Quotes of the Day:

“Everything we say, everything we do, and everything we fail to say or do will have its impact in other lands.”  

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” 

- George Bernard Shaw

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity. 

- Cicero

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 5 (Putin's War)

2. Ukrainian partisans ‘fought like special forces’ against Putin’s army

3. Mozart Group: the western ex-military personnel training Ukrainian recruits

4. Obituary: Gary Schroen, the CIA spy sent to get Osama Bin Laden

5. Chinese Stages Show of Force Near Taiwan for a Third Day

6. Ex-diplomat says there are 'more intelligent ways' for the U.S. to support Taiwan than to visit

7. China’s military exercises are an intel bonanza — for all sides

8. Canadian military’s special operations members helping train Ukrainians: sources

9. What Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan Tells Us about U.S.-China Relations

10. US-Israel-Palestine security role facing downgrade; can a colonel do a general's job?

11.  Military Briefing: Himars fuels Ukraine hopes of ‘limited’ counter-offensive

12. The Coming War Over Taiwan

13. Taiwan, Thucydides, and U.S.-China War

14. In the 'gray zone' outside Kherson, Ukraine's soldiers pay a terrible price

15. Dr. Dave Johnson on “Is the Virtue in the Weapon or the Cause?”

16. The Inside Story of Carlos Ghosn’s Brazen Escape From Japan

17. Top Taiwan missile official found dead in hotel room after heart attack

18. McMaster: Taiwan Could Prove Difficult for China to Invade

19. Putin is banking on a failure of political will in the west before Russia runs out of firepower

20. The Marine Corps’ new plan will not beat China in a fight for Taiwan

21.  Dan Rice, Special Advisor to CinC Valeriy Zaluzhnyi​: ​The beta test is over. Time for NATO to send in more arms to evict the Russians

22. America Can't Allow China to End Taiwan's Democracy and Dominate Asia

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 5 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-5

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 5

Aug 5, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Layne Phillipson, Karolina Hird, Katherine Lawlor, Angela Howard, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 5, 7:30pm ET

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

Ukrainian officials confirmed that Russia is using Iranian-provided drones in Ukraine. Advisor to the Ukrainian President’s Office, Oleksiy Arestovych, stated on August 5 that Iran handed 46 drones over to Russia and that the Ukrainian government has already noted the use of these drones in combat in Ukraine. [1] At least a portion of the provided drones are older-generation “Shahed 129” heavy strike drones, which Russian forces may seek to use to attack US-provided HIMARS in Ukraine. [2] It is unclear whether the 46 drones represent all the drones that Tehran has agreed to send, or the number of Iranian drones that are currently operating in Ukraine.

Key Takeaways

• Ukrainian officials confirmed that Russian forces are using Iranian-provided drones in Ukraine.
• Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground assaults on settlements south of Bakhmut.
• Russian and Ukrainian forces exchanged heavy artillery fire in Pisky, suggesting that Russian forces are unlikely to have full control of Pisky despite Russian claims.
• Russian forces conducted several limited ground assaults to the north, northwest, and southwest of Donetsk City.
• Russian and Ukrainian forces accused each other of firing rounds near the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Enerhodar, but ISW cannot independently determine which party is responsible for the incident.
• Russian forces have repeatedly used artillery systems deliberately positioned within the complex to fire on targets across the Dnipro River.
• Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to advance on Lozove, Kherson Oblast, likely targeting the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River.
• Russian federal subjects are forming new volunteer battalions in Omsk and Samara Oblasts.
• Russian occupation authorities are likely accelerating passportization and rubleization efforts and civilian data collection in occupied territories in preparation for the upcoming pseudo-referenda on the annexation of occupied Ukrainian territory into Russia.
• The Kremlin is continuing to replace Ukrainian collaborators in Russian occupation administrations with Russian officials, likely to prepare for formal Russian governance of annexed areas.

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

• Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
• Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
• Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
• Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
• Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks between Izyum and Slovyansk on August 5. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces shelled settlements along the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border northwest of Slovyansk, including Bohorodychne, Dolyna, Dibrivne, Mazanivka, Adamivka, and Kurulka. [3]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Siversk area on August 5. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops are engaged in small arms fire near Siversk in addition to continued artillery strikes on Siversk City and surrounding settlements.[4]

Russian forces conducted ground attacks south of Bakhmut on August 5. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops unsuccessfully attempted to gain ground and improve their tactical positions in Zaitseve and Vershyna, both within 5km of the southern outskirts of Bakhmut.[5] Several Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are actively fighting at the Knauf Gips Donbas gypsum factory on the southeastern outskirts of Soledar, about 8km northeast of Bakhmut and directly along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway.[6] Ukrainian sources stated that Russian troops are struggling to get through Ukrainian defenses surrounding Bakhmut, and Russian forces will likely continue to impale themselves on fortified Ukrainian positions under the cover of heavy artillery fire without securing large gains rapidly.[7]

Russian forces conducted several limited ground attacks to the north and west of Donetsk City on August 5. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops unsuccessfully attempted to advance towards Krasnohorivka (15km north of Donetsk City), Avdiivka (about 6km north of Donetsk City), and Pisky (about 5km northwest of Donetsk City).[8] Despite claims made by Russian sources that Russian troops have taken complete control of Pisky, geolocated videos from the area suggest that Pisky remains under heavy artillery fire from all sides, which means that Russian forces likely have not yet been able to actually establish full control of urban parts of Pisky itself.[9] Russian troops also unsuccessfully attempted to advance on Marinka, directly on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City.[10] Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Deputy Internal Minister Vitaly Kiselev claimed that separate DNR brigades and Wagner Group forces took control of half of Marinka.[11] While ISW cannot independently confirm the status of block-to-block control of Marinka, Russian troops will likely attempt to advance through the town from positions in the Petrovskyi district of Donetsk City.

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces continued to focus on preventing Ukrainian forces from creating conditions to resume a counteroffensive on the Kharkiv City Axis on August 5. Russian forces continued to conduct aerial reconnaissance and engage Ukrainian forces in positional battles in settlements northwest of Kharkiv City but did not make any territorial gains.[12] Russian forces continued shelling Kharkiv City and settlements to the northeast, northwest, and southeast.[13]

Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)

Russian forces continued to launch unsuccessful assaults in northwestern Kherson Oblast, likely targeting the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River. Ukrainian military officials reported that two Russian platoon-sized units consisting of SPETSNAZ and tank elements unsuccessfully attempted to advance onto Lozove, situated on the eastern Inhulets River bank.[14] Russian forces also continued to launch airstrikes near Lozove, Velyke Artakove, and Andiivka, all in the vicinity of the Ukrainian bridgehead.[15] Russian forces have also intensified aerial reconnaissance and maintained heavy artillery fire along the line of contact on the Kherson Oblast administrative border.[16]

Russian forces continued to target Nikopol, Mykolaiv City, Dnipropetrovsk, and Odesa Oblasts with artillery, MLRS, and missile strikes on August 5. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast regional authorities reported that Russian forces launched approximately 60 rockets from Grad MLRS systems at Nikopol’s civilian infrastructure and struck Myrivska Hromada (community district) with a Kh-59 cruise missile.[17] Mykolaiv Oblast officials reported that Russian forces shelled Mykolaiv City with Pion heavy artillery. [18] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian forces launched a missile strike on unspecified infrastructure in Mykolaivka on the Odesa-Mykolaiv Oblast border.[19]

Russian and Ukrainian officials accused each other of firing rounds near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Enerhodar on August 5. Ukrainian state nuclear power enterprise Energoatom reported that Russian forces conducted another artillery provocation and damaged three high-voltage communications lines of the Zaporizhzhia NPP autotransformer near the plant’s industrial site.[20] Enerhodar Mayor Dmytro Orlov also noted that Russian forces shelled Enerhodar’s residential neighborhoods from the direction of the Zaporizhzhia NPP, resulting in power outages in most neighborhoods.[21] Russian occupation authorities in Enerhodar claimed that Ukrainian artillery shelled the territory of the Zaporizhzhia NPP, damaging two power lines that are necessary for the operation of power units in the city.[22] ISW cannot independently determine which party is responsible for the incident, however, Russian forces are likely continuing to use positions around the Zaporizhzhia NPP to shell Nikopol just across the Kakhovka Reservoir. The UK Defense Ministry also assessed that Russian forces are using facilities at the Zaporizhzhia NPP and in Enerhodar City as a sanctuary in which to rest and protect their equipment from Ukrainian strikes, given the protected status of the NPP.[23]

Ukrainian forces likely continued to target Russian ammunition depots and positions in Kherson Oblast. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported destroying three Russian ammunition depots in Kherson City, and in Prydniprovske and Tokarivka (both situated east of Kherson City along the Dnipro River).[24] Ukrainian Telegram channel Operativnyi ZSU reported that Ukrainian forces have struck two unspecified military infrastructure objects in Oleshky and Nova Kakhovka with high-precision weapons.[25] Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed four Russian S-300 air defense missile systems, and geolocated footage showed Ukrainian missile units destroying Russian armored personnel carriers in Starosillya along the T2207 ground line of communication (GLOCs).[26] Local social media users reported on and published footage suggesting that Russian forces seized Kherson City Clinical Hospital after Ukrainian strikes on a Russian base in Kherson City in mid-July and are unloading military equipment in the building.[27]

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

Russian sources confirmed the formation of the 3rd Army Corps on August 5. Russian milblogger and military correspondent Sasha Kots announced recruitment for the “Samara” volunteer battalion in Samara Oblast and noted that the battalion will join the 3rd Army Corps of the Russian Armed Forces.[28] The battalion is recruiting men between the ages of 18 and 50 who have completed at least middle or high school education, without required prior military experience.[29] ISW has previously reported that Ukrainian officials believed that Russian forces were forming a 15,500-person-strong 3rd Army Corps within the Western Military District (WMD) based out of Mulino, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, but did not have official confirmation of its formation from Russian sources.[30] Sasha Kots’ announcement also indicates that the Kremlin is likely planning to compose the 3rd Army Corps at least in part from volunteer battalions.

Russian federal subjects (regions) continued to form regionally-based volunteer battalions. Omsk Oblast Governor Aleksandr Butkov reported on August 5 that Omsk Oblast is continuing to form three volunteer battalions - “Irtysh,” “Avangard,” and “Om” - to deploy to Donbas to provide engineering, medical and logistical support.[31] Butkov stated that Omsk Oblast will provide a one-time payment of 100,000 rubles (approximately $1,612) to recruits but specified that the funds will only be accessible after three months of service.[32] Omsk Oblast news outlet BK55 reported that recruits will receive a monthly salary is 40,000 to 50,000 (approximately $661-$826) which will increase to 130,000 (approximately $2,147) once they enter the territory of Ukraine.[33]

Russian forces continued to face low morale issues within its federal republics. Russian Telegram channel Rybar stated that the Akbuzat movement (a human rights activism movement) in the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan is calling on Bashkortostan servicemen to terminate their contracts with the Russian Armed Forces.[34] Rybar reported that Akbuzat leadership is offering legal assistance to those who break their contracts. Rybar condemned the movement and accused the Akbuzat leadership of sharing the personal data of applicants with third-parties, including the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).[35]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Russian occupation authorities are dramatically expanding their passportization of occupied Ukrainian territories by requiring Ukrainian civilians to acquire Russian passports to participate in basic life activities. Occupation authorities are also increasingly requiring the use of the Russian ruble rather than the Ukrainian hryvnia and will likely begin levying Russian taxes on Ukrainian residents of occupied areas.

Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on August 5 that Russian occupation authorities in Melitopol are forcing Ukrainian tenants who rent plots of agricultural land to negotiate new rental agreements, even if their agreements remain active.[36] Renegotiation of their rental agreements requires a Russian passport. The GUR also reported that Russian occupation authorities are requiring all Ukrainian vehicle license plates to transfer to temporary Russian-style license plates and to re-register their vehicles in a Russian system. Re-registration will require a Russian passport. The GUR also reported that the Russian-appointed Minister of Agrarian Policy for Kherson Oblast, Ukrainian collaborator Oleksii Kovalev, ordered Kherson farmers to register their businesses and pay taxes under Russian law. The GUR also reported that Russian authorities sent letters to businesspeople and self-employed residents of Kamianske, Zaporizhia Oblast requesting that they register their businesses and begin paying Russian taxes. Registration of business activity will require a Russian passport.

The Ukrainian advisor to the Kherson Oblast Military Administration, Serhiy Khlan, reported on August 4 that Russian occupation forces began to detain civilians for trying to exchange rubles to hryvnias in Kherson Oblast and began making pension payments in rubles to accelerate the forced rubleization of the occupied economy.[37] Pensioners hoping to collect their pensions are required to provide their personal information to occupation authorities. Khlan also reported that Russian forces require Ukrainian civilians who wish to have internet or cell phone access to provide their passports and personal information to authorities. Ukrainian Telegram Channel Mariupol Now reported that residents must bring their passports with them to register to vote in the annexation referenda.[38] The Ukrainian Mayor of Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast, Dmytro Orlov, said that Russian authorities are using the records of utility companies and the passport information of pensioners to build a database of Ukrainian civilian information to falsify the results of the planned pseudo-referenda on accession into Rusia.[39] Orlov speculated that Russian forces are rushing to implement the referenda because ”they are well aware they have almost no time left.”

Voter registration for Russia’s annexation pseudo-referenda in occupied Ukraine will likely pose an impossible choice to pro-Ukrainian residents, who will need to provide identification to register to vote that can then be used to falsify or disregard their votes. The forced Russian passportization of occupied areas and the mass collection of residents’ data will enable occupying forces to better monitor dissent and votes and could allow Russian authorities to target and penalize any Ukrainian who votes against Russia’s annexation, as ISW previously reported.[40] Russian occupation authorities could also confiscate Ukrainian passports, making it more difficult for Ukrainian civilians to flee occupied areas.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin is continuing to replace Ukrainian collaborators in occupation administrations with Russian officials, likely to prepare for formal Russian governance of annexed areas. Russian authorities replaced the head of the Kherson Oblast Civil-Military Administration, Ukrainian collaborator Vladimir Saldo, with Russian Deputy Head of Kaliningrad Oblast Sergey Yeliseyev on August 4. Yeliseyev was an employee of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) from 1993-2005.[41] Saldo announced that he was leaving his position to seek medical treatment after consultations with colleagues and doctors. Russian sources reported that he suffered from a form of nervous exhaustion after complications from COVID-19, while the Russian outlet BAZA and various Ukrainian partisan sources suggested he had been poisoned and was in a medically induced coma.[42] Ukrainian partisan channel Zalizna Palianytsia boasted that the ”fate of the traitors has been decided in advance;” either Ukrainian partisans will kill them, or Russians will poison them.[43]

[1] https://strana dot today/news/402398-iran-peredal-rossii-bespilotniki-rossijane-ispolzujut-ikh-v-vojne-protiv-ukrainy.html

[2] https://strana dot today/news/402398-iran-peredal-rossii-bespilotniki-rossijane-ispolzujut-ikh-v-vojne-protiv-ukrainy.html; https://censor dot net/ua/news/3356154/iran_peredav_rf_boyiovi_bezpilotnyky_shahed_129_djerelo; https://cybershafarat dot com/2022/08/05/islamic-republic-of-iran-delivered-46-drones-to-russia/; https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/irans-drone-inventory-and-poten...

[17] https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/413; https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/418; https://t.me/vilkul/1686; https://t.me/mykola_lukashuk/915; https://t.me/dnipropetrovskaODA/1472; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/05/vorog-obstrilyav-iz-gradiv-zhytlovi-kvartaly-nikopolya/; . https://t.me/spravdi/14781; https://t.me/spravdi/14776; https://twitter.com/EmineDzheppar/status/1555094719407001600

[18] https://t.me/mykolaivskaODA/2019; https://t.me/senkevichonline/1947; https://t.me/mykolaivskaoblrada/3384; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/05/u-mykolayevi-vranczi-progrymily-potuzhni-vybuhy/; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/05/vden-rosijski-okupanty-obstrilyaly-mykolayiv-ye-zagybli/

[22] https://ria dot ru/20220805/obstrel-1807586790.html

[25] https://t.me/operativnoZSU/35155

[26] https://twitter.com/PaulJawin/status/1555407688930136067?s=20&t=XaRQAeIKOrTKgWHDsslHaw;%20https://twitter.com/neonhandrail/status/1555440063072243712?s=20&t=XaRQAeIKOrTKgWHDsslHaw; https://twitter.com/neonhandrail/status/1554232385385799680?s=20&t=XaRQAeIKOrTKgWHDsslHaw

[27] https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1555185860651491331?s=20&t=XaRQAeIKOrTKgWHDsslHaw; https://twitter.com/PauliusZaleckas/status/1555474361087401984?s=20&t=XaRQAeIKOrTKgWHDsslHaw

[29] https://regnum dot ru/news/society/3658860.html

[31] https://bk55 dot ru/news/article/205829/?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.com

[32] https://bk55 dot ru/news/article/205829/?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.com

[33] https://bk55 dot ru/news/article/205739/

[36] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/tryvaie-prymusova-pasportyzatsiia-na-okupovanykh-terytoriiakh.html

[41] https://focus dot ua/voennye-novosti/524528-polnomochiya-peredal-eks-sotrudniku-fsb-hersonskiy-kollaborant-saldo-gospitalizirovan

understandingwar.org

2. Ukrainian partisans ‘fought like special forces’ against Putin’s army

Ukrainian partisans ‘fought like special forces’ against Putin’s army

The Times · by Marc Bennetts, Borodyanka · August 5, 2022

WORLD IN DEPTH

A band of untested volunteers delayed the Russian advance at a crucial point in the invasion, but they have received little by way of recognition, writes Marc Bennetts

Serhii Piven, right, and a fellow partisan fighter with one of the fifty or more Russian tanks and armoured vehicles they destroyed

The men sat in the shade, flanked by bombed-out apartment blocks as they reminisced about their war. In late February, as a huge Russian military convoy advanced on Borodyanka, a town near Kyiv, Serhii Piven, a brawny Ukrainian lieutenant-colonel, headed up a small group of partisan fighters preparing to face down President Putin’s invading army.

Piven, head of the town’s military commissar’s office, had refused an order to withdraw and leave behind only a rearguard force. “I answered that I would not abandon the people,” he said. “This is my land and I wasn’t going to run away.”

He gathered about 45 fighters to defend Borodyanka and handed them each a Kalashnikov assault rifle. About half of them had never served in the army. Did they even know how to shoot a gun? “Roughly. The rest worked it out,” Piven said.

Large swathes of Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, have been left in ruins by the Russian occupation

IONUT IORDACHESCU/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

For the next day and a half, dressed mainly in tracksuits, Piven and his men took the battle to the Russian army, springing deadly ambushes and bolstering their firepower with grenade launchers and other weapons that they seized from their fallen foes. “We were the first serious resistance that they had faced,” he said. “They thought they would just parade into Kyiv.”

They destroyed about fifty tanks and armoured vehicles, buying the Ukrainian army vital time to strengthen its defensive positions around Kyiv. Seven of the partisans were killed before the group finally melted away into the surrounding forest.

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“Our intelligence services told us later that they had intercepted Russian communications. They thought we were well-trained special forces,” Piven said. “It’s not that the Russians fought badly, just that we fought well. We know this area, we’ve lived here all our lives. We knew exactly where to engage them.”

As we sat in the town square they took out their smartphones and showed me images from the raging battle: dead Russian soldiers, burnt-out tanks, and streets strewn with the detritus of war. Yet the men, their faces etched with tiredness, admitted that their experiences have left them damaged psychologically. “The hairs on my arm are standing up even as I speak about this,” said Piven.

Whole neighbourhoods have been rendered unusable in Borodyanka

IONUT IORDACHESCU/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

All say they have had trouble sleeping since the fighting in Borodyanka ended. Some have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a common ailment among soldiers who have seen front-line action.

“At first, I couldn’t sleep at all,” said Vitaly Shevchenko, a military analyst who had no battlefield experience before the invasion. “Now, I get by on four hours a night.”

They also say they have become more aggressive, inclined to flare up at the slightest hint of injustice, even within their families. “Before the war I could discuss things that annoyed me in a normal way,” Piven said. “Not anymore.” Some deal with the stress in their own way. “I want to shoot all the time,” said Viktor Romanchuk, another partisan fighter. “I spent a lot of time at the shooting range.”

Piven said his men have not been given any official papers certifying that they are suffering any long-term effects of the fighting. The lack of documents means they will not be entitled to free medical treatment in the future. “Something needs to be done,” he said. “They need to be able to prove that they fought here.”

A Mykolaiv resident tries to salvage anything of value from the rubble of an apartment block destroyed by Russian shelling

METIN AKTAS/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

There is also a sense of lingering resentment that not everyone in their home town appreciated their sacrifices. “Some people said to us, ‘why did you fight back? If you hadn’t offered resistance, then our houses would still be standing,’” Piven said, gesturing at the shattered remains of tower blocks. He shook his head. “A friend — well, a former friend now — said this to me and I replied: ‘Did you want your teenage daughter to be raped by six Russian soldiers? What about your wife?’”

Russia’s brutal invasion has traumatised a large swathe of the civilian population, and half of all Ukrainian families are believed to have been split up by the fighting. In Kyiv, refugees from Mariupol, the port city that was devastated by Russian bombing, receive food packages at aid centres. They can get professional assistance to try and help them cope with the horrors they have witnessed and their feelings of despair.

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“They are afraid of loud noises, of talking to people. Those people who sat in basements for two or three months under shelling are constantly worried that they will run out of food,” said Anna Chasovnikova, a psychologist who also escaped the city. “Lots of people, those who have lost family members or homes, just don’t see any sense in going on.”

Volunteers from the Repair Together initiative help residents clear rubble from a house destroyed by the Russians in Ivanivka, a village in the Chernihiv region, another scene of early fighting in the war

ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA

She told of a 64-year-old woman from Mariupol who fled to the relative safety of Kyiv, but later threw herself off the 15th floor of an apartment block after suffering from depression. “Before the war lots of people had a negative attitude towards psychologists, and they thought they could deal with their problems themselves. But now people realise that they need help.”

The proximity of Mariupol to Russia, whose border is barely 40 miles away, exacerbated the sense of shock for many residents, while the lack of empathy and concern shown by friends and relatives in Russia prompted feelings of confusion and hurt. “There was utter incomprehension that a neighbouring country could attack us like this,” Chasovnikova said. “My godmother in Moscow wrote to me at the start of the war: ‘don’t worry, our army is there to liberate you.’ But liberate me from what? My work, my life, my family?”

Back in Borodyanka, I asked Piven and his fellow fighters if they are haunted by the faces of the Russian soldiers that they killed at close range. “It’s not like in the films,” said Shevchenko. “I felt absolutely no emotions at all.” Others nodded in agreement.

“To be honest, I want them to come back again,” Piven said. “So I can kill more of them.”

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Global politics

The Times · by Marc Bennetts, Borodyanka · August 5, 2022

3. Mozart Group: the western ex-military personnel training Ukrainian recruits

Mozart Group: the western ex-military personnel training Ukrainian recruits

Volunteers deliver crash courses in battlefield tactics that should take six months to teach

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

by Ed Ram

The Guardian · by Ed Ram · August 5, 2022

“Stand by,” shouts a former US Marine. “Threat!” comes the next call and a volley of gunshots echoes around a disused quarry, in a Ukrainian hillside, just a few miles from the frontline of the war.

Dust kicked up by the bullets mixes with the men’s sweat in the 30C heat. “That is not the gun,” says the trainer, singling out a frustrated looking man who had peppered a target five metres away with small holes. “You were putting the sight on a different spot every time.”

The Ukrainian recruits undertake target practice in a quarry near the frontline.

In the heart of the Donbas, a group of eight highly experienced western ex-military personnel are delivering an intensive 10-day training course for 40 new Ukrainian recruits who have been pulled straight from the fighting.

As the battle for Ukraine’s east grinds on, soldiers in the Donbas have been taking heavy casualties in a vicious artillery battle. Ukraine’s professional fighting force, who have been defending the eastern frontline since 2014, are severely depleted. Since 24 February new recruits have been surging to the frontline, many with shockingly little training.

The recruits on the course have a patchwork of equipment: different weapons, fatigues and body armour of varying quality. Aged between their early 20s and mid 50s, the men are of all shapes, sizes and levels of fitness.

Andy Milburn, left, talks to an interpreter.

One in 10 was in the military before the war and they have had very little formal training, explains Andy Milburn, founder of the Mozart Group, a new private security company that’s tasked itself with training Ukrainian soldiers.

Milburn, a retired Marine Corps colonel who spent 31 years in the US military, gathered expert volunteers to train civilians fighting in Kyiv’s civil defence force as they defended their capital. Now based in Donbas, the Mozart Group consists of between 20 and 30 volunteers from the US, the UK, Ireland and other western countries.

The Mozart Group’s name was coined by its members as a tongue-in-cheek musical reference to the Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian paramilitary organisation that’s often described as Vladimir Putin’s private army. Milburn says at first he was “a little ambivalent about using the name” but that it has “caught on as a brand now”.

Recruits on the 10-day training course

Since 2014 the Wagner Group has operated in insecure, low-income countries, including Syria, Libya and Central African Republic, protecting Russian interests with little regard for human rights or international law.

“I didn’t want to be associated with or compared to the Wagner group. We are not a counter to the Wagner Group; what we do is quite a bit different,” Milburn says.

Largely funded by US private donors and made up of carefully vetted recruits, the Mozart Group also delivers humanitarian aid including sanitary products and food to frontline towns, and extracts vulnerable people from high risk areas of fighting.

Ukrainian soldiers are given five- or 10-day crash courses in basic weapon handling, marksmanship, fire and manoeuvre and battlefield tactics that would ideally take six months to teach. The trainers have taught thousands of troops to speak to recruits via two interpreters, which Milburn says is not enough for the job but they have struggled to find people with the necessary skills.

Bison provides first aid to a soldier who had been hit by a hot bullet casing during target practice

“I’m yet to fight on the frontline but we have been manning positions that have been shelled and hit by rocket attacks,” a 42-year-old soldier who identified himself only by his call sign Bison tells the Guardian during firing practice, dressed in a secondhand British camouflage tunic with a union jack badge stitched on the sleeve.

Bison, a mechanical engineer from Dnipro, bought a hunting rifle after the war started, to get some shooting practice and is now operating as a platoon medic. “I did a week’s tactical medical course after having a bad cycling accident during the Covid lockdown. I told them and they made me a medic,” He says with a smile and a medical pack attached to his body armour.

An interpreter, centre, liaises between a trainer, left, and soldier

That’s more than most medics, according to Dathan, a former advanced paramedic who spent 23 years serving in the Irish military in counties including Syria and Kosovo, and joined the Mozart Group in May.

“You ask medics what their qualifications are and they say: ‘Well I was given this bag and now I’m the medic’,” says Dathan.

“Only one out of this group of 40 had zeroed his weapon before the training started,” says Milburn as he walks through the scrub to the makeshift training ground. Zeroing a weapon means aligning the sights so you can accurately aim at a target. “That’s the first thing you do,” says Milburn.

The Ukrainian troops are trained close to the frontline as their commanders cannot risk their soldiers being away from the battlefield for too long in case the Russians try to advance. Ideally these groups would be training 100 to 120 men at a time but they can’t afford to take them from their positions, says Milburn.

“It’s backwards: you don’t go to combat first and then come back to be trained,” Dathan agrees. “The Ukrainian government doesn’t want to say that most of their military isn’t really trained. But they are trying to fight the Russians who, luckily enough, aren’t trained either.”

Targets stand in a quarry near the frontline

“This is what it must have been like in world war one,” says Alex (not his real name), speaking to the Guardian over the phone from Bulgaria. Alex is former UK soldier who was taking a break but said he intended to come back to help permanently.

“They are 36-, 37-year-old men and four months ago these guys were taxi drivers or farmers. None of them want to be in the army, but they say our country has been invaded. What do you expect us to do? Massive respect to them. But it is quite sad to be honest,” says Alex.

But what the troops lack in experience they make up for in enthusiasm and determination. “They are upbeat, they listen, they are attentive and most of all they have a great sense of humour,” says Milburn, looking over the training exercise.

“They don’t complain, take everything in and give 100%,” Dathan agrees.

Tiger, a 22-year-old soldier who was studying law in Dnipro when the war started, says he is now completing the last year of his degree remotely while getting ready to fight.

A soldier adjusts Tiger’s kit

Mozart’s members are keen to separate themselves from the influx of war tourists and want-to-be fighters who could be found telling stories and propping up hotel bars in expensive new military outfits in Kyiv at the start of the conflict. “It’s dangerous,” Alex says. “You might get yourself or someone else injured or killed – and it damages relations between westerners and Ukrainians.”

The trainers say they joined the Mozart Group to become “combat multipliers”, saying it made sense to train hundreds of Ukrainians rather than risk quickly getting killed in the fighting. The UK government website says those travelling “to fight, or to assist others engaged in the war” could be prosecuted on returning to the UK.

From speaking to Ukrainian troops and commanders, Alex and Milburn agree that US and western weapons systems and military equipment are not being used or distributed correctly due to Ukrainians lacking training and skills.

“They are not deploying the weapons,” said Alex, who, during his seven and a half years with the British military, specialised and trained in the use of Javelins and NLAWs, hi-tech US and UK anti-tank weapons, the use of which proved pivotal in Ukraine’s success in pushing Russia back from Kyiv in March.

Alex says he understands from conversations with commanders that without the proper training, the $178,000 Javelins systems are being misused or becoming redundant, with sophisticated sight batteries running out before the rockets are fired. “They are not getting the training they need,” says Alex.

Nestor, centre, a 26-year-old Ukrainian soldier from Dnipro

At the end of the marksmanship lesson, the troops gather around for a briefing and Q and A session. “Where should the metal plates be positioned ideally in our armour?” asks one man, and the trainer gives a demo while the men look on, listening intensely. “I’m becoming more calm as I get more training,” says Bison when asked if he was worried about going to the frontline.

Nestor, a 26-year-old Ukrainian soldier also from Dnipro, one of the few who had been fighting in the Donbas since 2014, went back to their firing range with Rob, the former US Marine, to get some more tips on changing magazines once the debrief had finished. “These instructors are amazing, it’s so detailed no matter your experience level,” Nestor says. Of the 15 friends Nestor has lost to fighting in the conflict since 2014, 10 have died this year.

The Ukrainian troops are trained close to the frontline as their commanders can’t risk their soldiers being away from the battlefield for too long

While they have supplied weapons and training overseas, the US, the UK, the EU and other western allies have not deployed troops to Ukraine for fear of the conflict escalating to a war between Russia and Nato. However, Andy Milburn wishes he had more contact with the US government.

Asked whether he shares intelligence with the US, he replies: “That’s kind of the easy part” – and explains that the US government is concerned that if they fund Mozart, the group might turn into a private military contractor becoming involved in the fighting itself.

If any of the Mozart Group volunteers do get involved in the fighting, they are no longer part of the Mozart Group, Milburn explains. “There is a very clear line.”

The Guardian · by Ed Ram · August 5, 2022

4. Obituary: Gary Schroen, the CIA spy sent to get Osama Bin Laden

The shared battlespace of unconventional warfare between the CIA and Special Forces. The CIA has long established relations, resources, and authorities while SF brings relative "mass" and specific capabilities necessary to conduct UW on broad scale.

Excerpts:

"His experience in Afghanistan prior to September 11, 2001 was absolutely pivotal to our success there in the initial invasion, an invasion which he led," Mr Mulroy told the BBC. "Being on the first team into Afghanistan, Gary set the example and exemplified the concept of leading from the front."

As a military operation, the invasion of Afghanistan was remarkably successful and drove the Taliban from power by December 2001. But Schroen's main target - Bin Laden - and other senior Al-Qaeda figures such as Al-Zawahiri escaped, while the Taliban regrouped and fought a long guerrilla war that culminated in the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul last year.

In interviews later in his life, Schroen said the failure of the US to secure Afghanistan and capture its main enemies there was, in large part, due to a drain on both CIA and military resources caused by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Obituary: Gary Schroen, the CIA spy sent to get Osama Bin Laden

BBC · by Menu

By Bernd Debusmann Jr

BBC News

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Image caption,

Gary Schroen during a 2005 appearance on NBC

On 19 September, 2001 - with the ruins of the World Trade Center and Pentagon still smouldering from the 9/11 attacks - CIA officer Gary Schroen stepped into his boss's office and received a set of orders: "Capture Bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice".

As for Osama Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, and the rest of Al-Qaeda's inner circle, the orders were equally straightforward: "Their heads up on pikes".

Within days, Schroen and a motley crew of paramilitary officers became the first Americans on the ground in Afghanistan, armed with little more than satellite phones - but also millions of dollars in cash to curry favour with potential allies. Weeks later, on 7 October, the US begins its attack on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, sparking a nearly 20 year-long war that ended in August 2021.

Bin Laden was taken out in 2011, but it took another decade to kill Zawahiri.

And on 1 August - just one day after a US drone finally caught up to him in Kabul - Gary Schroen died at the age of 80, reportedly of a stroke.

• Was al-Qaeda leader killed by bladed missile?
• US kills al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan drone strike

In the wake of his death, CIA director William Burns hailed Schroen as "a legend and inspiration" to every officer working inside the US spy agency.

"In Afghanistan more than two decades ago and in every other role he served at CIA, Gary embodied the very best of our organisation," Mr Burns said. "We will never forget his unwavering dedication, loyalty and perseverance."

Few if any officers serving in the CIA at the time were better suited to lead the initial operation. Over the course of a career that spanned decades, Schroen served as the CIA's "station chief" for both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s.

At that time, "there was no interest by the US government" in Afghanistan, he later recalled in an interview with PBS,

"The Taliban were there. Everyone knew that they were committing human rights violations and were just a miserable government, treating their people terribly," he said. "But really, no one back in Washington really cared that much."

Image source, Central Intelligence Agency Twitter

Image caption,

CIA officers in a helicopter with $3m cash for Afghan commanders on 19 September, 2001 in a CIA photo.

By 1996, however, Schroen said that the "equation had changed" after US intelligence began to focus on the activities of Osama Bin Laden, a then-relatively unknown jihadist and veteran of the guerrilla war against the Soviets in the 1980s.

Schroen formed part of a small group within the CIA's Counterterrorism Center that warned of the threat from the Saudi national. Schroen soon began re-establishing contact with Afghan commanders whom he had known from his time in the region.

For the next three years, at Schroen's direction, the CIA repeatedly tried to kill or capture Bin Laden, with plans ranging from ambushes on his convoy and raids on his farm in southern Afghanistan to cruise missiles and bombing raids.

Ultimately, Bin Laden went on to orchestrate the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and survived a large-scale cruise missile attack on Al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan's Khost Province in August of that year.

Three years later, 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers launched the 9/11 attacks.

• What now for al-Qaeda?

The 2001 mission to Afghanistan - officially known as Operation Jawbreaker - would see Schroen and seven other Americans link up with the Northern Alliance, a coalition of groups fighting the Taliban government that had ruled Afghanistan since 1996. When he got his orders, Schroen, then 59, was already 11 days into the CIA's transition programme for employees going into retirement.

"I never expected I would get the call to go in," he said years later. "I think it was the right choice, given my long relationship with those guys in the Northern Alliance."

Schroen's assessment was echoed by Michael "Mick" Mulroy, a former CIA paramilitary officer, Afghan war veteran and ex-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence.

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption,

Gary Schroen's 2001 mission was to link up with Northern Alliance fighters such as these.

"His experience in Afghanistan prior to September 11, 2001 was absolutely pivotal to our success there in the initial invasion, an invasion which he led," Mr Mulroy told the BBC. "Being on the first team into Afghanistan, Gary set the example and exemplified the concept of leading from the front."

As a military operation, the invasion of Afghanistan was remarkably successful and drove the Taliban from power by December 2001. But Schroen's main target - Bin Laden - and other senior Al-Qaeda figures such as Al-Zawahiri escaped, while the Taliban regrouped and fought a long guerrilla war that culminated in the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul last year.

In interviews later in his life, Schroen said the failure of the US to secure Afghanistan and capture its main enemies there was, in large part, due to a drain on both CIA and military resources caused by the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Despite initial claims from the US administration of George W Bush that the Iraqi government was somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks, Schroen said he never believed in any linkage.

"The number of guys, CIA personnel, out in these little remote camps and bases were reduced in number...because of demand to staff up the Iraq effort," he told NPR in 2005. "It really did cost us, I think, a lot in momentum. A loss of momentum that exists still today."

Schroen finally managed to retire in the years after the Afghan invasion, and in 2005 published a book entitled "First In" about the operation.

Even years after his retirement, allies of bin Laden continued to see Schroen as a target. In 2013, the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab claimed on Twitter it had killed him, prompting unnamed US officials to tell NBC that such claims should be taken "with a grain of salt".

"Gary Schroen is alive and well," an NBC report at the time announced.

Schroen's mission lives on at CIA headquarters in Virginia: The helicopter used in the 2001 mission remains on CIA grounds as a reminder.

BBC · by Menu

5. Chinese Stages Show of Force Near Taiwan for a Third Day

We should be getting a good read on PLA capabilities.

Chinese Stages Show of Force Near Taiwan for a Third Day

The New York Times · by Vivian Wang · August 6, 2022

The live-fire military drills, which appear to be simulating an attack on the main island, have edged closer than ever before to territory Taiwan considers its own.

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A Chinese People’s Liberation Army aircraft flying over Pingtan Island, just across the strait from Taiwan, on Friday.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters

By

Aug. 6, 2022, 12:28 a.m. ET

China continued on Saturday to project its ire at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan, with its third straight day of military drills that have encroached ever closer to the island and raised concerns about potential conflict.

The Taiwanese defense ministry said on Saturday that several batches of Chinese military aircraft and warships had been detected around the Taiwan Strait, with some crossing the informal median line that divides the island from the Chinese mainland. They appeared to be engaged in an exercise simulating an attack on the main island of Taiwan, the ministry said.

Already, China’s show of force, which is expected to run through Sunday, has threatened territory that Taiwan considers its own more directly than any previous exercises had.

China has launched at least 11 missiles into the waters to the north, south and east of Taiwan, including at least one that flew over the island, though Taiwan said it was at a high altitude that constituted no threat. On Friday, it also deployed fighter jets, bombers, destroyers, drones and escort ships to waters near the island. Several of the zones the Chinese military designated for this week’s exercises are closer to the island than areas announced during the Taiwan Strait crisis in the mid-1990s, which also involved China firing missiles around Taiwan.

Since the exercises began on Thursday, at least 49 Chinese military jets have crossed the median line, according to Taiwanese officials.

Understand the China-Taiwan Tensions

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What does China mean to Taiwan? China claims Taiwan, a self-governing island democracy of 23 million people, as its territory and has long vowed to take it back, by force if necessary. The island, to which Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese forces retreated after the Communist Revolution of 1949, has never been part of the People’s Republic of China.

What does Xi Jinping want? China’s leader has made it clearer than any of his predecessors that he sees unifying Taiwan with China to be a primary goal of his rule — and a key to what he calls China’s “national rejuvenation.” Mr. Xi is also keen to project an image of strength ahead of his expected confirmation to an unprecedented third term this fall.

How is the U.S. involved? In an intentionally ambiguous diplomatic arrangement adopted in 1979, the United States maintains a “one China” policy that acknowledges, but does not endorse, Beijing’s claim over Taiwan. U.S. leaders have remained vague about how they would help Taiwan if China attacked, but President Biden has pledged to defend the island.

Why are tensions rising now? Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip to Taiwan has ignited regional tensions. She is the highest-level American official to visit the island since 1997. A chorus of official Chinese bodies portrayed her trip as part of an American effort to sabotage China’s efforts at unification with Taiwan.

How is China responding? A day after Ms. Pelosi’s trip, China began live-fire military drills near Taiwan, with missiles striking seas off the island, including five that landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone waters. Amid growing international criticism, Beijing then sent warships and aircraft into waters and airspace near the island.

Taiwan’s foreign ministry said in a statement Saturday that China had “unilaterally created a crisis” by overreacting to Ms. Pelosi’s visit.

“The Taiwanese people have the right to befriend the rest of the world, and China has no right to interfere with the rest of the world befriending Taiwan,” the statement said.

The military exercises are the most visible element of the Chinese response to Ms. Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, which she had said was intended to show support for the island and its vibrant democracy. Before her arrival on Tuesday, China had repeatedly warned that the gesture by Ms. Pelosi — the highest-ranking American official to visit Taiwan in 25 years — would provoke “serious consequences.” China claims Taiwan as its own territory, and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has promised an eventual reunification, through force if necessary.

China also said on Friday that it would cancel or suspend talks with the United States on military coordination and climate change, which some analysts said could increase the chances of a miscommunication spiraling into a full-fledged crisis.

The Hsinchu Military Air Base in Taiwan on Friday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

At the same time, the United States is looking to shore up its ties with other Asian countries, as a counterweight to China’s regional and global influence. On Saturday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met with the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., in Manila. In a public exchange, Mr. Marcos told Mr. Blinken that he did not think Ms. Pelosi’s visit had “raised the intensity” of tensions in the region, which he said had already been high — an apparent rebuttal to China’s claims that the United States was responsible for the current frictions.

Fears that China would seek to physically prevent Ms. Pelosi’s visit were unrealized. But American officials remain concerned that the exercises, which began less than 24 hours after she left Taiwan, could still escalate, intentionally or accidentally, into more direct conflict.

Chinese officials, who have encouraged swaggering and at times virulent nationalism at home, may feel pressure to show that they are putting on a strong response. Some Chinese social media users have expressed disappointment or embarrassment that the government did not go further to prevent Ms. Pelosi’s visit; some made it clear that they had been expecting military action.

Even if the drills do not directly escalate into a full-blown crisis, they could signal a new pattern of aggression and incursions by the Chinese military. The Global Times, a state-run tabloid, said in an editorial on Friday that the work of promoting reunification with Taiwan had “entered a new stage.”

The United States has tried to avoid provoking China further. It has said that it remains committed to the status quo in Taiwan, acknowledging China’s stated claim to the island without recognizing it. The Pentagon ordered the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan to “remain on station” in the region, while maintaining some distance from the Taiwan Strait.

But China has made it clear that it regards any criticism of its exercises as an affront. It has summoned several ambassadors after their countries expressed concern about the drills. After some of the Chinese missiles landed on Thursday in waters that Japan claims as its own, leading Japan’s prime minister to call for an “immediate halt,” a representative for the Chinese Embassy in Japan told Japan not to “slide into the abyss” of geopolitical confrontation.

Amy Chang Chien, John Liu and Edward Wong contributed reporting.

The New York Times · by Vivian Wang · August 6, 2022

6. Ex-diplomat says there are 'more intelligent ways' for the U.S. to support Taiwan than to visit

Excerpts:

While an immediate war is not likely, Rudd is concerned the Chinese may see Pelosi's visit as a U.S. walk-back from its 1982 agreement to recognize the "one China policy."

"Then I think we're in a whole new world," he said on CNBC's "Capital Connection."

"You have an increasingly febrile, fractious relationship between the two countries," he said. "It simply takes off a match to light a flame, which then catches fire more or less."

"That is what I'm concerned about — not tomorrow, not next month, but certainly in the years ahead, particularly as [Chinese President] Xi Jinping is likely to be re-elected or reappointed."

A war down the line can't be completely ruled out, however, especially when U.S.-China relations are unlikely to recover in the next decade, Rudd said.

Ex-diplomat says there are 'more intelligent ways' for the U.S. to support Taiwan than to visit​

KEY POINTS

• There are “more intelligent ways” to support Taiwan than for U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit the island, former permanent Secretary at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bilahari Kausikan said. 
• 
  
• The move could create negative ripple effects in undermining efforts by the U.S. and other countries to support Taiwan in the future and agitating further Taiwan’s political relationship with China.
• 
  
• China may see Pelosi’s visit as a U.S. as a walk-back from its 1982 agreement to recognize the “one China policy,” former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says.

​

CNBC · by Su-Lin Tan · August 6, 2022

VIDEO3:1403:14

More intelligent ways to give Taiwan support it needs: Bilahari says of Pelosi visit

Street Signs Asia

There are "more intelligent ways" to support Taiwan than for U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to have visited the island, former permanent secretary at Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bilahari Kausikan told CNBC.

The move could undermine efforts by the U.S. and other countries to support Taiwan in the future and has further complicated Taiwan's political relationship with China, he told CNBC's "Street Signs Asia" on Friday.

"I think Taiwan needs support and deserves support but has this achieved anything that is worthwhile? I don't think so. In fact, I think it has made things worse," Kausikan said.

Ignoring weeks of warnings from Beijing, Pelosi visited Taiwan and met President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday. Taiwan is a self-ruled democracy, but Beijing considers the island a breakaway province and says it has no right to conduct foreign relations.

Pelosi's visit makes her the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Taiwan in 25 years.

China launched military drills in the airspace and waters around Taiwan the next day. On Friday, Beijing announced sanctions against Pelosi and her immediate family members, though the content of those sanctions was unspecified.

Speaker of the U.S. House Of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), left, poses for photographs with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, right, at the president's office on August 03, 2022 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Handout | Getty Images

"What Taiwan needs is certain capabilities … what Taiwan needs is diplomatic support. What Taiwan does not need is a visit, that may give you a feel-good moment … and after that, may deter other countries from visiting Taiwan, if they look at China's robust response," Kausikan said.

Whether the visit was good or bad for Taiwan remains "at least an open question," he said. "There are many other ways, more intelligent ways, less risky ways of giving Taiwan the support it needs and deserves."

Kausikan said the visit could upset the status quo in the region and that prompted China to react in a "semi-hysterical way," adding that it "gave China an excuse" to fire missiles close to Taiwan.

You have an increasingly febrile, fractious relationship between the two countries. It simply takes off a match to light a flame, which then catches fire more or less.

Kevin Rudd

Former Australian Prime Minister

Still, the ex-diplomat maintained that a conflict between China and Taiwan is unlikely.

China is not eager to attack Taiwan and broad military consensus has suggested that China does not yet have the capability to launch a full scale "amphibious" military operation, he said.

"And don't forget, for all the bluster that China put out before — during and after the visit — it still failed to deter the visit," Kausikan said.

But accidents happen and they have in the past, he added.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said that it's the potential accidents that are most concerning.

VIDEO3:0403:04

Ex-prime minister of Australia on his biggest concern from Pelosi's Taiwan visit

Capital Connection

While an immediate war is not likely, Rudd is concerned the Chinese may see Pelosi's visit as a U.S. walk-back from its 1982 agreement to recognize the "one China policy."

"Then I think we're in a whole new world," he said on CNBC's "Capital Connection."

"You have an increasingly febrile, fractious relationship between the two countries," he said. "It simply takes off a match to light a flame, which then catches fire more or less."

"That is what I'm concerned about — not tomorrow, not next month, but certainly in the years ahead, particularly as [Chinese President] Xi Jinping is likely to be re-elected or reappointed."

A war down the line can't be completely ruled out, however, especially when U.S.-China relations are unlikely to recover in the next decade, Rudd said.

CNBC · by Su-Lin Tan · August 6, 2022

7. China’s military exercises are an intel bonanza — for all sides

My question for the intelligence analysts: Is China showing us how they will attack and invade Taiwan or is CHina showing us how they want us to think they are going to attack and invade taiwan? What are their real plans and intentions?

China’s military exercises are an intel bonanza — for all sides

By PAUL MCLEARY and LARA SELIGMAN

08/05/2022 02:52 PM EDT

Politico

Washington, Beijing and Taipei are watching each other closely as events unfold near Taiwan.

The dozens of warplanes flying daily over the median line in the Taiwan Strait and warships prowling the waters off the coast represent a significant and ominous change to the status quo. | Huizhong Wu, File/AP Photo

08/05/2022 02:52 PM EDT

China’s massing of ships, aircraft and missiles near Taiwan is giving the U.S. a never-before-seen glimpse of how Beijing might launch a military campaign against the island. But China is also learning plenty of lessons that could eventually prove more important in how it plans for any future strike against the island of 23 million people.

For all of China’s military might, the People’s Liberation Army has limited real-world experience outside of highly-choreographed domestic military exercises and hasn’t fired a shot in anger since border scraps with Vietnam that ended in the 1980s.

That makes these quickly assembled exercises around Taiwan a critical test for Beijing. China has brought dozens of aircraft, 13 ships, missile batteries and their crews to bear in the last days, signaling an ability to deploy quickly, even if it’s close to home. Its ability to sustain those operations over time, if that’s what Beijing decides, will be a critical test for the military, and closely watched.

The dozens of warplanes flying daily over the median line in the Taiwan Strait and warships prowling the waters off the coast represent a significant and ominous change to the status quo, and one that could have enormous consequences for the defense of Taiwan in the future, experts and officials said.

Pushing those warplanes over the line not only erases the previous boundary, but doing so in coordination with warships and staying clear of the missiles flying in close proximity is exactly the kind of real-time interaction that modern militaries spend so much time and effort to perfect, and has famously confounded the Russians in Ukraine. Getting those systems aligned, while watching Taiwan’s reaction, would yield critical knowledge about both capacity and readiness for Beijing if it launches military strikes against Taiwan or American interests in the Pacific.

Chinese military planners are no doubt soaking up the reaction to their efforts, as Taiwan activates missile defense radars and moves troops and equipment around the island, giving Beijing key insights into how Taipei might react in time of war.

Previous Chinese drills have been “like driving a new car around a lot, as opposed to taking it out on the highway,” said Randy Schriver, who served as the Pentagon’s top Asia policy official in the Trump administration. “The coordinated bracketing of the island is the kind of exercise that will be more applicable to an actual strike.”

To this point, the United States has publicly held back, saying very little about the exercises while keeping its Japan-based USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group in the region, but not close to Taiwan. The amphibious ship USS Tripoli is near Okinawa and the amphibious USS America is in the East China Sea. Both carry F-35 fighters.

More significant will be the glimpses into how China deploys and uses its forces. It will likely be a “bonanza of intelligence,” that could yield insights into “the strengths and weaknesses of PLA mobilization,” said Collin Koh, a research fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore.

Those peeks “would present a better picture of how the PLA may in future prosecute an invasion of Taiwan, or more generally how it would conduct a major military campaign,” than any long-planned exercise on the Chinese mainland ever could, Koh added.

Defense officials said the military is watching the exercises closely, but generally, they have remained quiet about the Chinese actions. White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby has said repeatedly this week that the U.S. isn’t looking for a conflict with China.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while traveling in Cambodia Friday, said “there is no justification for this extreme, disproportionate, and escalatory military response,” adding the Chinese moves “are a significant escalation” in the region.

While the Chinese military has tested its missiles for years, their launch crews have never worked in an operational scenario where they have to wrestle with the complexities of military and commercial air and sea traffic, and ensure their missiles can make it over populated civilian areas and land safely in designated waters.

Ahead of the live-fire exercises this week, Beijing unveiled a map of six zones where it planned to conduct the drills, forming a virtual ring around Taiwan. After the drills began on Thursday, the military launched at least 11 ballistic missiles, which splashed into the waters northeast, east and southeast of the island. Some landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, and one flew directly over Taiwan, an unprecedented action.

On Friday, China sent 30 fighter planes across the median line that cuts the Taiwan Strait in half, according to Taiwan’s defense ministry. The move “jeopardized the status quo of the strait,” the agency tweeted, noting that Taipei responded by scrambling aircraft and ships, as well as activating surveillance and anti-aircraft missile systems.

“We condemn such action that disturbed our surrounding airspace and waters and continue to ensure our democracy and freedom free from threats,” the ministry tweeted.

The drills may be designed as intimidation, but the highly choreographed and coordinated movements are much more complex than previous shows of force, Schriver said.

“This is several shots targeted at different closure areas timed in a particular way, so that more closely resembles if they were actually going to use missiles to strike Taiwan,” he said.

For the Chinese, the exercise is also a chance to find out whether Taiwan’s air defenses were able to pick up their missile launches, and how Taiwan’s civil defenses would respond to an attack, Schriver said.

“They would likely know, did Taiwan’s air defenses pick us up? Did they light us up with a fire control radar?” he said.

The drills have provided an opportunity to not just test whether their missiles can hit their targets in an operational scenario, but also whether China’s ships and planes can effectively blockade the island through their military movements.

The last time China made moves around Taiwan to this extent was in 1996, when Beijing fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait after being angered by Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s visit to the United States to give a speech about the island’s democratization.

But the modernized Chinese military of today barely resembles the force of 1996, boasting of new missiles, the largest navy in the world, two aircraft carriers, and fighter planes that rival Taiwan’s F-16s and U.S. carrier-based jets.

“The PLA then couldn’t do any of this,” said Lonnie Henley, a lecturer at George Washington University and former defense intelligence officer for East Asia.

“The things that the PLA is doing are perfectly routine things for the PLA to do these days,” Henley added. “They’re just doing them all at once surrounding Taiwan, instead of doing them spread out over a period of a couple of months at a number of training zones throughout the East China Sea and South China Sea.”

But Taiwan hasn’t been sitting on its hands either over the past decades. For years it has purchased U.S. F-16 fighters and other equipment, and in late 2020 reached a flurry of arms deals with Washington for highly sophisticated systems meant to make the island a “porcupine” to better deter or withstand a Chinese invasion. The deals included four armed MQ-9B drones, eleven High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems — the same weapon that Ukraine has made a household name — and Harpoon ship-killing missiles.

But Taiwan and the U.S. military are now seeing, for the first time, an indication of what they might soon have to fight.

Decades of carefully planned training exercises are vastly different from quick-moving military operations in unpredictable environments, and this latest crisis gives China its closest brush with the real world and its complications. The quick-reaction exercises “allows the PLA to put to test and validate the outcomes of its modernization” efforts and reforms carried out over recent decades,” Koh said.

“This latest Taiwan Strait crisis presents the opportunity to evaluate their capabilities and identify weaknesses to work on,” he added. “The PLA is likely to glean a lot about itself in the process.”

POLITICO

Politico

8. Canadian military’s special operations members helping train Ukrainians: sources

There is enough work for all of NATO SOF.

Canadian military’s special operations members helping train Ukrainians: sources

Mercedes Stephenson and Amanda Connolly - Yesterday 2:25 p.m.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newspolitics/canadian-militarys-special-operations-members-helping-train-ukrainians-sources/ar-AA10m2F0

© AP Photo/Roman Koksarov, File)

FILE - Canadian soldiers attend the NATO military exercises ''Namejs 2021'' at a training ground in Kadaga, Latvia, on Monday, Sept. 13, 2021. NATO responded to Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula by bolstering its forces near Russia and conducting drills on the territory of its Baltic members _ the maneuvers the Kremlin described as a security threat. (AP Photo/Roman Koksarov, File)

ground in Ukraine. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated they would be assisting with the training plan announced on Thursday that will see regular force members working in the U.K. Global News regrets this error.

Elite Canadian operators from the Canadian Special Operations Command are training Ukrainians on the ground in Ukraine, multiple sources tell Global News.

Sources told Global News the members from the Canadian Special Operations Command are also facilitating weapons and equipment delivery.

Global News is not identifying which units are involved due to operational security concerns.

The news comes after Defence Minister Anita Anand had announced plans to have regular Canadian Forces members deploy to the U.K. as part of a plan to specifically train Ukrainian recruits, describing it as a fulfilment of the pledge the Canadian government made when it paused the Operation Unifier training mission in Ukraine shortly ahead of the Russian invasion earlier this year.

Read more:

Canadian Forces will train Ukrainian soldiers in the U.K. on countering Russia

The Canadian Special Operations Command did not deny the operations but declined to comment when contacted by Global News. In an interview, Anand also did not deny the operations.

"In terms of special forces and their location and information along those lines, it would be imprudent for me to provide that information," she said in a Thursday interview with Global News.

"These are very sensitive matters and I take my role as Canada's minister of national defence very seriously, including the protection and the safety and security of our troops across the board. And so I will leave it at that."

The New York Times had previously reported the presence of some Canadian special operations members in Ukraine, but their role and presence had not been confirmed until now by any Canadian media.

The training rotation Anand announced on Thursday will see up to 225 Canadian Forces members deployed to the U.K. over the next four months, with the first group of trainers departing next week.

They will train Ukrainian recruits on front-line combat and the rules of combat under international law, with Anand calling the training program “extensive.”

The Canadian Press also reported on Thursday that training support will focus on teaching Ukrainians how to use the four M777 howitzers that Canada donated earlier this year, as well as cyber assistance through Canada’s electronic spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment.

Anand said on Thursday the world is now entering “a new and very dangerous phase of this conflict” as Russian President Vladimir Putin attempts to cause “long-term damage” on Ukraine.

9.  What Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan Tells Us about U.S.-China Relations

Is Pelosi's visit the tipping point?

Conclusion:

Future scholars and analysts may well identify Beijing’s Taiwan tipping point as Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to the island. But, in the immediate aftermath of the visit, careful attention ought to focus on close monitoring of Chinese rhetoric and actions, as well as unambiguous and consistent U.S. messaging. This effort is vital if the two countries are to avoid unintended escalation and unwanted war in the coming weeks, months and years.

What Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan Tells Us about U.S.-China Relations

Clear U.S. messaging and careful monitoring of Chinese rhetoric and actions are vital to avoiding escalation over Taiwan.

Friday, August 5, 2022 / BY: Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.

usip.org

The media-driven speculation surrounding the lead up to U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan contributed to an alarmist atmosphere in which multiple experts and analysts warned of a dangerous crisis, which threatened to escalate into a military confrontation between the United States and China. The visit is not without precedent. Members of Congress routinely travel to Taiwan, although the last speaker to visit the island was Newt Gingrich in 1997.

Stepping back from the pre-trip hype and the intense attention focused on Pelosi’s actual visit to Taiwan on August 2 and 3, what does the episode tell us about the state of U.S.-China relations? Three points come to mind. First, it demonstrates the central and contentious place Taiwan now occupies in relations between the United States and China. Second, the ominous trends that Washington and Beijing perceive are more important that the specifics of any single episode. Third, nevertheless, one pivotal episode could turn out to be a tipping point in U.S.-China relations — becoming the event that pushes Beijing on a trajectory to war.

Taiwan is Center Stage in U.S.-China Relations

In 2022, Taiwan is ground zero in heightened great power competition between the United States and China. While the island has long been the most contentious issue in U.S.-China relations and the location of multiple crises during the 1950s, in the aftermath of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, both Washington and Beijing worked hard to manage the Taiwan issue. Insisting that Taiwan is part of China, Beijing demanded that Washington adopt a “one China” policy as a precondition for rapprochement, and successive U.S. administrations tried to balance avoiding unduly antagonizing China as they simultaneously sought to provide continued support to Taiwan. Until Washington and Beijing established formal diplomatic relations in 1979, Washington retained ambassador-level ties with Taipei officially recognized as the Republic of China. Thereafter, Washington maintained quasi-official relations with Taipei under the creative framework of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA).

While most Americans have viewed ongoing U.S. ties with Taiwan as prudent and positive, providing much-needed stability in the Taiwan Strait, most Chinese have perceived American actions as contravening the spirit if not the letter of multiple formal U.S. commitments to observe a “one China” policy. From Beijing’s perspective, Washington has ignored the contents of three U.S.-China communiques, which leads it to believe that successive administrations were negotiating in bad faith. From Washington’s perspective, U.S. commitments were caveated and conditional. Caveated in the sense that a parade of presidents never endorsed China’s position, rather they merely acknowledged it; conditional in the sense that Washington expected that Beijing would conduct cross-strait relations peacefully and without coercion. This expectation is explicitly articulated in the TRA: “peace and stability in the area are in the political, security, and economic interests of the United States, and are matters of international concern. [Moreover] … the United States decision to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means…”

Trends Trump Individual Events

Second, with an overwhelming focus on the specific merits of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, what can get overlooked is that neither Beijing nor Washington views this high-profile episode in a vacuum. In short, context is everything. Both sides see the event as part of broader trends in the perceived policies of the other. Each side stresses the importance of maintaining the status quo vis-à-vis Taiwan while blaming the other side for concentrated efforts to change the status quo. While in earlier decades, both Washington and Beijing perceived trends in bilateral relations moving in the right direction and held overall positive images of the other, since the 1990s, each side began to perceive trends going in the wrong direction and formed increasingly negative images of the other.

Recent research conducted by USIP suggests China perceives that the Biden administration has undertaken a significant shift in its Taiwan policy resulting in a concerted effort to qualitatively upgrade U.S. relations with the island. This perception is the polar opposite of the message that the Biden administration intended to signal to Beijing: that U.S. policy on Taiwan has remained unchanged and is completely consistent with the approach of prior administrations. Why the misinterpretation? Clear signaling and unambiguous messaging is exceedingly difficult in the current toxic climate of U.S.-China relations, which is rife with mutual suspicion and deep distrust.

Beware the Tipping Point to Come

Third, trends notwithstanding, beware of a future tipping point — an event that may push Beijing to cross the Rubicon and prepare to take military action against Taiwan. Malcolm Gladwell defines a tipping point as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” In the context of China, the United States and Taiwan, a tipping point refers to a point in time at which Beijing: (1) determines Taiwan’s trajectory has turned inexorably and irreversibly away from unification; (2) concludes its strategy of “peaceful reunification” has met with abject failure; and (3) decides that the time has come to focus wholeheartedly on unification by force. To be clear, this tipping point can be found in the minds of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his fellow members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo rather than in the rhetoric or actions of anyone in Taipei or Washington. Hence, the full responsibility for Beijing initiating hostilities would fall squarely on shoulders of Xi and other top echelon CCP officials.

Identifying this tipping point in real time could be exceedingly difficult especially given the opaque and secretive nature of China’s deliberative and decision-making processes. Indeed, it is very likely that the tipping point will only be evident ex post facto. Just as key decision points on China’s road to intervention in Korea in 1950 could only be documented by meticulous scholarship after the fact (the initial scholarship effort was conducted in the late 1950s based upon a judicious analysis of very limited open-source evidence), so pinpointing a 21st century Chinese tipping point on Taiwan may only be possible in hindsight. Fortunately, operational indicators and warnings of impending military action tend to be less difficult to discern in real time than a tipping point but lead times for the former can be relatively short.

What’s Next?

Although the dire warnings against the speaker’s visit to Taiwan were probably overwrought, the general sentiment behind them was not misplaced. In the immediate aftermath of Pelosi’s trip, China initiated a series of massive multi-day military exercises at multiple locations around Taiwan’s periphery, canceled or suspended some exchanges with the United States, and announced that unspecified sanctions would be imposed against the speaker and her family. The sum total of these actions was intended to signal the intensity of CCP leaders’ anger but at the same time calibrated — at least in their minds — to avoid further escalation. But, they are playing a dangerous game since Taiwan is the focal point of elevated great power competition and the most plausible location and trigger for a major military confrontation between the United States and China.

Both Washington and Beijing perceive that trends in bilateral relations vis-à-vis Taiwan are moving in the wrong direction and each blames the other for instigating this dangerous trajectory. More ominously, Beijing may soon reach a watershed moment regarding Taiwan, or it may have already reached this point and Washington has yet to recognize it.

Future scholars and analysts may well identify Beijing’s Taiwan tipping point as Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to the island. But, in the immediate aftermath of the visit, careful attention ought to focus on close monitoring of Chinese rhetoric and actions, as well as unambiguous and consistent U.S. messaging. This effort is vital if the two countries are to avoid unintended escalation and unwanted war in the coming weeks, months and years.

usip.org

10. US-Israel-Palestine security role facing downgrade; can a colonel do a general's job?

There is no good answer to that question: -) 

A less snarky comment is given the parties involved (and the rank and stature of counterparts and the mission itself) it seems to demand a general officer. But maybe a retired one would be suitable. And of course priorities are often illustrated by the personnel assigned. Personnel is policy. Will a Colonel have the SECDEF and CJCS on speed dial and will they take his call any time he calls?

On a related note I wonder if DOD is looking to reduce general officer positions (or shift them to other areas). I wonder how that bodes for general officer positions in areas of lesser priority.

​Excerpts:

The USSC serves a unique role: a military officer who reports both to the Secretary of State and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Officially, its role is to help develop the Palestinian security forces, work with Israel’s security apparatus and have a “persistent presence [that] provides a positive and visible sign of the U.S. commitment to an enduring partnership with both Israel and the Palestinian people,” according to an official State document.

But while security cooperation efforts between the two sides and the US can happen at a number of levels, the real job of the USSC head, according to a former official from the USSC team, is to serve as a neutral party and backchannel and calming influence in times of crisis. Doing so, according to a number of interested parties, requires being able to be in the room and have frank conversations with key military officials — something that is much harder to do if not armed with sufficient rank.

...

So what are the options? The former USSC official suggested turning that job into a civilian role, which would still eliminate a flag officer spot, but could fill it with a retired general officer who would still bring gravitas to the job. In theory, it could be someone with experience in the region like a former CENTCOM head, or even a former USSC official himself.

Lord, for his part, is skeptical that could work, noting it’s “not realistic to think you can consistently put a retired general in that role. … Perhaps you can ask someone to serve and he or she agrees, but there’s no facility to permanently billet US government roles for retired military personnel.”

And, Lord said, the message would likely still be interpreted the same: that “this role isn’t enough of a priority to billet an active-duty general officer.”

Counters the former USSC official, “Retired General Officers with Middle East experience would be knocking on the SecDef’s door left and right to lead the USSC.

“The USSC makes a difference. It advances American interests in the Middle East and greatly impacts the lives of Palestinians and Israelis,” the official said.​

US-Israel-Palestine security role facing downgrade; can a colonel do a general's job? - Breaking Defense

Amos Gilead, a retired general officer for the IDF, told Breaking Defense, "Especially at this time, this decision is a mistake. It is a mutual American and Israeli interest to strengthen the US influence on the relations between Israel and the Palestinian authority."

By AARON MEHTA and ARIE EGOZI

on August 05, 2022 at 6:04 AM

breakingdefense.com · by Aaron Mehta · August 5, 2022

The role of the USSC is seen as key for advancing US interests between Palestine and Israel. (Gabriella Demczuk/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON and TEL AVIV: A below-the-radar American military liaison role between Israel and Palestine is facing a major change, one advocates and experts worry could further set back relations between the two sides.

On June 1, Axios reported that the Pentagon was looking to downgrade the role of the United States Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority from a three-star general, which it has been since its creation in 2005, to a colonel-level position, as part of a Congressionally mandated requirement to cut the number of general officer roles at DoD. Despite pushback from a number of corners, including 32 US Senators, the Times of Israel reported Tuesday that the downgrade is still likely to happen by the end of the year.

The USSC serves a unique role: a military officer who reports both to the Secretary of State and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Officially, its role is to help develop the Palestinian security forces, work with Israel’s security apparatus and have a “persistent presence [that] provides a positive and visible sign of the U.S. commitment to an enduring partnership with both Israel and the Palestinian people,” according to an official State document.

But while security cooperation efforts between the two sides and the US can happen at a number of levels, the real job of the USSC head, according to a former official from the USSC team, is to serve as a neutral party and backchannel and calming influence in times of crisis. Doing so, according to a number of interested parties, requires being able to be in the room and have frank conversations with key military officials — something that is much harder to do if not armed with sufficient rank.

“The Israeli defense chief is a three-star. Their West Bank chief is a two-star. No colonel will get the one-on-one time they need for this job,” the former official said, adding that the system “actually worked” well for a number of years and expressing frustration that it could be scuttled now.

“About the only groups opposed to the USSC’s work has been Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. So that tells you that the USSC is doing something right,” the former official added.

Jonathan Lord of the Center for a New American Security calls the USSC role a “thankless job” because of the restraints put on it.

“It’s basically what he can do through the power of diplomacy and small” security assistance funding, said Lord, who before joining CNAS held a number of regional jobs for the Pentagon and led the Middle East portfolio for the House Armed Services Committee. “But while it’s not a huge investment we’re making in there, the fact it’s a three-star gives it credibility and allows them to do things that otherwise can’t be done by field grade officers. Ultimately, rank matters.”

Amos Gilead, a retired general officer for the IDF, told Breaking Defense that if the Pentagon goes through with the downgrade, it may come to regret it.

“Especially at this time, this decision is a mistake. It is a mutual American and Israeli interest to strengthen the US influence on the relations between Israel and the Palestinian authority,” Gilead said.

Gilead served in the IDF intelligence and in 2001 was appointed Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). In that position he held through 2003, Gilead was responsible for the overall relations with the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority. In 2006, he was reassigned to this position in addition to his position in the Ministry of Defense.

There are concerns on the pro-Palestinian side as well. Robert McCaw, government affairs director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Breaking Defense that “now, more than ever, Palestinian leadership needs a back channel to mitigate possible conflicts … Our government still doesn’t have a consulate in Palestine, and downgrading the security councilor now would just weaken our ability to mitigate future issues and security concerns for Palestinians.”

What Options Are On The Table?

But the office may not be what it was when it was first formed, said Eitan Dangot, another retired Israeli general who served as the COGAT in 2014. Prior to that post, he served as the military secretary to three ministers of defense. He noted that in recent years, the USSC seemed to lose some of its importance — which perhaps is why the Pentagon considers the position expendable.

“When the USSC was formed, generals like [Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton] and others that replaced him played a major role in shaping the US role related to the Palestinian authority. The change started in the Obama era and especially in the Trump era. That is why I think the Americans [have reduced] their material help to the Palestinian authority and decided that a colonel is enough in this position,” he said.

So what are the options? The former USSC official suggested turning that job into a civilian role, which would still eliminate a flag officer spot, but could fill it with a retired general officer who would still bring gravitas to the job. In theory, it could be someone with experience in the region like a former CENTCOM head, or even a former USSC official himself.

Lord, for his part, is skeptical that could work, noting it’s “not realistic to think you can consistently put a retired general in that role. … Perhaps you can ask someone to serve and he or she agrees, but there’s no facility to permanently billet US government roles for retired military personnel.”

And, Lord said, the message would likely still be interpreted the same: that “this role isn’t enough of a priority to billet an active-duty general officer.”

Counters the former USSC official, “Retired General Officers with Middle East experience would be knocking on the SecDef’s door left and right to lead the USSC.

“The USSC makes a difference. It advances American interests in the Middle East and greatly impacts the lives of Palestinians and Israelis,” the official said.

11. Military Briefing: Himars fuels Ukraine hopes of ‘limited’ counter-offensive

I hate to see the use of "limited" as part of the mission. Which takes priority, "limited" or "victory?"

Military Briefing: Himars fuels Ukraine hopes of ‘limited’ counter-offensive

US-supplied artillery systems deliver some impressive results against Russia but Kyiv wants more of them and faster

Financial Times · by Mehul Srivastava · August 4, 2022

In under a month, precise, long-range rockets from the US have delivered Ukraine some striking battlefield wins against the Russian army, deep behind the frontline.

Last week Kyiv’s forces used the long-awaited Himars — high-mobility artillery rocket systems — for a strike described by one official as “jewel-like” on the Antonivsky bridge over the Dnipro river in Russian-occupied territory east of Kherson. The attack made the 1.4km-long link unusable for heavy military trucks, disconnecting supply routes to the the occupied southern city from Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

Another Himars strike over the weekend hit a train carrying supplies and soldiers from Crimea to the Kherson region. It killed 80 Russian soldiers and wounded 200, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry. The railway line could take weeks to repair, a British official said.

These strikes are a few examples of the pain that the truck-borne rocket launchers, with a range of around 80km, have inflicted on the Russian army across the battlefield. With them Ukraine has taken out more than 100 high-value targets, including command posts, ammunition depots, air defence sites, nodes for radar and communications, and long-range artillery positions, according to a senior US defence official.

“The word Himars has become almost synonymous with the word justice for our country, and the Ukrainian defence forces will do everything to ensure that the occupiers experience more and more painful losses every week thanks to these very effective systems,” said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his daily evening address on Tuesday.

Four additional American units arrived this week, bringing the total of Himars in Ukrainian hands to 20. On Monday the US approved the delivery of more Himars ammunition and Germany supplied three similar rocket systems with a range of about 70km.

But Kyiv says it needs more of the advanced weapons faster — it asked for at least 50 in March, according to a person familiar with the matter — as well as more ammunition to use them at the tempo they want to. The limited supply has led Ukraine to focus on wrenching back control of Kherson, which fell to the Russians in early March, rather than attempt to regain ground in the eastern region of Donbas, where Ukrainian forces are outnumbered and outgunned, according to three officials briefed on discussions.

The Ukrainians have used Himars to take out weapons caches and make it difficult for Russian forces to be resupplied in Kherson and deny them the firepower superiority that has helped them advance in eastern Ukraine.

“Without resupply lines, [the Russians] will not be able to maintain the level of shelling — their consumption is huge,” said one Ukrainian official. “They will be forced to use infantry, Manpads (shoulder-mounted missiles) — relatively light weapons.”

Samuel Cranny-Evans, a military analyst at the Royal United Services think-tank, said that: “If and when it happens, Kherson will be a significant offensive that could give Ukraine momentum and a chance to regain the narrative.”

Kherson is the only big city outside of the east to be held by the Russians, and its location on the west side of the Dnipro and its distance from resupply routes make it a tempting target for the stretched Ukrainian military.

The region’s porous front lines have left Russia’s 49th Army, stationed on the Dnipro’s west bank, vulnerable to encirclement, the UK’s ministry of defence said on July 28. Kherson, “the most politically significant population centre occupied by Russia, is now virtually cut off from the other occupied territories,” it said.

A local official said just under 50 villages near Kherson had already been retaken.

But Ukraine officials worry that the battle to regain control of the city might be the only substantial counter-offensive they will be able to execute before winter. In addition to lamenting the slow pace of Himars arrivals, Ukraine complains it is restricted to launching them only into its own territory. This prevents them from neutralising critical Russian infrastructure such as the 19km bridge across the Kerch Strait connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland, said one official in Kyiv.

Washington has rebuffed Kyiv’s request for longer-range rockets capable of striking inside Russia for fear of escalation.

Kherson residents apply for Russian citizenship at an interior ministry office in occupied Kherson last month © Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters

Ukrainian officials say they have been forced to ration ammunition to a few strikes a day. “We know all the co-ordinates, all the locations of Russian depots and command and control stations — [the lack of ammunition] is limiting the Ukrainian ability to truly change the situation on the ground,” said one official.

Another said: “We can make a big deal out of every delivery to Ukraine, but if we are being reasonable, we have to calculate and compare them to our strategic needs — at that rate, we do not have even 30 per cent of what we need. We don’t expect to get enough capabilities to plan any decisive counter-offensive for this year. Our major plans will have to be next year now [when stocks of weapons will have built up].”

Financial Times · by Mehul Srivastava · August 4, 2022

12. The Coming War Over Taiwan

The subtitle has me intrigued. Is China's global power at a peak? Are we really running out of time to prevent a conflict?

And if I were Kim Jong Un reading this essay what would I be thinking about doing on the Korean peninsula (or around the world such as in Ukraine)? Strategic dilemmas.

Excerpts:

Finally, the U.S. must make China realize that a Taiwan war could go big as well as long. The more friends America can bring into the fight, the less appetizing that fight will look to Beijing.

The PLA may talk big about crushing Japan if Tokyo helps Washington in a crisis, but it can’t relish the prospect of fighting a global superpower and its mightiest regional ally. The Indian and Australian navies could help Washington choke off Beijing’s oil imports as they transit the Malacca Strait. Key European powers—especially the United Kingdom and France—can contribute submarines or surface combatants; more important, they can impose painful technological and economic sanctions. Sanctioning China obviously would be more difficult than sanctioning Russia—which is why America and its allies need to plan these punishments now, before a crisis starts.

If Washington can credibly promise to turn a fight over Taiwan into a showdown between China and the world’s most advanced democracies, that is a strategic price even Xi Jinping might not want to pay. Indeed, the best way to avoid a looming war in Asia is to make clear that Beijing cannot win at anything like an acceptable cost.

The crisis over Speaker Pelosi’s visit is just the beginning. The U.S. is entering the most crucial phase of its rivalry with China, when the risk of war is highest and decisions made, or not made, will reverberate for decades. America can win a protracted competition against a formidable but faltering China, but only if it braces now for the very real possibility of a dramatic attack on Taiwan.

• THE SATURDAY ESSAY

The Coming War Over Taiwan

With its global power at a peak and domestic problems mounting, China is likelier than ever before to make good on its threats.

By Hal Brands and Michael Beckley

Aug. 4, 2022 8:00 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coming-war-over-taiwan-11659614417?

The U.S. is running out of time to prevent a cataclysmic war in the Western Pacific. While the world has been focused on Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Xi Jinping appears to be preparing for an even more consequential onslaught against Taiwan. Mr. Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness: Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity.

This peaking-power syndrome—the tendency for rising states to become more aggressive as they become more fearful of impending decline—has caused some of the bloodiest wars in history. Unless the U.S. and its allies act quickly, it could trigger a conflict that would make the war in Ukraine look minor by comparison.

Chinese President Xi Jinping reviews an honor guard before boarding a destroyer in Qingdao, China, April 23, 2019.

PHOTO: LI GANG/XINHUA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

No one can say we didn’t see it coming. Just this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi paid a high-profile visit to Taiwan, and Beijing responded by encircling the island with several days of live-fire military exercises. For the past decade, China’s factories have churned out ammunition and put warships to sea faster than any country since World War II. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) regularly practices missile strikes on mock-ups of Taiwanese ports and U.S. aircraft carriers, and PLA vessels and aircraft menace Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace several times a week. The regime has issued bloodcurdling threats toward the island and countries that might come to its aid. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Mr. Xi told President Joe Biden last week. Senior U.S. officials warn that China might attack Taiwan in the next half-decade, possibly even in the next 18 months.

Beijing’s belligerence might look like the mark of an ascendant superpower. But the reality is more complex. China isn’t so much a rising state as a peaking power, one that has acquired fearsome coercive capabilities—and soaring power ambitions—but now faces worsening challenges at home and abroad.

From ancient times to the present, once-rising powers have taken up arms when their fortunes faded, their enemies multiplied, and they felt they had to lunge for glory or lose their chance forever.

Such a combination of aspiration and anxiety can be explosive. From ancient times to the present, once-rising powers have taken up arms when their fortunes faded, their enemies multiplied, and they felt they had to lunge for glory or lose their chance forever. Fast-growing countries have responded to economic slumps with reckless expansion. Revisionist states that find themselves cornered by rivals often use force to break the ring. The ghastliest wars of the last century were started not by rising, optimistic powers but by countries—such as Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941—that had crested and begun to decline. Now China is following this arc—an exhilarating rise followed by the prospect of a hard fall.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi poses for photographs with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, Taipei, Taiwan, Aug. 3

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Thanks to decades of rapid growth, China boasts the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity), navy by number of ships and conventional missile force. Chinese investments span the globe, and Beijing is pushing for primacy in crucial technologies. Chinese leaders are dreaming some very big dreams: They want to absorb Taiwan, make the Western Pacific a Chinese lake and carve out a vast economic empire across the global south—all part of the “national rejuvenation” that will return China to its former place as the most powerful country on Earth. In the West, pundits breathlessly warn that Beijing will soon be number one.

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Look closer, however, and China’s future doesn’t seem so bright. Once-torrid growth had already slowed dramatically before Covid-19 compelled the government to lock down major cities indefinitely. Water, farmland and energy resources are becoming scarce. Thanks to the legacy of its one-child policy, China is approaching demographic catastrophe: It will lose 70 million working-age individuals over the next decade while gaining 120 million senior citizens. And whereas the outside world once aided China’s rise, now advanced democracies are kicking Chinese firms out of their financial markets, strangling China’s tech giant Huawei, boosting military spending and creating multilateral coalitions to check Beijing’s expansion. Mr. Xi may tout the rise of the East and the decline of the West, but behind the scenes, Chinese government reports paint pessimistic pictures of slowing growth at home and surging anti-Chinese sentiment abroad.

What's Next for Taiwan as U.S.-China Tensions Rise

What's Next for Taiwan as U.S.-China Tensions Rise

Play video: What's Next for Taiwan as U.S.-China Tensions Rise

Taiwan has become a key front line in the U.S.-China rivalry, with both countries ramping up military posturing in the region. WSJ explains why the U.S. is displaying support for the self-ruling island that China sees as part of its territory. Photo: I-Hwa Cheng/Bloomberg News

In the long term, China’s woes will make it less competitive. It probably can’t outpace America in a superpower marathon, let alone America plus its allies. But in the near-term, we should expect a more dangerous China—one that gambles big to reshape the balance of power before its window closes.

Taiwan is the most likely target of this anxious expansion. Reclaiming Taiwan would eliminate a government whose very existence disproves the Chinese Communist Party’s claims that Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. It would give Beijing a commanding position in the Western Pacific and terrify U.S. allies like the Philippines and Japan. Not least, it would cement Xi Jinping’s legacy as a leader on par with Mao Zedong.

For decades, a confident, rising China was content not to force the issue, seeking to gradually lure Taiwan back through peaceful means. Today, though, the prospects for peaceful unification are fading fast. Most Taiwanese don’t want to be ruled by a genocidal dictatorship. Popular support for unification has nearly disappeared while support for incremental moves toward independence has doubled since 2018.

The Taiwanese military conducts exercises, July 27, New Taipei City, Taiwan.

PHOTO: ANNABELLE CHIH/GETTY IMAGES

But between now and the end of the decade, China has a tantalizing opportunity to secure unification by force. Mr. Xi’s reforms of the PLA—meant, among other things, to make it capable of taking Taiwan—are nearly complete. China is rapidly deploying missiles, aircraft, warships and rocket launchers that can pummel Taiwan; it is assiduously rehearsing large-scale amphibious assaults.

Meanwhile, U.S. military power is about to dip. The mid-2020s will witness the mass retirement of aging U.S. cruisers, guided-missile submarines and long-range bombers, leaving the U.S. military with hundreds fewer missile launchers—the key metric of modern naval firepower—floating and flying around East Asia. While Washington, Tokyo and Taipei are all undertaking much-needed defense programs focused on denying Chinese hegemony in Asia, those efforts won’t bear fruit until the early 2030s. Mr. Xi has repeatedly said that the task of “liberating” Taiwan cannot be passed down from generation to generation. In the mid- and late 2020s, he’ll have his best chance to accomplish that mission.

If war comes, it is likely to feature the massive application of force. Beijing could theoretically try to coerce Taiwan into unification with a more limited operation, such as an air-sea blockade or the seizure of Taiwan’s small offshore islands. Yet none of these options can guarantee Taiwanese capitulation, and all of them would give Taipei, Washington and other democracies time to mount a punishing response. To achieve its goals, China has to go big and brutal from the start.

Mr. Xi has repeatedly said that the task of ‘liberating’ Taiwan cannot be passed down for generations.

Its war plan could well involve a surprise missile and air attack against Taiwan and U.S. military bases in the Pacific, strikes on the satellite communications that underpin the American way of war and a wave of sabotage and assassinations within Taiwan—all as prelude to a massive airborne and amphibious invasion.

Both U.S. and Taiwanese forces could be crippled as the PLA rushes toward its objectives. Even if America avoids rapid defeat, the nightmare scenario currently envisaged in Ukraine—direct clashes between the U.S. and a nuclear-armed great power—would be the reality at the outset. A Sino-American war could escalate rapidly because it will involve technologies that work best when used first, including cyberattacks, hypersonic missiles and electronic warfare. The side that is losing might decide to use low-yield nuclear weapons to turn the tide or force its opponent into submission.

The economic fallout would also be horrendous. Vital waterways would become shooting galleries; the world might find itself cut off from the more than 90% of cutting-edge semiconductors that are manufactured in Taiwan. According to the RAND Corporation, one year of fighting would reduce America’s gross domestic product by 5% to 10% and China’s by 25% to 35%. A global depression would be all but guaranteed.

American officials aren’t blind to the problem, but Washington—thanks to a mixture of inertia, distraction and simple denial—isn’t racing to address it. President Biden has pledged, albeit ambiguously, to defend Taiwan from Chinese attack. Speaker Pelosi has joined a growing list of lawmakers to visit Taiwan. The Pentagon calls China its “pacing challenge.” Yet such symbolic gestures will amount to cheap and provocative talk if not backed by a strong and resilient defense—something the U.S. and Taiwan currently lack.

American forces in the Pacific are still concentrated at large bases, principally on Guam and Okinawa, that are highly vulnerable to missile attacks. The U.S. defense budget has loads of money for future capabilities that might materialize in the 2030s but won’t help win a war over Taiwan in this decade. Washington has, rightly, committed tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine yet struggles to find a fraction of that to fund the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, meant to make U.S. forces in the region more resilient and powerful. The fact that China faces an ugly long-term trajectory won’t be much consolation if Beijing nonetheless thrashes Washington and Taipei in the coming fight for dominance of the Western Pacific.

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But the situation isn’t hopeless. Amphibious assaults are devilishly difficult, and a full-on invasion of Taiwan would be one of the largest amphibious assaults in history. It would require the PLA to surge hundreds of thousands of troops across the turbulent Taiwan Strait and to seize an island whose geography—mountains, dense jungles, crowded urban environments—is a defender’s dream. A smart, committed defender could turn this operation into a bloody nightmare for invading forces. And doing so doesn’t require defying the laws of physics; it just requires moving—now—to make an invasion look all-too-daunting for even a risk-prone peaking power.

First, the Pentagon can turn the Taiwan Strait into a deathtrap for attacking forces by stocking up on tools that are ready or nearly ready today. This means positioning hordes of missile launchers, armed drones, electronic jammers and sensors at sea and on allied territory near the strait. Instead of waiting for a Chinese assault to start and then surging missile-magnet aircraft carriers into the region, the Pentagon could use what is, in essence, a high-tech minefield to decimate China’s invasion forces and cut their communications links. These diffuse networks of munitions and jammers would be difficult for China to eliminate without starting a regionwide war. They could be installed on virtually anything that floats or flies, including cargo ships, barges and aircraft.

The U.S. also needs to ensure that its military doesn’t have a glass jaw. To prevent China from wrecking forward-stationed American forces at the start of a conflict, the U.S. must scatter those forces across dozens of small operating sites in East Asia. The few big bases that remain must be outfitted with hardened shelters, robust ballistic missile defenses and fake targets to absorb Chinese missiles. Hanging tough also requires dramatically ramping up production of key munitions, so that America has adequate stockpiles and active production lines when the shooting starts. In short, Washington must deprive Beijing of any hope of landing a knockout blow—and thereby confront it with the prospect of a long, grueling war that could threaten the CCP’s hold on power at home.

A Taiwanese pilot participates in an Air Force drill in Chiayi, Taiwan, Jan 5.

PHOTO: REUTERS

Another priority is for Washington to help Taiwan help itself. Taipei has smart plans to stock up on mobile missile launchers, mines and radars; harden its communications infrastructure; enlarge its army and ground-force reserves; and otherwise prepare to inflict sky-high costs on an aggressor. But Taipei isn’t implementing these plans fast enough. If Taiwan doesn’t pick up the pace, there is nothing the U.S. can do to save it. If Taiwan redoubles its efforts, however, then America should provide money, hardware and expertise to make the island a tougher target.

The U.S. can help by donating ammunition and sensors, subsidizing Taiwanese procurement of missile launchers and mine layers, matching Taiwanese investments in vital military infrastructure and expanding joint training on crucial defense missions. American special operations forces can help Taiwan prepare for a lethal insurgency against Chinese occupiers, the threat of which may help deter an invasion in the first place. Just as important, Washington can undertake more complex exercises with Taiwan’s military—and quietly station larger contingents of trainers and special operations forces on the island—to ensure that the two countries can act as a real alliance if a conflict ignites.

The U.S. also needs to exploit the enemy’s weaknesses. Because the PLA hasn’t fought a major war since invading Vietnam in 1979, it hasn’t tested its modern command-and-control processes under fire. By developing the ability—through cyberattacks and related means—to inject confusion into military communications networks, the Pentagon can make Chinese officials wonder how glitchy their forces will be in combat. And by rehearsing a distant blockade of Chinese energy imports, America can threaten to turn any protracted conflict into an economic disaster for Beijing.

Finally, the U.S. must make China realize that a Taiwan war could go big as well as long. The more friends America can bring into the fight, the less appetizing that fight will look to Beijing.

The PLA may talk big about crushing Japan if Tokyo helps Washington in a crisis, but it can’t relish the prospect of fighting a global superpower and its mightiest regional ally. The Indian and Australian navies could help Washington choke off Beijing’s oil imports as they transit the Malacca Strait. Key European powers—especially the United Kingdom and France—can contribute submarines or surface combatants; more important, they can impose painful technological and economic sanctions. Sanctioning China obviously would be more difficult than sanctioning Russia—which is why America and its allies need to plan these punishments now, before a crisis starts.

If Washington can credibly promise to turn a fight over Taiwan into a showdown between China and the world’s most advanced democracies, that is a strategic price even Xi Jinping might not want to pay. Indeed, the best way to avoid a looming war in Asia is to make clear that Beijing cannot win at anything like an acceptable cost.

The crisis over Speaker Pelosi’s visit is just the beginning. The U.S. is entering the most crucial phase of its rivalry with China, when the risk of war is highest and decisions made, or not made, will reverberate for decades. America can win a protracted competition against a formidable but faltering China, but only if it braces now for the very real possibility of a dramatic attack on Taiwan.

Mr. Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Beckley is associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from their new book, “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China,” which will be published by W.W. Norton on Aug. 16.

Appeared in the August 6, 2022, print edition as 'The Coming War Over Taiwan How the U.S. Can Avert a Chinese Attack on Taiwan'.

13. Taiwan, Thucydides, and U.S.-China War

Excerpts:

In the nuclear domain, there is no question about the fact that the United States could erase China from the map. There is also no question about the fact that it could not do so without China retaliating with nuclear strikes that would kill most Americans. China now has a robust nuclear arsenal that creates a condition Cold Warriors called MAD: mutually assured destruction. In a nuclear war, neither the United States nor China could destroy the other without being destroyed itself. In that world, as President Ronald Reagan taught us, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must therefore never be fought.” But while no rational leader would choose to fight a nuclear war, the history of the Cold War includes a number of confrontations in which leaders chose to take increased risks of war rather than to accept the Soviet seizure of Berlin or the emplacement of nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.

If the best the current U.S. and Chinese governments can manage is statecraft as usual—which is what we’ve seen this past week—then we should expect history as usual. Tragically, history as usual would mean a catastrophic war that could destroy both.

Taiwan, Thucydides, and U.S.-China War

If the best the current U.S. and Chinese governments can manage is statecraft as usual—which is what we’ve seen this past week—then we should expect history as usual.

The National Interest · by Graham Allison · August 5, 2022

The fastest track to bloody war between China and the United States runs through Taiwan. If the current crisis provoked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s untimely trip and China’s robust military response leads to a collision between Chinese and American naval vessels or aircraft, even an “accident” could provide the spark that ignites a great fire. In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was advised not to go to Sarajevo—as Speaker Pelosi was by the Pentagon before her visit. But no one imagined that during his visit he would be assassinated, providing the spark that ignited a conflagration so devastating that historians had to create an entirely new category: World War.

Fortunately, the American and Chinese governments know that a hot war would be a disaster for both. No serious person in either government wants war. Unfortunately, history offers many examples in which rivals whose leaders did not want war nonetheless found themselves forced to make fateful choices between accepting what they judged an unacceptable loss, on the one hand, and taking a step that increased the risks of war on the other. The classic case is World War I. After a terrorist with shady ties to the government of Serbia had assassinated his successor, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary judged that he had to forcefully punish Serbia. Since Austria was its single ally, Germany felt it had no option but to give it full backing. Russia felt obliged to support its Orthodox Christian brothers in Serbia. One step led to another in a vicious cycle of actions and reactions that had all of Europe at war within five weeks.

On the larger canvas of history, when a rapidly rising power seriously threatens to displace a major ruling power, the rivalry most often ends in war. The past 500 years have seen sixteen cases of such Thucydidean rivalries. Twelve resulted in war. In each case, the proximate causes of war included accidents, unforced errors, and unintended consequences of unavoidable choices in which one of the protagonists accepted increased risks hoping that another would back down. But beneath these were underlying structural drivers that Thucydides highlighted in explaining how the two leading city-states of classical Greece destroyed each other in the Peloponnesian War. As he wrote: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

Today, the United States and China are engaged in the GOAT rivalry—the greatest rivalry of all time. In this struggle, is war over Taiwan inevitable? The historical record suggests war is more likely than not. But as the past five decades show, it ain’t necessarily so. Fifty years ago in 1972, when Nixon and Kissinger opened relations with China, the differences between the United States and China over Taiwan were certainly irreconcilable. But statesmen demonstrated that irreconcilable did not mean unmanageable. They created a framework of strategic ambiguity that has provided five decades in which citizens on both sides of the straits have seen greater increases in their incomes, health, and well-being than in any equivalent period in their long histories.

The brute facts about the face-off between China and the United States over Taiwan today are three. First, not just Xi Jinping but the entire Chinese leadership and nation are unambiguously committed to preventing Taiwan from becoming an independent state. If forced to choose between accepting an independent Taiwan and a war that destroys Taiwan and much of China, Xi and his team will choose war.

Second, what Winston Churchill called the “deadly currents” in domestic politics are now running rife in both the United States and China. A fundamental axiom of American politics forbids letting a serious competitor get to one’s right on an issue of national security. Republican and Democratic politicians are thus rushing to show who can be tougher on China than the other. Presidential hopeful Mike Pompeo has called for the United States to recognize an independent Taiwan, and given the dynamics among Republicans, this will likely be a common plank in the Republican Party’s platform in the 2024 presidential campaign. In Taipei, Pelosi heralded the United States’ “solemn vow … to support the defense of Taiwan.” And this week, Sen. Bob Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican leader on defense issues, introduced the Taiwan Policy Act, which would designate Taiwan a “major non-NATO ally” and commit $4.5 billion in military aid. Meanwhile, as Xi is arranging the political pieces for a precedent-breaking third term as general secretary and virtual emperor for life, the pressure for him to stand up to the United States and stand strong on Taiwan is more powerful than ever.

Third, while most American politicians have yet to recognize it, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait has been transformed in the quarter century since the last Taiwan crisis. The local balance of power has shifted decisively in China’s favor. As I explained in an article published here last year, the United States could lose a war over Taiwan. Indeed, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work has stated publicly, in the Pentagon’s most realistic simulations and sensitive war games, in conflicts limited to Taiwan, the score is eighteen to zero, and the eighteen is not Team USA.

Were the United States to fight a local war over Taiwan, the president would likely face a fateful choice between losing and escalating to a wider war in which the United States would have the upper hand. Despite its huge leap forward in military capabilities, the United States continues to dominate the blue water seas on which China is dependent both for the import of energy and for exporting its products. Of course, that wider war could escalate further. And the upper rungs of this escalation ladder include the use of nuclear weapons.

In the nuclear domain, there is no question about the fact that the United States could erase China from the map. There is also no question about the fact that it could not do so without China retaliating with nuclear strikes that would kill most Americans. China now has a robust nuclear arsenal that creates a condition Cold Warriors called MAD: mutually assured destruction. In a nuclear war, neither the United States nor China could destroy the other without being destroyed itself. In that world, as President Ronald Reagan taught us, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must therefore never be fought.” But while no rational leader would choose to fight a nuclear war, the history of the Cold War includes a number of confrontations in which leaders chose to take increased risks of war rather than to accept the Soviet seizure of Berlin or the emplacement of nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.

If the best the current U.S. and Chinese governments can manage is statecraft as usual—which is what we’ve seen this past week—then we should expect history as usual. Tragically, history as usual would mean a catastrophic war that could destroy both.

Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Image: Reuters.

The National Interest · by Graham Allison · August 5, 2022

​14. In the 'gray zone' outside Kherson, Ukraine's soldiers pay a terrible price

Fighting for their homeland and freedom.

Excerpts:

A victory here could change the trajectory of the war.

It would demonstrate Ukraine's capacity to wield high-tech Western artillery effectively, while using ground troops to take and hold key territory.

Losing Kherson, a key bridge crossing and regional government center on the Dnipro River, would also strike a major blow to Moscow's official narrative that the war is a "limited" military operation, which Russia still claims to be winning.

A short drive from the ambulance station brought us closer to active fighting. The thump of Russian tank fire sounded more often, like a distant summer thunderstorm.

Even Ukrainian soldiers who've been fighting here for months say the "gray zone" is a vast, confusing place. It stretches in a rough arc from war-torn villages on the outskirts of Kryvyi Rih, roughly 100 miles north of Kherson, to Mykolaiv, a city near the Black Sea.

The line of active combat between Ukrainian and Russian units shifts daily, as troops move through old industrial sites, half-abandoned villages, farm fields, winding rivers and dense forests.

In the 'gray zone' outside Kherson, Ukraine's soldiers pay a terrible price

NPR · by Brian Mann · August 6, 2022

Ukrainian soldiers led NPR's team into the forest in the "gray zone" where they dug one of the defensive trenches used to stall Russia's advance. Brian Mann/NPR

NEAR KHERSON, Ukraine — On a hot summer afternoon, NPR was interviewing soldiers near the front lines northeast of Kherson, when something happened that shows how perilous this sprawling combat zone can be.

Two Ukrainian fighters, who identified themselves only by their first names, Viktor and Serhiy, said they had detected a Russian drone overhead.

We were in a dense stand of forest, sheltered by the tree canopy. But the drone was apparently watching our location, possibly sharing our position with Russian artillery or other units.

"It's hovering above us as we speak," Viktor said. "It's nearby, while we are here. It's gonna fly away and then we can go back."

It was a terrifying moment. For the first time, we felt some part of the fear experienced every day by thousands of Ukrainian soldiers since Russia's invasion.

We would soon learn that in this deadly place, which some Ukrainians call "the gray zone," danger can come in many forms.

The effort to retake Kherson is Ukraine's first major counter-offensive against Russia

That morning, NPR's team set out from Kryvyi Rih, a fortified Ukrainian city in the east that often comes under Russian missile fire.

Our goal was to meet and talk to soldiers taking part in the first major counter-offensive against Russia: an effort to retake the strategic transport hub of Kherson.

Our first stop was an abandoned factory where a burly man with a dense black beard waited in the back of a Ukrainian army ambulance. Calling himself "Doc," he thumped the medical supplies strapped to his body armor. "I carry everything I need on me," he said.

Like many Ukrainian soldiers, Doc agreed to be interviewed only if NPR would use a nickname.

A Ukrainian field medic who identified himself as "Doc" waited to care for soldiers injured on the front lines. Soon after this photo was taken, Doc would help care for NPR's team. Brian Mann/Brian Mann/NPR

On this day, he was waiting. There were no patients at this hour, only the distant rumble of Russian tank fire. Doc said when wounded soldiers do come to this rendezvous point, they're often in "a very bad state," injured by the enemy's fearsome artillery.

"We need to quickly give them injections, stabilize them," he said.

From this remote outpost, the wounded are then rushed in his ambulance or other vehicles to military hospitals for further care.

According to British and U.S. intelligence reports, fighting at the Kherson front in southern Ukraine along the Dnipro River is already intense and brutal. For the first time, the Ukrainian army is trying to retake a major city, one occupied by Russia since the early days of the invasion.

Much of the fighting is being done by soldiers who were civilians not too long ago.

Asked what he expects to happen as Ukraine's first major counteroffensive pushes toward Kherson, Doc shrugged and gestured at the waiting stretchers.

"Definitely there will be more casualties," he said.

Why Kherson matters

A victory here could change the trajectory of the war.

It would demonstrate Ukraine's capacity to wield high-tech Western artillery effectively, while using ground troops to take and hold key territory.

Losing Kherson, a key bridge crossing and regional government center on the Dnipro River, would also strike a major blow to Moscow's official narrative that the war is a "limited" military operation, which Russia still claims to be winning.

A short drive from the ambulance station brought us closer to active fighting. The thump of Russian tank fire sounded more often, like a distant summer thunderstorm.

Even Ukrainian soldiers who've been fighting here for months say the "gray zone" is a vast, confusing place. It stretches in a rough arc from war-torn villages on the outskirts of Kryvyi Rih, roughly 100 miles north of Kherson, to Mykolaiv, a city near the Black Sea.

The line of active combat between Ukrainian and Russian units shifts daily, as troops move through old industrial sites, half-abandoned villages, farm fields, winding rivers and dense forests.

A Ukrainian officer described the terrain north of Kherson as "very hard, it's open ground...the enemy can detect you very well, so it's tricky." Brian Mann/Brian Mann/NPR

Russian units are still punching back

Our next stop was a heavily damaged bunker and observation post that had to be abandoned recently because of incoming Russian artillery and missile fire.

"They started off by hitting us with BM-27 Uragan," Maj. Oleksandr Lytvynov said, referring to a powerful Soviet-era rocket launcher known as a "Hurricane."

"Then a missile hit this wall from the other side. When they hit us the second time, we made the decision to relocate."

Climbing down into to a bomb crater a dozen yards across, he laughed and said he was lucky to have survived. The Russians' aim was just a little off.

Before the war, Lytvynov - a man in his mid-50s - worked outside Ukraine as a chauffeur but like many Ukrainian men he returned home to fight. He told us he volunteered to escort us closer to the fighting because it was important for people to know what life is like for Ukrainian soldiers.

A Ukrainian ambulance drives to a rendezvous point near an abandoned factory in the "gray zone," where it will wait for wounded soldiers being evacuated from the front lines. Brian Mann/NPR

"Next location," he said, holding open the door to a battered SUV.

From this point forward, Ukraine's military required NPR's team to ride in their vehicles as part of a two-car convoy.

Mile by mile, the countryside looked ever more eerily empty - farm buildings pocked by artillery, fields and roads torn by bomb craters. As the cars bounced and jarred down rutted country lanes, Lytvynov told us through an interpreter it's easy to get lost here.

Soldiers in the gray zone face constant anxiety because of Russian spotter drones, snipers and artillery.

Lytvynov pointed to farm fields where the bronze-yellow wheat will go unharvested this year because of the ever-present danger.

A trench where Ukrainians held out against Russian tanks

After a 20-minute drive, the vehicles turned into a camouflaged parking area in a line of trees. Ukrainian soldiers manned this area during some of the fiercest weeks of fighting.

"Our company held and fought here, our grunts lived here, and this is still our fallback position," said a Ukrainian soldier who identified himself by his first name Viktor.

"There was a lot of incoming. We were hit by tanks and mortars."

On foot, Viktor led the way deeper into the trees, where his fellow soldiers had dug their trench roughly 10 feet deep into the raw earth, roofing it with logs cut from the nearby forest. It was a narrow space, cramped and claustrophobic.

He said troops were often stationed here for a month at a time.

"Of course it is scary when you are under fire," said another soldier, who identified himself as Serhiy. "These feelings differ from person to person. There are people who are scared, but we also have men able to overcome this feeling."

In recent weeks, Ukraine's army pushed the Russians back from this point. It's been a grudging, bitter fight. One officer interviewed by NPR compared the fighting here to what the U.S. encountered during some of the toughest battles of Vietnam.

A Ukrainian soldier who identifies himself as Viktor points to the trench where he and fellow soldiers faced incoming Russian mortar and tank fire. Brian Mann/NPR

Despite the risk and the hardship, these soldiers seemed confident Ukraine's counteroffensive to retake Kherson will succeed.

"We are moving forward and planning to move forward more," Viktor said. "Like that, bit by bit, we move."

A Russian drone and a death in the gray zone

But it was at this moment, as the soldiers spoke confidently of Ukraine's progress pushing Russia back, that the enemy drone appeared overhead. After a few minutes' anxious wait, the soldiers led NPR's team quickly back through the forest to the cars.

We scrambled into the vehicles and left in a rush. Lytvynov, the former chauffeur who volunteered to fight and serve as our escort, drove fast over the rutted road, gripping the SUV's steering wheel.

Then he suddenly lost control. The military SUV slewed into a wheat field and then over-corrected, veering into the woods and slamming against a tree. Two members of NPR's team were injured in the crash. Lytvynov was pronounced dead at the scene by the Ukrainian military.

Ukrainian soldiers and medics — including Doc, the field medic we met earlier in the day — would help evacuate us from the grey zone to a military hospital a safe distance away.

Later, Ukrainian authorities investigating the incident said they believed the accident occurred after the SUV came under attack by Russian mortars or artillery.

NPR's team didn't hear or see hostile fire. What we did observe firsthand is how swiftly things change in this confusing, often frightening combat zone. On a summer afternoon, a stretch of forest or farm field or a village road can turn deadly almost without warning.

We also saw the terrible price Ukrainian soldiers, like Oleksandr Lytvynov, are paying as they struggle to push Russia's army out of their territory.

NPR · by Brian Mann · August 6, 2022

15. Dr. Dave Johnson on “Is the Virtue in the Weapon or the Cause?”

Excerpts:

Anti-personnel landmines can be a danger to civilians, but the US exception for their use in South Korea shows that they still have a vital role to play in war.

It would likely be too late to revisit the Biden administration decision, but at some point the implications of the war in Ukraine need to be assessed to get a better sense of what means the United States, it allies, and partners will require to defend against possible aggression by Russia and China—neither of whom are signatories to the Ottawa Convention.

These are the adversaries for which every administration since Obama’s have told the military to prepare. If analysis were to show that anti-personnel landmines were integral to effective defenses against these possible aggressors, then the military could be directed to do what Milley asserted was possible: develop anti-personnel landmines that render themselves inert or self-destruct so that at least they would pose no future hazard.

Bottom line: mines can be an effective military tool although they admittedly can kill or injure civilians. I imagine that, if asked right now, a fair number of Ukrainians might say that dealing with unexploded ordnance would be preferable in their minds to living under Russian occupation.

Dr. Dave Johnson on “Is the Virtue in the Weapon or the Cause?”

sites.duke.edu · by Charlie Dunlap, J.D. · August 5, 2022

Today’s guest post is by Dr. a retired Army colonel and a principal researcher at the RAND corporation who you may remember from his post last May on the war in Ukraine (an essay which has proven to be amazingly prescient).

In his current post Dave, writing in his personal capacity, addresses the recent decision by the Administration to ban anti-personnel landmines (except in Korea) even though the previous U.S. policy fully complied with domestic and international law (see here).

Moreover, as Dave notes, in Congressional ust last April the use of landmines by Ukraine had been praised by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to Milley:

“I do think land mines are important, especially if you are in the defense, but also in any other capability in order to shape enemy operations. We need to look no further than what is happening, actually, in Ukraine. Land mines are being effectively used by the Ukrainian Forces to shape the avenues of approach by Russian armored forces….” (Emphasis added.)

“So, that is one of the reasons why you see column after column of Russian vehicles that are destroyed. So, anti-tank or anti-personnel mines are a very effective [weapon to] use in combat.” (Emphasis added.)

I hope to write about this topic myself as I believe very strongly that the Administration’s new policy is a grave mistake. Though the U.S. has not needed to use landmines in the counterinsurgency efforts of recent years, in today’s dangerous world where peer-to-peer conflict is no longer unthinkable, our forces need to have available legal technology that can help them win.

Importantly, General Milley also explained that the U.S. was developing a newer landmine “so that they time out and they don’t present harm after the conclusion of hostilities…They become inert at the end of hostilities.” Yet the new policy denies U.S. troops the potential benefit of such high-tech – and fully legal – technology even though it would be “very effective” in combat and would present a minimal risk to civilians.

Dave asks us to consider the sobering scenario of “an American soldier guarding a border somewhere…in the world in the future.” He then poses this rhetorical question: “Should we tell that trooper that although there are weapons that could slow an enemy invasion by bolstering his defensive position, he will not have them because they might injure civilians later and, therefore, are inappropriate?”

As Dave explains in his thoughtful and measured analysis, those against the use of antipersonnel mines (and cluster munitions) believe the moral argument of avoiding civilian harm outweighs any potential benefit these weapons have in warfare.

Dave questions this view, and he does so as someone who has been examining these issues for years (as seen, e.g., in his 2018 article “Cluster Munitions and Rearming for Great Power Competition”). He puts the moral issue differently:

“Insistence on an absolute ban on weapons such as anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions, by not weighting more heavily their military necessity in the balance against possible risk of civilian harm, could potentially risk undermining the ability to prevail in larger moral struggles that may play out in state-on-state combats.”

As we have seen in this war Russia is using them indiscriminately against civilians while Ukraine is employing them to survive. Hence, as Dave alludes to in the title of this essay: the morality of a weapon is first and foremost in how it is used.

This is a “must read”!

Is the Virtue in the Weapon or the Cause?

By David E. Johnson

The Biden ecent announcement of its intention to adhere to the provisions of the Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel landmines has real consequences. Going forward, the United States will not use, stockpile, produce, or transfer those weapons any longer. Maintaining sufficient stocks for the unique situation of defending South Korea is the one exception; all other anti-personnel landmines will be destroyed.

This decision is the latest in the long controversy over the use of anti-personnel landmines and, more broadly, what means are moral in war. Indeed, the Biden policy is a return to that of the Obama administration, which had been reversed by the Trump administration.

These policy changes can be made at the presidential level, because the Ottawa Convention against anti-personnel land mines is not, by strict definition, a “treaty.” Treaties must be ratified by a two-third affirmative vote in the Senate, which is unimaginable in the current US political landscape. What is somewhat surprising is that the war in Ukraine may not have changed the minds of more of those convinced that anti-personnel landmines weapons must be banned.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley explained the importance of landmines for the Ukrainians during his April testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying “I do think land mines are important, especially if you’re in the defense…. The landmines are being effectively used by Ukrainian forces to shape the avenues of approach by Russian armed forces… anti-tank or anti-personnel mines are very effective when used in combat.”

Milley’s assertions may have been on solid ground during the hearing, but now appear out of step with the Biden administration’s stated policy. A particular distinction would seem to be his statements that anti-personnel landmines are necessary in conjunction with anti-tank landmines in order to keep enemy soldiers from moving and disarming these larger landmines; anti-tank landmines have pressure activated fuses that require the weight of a vehicle to set them off, meaning they are (relatively) easy to move or disarm by a trained professional.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Milley raised these concerns with the White House, per an anonymous State official, but were apparently overruled.

Despite couching his comments in pure battlefield terminology, Milley almost surely knew that he was entering a virtual minefield himself with those who strongly believe that anti-personnel landmines must be completely banned.

There is strong support in the Senate for banning anti-personnel landmines. A resolution by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a long time champion of banning anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions, is representative: “Let us be the country that not only denounces their use in Ukraine, but denounces and renounces their use everywhere.”

Within days of the hearing the US Campaign to Ban Landmines – US Cluster Munition Coalition issued a press release, supported by a number of organizations, that “condemns use of anti-personnel landmines regardless of potential military value.”

They had already written a letter to Biden entreating him “to ban their use, production, acquisition, and transfer and to swiftly accede to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, aka the Ottawa Convention of which more than 160 nations have signed.

The problem with anti-personnel landmines — and another weapon often labeled as inhumane, cluster munitions — is that they do not always function properly. The unexploded weapon can be detonated years later by an unsuspecting civilian. Milley understands this danger and noted that this is a technical problem that can be solved by making the mine deactivate after a specified time and become inert.

But to those who believe that use of these weapons can never be justified due to their potential to indiscriminately harm civilians none of Miley’s arguments are relevant. It does not matter that the mines could be rendered inert after a period of time.

They should be banned and all stocks destroyed to discourage others who will not, or cannot, develop and field sophisticated anti-personnel mines from using them. Only then can it be assured that they can never be used again. It’s a lovely idea, but one that would have additional consequences in conflicts of resistance.

We can all agree that unexploded ordnance is horrific, particularly when it injures or kills unsuspecting civilians long after a conflict ends. Nevertheless, anti-personnel landmines, when used legally, provide a vital tool for resisting an invader.

Similar outrage has appeared periodically about Russians wantonly using weapons that are supposedly banned by the Geneva Convention. The employment of thermobarics, white phosphorous — as well as cluster munitions and landmines — were erroneously characterized as illegal, because the weapons themselves were erroneously characterized as illegal. In the early days of the Ukraine War, these accusations were a common refrain in the media.

These weapons are horrible as are all weapons of war. They are not, however, illegal. They are in the arsenals of many nations because they are effective. The potential for illegality is in the particularity of their intended use — as with all weapons ranging from rifle bullets to cruise missiles — when they are employed indiscriminately against civilians.

Anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions actually are generally small and have a relatively small radius of damage as compared to a number of other weapons that are dumb and even more deadly.

For instance, fragmentation from the US Mk84 2,000 pound bomb will kill people up to 360 meters from its point of impact. Its blast can cause severe injuries out to 800 meters. Antipersonnel landmines and the small munitions that come from a cluster munition round are more like the US MK32 hand grenade, which has an effective casualty radius of two meters in open areas

The discussions regarding the banning of anti-personnel landmines and other weapons are generally among nations that have not been involved in a large-scale war against a well-armed, competent aggressor since World War II.

Thus, the view has evolved, during over 70 years of relative peace, that some weapons are irredeemably wrong. The development of this perspective, right or wrong, may well have been possible because the weapons were not seen as necessary in the future conflicts that the signatories envisioned.

As we are seeing in Ukraine, the future likely envisioned when the Ottawa Convention was signed — a peaceful, post-Cold War world—may not resemble the reality that we have to work with now. Certainly the Ukrainians find themselves trying to thwart a well-armed, ruthless aggressor.

As they must, they are most likely using every legal weapon at their disposal. This would similarly be the case for other nations facing similar aggression in the future.

What would advocates of the absolute ban of anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions tell the Ukrainians? That it is better that they suffer more casualties, if not lose the war, so long as they prevent the potential harm to some unknown number of their civilians that the landmines pose after the war?

Or, consider an American soldier guarding a border somewhere else in the world in the future. Should we tell that trooper that although there are weapons that could slow an enemy invasion by bolstering his defensive position, he will not have them because they might injure civilians later and, therefore, are inappropriate? These are not easy questions.

We might recall the words of the Union Civil War General William T. Sherman once said: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”

For some, what might separate the morality of the weapons being used in the ongoing war in Ukraine is not the means, but the purpose of their employment. In the case of Ukraine, defense versus Russian aggression.

Consequently, it might seem absolutely proper to such adherents for the Ukrainians to use these weapons in their defense to stop the Russians in their immoral and illegal act of aggression. Under this view, the same would hold true for any state, to include the signatories of the conventions banning their use, in similar circumstances.

The possibility of future Russian aggression is no longer a wargaming scenario to test concepts and capabilities; it is a threat that must be mitigated. Given that NATO is a defensive alliance, anti-personnel landmines, cluster munitions, and other legal but shunned weapons may have a vital role to play in the defense of the alliance.

Indeed, they might be vital in defending the small, isolated Baltic States if Russia ever invaded. In some ways, the defense of those nations might seem even as difficult as that of South Korea against North Korea.

Insistence on an absolute ban on weapons such as anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions, by not weighting more heavily their military necessity in the balance against possible risk of civilian harm, could potentially risk undermining the ability to prevail in larger moral struggles that may play out in state-on-state combats.

Anti-personnel landmines can be a danger to civilians, but the US exception for their use in South Korea shows that they still have a vital role to play in war.

It would likely be too late to revisit the Biden administration decision, but at some point the implications of the war in Ukraine need to be assessed to get a better sense of what means the United States, it allies, and partners will require to defend against possible aggression by Russia and China—neither of whom are signatories to the Ottawa Convention.

These are the adversaries for which every administration since Obama’s have told the military to prepare. If analysis were to show that anti-personnel landmines were integral to effective defenses against these possible aggressors, then the military could be directed to do what Milley asserted was possible: develop anti-personnel landmines that render themselves inert or self-destruct so that at least they would pose no future hazard.

Bottom line: mines can be an effective military tool although they admittedly can kill or injure civilians. I imagine that, if asked right now, a fair number of Ukrainians might say that dealing with unexploded ordnance would be preferable in their minds to living under Russian occupation.

About the author

David E. Johnson, Ph.D., is a retired Army colonel. He is a principal researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point. From 2012-2014 he founded and directed the Chief of Staff of the Army Strategic Studies Group for General Raymond T. Odierno.

Disclaimers:

The views expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employers, myself, the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, or Duke University (see also here).

Remember what we like to say on Lawfire®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!

sites.duke.edu · by Charlie Dunlap, J.D. · August 5, 2022

16. The Inside Story of Carlos Ghosn’s Brazen Escape From Japan

Truth is stranger than fiction.  A cliche yes but this is a very well researched and reported story.

• BUSINESS

The Inside Story of Carlos Ghosn’s Brazen Escape From Japan

The scheme involved stacks of cash, a stealthy dash to the airport, and plenty of cloak-and-dagger tactics. In the end, though, the auto executive had to hunker down in a claustrophobic box, hoping no one would look inside.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/carlos-ghosn-escape-japan-private-jet-box-hidden-11659733392?utm

By Nick KostovFollow

 and Sean McLainFollow

Updated Aug. 6, 2022 12:01 am ET

Ever the thorough operative, Michael Taylor began laying the groundwork of his cover story as soon as the private jet he had chartered landed in Japan. He and George Zayek were violinists who would be performing nearby, he told a worker at the Osaka private-jet terminal shortly after the Bombardier Global Express arrived from Dubai at 10:10 a.m. local time.

As personnel at Kansai International Airport unloaded suitcases, a guitar case and two large black boxes, Tomoyuki Matsui, the manager of the private-jet terminal’s ground-service team, ushered the men to the terminal bus, which took them to the posh Premium Gate Tamayura. Kayoko Tokunaga, a 30-year-old employee fluent in English, was waiting to greet them and comfortably struck up conversation with Messrs. Taylor and Zayek as they waited for their passports to be stamped. “Your stay is so short,” she remarked, according to transcripts of police interviews.

They had an important meeting outside Japan the following day, Mr. Taylor explained. But he planned to come back for the Olympics in Tokyo the following summer. From the little that Mr. Zayek contributed, he struck Ms. Tokunaga as blunt and disagreeable.

As their luggage was wheeled into the terminal, Ms. Tokunaga and her boss, Mr. Matsui, started discussing the odd couple they were dealing with. As Mr. Matsui spoke, Ms. Tokunaga eyed the massive cases that she figured must contain amplifiers, even though they looked too large for the purpose.

She also saw a guitar case. Why were violinists carrying a guitar? Mr. Matsui and Ms. Tokunaga had been told the passengers were attending a concert by celebrated violinist Taro Hakase as guests, rather than as performers.

A vehicle carrying Carlos Ghosn from his lawyer’s office in Tokyo was mobbed by photographers and reporters in 2019.

PHOTO: TORU HANAI/BLOOMBERG NEWS

In reality, they were neither. Mr. Taylor had been hired to help Carlos Ghosn, the former chief of Nissan Motor Co. NSANY -0.52%▼ and Renault SA, RNO 1.81%▲ flee Japan, where he was facing serious criminal charges, having been accused of orchestrating a complex flow of money between Nissan, the Middle East, and his own pocket.

Mr. Ghosn, who has denied wrongdoing, had been the world’s most prominent car executive of the 21st century. To the astonishment of naysayers worldwide, he had forged two middling car makers into a global powerhouse, the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Near the end of his career, he had been ready to push through his last great act as an executive—a merger between the French and Japanese car makers.

By Mr. Ghosn’s account, a plotting group of Nissan executives had prevented that by conspiring to orchestrate his downfall. His careful plans had been thwarted by a dramatic, unexpected arrest in November 2018. Nissan has said: “The sole cause of this chain of events is the misconduct led by Ghosn.”

In mid-2019, Mr. Taylor received a call from one of Mr. Ghosn’s acquaintances asking whether he could mastermind an escape. Mr. Taylor roped in his old friend Mr. Zayek and also enlisted his son, Peter Taylor, to play a limited, supporting role in the scheme. The plan was to flee to Lebanon, where Mr. Ghosn had grown up and—most important—a country that did not extradite its citizens.

The men who had come to sneak Mr. Ghosn out of the country made about the least likely pair of violinists imaginable.

Now Mr. Ghosn, 65 years old, was out on bail while awaiting trial, which he feared would be unfair, he has said repeatedly. Furthermore, he believed the Japanese court process moved so slowly that he might die before a verdict was delivered. He was willing to risk everything for a chance at freedom.

This account is based on police interviews, security footage, bank statements and other documents, as well as interviews with people familiar with how the escape was conducted, including Mr. Ghosn himself.

On Dec. 29, 2019, Messrs. Taylor and Zayek landed in Japan to pull off the plan.

* * *

The men who had come to sneak Mr. Ghosn out of the country made about the least likely pair of violinists imaginable. Mr. Taylor looked like the former Green Beret that he was. Fitter than men half his age, with closely clipped salt-and-pepper hair and a square jaw, he was straight out of central casting.

Mr. Zayek painted an even more striking image. He openly bore the scars of his former life as a Lebanese militiaman. He was partially deaf in his left ear and partially blind in one eye and walked with a pronounced limp, the result of a leg injury decades ago.

From the airport, Messrs. Taylor and Zayek took two vans to the Star Gate Hotel, where they checked in at 11:12 a.m. Mr. Taylor was given room 4009, where hotel staff dropped off their suitcases and the guitar. Mr. Zayek checked into a room six floors above, to which hotel staff brought the two large black boxes.

Mr. Ghosn was spirited onto a private jet hidden inside the larger of these two musical-instrument cases.

PHOTO: ISTANBUL POLICE DEPARTMENT/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

Michael Taylor, foreground, and George Zayek at passport control at Istanbul Airport in Turkey after they helped Mr. Ghosn slip out of Japan.

PHOTO: DHA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mr. Zayek returned to the lobby and waited for Mr. Taylor. While he sat there, an anxious employee from the terminal showed up with a suitcase they had forgotten on the plane—a slip-up that hadn’t been part of the plan. The worker bowed and apologized for the mistake. The employee noticed that Mr. Zayek turned his head as the employee was speaking. Mr. Zayek the “concert violinist” explained that he had difficulty hearing out of his right ear, then told him not to worry about the delayed suitcase.

Messrs. Taylor and Zayek hadn’t determined whether they would get Mr. Ghosn out that day or if the whole exercise would turn into a dress rehearsal. As seasoned operatives, they tried to make sure that there would be no surprises or unpredictable scenarios on such a high-stakes, high-risk mission. Just in case, Mr. Zayek took the opportunity of chatting with the employee to seed their cover story more fully, asking whether airport staff had screened their luggage. “The boxes contain amplifiers,” he explained, adding that the cargo was fragile and would be compromised if put through an X-ray machine.

Mr. Taylor came down a few minutes later, and just before noon, they flagged a taxi and headed for Shin Osaka Station, a hub of the shinkansen bullet train. Mr. Zayek had traveled to Japan twice before the escape and had learned his way around the Japanese train system. He walked to the counter and purchased two tickets for Tokyo.

* * *

As Messrs. Taylor and Zayek were checking into their hotel room in Osaka, Mr. Ghosn was having a leisurely morning with his youngest daughter, who was 27. He packed some bags. Ms. Ghosn’s return flight to the U.S. provided a convenient cover to send out some of her father’s personal belongings ahead of his escape.

‘It’s time to go home.’

— Michael Taylor

They went to lunch, probably for the last time in Tokyo. If anything went wrong, it would be the last meal Mr. Ghosn would eat outside a jail cell for a long time—maybe forever. The pair chose a restaurant called We Are the Farm, a trendy farm-to-table eatery in a former dry cleaner located in the chic Azabu Juban neighborhood. The Ghosns loved this side of Japan. The food was excellent and the atmosphere lively. After lunch, they stopped by the house again to drop off Mr. Ghosn and pick up his daughter’s luggage. Mr. Ghosn pushed five suitcases to the garage, where his driver was waiting. Ms. Ghosn looked at the unusually large amount of baggage. She told the driver that she had too much and would need to drop some off for a friend to carry back to the U.S. Mr. Ghosn has said his own family played no role in the escape; his daughter hasn’t been charged with a crime.

Before they drove off, Mr. Ghosn told the driver to take the rest of the day off. He would call him again in two days, he said. At 2:05 p.m., the car carrying Ms. Ghosn pulled up in front of the Grand Hyatt. She shook hands with the younger Mr. Taylor, who had checked in to the hotel the previous day, and he took two of her suitcases up to his room. She got back into the car and headed for nearby Haneda Airport.

* * *

At 2:30 p.m. precisely, Mr. Ghosn pushed open the front door of his two-story home and stepped outside. The moment before he crossed the threshold, he was Carlos Ghosn, revered auto executive fighting to clear his name. As soon as he stepped across it to execute his plan, at best he would become Carlos Ghosn the international fugitive. If he was caught, it would be back to jail, perhaps for the rest of his life.

Dressed in a dark jacket and scarf with a woolen cap and sunglasses, he walked west on the main road. He paused and looked over his shoulder before continuing. He had recently complained to a court that Nissan’s security contractors spied on his every move.

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Nissan wasn’t the only monitor. Cameras had been installed outside and inside the foyer of the home by the court, checked once a week by the prosecutors. In addition, a constellation of security cameras on homes and buildings captured every step of Mr. Ghosn’s 25-minute stroll from his spacious rented house to the Grand Hyatt.

It was a brisk, sunny winter Sunday ahead of the New Year’s holiday, one of the few times Japan shuts down. It was the perfect time to escape. Within a half-hour, Mr. Ghosn had reached the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo. Keeping his head down, he made his way through the lobby to the guest-room elevators. He got out on the ninth floor, walked down the hall, and entered room 933, where the younger Mr. Taylor was waiting.

* * *

The Nozomi express pulled into Shinagawa Station in Tokyo at 3:22 p.m., and Messrs. Taylor and Zayek, both wearing baseball caps, got off and headed for the north ticket gate. They exited the station on the western side and boarded a taxi for the Grand Hyatt.

For more than 30 minutes Mr. Ghosn had been in Peter Taylor’s room, where he’d changed clothes and was making small talk.

By the time Michael Taylor and Mr. Zayek reached the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, Peter was there waiting, having come down shortly before their arrival. When the two older men appeared, Peter immediately made for the elevator. The trio wanted to appear to be strangers in case the surveillance camera footage was reviewed. More than anything, Mr. Taylor wanted to ensure that his son wasn’t seen as an accomplice.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

What lies ahead for Carlos Ghosn? Join the conversation below.

Michael and Peter Taylor, along with Mr. Zayek, entered the ninth-floor room. It was the first time Mr. Ghosn had met his would-be rescuers face-to-face.

“It’s time to go home,” Michael Taylor told Mr. Ghosn, greeting him with a large smile.

Seven minutes later, the four men left the room with Mr. Ghosn’s luggage. Peter Taylor headed to the hotel parking lot and took a taxi to the airport, where he was booked on a flight to China. Michael Taylor wanted his son to get out of the country before anything potentially illegal happened. Messrs. Ghosn and Zayek and Michael Taylor left through the main entrance of the hotel and hailed a cab to Shinagawa Station. Mr. Ghosn now wore a pair of black, thick-rimmed glasses and a surgical mask, a common sight in Tokyo during flu season, as a convenient means of preventing people from recognizing the face of Japan’s most notorious criminal suspect. The station was packed with holiday travelers. The three men headed for the train platform.

Once the most prominent car executive of the 21st century, Mr. Ghosn became Japan’s most notorious criminal suspect after he was arrested for alleged financial misdeeds.

PHOTO: SHUJI KAJIYAMA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mr. Ghosn entered carriage 1 with Mr. Zayek. Michael Taylor entered carriage 2. The train left the station for Osaka at 4:55 p.m. The men tried to regularly keep on the move during the journey. Mr. Ghosn’s face had been a fixture on TV and plastered on magazine covers for two decades. Seeing him there would be like spotting Steve Jobs on a New York City subway. Mr. Taylor had given him advice about how to behave, urging him not to speak in case people recognized his voice. Don’t catch anybody’s eye, he counseled. Keep walking, but look straight down to the ground.

The bullet train arrived at Shin Osaka Station at 7:20 p.m. The men filed out and headed to the south ticket gate. They walked with military precision in single file, a few paces apart: Michael Taylor, then Mr. Ghosn, then Mr. Zayek.

They piled into another taxi bound for the Star Gate Hotel, with Mr. Ghosn and Mr. Taylor in the back seat and Mr. Zayek up front, next to the driver. Once in the taxi, Mr. Ghosn, who had remained bundled up for nearly three hours on the train, removed his mask to take a few deep breaths of fresh air. He also took off the hat but put them both back on a few minutes later.

At 8:15 p.m., the trio walked through the entrance of the Star Gate Hotel. Messrs. Ghosn and Zayek went directly to the 46th floor, where the boxes were kept, while Michael Taylor went to the front desk before going to his room on the 40th floor, grabbing a piece of luggage and the guitar case before heading up to meet the other two.

Mr. Ghosn took his time, inspecting the box carefully. He turned to Michael Taylor and Mr. Zayek, resolute. He wanted to get out of Japan that night. There would be no dry run.

* * *

While Messrs. Ghosn and Zayek rested and made preparations in the hotel room, Michael Taylor returned to the private-jet terminal to ensure that the plane would leave as planned and to double-check that the personnel there had received the message that their bags shouldn’t be scanned. Most charter airlines don’t require bags to be checked, so passengers can choose their level of security. Obviously, if the airport were to insist on opening the case containing Mr. Ghosn, the trio might never leave Japan. Mr. Taylor walked into the terminal at 9 p.m., catching the staff by surprise.

Ms. Tokunaga, the English-speaking employee, asked what he was doing there. Passengers who fly on private jets don’t often show up 90 minutes before departure.

“Are we going through a security check when we leave?” Mr. Taylor asked.

WHERE THEY ARE NOW

• Carlos Ghosn. After fleeing Japan, Mr. Ghosn is living as an international fugitive in Lebanon, which doesn’t extradite its citizens. He is living in a house Nissan purchased for him years before the accusations against him.
• Michael Taylor. Mr. Taylor pleaded guilty to aiding Mr. Ghosn’s escape and started a two-year sentence at Tokyo’s Fuchu Prison in the summer of 2021; he spends much of his day in solitary confinement.
• Peter Taylor. The younger Mr. Taylor is serving a slightly lighter 20-month sentence at Yokohama Prison for the same crime as his father.
• George Zayek. Mr. Zayek is also a fugitive in Lebanon, where he flew separately from Mr. Ghosn. Japan issued an Interpol red notice against him; he is wanted on suspicion of aiding Mr. Ghosn’s escape.

See more...

Ms. Tokunaga told him that there would be no security check. She then called Mr. Matsui, her manager, who was with the pilot. The pilot and Mr. Taylor talked briefly on the phone. Mr. Taylor hung up and said he would head back to the hotel, but not before handing Ms. Tokunaga an envelope.

“Here’s a tip for you,” he said. Inside, Ms. Tokunaga saw a stack of 10,000-yen notes, each worth roughly $100, held together by an elastic hair band. She had never seen that much money at once. She figured there must have been at least $10,000 in there.

Ms. Tokunaga told him she couldn’t take it. Tips were forbidden. Mr. Taylor declined to take back the envelope and told her to share it with her co-workers. He reminded her that he was returning for the Olympics. Ms. Tokunaga didn’t want to offend Mr. Taylor, so she held on to the envelope. Shortly after Mr. Taylor left, Mr. Matsui, the terminal manager, dialed Ms. Tokunaga. He had been surprised by Mr. Taylor’s sudden appearance and wanted to know what was going on.

“I think he just wanted to check the status of the aircraft,” Ms. Tokunaga said. Mr. Matsui asked to talk to Mr. Taylor, but he had already left for the hotel. Mr. Matsui made his way to the terminal and again asked why Mr. Taylor had come so far ahead of the departure time. Ms. Tokunaga told Mr. Matsui about the envelope of cash. It presented Mr. Matsui with a conundrum. He had handled ground services at the terminal for the past three years. He was used to foreigners who flew in and started handing out cash, not understanding that that was not done in Japan. But no one had ever handed him an envelope stuffed with such a huge amount.

Mr. Matsui dialed a manager at another agency to discuss whether they could accept the money. They decided it should be returned politely and in a way that wouldn’t offend Mr. Taylor, which could jeopardize future business. Mr. Matsui decided to wait until the last moment to return it to minimize any conversation.

* * *

When Mr. Taylor got back to the hotel, he asked for a luggage trolley to be sent to his room. A few minutes later, porters removed two suitcases from the room and took them to the lobby.

Mr. Taylor headed to the 46th floor and entered the room around 9:30 p.m. The private jet was due to leave the Osaka terminal, bound for Istanbul, in one hour.

Mr. Ghosn remains in Lebanon, which doesn’t extradite citizens. He has said he feared he couldn’t get a fair trial in Japan.

PHOTO: TAKAAKI IWABU/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Mr. Ghosn stood contemplating the box that was supposed to smuggle him aboard the jet. It was the last hurdle—and by far the biggest. Up until now, he had not technically done anything wrong. He was allowed to travel around the country. But he couldn’t explain this away. Nonetheless, it was the box he had chosen. It was that or a jail cell.

Taking a final deep breath, Mr. Ghosn lay down on the base of the box, and Mr. Taylor pulled a sheet off the bed and laid it over him. Mr. Taylor then put his guitar on top of Mr. Ghosn and tried closing the box. It fit, but the guitar pressed down on Mr. Ghosn. He would have to spend at least an hour in there, and he needed to be comfortable. The sheet stayed. It would be the only camouflage if airport staff decided they needed to look inside. The guitar case would be placed on top of the box.

Mr. Taylor could sense that Mr. Ghosn was nervous.

“Have you ever gone scuba diving?” he asked Mr. Ghosn.

“Yes,” said Mr. Ghosn.

Mr. Taylor told him to imagine that he was scuba diving and mimed taking slow, controlled breaths. He looked him in the eyes, communicating calm and confidence.

“Breathe slowly,” he reminded Mr. Ghosn.

Mr. Taylor lowered the top of the box, and everything went black.

This article is adapted from “Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn” by Wall Street Journal reporters Nick Kostov and Sean McLain, to be published on Aug. 9, 2022, by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp).

Write to Nick Kostov at Nick.Kostov@wsj.com and Sean McLain at sean.mclain@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 6, 2022, print edition as 'The Inside Story of Carlos Ghosn’s Escape'.

17. Top Taiwan missile official found dead in hotel room after heart attack

We could make a gallows humor comment. (e.g., his last words looking at the PLA missiles might have been"holy sh*t")

Then again was there foul play? A covert action? The PRC "attacking" on many fronts?

Top Taiwan missile official found dead in hotel room after heart attack

Newsweek · by Darragh Roche · August 6, 2022

A top Taiwanese missile official was found dead in a hotel room on Saturday morning after suffering a heart attack, according to the country's official Central News Agency (CNA).

Ou Yang Li-hsing was deputy head of the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, which is owned by the Taiwanese military and is the defense ministry's research and development unit.

Taiwanese authorities said there was no sign of an "intrusion" in the hotel room in southern Taiwan where the 57-year-old died, according to CNA. He was in charge of supervising various missile production projects.

Ou Yang's family said he had a history of heart problems and also had a cardiac stent.

His death comes amid increased tensions between Taiwan and China following Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island, which China considers part of its sovereign territory.

China has been carrying out live-fire military drills near Taiwan as part of its response to Pelosi's visit, which the Chinese government strongly condemned.

Ou Yang had taken up the role at the military research and development unit earlier this year as the organization aims to more than double its missile production capacity to around 500 in 2022.

That increase in production capacity is reportedly in response to what Taiwan views as a growing military threat from China. Chinese forces have been conducting live-fire exercises near the island following Pelosi's visit.

Ou Yang was on a business trip to southern county of Pingtung at the time of his death.

Taiwan's Apple Daily reported on Saturday that Ou Yang's staff knocked on his hotel room and when he did not answer, hotel staff opened the door and found him dead. Police attended the scene and reviewed security footage but found no evidence of an intrusion.

Newsweek has asked the government of Taiwan for comment.

On Friday, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said that Chinese ships and warplanes had crossed the mid-line of the Taiwan Strait as part of those drills. The mid-line is considered an unofficial buffer zone between China and Taiwan.

China also announced unspecified sanctions against Pelosi and her immediate family over her trip to the island, while also saying the country was ending cooperation with the U.S. in a number of areas, including climate change and repatriation of illegal immigrants.

The U.S., along with most other countries, does not formally recognize Taiwan as an independent country but successive U.S. administrations have provided key support to the island, including supplying arms.

Update 08/06/22 04.15a.m E.T.: This article was updated to include more information.

Navy soldiers walk past two US-made Standard missiles on a destroyer during the annual Han Kuang Drill, at the Suao navy harbor in Yilan county on July 26, 2022. SAM YEH/AFP/GETTY

Newsweek · by Darragh Roche · August 6, 2022

18. McMaster: Taiwan Could Prove Difficult for China to Invade

He may not know it but he is calling for the implementation of a resistance operating concept.

Excerpt:

Steps that Taiwan can take – like lengthening the time Taiwanese conscripted reservists spend on active duty, creating a territorial defense force and improving joint training for active and reserve forces – would improve Taiwan’s deterrence by denial, McMaster said.

McMaster: Taiwan Could Prove Difficult for China to Invade - USNI News

news.usni.org · by John Grady · August 5, 2022

Despite China’s recent aggression toward Taiwan, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster argued this week that Taiwan “not an easy military problem” for Beijing to solve.

Speaking during a Hudson Institute online forum on Thursday, the retired Army lieutenant general added that Taipei could be difficult to attack across the 100-mile wide, often stormy Taiwan Strait. It’s a matter of “capability and will.”

To protest House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) 19-hour visit this week to the self-governing island, Beijing fired missiles into Japanese waters, sent military aircraft into Taipei’s air defense identification zone and conducted large-scale live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait.

But all these escalating military moves from the People’s Republic of China is a “signal to the world” that Beijing could blockade or invade Taiwan, said Patrick Cronin, Hudson’s Asia-Pacific chair. He mentioned threats by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi that Pelosi’s visit could lead to a slippery slope of conflict as a means of intimidating other nations.

Wang, speaking at an Association of South East Asians Nations event on Wednesday, termed Pelosi’s visit “manic, irresponsible and highly irrational.”

McMaster said he hopes that the Chinese actions give the United States a “sense of urgency when it comes to Taiwan’s future and how important the Indo-Pacific is to the United States militarily and economically.

Steps that Taiwan can take – like lengthening the time Taiwanese conscripted reservists spend on active duty, creating a territorial defense force and improving joint training for active and reserve forces – would improve Taiwan’s deterrence by denial, McMaster said.

Two years ago, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said her administration increased defense spending to 2.3 percent of its gross domestic product and was very interested in buying asymmetric defense systems ranging from mines to anti-ship missiles, as well as modernizing force structure. In the past, Taiwan had looked to the U.S. for big-ticket items like fighter aircraft to block Chinese ambitions. Its parliament approved a special $8.6 billion appropriation earlier this year in the face of Chinese naval and air incursions during the winter.

Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at Hudson, said the time for Taipei to spend on military equipment and receive it is now. It would be far more difficult to supply Taiwan if the Chinese invaded the island, as it has been to come to Ukraine’s aid using highways and rail following the Russian invasion earlier this year, she said.

So far, McMaster has been encouraged by “Taiwan’s will” in resisting escalating pressures of a possible blockade of the island. He added that such a blockade would disrupt not only the island’s economy but also global trade in the Indo-Pacific. McMaster said a key Chinese objective is to isolate Japan from its allies and partners, which could happen under a Beijing-controlled Taiwan.

“Japan has been a real source of strength” in standing up to China over Taiwan’s future, he said. McMaster said nations in ASEAN could learn from Tokyo’s example. “The choice they’re facing is sovereignty or servitude” if they accept China as the final arbiter regionally.

Not surprisingly, “Russia has come to China’s position in this” escalation of tensions, Heinrichs added.

McMaster compared it to the 1930s, “almost like Hitler’s playbook” of authoritarian coercion in Europe and the Pacific. He said Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin believe that together “we will rewrite the rules” because the U.S. and its allies are weak.

For the U.S. and its allies, “it is a period of trial … to maintain resolve” as they are showing in Ukraine, he said.

Heinrichs added that Pelosi’s visit should be a “reassurance to allies” of America’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific. She added that Taipei welcomed the speaker “with open arms” and a bipartisan Congress at home supported her visit. Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan when he was speaker in the late 1990s.

The Trump Administration opened the door for more high-level U.S. official visits to Taiwan after decades following U.S. recognition of the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s.

She added that the speaker’s stopover was not the rejection of the United States’ “One China Policy,” as Beijing claimed.

“The Biden administration must embrace this visit” and “make sure there is no appearance of daylight” between the speaker and the White House and Pentagon, she said. Earlier, President Joe Biden warned of consequences that might arise over such a visit.

Heinrichs said Pelosi “holds a critical office” and showed courage in visiting Taiwan that can help Americans understand what is at stake in the Indo-Pacific for democracy and the world’s economy.

Related

news.usni.org · by John Grady · August 5, 2022

19. Putin is banking on a failure of political will in the west before Russia runs out of firepower

Will we lose interest? Do we have the stratgic resolve?

Quotes:

“America doesn’t lose wars, it loses interest.” Hussain Haqqani, former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S.

"I'm convinced strategy development and operational planning is largely a lost art, but at the tactical level we can kick butt until we get tired and decide to go home". - Bill Moore 

Putin is banking on a failure of political will in the west before Russia runs out of firepower | Timothy Garton Ash

Democratic leaders need to prepare their citizens for a long struggle over Ukraine – and a hard winter

The Guardian · by Timothy Garton Ash · August 5, 2022

The Russo-Ukrainian war is coming down to a race between the weakening political will of western democracies and the deteriorating military means of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. But this race will be a marathon, not a sprint. Sustaining that political will requires the kind of farsighted leadership which most democracies are missing. It calls for a recognition that our own countries are also, in some important sense, at war – and a corresponding politics of the long haul.

Is this what you hear when you turn on your television in the United States (where I am now), Germany, Italy, Britain or France? Is this a leading topic in the Conservative party contest to decide Britain’s next prime minister, or the run-up to the Italian election on 25 September, or the campaign for the US midterm elections on 8 November? No, no and no. “We are at war,” I heard someone say recently on the radio; but he was an energy analyst, not a politician.

The rouble is soaring and Putin is stronger than ever - our sanctions have backfired | Simon Jenkins

Read more

The fact that Ukrainian forces are preparing for a big counter-offensive to recapture the strategically vital city of Kherson shows what a combination of western arms and Ukrainian courage could achieve. US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (Himars) – long-range multiple-launch rocket systems – have enabled the Ukrainians to hit artillery depots, bridges and command posts far behind Russian lines. Russian forces have been redeployed from Donbas to defend against the expected offensive, thus further slowing the Russian advance in the east. Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), observed recently that Russia might be “about to run out of steam” in Ukraine because of shortages of material and adequately trained troops. So Ukraine has a good chance of winning an important battle this autumn; but it’s still a long way from winning the war.

In his campaign to defeat not only Ukraine but also the west, Putin is counting on Russia’s two traditional wartime allies: Field Marshal Time and General Winter. The Russian leader is weaponising energy, reducing gas flows through the Nordstream 1 pipeline so Germany can’t fully replenish its gas storage before the weather turns cold. Then he will have the option of turning off the gas entirely, plunging Germany and other dependent European countries into a desperate winter. High energy prices as a result of the war continue to turbocharge inflation in the west while keeping Putin’s own war chest filled with the billions of euros Germany and others are still paying for Russian gas and oil. Although a few grain ships are now leaving Odesa, his blockade of Ukrainian ports has caused a food price crisis across parts of the Middle East and Africa, resulting in much human misery and potentially in refugee flows and political chaos. Those, too, are Putin’s friends. Better still: the global south seems to blame this at least as much on the west as on Russia.

Putin’s cultural and political analysis of the west leads him to believe that time is on his side. In his view, the west is decadent, weakened by multiculturalism, immigration, the post-nationalism of the EU, LGBTQ+ rights, atheism, pacifism and democracy. No match, therefore, for carnivorous, martial great powers which still cleave to the old trinity of God, family and nation.

There are people in the west who agree with him, subverting western and European unity from within. Just read Viktor Orbán’s scandalous recent speech to an ethnic Hungarian audience in Romania, with its insistence that Hungarians should not become “mixed race”, its sweeping critique of the west’s policy on Ukraine and its conclusion that “Hungary needs to make a new agreement with the Russians”.

Although the party likely to emerge victorious from next month’s Italian elections, the Fratelli d’Italia, is the indirect successor of a neo-fascist party founded in 1946, it does at least support the western position on the war in Ukraine. But the leaders of the Fratelli’s probable coalition partners, the Lega’s Matteo Salvini and Forza Italia’s Silvio Berlusconi have a pro-Putin past and cannot be relied on to stand firm on Ukraine, as the current Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi, has done. In Germany, a plurality of those asked in a recent opinion poll (47%) said Ukraine should give up its eastern territories in return for “peace”. European voices calling on Ukraine to “settle” along those lines will only get louder as the war grinds on. (Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn recently joined them, although his intervention won’t affect the strong cross-party consensus in Britain on support for Ukraine.)

Most important are the midterm elections in the US. If Donald Trump announces his presidential candidacy off the back of midterm election successes for his partisans, this could spell big trouble for what has so far been rare bipartisan consensus in the US on large-scale economic and military support for Ukraine. Notoriously reluctant to criticise Putin, Trump has told his supporters that “the Democrats are sending another $40bn to Ukraine, yet America’s parents are struggling to even feed their children”.

What would it take to prove the Russian leader wrong about the intrinsic weakness of western democracies? Rather a lot. The two largest armies in Europe are going to be slogging it out in Ukraine for months and quite probably years to come. Neither side is giving up; neither has a clear path to victory. All the current peace scenarios are unrealistic. When you can’t begin to see how something is going to end, it’s unlikely to end soon.

To sustain Ukraine’s resistance and enable its army to recover lost territory requires weapon supplies on a scale that is large even for America’s military-industrial complex. For example, the US has reportedly already sent one-third of its entire stock of Javelin anti-tank missiles. According to a former deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, the country needs a further $5bn a month in macroeconomic support just to ensure that its economy does not collapse – close to double what it is currently getting. That’s before you even get to the challenge of postwar reconstruction, which may cost as much as $1tn.

If we stay the course, at scale, then Field Marshal Time will be on Ukraine’s side. Putin’s stocks of his most modern weapons and best trained troops have already been depleted. Keep up the pressure and – military experts tell us – he will be reaching back to 40-year-old tanks, and raw recruits. Western sanctions are hitting the hi-tech parts of his economy, needed for resupply. Could he compensate for the loss of skilled troops by a general mobilisation? Will China come to his aid with modern weapons supplies? Can he escalate? These questions have to be asked, of course, but the pressure would be back on him.

In democracies, leaders must justify and explain to voters this kind of large-scale, strategic commitment, otherwise they will not support it in the long run. Putin would then be proved right in his diagnosis of the weakness of democracy. Estonia’s Kaja Kallas is giving an example of such leadership, but then her people know all too much about Russia already. At the moment I don’t see any leader of a major western democracy doing the same, except perhaps for Mario Draghi – and he’s leaving.

• Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

The Guardian · by Timothy Garton Ash · August 5, 2022

20. The Marine Corps’ new plan will not beat China in a fight for Taiwan

​​Excerpts:

The carnage inflicted on faithful Marines and sailors aboard expeditionary mobile bases will serve the purpose as a tripwire to enrage the public and escalate the conflict.

But Taiwan always will mean more to China than the U.S. We will lose a fight for Taiwan due to the U.S.’ unwillingness to endure the losses when the cause was never existential to our nation’s survival.

Regardless of how it plays out, China’s regional overmatch portends EABO’s futility and a certain U.S. defeat. We should abandon Force Design 2030 while there is still time.

Instead, we can provide better service by returning to our global focus as a combined arms force in readiness that employs scalable MAGTFs for the broad variety of missions they were intended.​

The Marine Corps’ new plan will not beat China in a fight for Taiwan

marinecorpstimes.com · by Maj. Franz J. Gayl (retired) · August 4, 2022

Marine Commandant Gen. David H. Berger has elected to shed the time-tested potency of the Corps’ signature self-sufficient combined arms Marine Air-Ground Task Force.

His haste to do so appears to be his eagerness to secure a service role in defending Taiwan and containing China.

Yet, the commandant’s Force Design 2030 team members defend the changes. Their analyses of expeditionary advance base operations war games and experimentation prove the Marine Corps is a key contributor to victory in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Taiwan contingency.

However, information obtained from open-source literature reveals examples of how the new EABO doctrine is destined to fail.

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The Corps’ expeditionary advance base operations plan requires distributed small units in the 1st Island Chain to practice concealment and emissions control across the electromagnetic spectrum 24/7.

The expectation is utopian. It underestimates China’s integrated, space, terrestrial, marine, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance network.

China operates 250-plus advanced space surveillance platforms and possesses numerous commercial imagery systems licenses, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency. The disciplined Chinese also hold unacknowledged war reserve mode capabilities close to the chest.

China’s quantum computing capabilities overmatch those of the U.S., data from the South China Morning Post show, and are built for dual military-civilian access, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

China will be able to crack our secure communications, Theresa Payton, former White House chief information officer recently wrote in Newsweek, and mash electromagnetic spectrum and cyber data with other data collected from its regional ISR network in real-time.

Since deception is critical for EABO, our efforts to conceal and mislead as to the strength, locations and missions of Marine Corps small units will be rendered transparent.

Marine Corps Tomahawk and Naval Strike Missiles are currently subsonic ― while China already has fielded a family of precision hypersonic missiles, including infrared homing.

Immediately following any Marine Corps launch, the Chinese will know the point of launch and the type of missile through the mature technique of plume spectral analysis, multiple sources show. If the Chinese counter-fire on detection, at Mach 3 to Mach 5 or higher, their missiles will reach our Marines before our missile even hits its land or sea target. Shoot and scoot is unrealistic.

The 1st Island Chain has been China’s backyard for centuries. Overseas Chinese with familial, government-to-government, trade and private business relations saturate the region.

Every militarily useful piece of terrain in and along the 1st Island Chain surely has been mapped, and some possibly covertly occupied in anticipation of our arrival. Pre-existing Chinese human intelligence networks are robust, and U.S. expeditionary advance bases will be compromised even before they are established.

Cooperation of our allies is not guaranteed.

For example, the Republic of the Philippines does not want to become a Chinese satellite, but it wants even less to become a proxy nuclear battlefield.

The Philippines tolerates U.S communications, logistics and ammo storage facilities on its territory. But when country officials recently expressed concern that the U.S. might be storing nuclear weapons, cooperation almost ceased.

If our plan is to establish expeditionary mobile bases that host nuclear “capable” Tomahawks those suspicions — and China’s suspicions — will become acute.

China will tolerate high casualties to counter what it perceives as an existential threat to its territorial integrity and sovereignty. In contrast, the U.S. will not, as Taiwan’s fate is not a core U.S. national security priority.

In addition to the quality of its military, China’s command economy permits mass weapons and munitions production to a degree the U.S. model cannot for an ultimately optional foreign expedition.

Finally, China will exploit its mass and internal lines advantages, as well as the U.S.’ geographic disadvantages, to maximize its historically successful penchant for surprise.

Berger still has more than a year to make his Force Design 2030 changes permanent. His hand-picked successor will be cut from the same cloth.

After four additional years of solidification of the new doctrine and war-fighting kit, the MAGTF philosophy will be rotted out of our Corps’ culture.

The carnage inflicted on faithful Marines and sailors aboard expeditionary mobile bases will serve the purpose as a tripwire to enrage the public and escalate the conflict.

But Taiwan always will mean more to China than the U.S. We will lose a fight for Taiwan due to the U.S.’ unwillingness to endure the losses when the cause was never existential to our nation’s survival.

Regardless of how it plays out, China’s regional overmatch portends EABO’s futility and a certain U.S. defeat. We should abandon Force Design 2030 while there is still time.

Instead, we can provide better service by returning to our global focus as a combined arms force in readiness that employs scalable MAGTFs for the broad variety of missions they were intended.

Franz J. Gayl enlisted in 1974, serving as an 0351 and leaving as a sergeant in 1979. He was commissioned in 1983, serving as an 0302 infantry officer and retiring as a major in 2002. He then served as a GS-15 science and technology adviser in Headquarters Marine Corps, retiring in 2022.

21.  Dan Rice, Special Advisor to CinC Valeriy Zaluzhnyi​: ​The beta test is over. Time for NATO to send in more arms to evict the Russians

Dan Rice, Special Advisor to CinC Valeriy Zaluzhnyi

The beta test is over. Time for NATO to send in more arms to evict the Russians

ukrinform.net

Dan Rice, a U.S. combat veteran and Special Advisor to Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, has recently returned from a trip to the Donbas warzone where he had gone to observe the current battlefield and assess Ukraine’s needs to win the war, unjustifiably unleashed by Russia.

The expert spoke with Ukrinform, for the second time this year, to offer his view of the latest developments, share his opinion on recognizing Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, and reflect on what needs to be done by allies and partners of Ukraine to put the brutal war to an end, sealing Ukraine’s win on the battlefield.

RUSSIAN MILITARY LEADERS ARE IMMORAL, AMORAL, AND HAVE NO REGARD FOR THE INNOCENT UKRAINIAN CIVILIANS

What are the major strengths and weaknesses of the Ukrainian and Russian armies in your opinion?

As for Ukraine’s strengths, I have found the Ukrainian Army to be educated, literate, highly motivated, with the will-to-fight, and far better led both politically and militarily. Ukraine is now working very well with NATO to deliver and target key Russian targets all throughout the occupied territories. Every month Ukraine gets much stronger, with a larger, battle-hardened army that is getting better and more equipment daily. Ukraine has pushed down authority and decision-making to the lowest levels. Ukrainian officers give their “intent” and inform the soldiers “why” they want something done. This allows the soldiers to figure out and be creative with “how” to achieve it. This allows innovation on the battlefield. We have seen how that innovation allows Ukraine to fight and beat a less innovative, rigid Russia invader.

Russian strengths… Russia has always fought using “mass”. Mass artillery, mass armor and a maximum number of troops. Russia uses this strength to its advantage using rolling artillery barrages, ignoring the morals of attacking civilian targets, destroying entire cities in its path. This mass then becomes a weakness, when the Russian army is far from home, on foreign soil, and its command and control, and supply chain is being effectively targeted using precision-guided weapons deep behind Russia’s interior lines within the occupied territories. It is difficult to supply an army far from home when under accurate fire at all concentrated positions. Russian artillery barrages have significantly weakened, and intelligence confirms it is because Ukrainian attacks on Russian supply depots are wreaking havoc on their supply chain. With more and more NATO weapons being delivered this supply chain issue should start hurting the entire Russian army, with food, winter gear, ammo, fuel, etc.

As for Russian weaknesses, Russian leaders are usually using the old Soviet model of top-down “command and control” leadership. Tell soldiers “what and how” to do something, but not “why”. Only the leaders can make decisions, not the soldiers or non-commissioned officers. This makes their army very rigid and not able to make changes quickly on the battlefield. They are not a learning organization. They have attacked the same target and lost, and attacked again and again, and lost repeatedly, using the same battle plan. So leaders are not averse to taking significant casualties. This can help them achieve their military results but comes at a horrible cost for the Russian soldiers and local people.

Russian troops are often illiterate and uneducated; they are more susceptible to Russian propaganda. The troops are often undisciplined and immoral, resulting in atrocities to the Ukrainian military and civilian population, looting and all of the other horrible symptoms. The leaders are immoral, amoral, and have no regard for innocent Ukrainian civilians. They tolerate and seem to encourage war crimes against the civilian population to use as a terror weapon. They are poorly led by rigid leaders that run top-down organizations. This weakness is being exploited by Ukraine by targeting and killing Russian leadership. As the Russian army gets bogged down, the Generals and Colonels need to go further and further to the front and are effectively targeted by western intelligence working with Ukrainian soldiers to kill the command and control of the Russian Army. The lack of discipline on the battlefield can be exploited by better disciplined Ukrainian soldiers who have both the will to fight, and are fighting for Ukrainians, on Ukrainian land. This weakness will also cause Russian morale to continue to weaken.

Speaking of Ukraine’s weaknesses, it must be borne in mind that Ukraine started the war with a far smaller army with far fewer troops, far fewer aircraft, armor, artillery and fewer….everything, which was a weakness. Ukraine has built up its army since February 24th with even more motivated, educated Ukrainian patriots. Ukraine is still outgunned in most major weapons platforms- artillery pieces, armor units, and number of troops. NATO is working tirelessly to address this weakness by providing more, and better weapons that the Russians will not likely be able to counter. Every day the Ukrainian army gets stronger and better.

UKRAINIAN TROOPS ARE ABLE TO IMPLEMENT SOPHISTICATED, HIGH_PRECISION WEAPONS SYSTEMS QUICKLY

Will the West provide Ukraine with all the requested support? What trends are being observed across the Atlantic?

When I arrived in early May 2022, very few western weapons and ammo were being approved at the time. That has changed dramatically over the past three months. M777’s were first approved and then M142 HIMARS and M270 (multiple launch rocket systems) after that. Many other types of NATO 155mm howitzers have been sent. 155mm ammo and many different types of cannons have increased. Multiple Launch Rocket Systems were not only but at least four countries have contributed launchers (M142 HIMARS or M270) each of which can fire the same munitions. Poland has sent T-72s in large numbers. The momentum is encouraging and extremely positive. Not only have the numbers increased, but the Ukrainian soldiers have proven incredibly adaptable to employing new weapons systems – fast, and with deadly results for the Russian invaders.

How effectively are the Ukrainian servicemen mastering Western weapons?

The Ukrainian soldiers are very adaptive at weapons, ammo, systems and procedures, and adapt their tactics and procedures based on the new weapons systems very efficiently and effectively. Because the Ukrainian population is so highly literate (99%), and well trained, battle-hardened and experienced, it makes sense that they would be able to implement these sophisticated, high-precision and lethal weapons systems quickly.

Putin’s minimum goal: what territories of Ukraine does he might plan to annex?

I do not have any more information than anyone else here. Whatever he attempts to annex will not be recognized internationally, so it will be merely Russian propaganda theater.

IF UKRAINE GETS ATACM, THERE WILL BE NOWHERE WITHIN UKRAINE FOR RUSSIA TO HIDE THEIR COMMAND-AND-CONTROL SYSTEMS AND SUPPLY DEPOTS

How long is Russia capable of waging a war given the current dynamics of hostilities?

It appears that Russia is having more and more difficulties conducting war in Ukraine. Ukraine has done an excellent job of attacking command and control, supply depots and concentrated troop formations. The logistics system of the Russian army requires centralized depots, due to the palletized manner of logistics. This makes better and better targets for HIMARs or M777 precision guided strikes. If, and hopefully when, Ukraine gets the ATACMs munitions, there will be nowhere within Ukraine for Russia to hide neither their command-and-control systems nor supply depots. ATACMs are fired from the standard HIMARS M142 platform, or the M270 MLRS platform. ATACM has a range of 300 km and it would be agreed between NATO and Ukraine that no ATACMs could be fired outside of Ukraine territory. Maintaining an army that does not control the skies, and will be under fire at any location that they occupy in Ukraine, will likely prove to be an impossible task for the Russian army.

Western and Russian armored vehicles: what are their strong and weak features?

The battlefield was littered with various generations of Russian armored vehicles from T-62s main battle tanks through T-90 main battle tanks. They are better in the defense as a dug-in firing position. In the offense they are just a larger target with more inevitable casualties for the Ukrainian anti-tank and artillery. The Russians are notoriously poor at maintenance and after six months of war, the equipment is breaking down, artillery and tank barrels cannot fire in perpetuity without blowing up, and that is what is happening.

THE RUSSIAN ARMY IS NOT A LEARNING ARMY, WHEREAS THE UKRAINIAN ARMY IS A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

What is the likelihood of anti-war sentiments emerging in Russia?

Russia, like many authoritarian dictatorships, has strong control over information. Unfortunately, their propaganda is fairly effective since they control most information sources within Russia. Public sources do show a high degree of support from the population for the “special military operation” as they call it. Morale in the Russian army is, and should, continue to drop significantly. We are told new units coming in to give some rest to old, tired units, are not allowed to have contact with the outgoing unit to avoid demoralizing them. This is a bad sign for Russia. The new troops do not learn from the old troops, and will make the same mistakes and take high casualties. Yet another example of why the Russian army is not a learning army, whereas the Ukrainian Army is a learning organization.

What do you believe is the most important factor that could help Ukraine win on the battlefield?

Leadership and the will to win. The brave Ukrainian soldiers beat the Russian back at the Battle of Kyiv through better leadership, better strategy and tactics, and making use of limited precision guided weapons, used very efficiently while being outgunned 10:1. Now in the south and the east, the average soldier cannot get to within range of the Russians because the Russians have longer range artillery. They have better leadership, better soldiers, and the will to win. The weapons are coming, but until those units get long range artillery, they cannot go on the offensive.

MCDONALD’S PULLING OUT OF RUSSIA WILL BE HIGHLY VISIBLE TO THE RUSSIAN POPULATION, AND NO PROPAGANDA CAN HIDE THAT FACT

What do you think is the real impact of war on Russian economy?

The Russian GDP has increased because of the war, due to the rising fuel prices and the fact that 35% of Russia’s GDP comes from energy. So Putin is in better financial shape, oddly, due to the war. The people, however, are suffering more now than before and it will only get worse. War is kinetic and immediate. The invasion had an immediate negative impact on Ukraine’s economy and GDP. Sanctions are much slower but can cause the Russian government, oligarchs and people, to suffer. But it takes time. Each month that goes by it will get worse and worse. One of the by-products of Ukraine’s effective communications strategy, is that not only are western governments supporting Ukraine and against Russia, but global corporations are nearly all against Russia. VISA, Mastercard, American Express all pulled out of Russia. Starbucks abandoned 500 stores and they are committed to never returning. When McDonald’s opened in Moscow it was symbolic of the end of the Cold War. McDonald’s pulling out hundreds of stores throughout all of Russia will be highly visible to the Russian population, and no propaganda can hide that fact.

Is it possible for Russia to oppose or counter heavy Western weaponry?

War is a dynamic, fluid and constantly changing environment. So there are always ways to counter weapons system, given enough time with the right amount of money, technology, innovation and motivation. Most of the western weapons of NLAW, Stinger, Javelin, HIMARS, Switchblade, M777 precision-guided munitions, Gray Eagles, Harpoons have each been incredibly successful against the current Russian army. Russia has been aware of most of these platforms for a long time and has not been able to successfully counter them elsewhere. It is unlikely that Russia could significantly counter these weapons’ platform in the short term- in the next few years. With enough of these weapons shipped into Ukraine, it is only a matter of time until Ukraine achieves victory and evicts the Russians in my opinion.

How likely do you think is that the weapons supplied by the West will be used not as intended and agreed with partners?

In my experience with the Ukrainian Army over the past three months we have found the Ukrainian military to be solidly united with the desire to fight and destroy the Russian army. I believe Ukraine is one of the greatest allies of the United States and have confidence that weapons delivered to the Ukrainian soldiers will not be diverted elsewhere and have no concerns that Ukrainian leadership would violate any agreement. We have trust in Ukrainian people, political and military leadership, and in the brave Ukrainian Soldiers. And that is why I am constantly writing and speaking publicly within the United States, recommending getting the right number of weapons (more) to Ukraine immediately to drive the Russians out of Ukraine and help the “First Army of Peace” win back its territory, people, culture and peace.

THE LACK OF INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE TO PREVIOUS ACTS OF PUTIN’S AGGRESSION WAS WRONG, AND ONLY EMBOLDENED HIM TO TAKE MORE

If Putin had known that the war would drag on for so long, would he have decided to invade Ukraine?

With regards to Putin’s state of mind, one can only guess. Putin over-estimated his own army’s capabilities, under-estimated Ukraine’s capabilities, and under-estimated the west’s response. The West’s response can be attributed to the leadership of one person: President Zelensky. Putin invaded Chechnya (1999), Georgia (2008), Syria (2017), Crimea and Donbas (2014) and the world did not react in this way, or even close. The lack of international response to those acts of Putin’s aggression was wrong, and only emboldened him to take more. President Zelensky’s leadership in February and March 2022, simply inspired the nation and the world and is the reason why NATO and the west are now rallying around Ukraine.

THE ENTIRE RUSSIA ARMY SHOULD BE DESIGNATED AS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION

The latest Russian atrocity against Ukrainian POWs in a penal colony in Olenivka has caused major outcry in Ukraine, which once again is calling on western powers to recognize Russia as a terrorist state. What do you think about the initiative?

Agree 100% that Russia as a country should be listed as a state-sponsor of terrorism, joining Cuba (2021), North Korea (2017), Iran (1984) and Syria (1979). At the same time, the entire Russia army should be designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. No Foreign Terrorist Organization, ISIS, Al Qaeda, HAMAS, Hezbollah, FARC, ISIL, Boko Haram, etc) has killed as many innocent civilians through terrorist activities as the Russian Army over the past two decades in Chechnya, Syria, Georgia, Donbas, Crimea and this 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Russia Army has likely killed more than all those terrorist organizations combined – so of course it should be labeled with the same label.

Putin’s leadership and the leadership of his generals have been horrible, and the entire world is disgusted by Putin’s actions, his Generals’ actions and strategies, and the behavior of Russian soldiers across the Army. The long list of state-sponsored terrorism against the people of Ukraine is well known and documented for the world community. President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny’s leadership has been inspirational to Ukraine and to the entire free world. This war is a “just war”. It is good vs pure evil. And Ukraine will win because of better leadership, better people, and now the world’s support.

THE OBVIOUS SOLUTION TO END THIS WAR IN UKRAINE’S FAVOR IS THE NEED FOR MUCH MORE LONG-RANGE ARTILLERY AND MULTIPLE LAUNCH ROCKETS

How would you assess your latest visit to Ukraine’s frontlines?

Few if any Americans have been there and none that I know of who have American military experience and have in depth knowledge of the capability of the weapons systems that are flowing Into Ukraine largely funded by the US taxpayer through Foreign Military Financing (FMF). We were able to observe the METT-T (Estimate of the Situation) analysis and understand the need and the impact these systems will have. We were also able to assess the morale of the Ukrainian Army and the leadership of these “citizen-soldiers” many of whom joined the Army after the 24 Feb invasion.

In the end, what do you think must be done now to push this Russian evil out of Ukraine as soon as possible?

The obvious solution to end this war in Ukraine’s favor is the need for much more long-range artillery and multiple launch rockets. Ukraine has proven it can effectively deploy and destroy Russian units using these systems. The beta test is over. Time for NATO to send in the number of artillery pieces and ammo to win the peace and evict the Russians.

Ievgen Matiushenko

ukrinform.net

​22. America Can't Allow China to End Taiwan's Democracy and Dominate Asia

America Can't Allow China to End Taiwan's Democracy and Dominate Asia

19fortyfive.com · by Steve Yates · August 5, 2022

Coincident with China’s Army Day, Beijing rolled out the “Red” carpet for Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan by launching live-fire drills, sending fighter jets into the Taiwan Strait, announcing missile tests in zones encircling Taiwan, and unleashing a tirade of wolf warrior threats of dire consequences to follow for the U.S. and Taiwan.

All of this would seem a bit much in response to the travel of a senior U.S. legislator. U.S. Senate and House members routinely visit Taiwan and have done so for decades. Even a visit by a House Speaker is not without precedent, as Newt Gingrich did so in 1997. So, what makes this visit different? Awkward timing, Xi Jinping’s aggression, and the Biden Administration’s provocative weakness.

A Chengdu J-10 fighter of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force.

Speaker Pelosi could have helped legitimize and normalize this kind of visit if she had chosen to do so during her first tenure as Speaker and earlier in her second tenure. Given her outspoken criticism of China’s human rights violations and welcome disposition to visitors from Taiwan, this would seem to have been a natural priority for her. Unfortunately, it was not. Original plans were announced to visit in April, largely without incident, but had to be postponed due to her bout with COVID-19.

Likely without forethought or situational awareness, Pelosi’s delegation rescheduled for dates overlapping the 95th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army — an occasion on which ethno-nationalist Xi Jinping was certain to flex his political warfare muscles under any circumstances and could easily amplify as if solely planned for Pelosi. This seemed to bedevil the ever-foundering and feckless Biden Administration, who leaked efforts to dissuade Pelosi from visiting and offered conciliatory assurance to Beijing that the U.S. “does not support Taiwan independence.” Pointless and silly, in that Beijing is interested in threatening, not in being reassured, but also emasculating, given that Pelosi was sure to make the trip and the president’s team allowed him to appear less than authoritative as commander in chief or even as the leader of his party.

On substance, all of this matters a great deal more than most may realize. Democratic Taiwan is America’s ninth-largest trade partner and nearly the sole producer of the advanced semiconductor chips on which modern life relies. There never will be a good time for disruption of that supply chain, but especially after COVID, American families cannot handle another Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack on their daily lives. Moreover, under the Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. is committed to providing Taiwan with adequate self-defense, and there are consequences beyond Taiwan should we fail to meet that commitment.

Thankfully, we have allies and partners willing to share this burden and do their part. Japan sees what China has become under Xi Jinping’s rule and is committed to investing more to support Taiwan’s way of life and deter Chinese aggression. Taiwan, too, has the means to enhance its defenses against Beijing’s political, economic, and military coercion. In both cases, the U.S. can help itself by growing out of self-imposed Cold War constraints and treating both Tokyo and Taipei as reliable and responsible partners whose independent defense capabilities complicate Beijing’s calculus and ease America’s military burden.

Beijing’s coercion of Taiwan and bullying of others will continue beyond the Pelosi visit and the upcoming Communist Party Congress, where Xi’s continued rule is expected to be acclaimed. Xi’s strategy on Taiwan is to encircle but not attack, create friction, instigate internal subversion, and force a takeover of Taiwan’s military. The net result would be highly damaging to American workers, families, and our allies if allowed to proceed to fruition. The defeat of democratic Taiwan would undermine Korea and Japan’s economic and security interests, potentially breaking our alliances and compelling Asia to bend to the hegemony of Xi’s Communist China.

We are not fated for this outcome, however. If we wish to avoid repeating or escalating this week’s war games and other provocations, we must first begin rejecting Beijing’s framing of the conflict. The People’s Republic of China has no legal, cultural, or historical claim over the people or territory of Taiwan. Weak Western minds must stop indulging in this entho-nationalist fantasy. No Beijing-based Chinese government has governed the island. While Mandarin is the national language (hardly a defining factor), Taiwan is as culturally Japanese and American as it is Chinese in many ways. It also has an aboriginal population that should count for something in this equation. Having emerged from decades of martial law into a fully self-governing democracy, that is the only legitimate starting point for defining the current status quo. Neither Taiwan nor others seek to change that. Only China does, by coercion and the threat of attack.

Drawing upon lessons learned from the COVID-19 experience, negotiations with Iran, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it should now be clear that the free world must begin the process of strategic decoupling from China and applying maximum pressure on the CCP regime if we aim to contain its malign influences and alter its current trajectory. Beijing’s threat of sanctions against Taiwan and the U.S. should be a reasonably strong signal to the free world that it needs to transition away from dependency on China for any strategic or vital goods.

This is the path that China under Xi Jinping has put us on. The critical question is whether Taiwan, Japan, the U.S., and others are prepared to endure the disruption, overcome current dependencies, and impose a “maximum pressure” campaign on Xi and his CCP government. China needs the free world more than the free world needs China. Accommodation and flooding an unreformed authoritarian polity with technology and hard currency is what brought us to this point. A brighter future awaits if we sober up and change course now.

Steve Yates is chair of the new China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute and former White House deputy national security advisor to the Vice President (2001-05).

19fortyfive.com · by Steve Yates · August 5, 2022

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com