public Affairs Release)
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22. Sanitizing Censorship: The Twitter-AP-Reuters News Partnership
On my daily emails from Associated. Press this quote is always at the bottom:
“There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe … the sun in the heavens and The Associated Press down here.”
Mark Twain
Sanitizing Censorship: The Twitter-AP-Reuters News Partnership – OpEd
This week, Twitter was keen to share the news about its new arrangement with The Associated Press and Reuters “to expand our efforts to identify and elevate credible information” on its platform. The company reiterates its commitment that people using its service are able to “easily find reliable information” hoping to “expand the scale and increase the speed of our efforts to provide timely, authoritative text across the wide range of global topics and conversations” taking place on the platform each day.
The global head of user-generated content at Reuters, Hazel Baker, was businesslike in describing a partnership that would “leverage our deep global and local expertise to serve the public conversation with reliable information.” Tom Januszewski, Vice President of Global Business Development at AP, was “particularly excited about leveraging AP’s scale and speed to add context to online conversations, which can benefit from easy access to the facts.”
Such promises to “leverage” could well have been matched to any shadowy information department from the Cold War with the express purpose of ensuring what news was consumed when and by whom. Twitter will seek help from the two newswires “where facts are in dispute or when Twitter’s Curation team doesn’t have the specific expertise or access to a high enough volume of reputable reporting on Twitter.” Those using the platform “can expect more Trends with contextual descriptions and links to reporting from trusted sources more frequently.”
Bringing aboard these news giants is no guarantee that the text and information provided will be authoritative, credible or reliable. News wires are not immune to being disseminators of inaccurate information, or information that is slanted in favour of a power or interest. Often, they hide behind their reputations even as they ventriloquise different interests and planted narratives.
Take Reuters, which, by its claim, “shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters, and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals, and others with whom Reuters has or may have contracts.” In 1941, the company created its Trust Principles in agreement with The News Paper Proprietors Associated Limited and The Press Association Limited. These imposed obligations on the organisation and its employees to “act at all times with integrity, independence, and freedom from bias.”
Noble in print, the practise did not always stack up. In 1969, a British government document available in the National Archives called “Funding of Reuters by HMG” (Her Majesty’s Government) also outlined an agreement with Reuters to do the sort of thing that has become popular at Twitter: curate the news.
The way that curating would take place was what mattered. “We are now in a position to conclude an agreement providing discreet Government support for Reuters services in the Middle East and Latin America”. The interests of HMG “should be well served by the new arrangement.” The negotiations with the news outlet were led by the anti-Soviet propaganda unit known as the Information Research Department. “The new relationship established with Reuters in the Middle East and Latin America,” John Peck, former head of the IRD notes in the documents, “can lead to valuable goodwill and cooperation with the Agency on a global scale.” Reuters “could and would provide” what the government needed.
The scheme also brought in that other paragon of objective journalism, the BBC, which paid an “enhanced subscription” to Reuters, which was then going through a financially lean time. That money was duly recouped from the Treasury’s purse. Knowledge of this arrangement, approved by the BBC’s head of external services Sir Charles Curran, was kept to a select few.
With these revelations, Reuters was keen to regard this practise as not only normal but acceptable – at least historically. “Many news organisations received some form of state subsidy after World War Two,” was the weak explanation from the wire’s spokesperson David Crundwell. The arrangement, he claimed, “was not in keeping with our Trust Principles and we would not do this today.”
The BBC, through a spokeswoman, similarly said that, “The BBC charter guarantees editorial independence irrespective of whether funding comes from the UK government, the license fee or commercial sources.”
Much of this is wishful thinking. Such working understandings have not ceased in the post-Cold War era. If anything, the misinformation and disinformation stakes have reached a new frontier, pullulating with contenders. Max Blumental, editor of The Grayzone, revealed last February that Reuters and the BBC had been sponsored to engage in a covert information warfare campaign against that old adversary Russia. This involved a collaboration with the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD) section within the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Media organisations worked alongside various intelligence contractors, training Russian journalists under the Reuters umbrella to produce “attitudinal change in the participants”. The aim, fluffily put, was to produce a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”
The development tracker of the UK government also reveals that the CDMD programme involves working with various partners “to enhance the quality of public service and independent media (including the Russian language) so that it is able to support social cohesion, uphold universal values and provide communities across Eastern Europe with access to reliable information.”
Twitter’s response to Blumenthal’s work is a sign of things to come. Providing its own idea of context to the article, the platform placed a warning on all tweets linked to it. Far from discrediting the sources used, the message simply went on to warn that the documents used “may have been obtained through hacking.”
As for Twitter, we already know about executive connections between its operations and the military-intelligence establishment. In 2019, the Middle East Eye found that Gordon MacMillan, a senior executive with editorial responsibility for Middle East matters, was also moonlighting as a reservist for the 77th Brigade, the British Army’s psychological warfare unit established in 2015 to find ways of waging “non-lethal” war. According to General Nick Carter, the unit’s primary task is to conduct research into “information warfare” and give the British military “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level”.
The battle against misinformation can very often become a battle against information you do not particularly like or want people to access. The line on this is not always clear, though hope springs eternal that the marketplace of ideas, to use that increasingly empty expression, can sort the wheat from the chaff. Twitter’s calculating pivot towards this new information landscape shows a new strategy to anchor itself in an ecosystem already marginalising independent journalism. In doing so, it is courting the high priests who determine what counts as news and what doesn’t. Soon, a sanitised platform will simply be code for a censored one.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
